An Uncomfortable Conversation About Obesity | Dr. Mike Israetel

If I was still working at the University I would never give this [Music] interview because saying that poor people on average have lower conscientiousness I'm still worried about this going out holy that's insulting if you're nuanced then you're smart you can understand how it's both real and not insulting but if you're anything else and if you're very Politically motivated it's going to be a nuclear bomb you're blaming people for their problems please welcome return guest Dr Mike is tell PhD to the checkup podcast we had a very scientific even philosophical discussion about the nature verse

nurture debate surrounding obesity we get into that and so much more muscle its implication on your health what's hype what's not you're going to enjoy this conversation I know I did let's get started with the checkup Podcast with Dr Mike squared I remember last time we talked about this I don't think you read comments and feedback and stuff I do sometimes like I was looking at feedback at our conversation and uh a lot of people were saying that they don't believe AI is expon exponential as you say it is yeah they're just categorically wrong this

is not really like a debatable topic for people who are deeply entrenched in the field um I Can approach us from a variety of of of angles to illustrate this point but it used to be that the number of people that were saying that um artificial general intelligence roughly human capability intelligence um back in the late 90s the vast majority of AI researchers thought it was um some combination of impossible or would arrive later than 2100 MH every single 5 years that they do investigations into what the consensus Of the AI profession is that number

Falls lower and lower and lower up until and and originally Ray Kurtz was kind of the real kind of not the father but one of the main progenitors of this idea that AGI is coming much sooner than people think his original prognostication date was um 2030 he later revised that 2029 which is oddly specific there are conversations now in among the CEOs of anthropic open AI various people at Google these are the People making these things and the conversation is now is like are we going to hit AGI in like 2027 or is it really

going to be 2029 or somewhere between and so the entire profession has been coalescing into more and more aggressive prediction timelines and so the idea that like I'm overly pessimistic or sorry overly optimistic about it is I've just read enough about it to understand like this is the space that we live in and uh the pessimism there's also Another thing there's some a well-documented human intellectual fallacy called the pessimistic fallacy and most humans on average are more pessimistic than they should be but it's also understandable because humans evolved in an environment most of our brain

and the way we think was designed in periods of evolution where hunter gatherer survival was how we made things happen um hell is a pretty good way to describe what that was like you know Elements of paradise and lots of elements of hell and things also just did not get better over time in any measurable way and you could absolutely depend on things getting real bad real soon for most people like the average age of survival was like 30 so on and so forth so that's where our brains kind of have a baseline feel of

what's happening and over the last 10 to 5 thou 5 to 10,000 years there's been an exponential growth in culture and society and Industry that that means that we're really out of touch with the rate of progress we're not usually exponential thinkers we're linear thinkers um almost nobody predicted the internet and I believe 1997 or 1998 Paul Krugman Nobel prizeman Economist had a comment that I'm sure he regrets making which is you know the internet's probably not going to go anywhere because most people just don't have much to say to each other I mean like

we're laughing at it now he Also recently I believe uh please don't take my word for this you should verify this but I think he also a few months back said something negative about AI as well it'll be tripping twice in his life unfortunately but um the internet was that this thing that um is just straight up pure magic like think about Amazon you use Amazon like you think of something and you actually don't even have to type anything anymore you go hey Alexa can you order me XYZ I don't use That me neither my

parents do she's great um she's not even in llm yet believe it or not she's not not a large language model like yet to upgrade her to that um but uh you go on your phone and you go like protein bars and it finds the one you like and you go Okay click go hit and then like it AR is between 5: and 7:00 p.m. that same day mhm like how how that's insane we live in an insane time already imagine telling someone in the '90s like dude You can just like you'll have a cell

phone and they're like okay like one of those big ones you're like it's much smaller but way more power like a 100 times more powerful than your best desktop today like okay it's going to be in your pocket all the time they're like okay so the rich have it like everyone in the world has one okay you just click on something and they just arrive later like where is it arriving from like I actually have no idea but I don't care Cuz it arrives on time you can think of about a 100,000 different ways in

which we take totally for granted the fact that we live in an era of insane abundance and prosperity and predictable Improvement and so combining all of that together and saying well Mike's like a bit too optimistic about AI uh I would say I'm probably on the aggregate when I hopefully am alive and 20 years look back I was probably like more optimistic than most people but still more Pessimistic than the reality that I think about uh rate limiting steps in the exponential growth cuz I absolutely can see the amount of growth that we've had in

scientific understanding achievement in fact there's a great book called like the halflife effects that initially was doing research to prove why we have so much scientific breakthroughs and a big part of it is a pretty cool statistic where 80% of scientists that have ever lived Are alive today oh yeah because this is the time when they started becoming scientist be very rare to be a scientist and through that collaboration there's been an exponential growth but then there's going to be a rate limiting step because there's not that many people to keep growing the field of

science AI will solve that problem so that's the next factor that comes into it um Amazon and the reason why its ability to be at the level where it is is because of Incentives and incentives aligning creates a really clear Road for something like Amazon to occur so you have incentivization from capitalism uh people that want those products the products being able to be made at a reasonable way area for storage all these things aligning together because we all uniformly agree that's what we want MH and I think it's very easy for incentives to shift

because humans are not always Rational and there's a lot of emotional components Wars political divisiveness disease that can interrupt the algorithmic growth that we've seen in the past it has never interrupted it up until never so if you look at all of the important events in geological history biological history cultural anthropological history and the history of development technology and civilization you can plot them all on The same log scale and they basically don't move up and down accounting for Wars holocausts uh massive natural disasters um and there's a reason for that uh at least a

candidate hypothesis it's a very mysterious thing to see in the data the data is crystal clear about it like how the hell did World War II not slow down progress because there are two things that allow progress to happen one is abundance like you know you have time to work on cool you have money To work on cool you develop cool the other is uh incentive the impetus to make something happen because of difficulty and these work kind of as um top and bottom end buffers to the rate of progress when you have good times

you have a huge abundance but not a lot of incentive to make happen that's cool because it doesn't not matter everything's kind of nice so who cares like really is it really more important to make the next amazing IPhone like the iPhone's pretty goddamn good like who cares however when you get into Wars um natural disasters that's when the incentive to make radical Innovations really pops up and seems to cover that difference so what we see is a very homogeneous rate overall now there are absolutely declivities and proclivities throughout but in the grand historical sense

they seem to so far be very minor um like the Cambrian explosion uh of life on Earth seems to Be a big deal when you look at it but when you spread out the timeline you're like actually quite predictable that that would have happened I guess uh it's all on the same curve so yeah I think about it like I think of uh when investors pitu their deck and they say what's that line past results don't necessarily reflect future outcomes sure sure so I say all of that with that in mind of how the future

plays out and it's been interesting how the natural Human buffer that you discuss exists and has guided us here and then there's also the regulation of it all and the wars and the economic progress of it all like there was talk about social media just continuing to grow in a way that was becoming unreasonable and then you see young people say well I'm kind of getting bored of doing the same thing of posting perfect images on Instagram now you know what the less tailored less structured yeah exactly streaming yeah Live so like it's not always

been clear to me how the future will adapt to current Technologies and I'm always aware of that when trying to make predictions and that's why even though I probably would have agreed with someone who was very pooing AI 10 years ago but not because I to pooo AI I just pooo their ability to make a good prediction sure most predictions that are very specific end up getting a lot wrong 100% but we can just go based on Generalities the amount of total intelligence in our society has been increasing exponentially for all of measured time and

it looks like it's going to continue to do that they've done lots of work on theoretical limits of intelligence based on like um physics and information Theory and the limits of intelligence are Preposterous like way out of reach of anything you could surmise like you could hypothetically turn like decent fraction of the Earth's Mass into a computer and like the amount of intelligence it has like humans are like a fungal growth on the Earth's crust level of like occupying the solar system people are like what about physical limits like you don't we could just mine

Jupiter for matter and like I can't like the there's like a storm on Jupiter the the the eye or whatever that's like three times bigger than the earth like it's a lot of hydrogen you know so think about physical limits you Don't really get a big limit on that one and then you think about trajectories trajectories have been good so far and you think okay so if intelligence increases a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more you can start to see certain problems kind of melting away because a lot

of the problems that are are extent right now because of a lack of intelligence uh uh here's here's something fun and wildly Politically Incorrect so as you measure people's political opinions you scale them against proxies or direct measurements of their intelligence there is a massive degree of consensus on political opinions as intelligence scales in either way people who are less intelligent on average measured however you like tend to be more authoritarian in both the regard of Social and economic freedom so people that are less intelligent tend to not be For social uh Liberties they're not

super big fans of gay rights trans rights rans rights the whole thing and they're not big fans of economic freedom and general they seem to think that more government regulation is the way to do things like anytime they see something wrong they go there should be law that against that people on average as they become more intelligent seem to become more libertine in their attitudes they favor a Freer economy uh substantially Less more intelligent regulation and they favor more libertine approach to social things like Live and Let Live kind of attitude and so if you

manage to increase the amount of intelligence in the system it's going to cause a predictably better place for all of us to live because when you have uh peoples that tend to be lower Intelligence on average running an institution or country wherever they generally run it really poorly and you have all of the Social maladies that you can see in a variety of areas whereas as people become more intelligent or as the aggregate of people plus machine intelligence becomes better things get better overall and so if you scale that out at some point you're like

man if our Collective IQ us plus machines goes up another 10 points a lot of places are going to be freeer more prosperous and cleaner and more stable and have less war because if you think about it for Like a little bit you know basic economics very basic economics War almost never makes logical sense almost ever like should we attack the Netherlands why to get the resources like we can just buy the resources like we can get them for free like no you still need to buy them because then some of us live there and

they sell us that stuff like the whole War for oil nonsense it's just almost certainly just pure nonsense there all war for oil in The modern time has just not occurred well that's that emotional reasoning that we were talking and so like as you scale up your intelligence your emotional reasoning tends to capture less and less of your cognitive band if I agree with that it's just demonstrably true empirically well on average now there are absolutely exceptions of smart people you're really having a lot of feeling I'm not talking about the extremes I just see

that like as IQs and Noble laurates have attested that they often times are able to convince themselves of wildly inaccurate theories and the belief that whatever they're saying is true when it's absolutely not true that's also been shown and then also there's a chicken or the egg effect here where it's when you you are poorer and have less education you need to have a little bit more of an authoritative mindset to succeed in order to be practically successful and when you're Wealthy and you have less to worry about you think about being more free and

you think about other things whereas when you're poorer you have to survive so that you it frees you up to think more liberally and peacefully which is why there's always so much disagreement of people who live on the coasts that have money versus people are struggling to be rising in society and they want their children to focus and live the most strict lifestyle because they think That's the only way to achieve it and they could be right given their circumstances do you think that could be a reasonable thought maybe so to the first point of

noble laurates questioning their ability or illustrating their ability to sort of justify anything they like the fact that they're introspective enough to know that that's happening is already alienating them in a Lon group well I don't think they're aware of it I Think we studying them I see I think some of them have uh talked about it openly maybe uh and we are being less intelligent no Noble orates are probably less self-aware than they are and if we're self-aware of it you have to ask what about people of substantially lower intelligence they're substantially less aware

in general and so they're apt to make mostly emotionally biased choices as a matter of fact many people when you ask them what they think about politics Are answering a completely different question they're answering actually I'm wearing my Thomas Soul shirt to to illustrate that exact thing former position of his current position of his most people feel a certain way about politics they don't think a certain way about politics which is the wrong thing altogether because politics they ask asking the question of how do you run a society for the maximum benefit however you define

that it's a technical Question it's a machine question it's not a question of how you feel about things most people feel rather than think about these kinds of topics people who are more intelligent tend to think on the margins more than not and people who are less intelligent tend to feel more than not and so on average if you think Noel laureates are biased you should talk to someone of profoundly lower intelligence and you will see probably exclusively bias and almost Nothing else I wonder what the research of that actually confidence in from an anthropology

standpoint give it a look it's yeah because because no no no like even from a practical standpoint of what I've experienced in my life of I I treat two very distinct populations of where I practice medicine where I have people who live in the wealthy community where my Hospital exists and then I have people who are coming in for the community health aspect of it charity Care aspect perhaps that are employed by the people who are very wealthy and I see the problems that they experience their logic by how they approach the world and the

strategies that they each use to survive and they're radically different in ter terms of looking at them on paper but they're radically appropriate given their situation I think if you're you're being very charitable I think if you're a single mother who's working two jobs have two Children one of which that's struggling academically you don't have the capacity or time to think about what a better world looks like for certain subsets of individuals you're trying to be as practical and create the guard rails for the success of your immediate family I think looking down upon that

as dumb or wrong I think misses the point of how that person got there and therefore we're judging a whole group of people for Making a decision that had we been in that situation we would have made the same exact decision I don't agree you don't agree no why is that uh boy so couple caveats m we're speaking in statistical generalities so we're not trying to paint an entire group of people anyway the group of people we're painting is also a statistical abstraction it's not an actual group of people you can point to one example

of this is people talk About the poor but like something like a third of the poor are just like people who just graduated high school most of them will end up quite wealthy they're just at the wrong time of life so you can't group them in with the various other demographic groups that are poor consistently throughout their lives and when you talk about the rich it's about money they have or how much they earn this year because as Tomy says right that's not always changes every year Because the people that are extremely wealthy may not

have earned a lot this year sure sure and they're also within any kind of category let's just say poor people they're vastly different kinds of people in that with vastly different kinds of behavioral patterns but the behavioral patterns are seem to be the number one correlate of what continues to keep you poorer than average or continues to push you on the trajectory of wealthier than average eventually So when we say on average poor people do XYZ you can give me millions of counter examples of poor people being very diligent very organized very conscientious very thoughtful

and very coordinated in their action and uh those people are much less likely to remain poor than the fraction of poor people that have the opposite of those characteristics so when you look at wealthier people and poor people on average you tend to find that wealthier People on average more conscientious more go- driven more organized clear thinkers about things they have lots of feelings just like everyone else but they don't let the feelings take over as much as people who on average who are poor but the averages kind of bely the fact that it really

goes individual by individual and whether or not you're rich or poor you have no doubt well maybe no doubt some people are not um uh capable of having as many social Interactions but uh you've met at least four kinds of people likely poor person who is like just a just a really changes really organized really thoughtful calm person very intelligent very motivated to improve their circumstance even if they've been dealt a nasty hand like they had married someone who was really good to them that person died in an automobile accident left them with three children

and now they work two jobs and they're doing Their godamn best that person and their children through the genetic relatedness of having those features inherited from them and the very nice father that unfortunately was taken too early their children and them will probably be over time average expectedly Rising through the income strata because they're just good at stuff that's just who they are they don't spend excessively they don't make impulsive decisions as often so on and so forth so that's subtype number One subtype number two of a poor person is when you like hang around

them for long enough you're like don't say this to them personally but you could be like I'll tell you why you're poor God damn it you spend all of your money you're addicted to like 10 different things you have an I don't give a attitude about basically everything you've never invested a dime in and improving yourself in any way what whatsoever you're you're rude to Everyone around you how are you possibly going to make money and hold on to it in almost impossibility there two subtypes of poor people so for that second subtype is that

caused by Society a societal situation or is that a genetic situation it's a combination of the two but genetics explains much more of the variance as far as literature I've consumed um because both poor people are both subtypes of poor people are supposed to roughly the same social Influences and it does not affect everyone the same way there are some cultural elements there that have to be thrown in because there kind of like Society at large there's genetics but there's also an intermediary variable culture how do you process society and express your genetics there's probably

something to say for culture though based on the more recent behavioral genetic data that I've seen people in some sense secrete their culture based On their genetics at least to some great degree like if you're the kind of person that's born into uh even a family of very highly unconscientious people but you have a lot of tra conscientiousness and they introduce you to a very low conscientious culture like just it do whatever YOLO you probably as you mature into teenagehood will be like this sucks I get the out of here you know like the small

town liit get me get me out of here I'm not PA for this Kind of thing we have two of those people so far two archetypes are very rough right and there's also just to finish that point yeah am I think there's a protective Factor if you're in the correct social group so how many kids that make let's say genetically have an issue with addiction with lack of delayed gratification ability all those factors that we label as potentially successful like they have low levels of that but if They're in the right social class they're born

wealthy into a wealthy family United States will they make mistakes and suffer consequences absolutely but it's protective in the way that they're not going to become drastically poor you just made category three of the four so category three is people who come from wealth but exhibit very low conscientiousness and they tend to have that protective buffer but you can work Your way through any protective buffer and through multiple generations of low conscientious individuals you can lose absolutely everything and just become absolutely destitute no problem say gambling addiction can cancel out every single bit of generational

wealth in a matter of minutes if you think about it uh definitely hours and days for sure years uh PR profound drug addiction I would like to believe in a world in which people who are have a huge proness To drug addiction you simply give them the right access to care and they're better Mike you've seen the data on drug recovery rates it's not pretty uh a lot of wealthy people who have all the resources who are prone to drug addiction just continue I'm not going to name any celebrities continue to struggle with it their

entire lives and so yes the buffer is real but the we can't paint the buffer too strongly as like you're never going to be poor oh You can you can recess down no problem easier to l them to gain yeah what the data shows about specifically let's say substance abuse is quite interesting in that if you look at people who are struggling with substance abuse in decade three of their life checking in back in with them at decade five the odds that they still have a substance abuse issue is not as high as you think

it would be so really a lot of times it's about buying time to get past this Issue by a means of risk reduction and that could be taking a pharmaceutical medication to get you off of that medicine even though it has side effects it could mean trading one unhealthy habit like substance abuse for a healthier one how many people cope yeah with with issues in their lives through abusing themselves in Fitness or maybe overusing testosterone because before they were addicted to heroin and they've gotten off heroin but they still miss That rush or whatever it

is and they're getting it elsewhere in a slightly less negative way so it's pretty interesting to see how if you look at humans in one point in their life that doesn't always equate like we say people who have substance abuse the same way that it's unfair to say people who are rich yeah this year or earn the most this year the top 1% this year it's not going to be next year the same holds true for people with substance abuse yeah and every Other Factor as well that's an excellent point but um the other last

category is people who are relatively wealthy already and also have high trade conscientiousness and those individuals tend to have extreme amounts of continual success and aggregate high amounts of intergenerational wealth I've met uh a few folks who are from old money old money and one of the things that uh stood out to me about them was how many of them were just Mega Degenerate losers just totally just riding it out what also stuck out is how many of them were just unbelievably awesome kind conscientious people that you're like I can tell you why your parents

were successful cuz you're related to them and you got the same thing like I know at least one person who came from money money and he's unlike his third hundred million business creation all by himself no help for Mom and Dad in any capacity just Like well I can't believe idea no help for Mom and Dad if you have a protective buffer behind you the amount of risk you're willing to take on is going to be greatly different I have Counterpoint to that as an intellectual exercise if you have no impetus to succeed because it

doesn't matter because you're already rich you have arguably much less drive to make it people who came from very little um always recount the fact that it's because they came from very little That lit them up and made them Drive whereas we're all familiar with the Trope of the wealthy person that like goes to Dartmouth but like they take whatever classes they feel like taking cuz who gives a dad did hedge funds and I don't have to do anything so how do you Traverse that the way that I think about it is they want to

do better than whatever goalpost was set for them you know the we're speaking of tropes daddy didn't love me because he thought He was more successful than me so I'm going to outdo him or my dad started a billion dollar company I want to make a 10 billion doll company sure I think that motivation still exists for that IND definitely but it also I think works the other way where people who have seen close to the bottom really don't like to be close to the bottom and they're maybe less likely to be lazy about things

and just let it ride sure but how much do connections matter like coming to America for us almost not at all come on that's complete nonsense almost not at all come on that's complete nonsense I'll even give you a practical simple takeaway from it moving to America not having a connection for a plumber a car repair person a dentist versus someone who has all that and then that frees them up to have the time to work more to achieve more to have the Buddy Buddy uh relationship of a grant going their way is an inherent

Advantage yeah so how can We say that it's not yeah yeah it's short-term Advantage it definitely makes things easier in the short term for you but usually that stuff doesn't last so um if you have somebody who's been connected into business like dad was in the industry said hey hire my son you know that sort of thing sure nepotism business is ruthless I don't give a who you're related to if you're related to Dad and he said hire you I'll hire you you don't perform and your stock Trading isn't up to standard I'm going to

hire some dude from China that's a MC and he doesn't give a and I don't know him I don't know his parents there's so much nepotism there's so many people who are terrible at their jobs at the highest levels yeah uh many but it's much rarer than you may think and there are also so many people at the highest levels that are just good and over time especially the free market now government's slightly different but the Free market private institutions private companies grotesquely over reward capability versus anything else you ever been inside Google and no

offense to anyone all jokes all of and respect Google uh all the companies assoc with that Tech feere bro it's like one half of the nation of India is there some kind of thing where people just love Indians at tech companies no they're mercs dude they're good they're just good and like I'm going to Hire people that are good and it's also uh we we like to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time about you know the the myth of the maybe not myth the exaggerated form of the greedy capitalist it's both

a nepotistic and a greedy nepotism and greed don't work very well together because if I'm greedy enough I don't need you my son working for my company because you're flubbing I need uh you know garage Patel working for my company Because he comes in at 6:00 in the morning I don't think he ever leaves his his portfolio looks like someone make belief in into existence I want to get this guy who is the current uh was it CEO of Microsoft or Microsoft or is it Google one of the guys is like an Indian dude right

yeah I where'd he come from where was his Advantage the what I've seen anecdotally speaking the Practical version of what you're saying is you're the greedy that hires His son who's inept and benefits from the hard labor of the Indian dude without paying them fairly I think that's the more reality dud smarter than all of you and the Indian dude gets a startup going and he crushes you and buys out your company how often do we see that happening all the time I I feel like the big companies that have been in power are still

in power the Blue Chip companies Google was founded by an a Russian immigrant in the '90s yeah this Is during a period of transition of new technology of a new industry being formed as opposed to an old industry being taken over so which Industries are the ones that are like the old boys still Disney's not an industry Disney's one company well Disney's industry is Media it's amusement parks It's Entertainment sure Sports you don't see brilliant Engineers taking over sports teams I think the profit margin on sports teams is uh huge is it the is The

margin huge or is the revenue the Val the valuation is huge of change that's the real value sure and now nowadays you can't buy a a sports team it is now firms that are run by the same 10 people that are buying sports teams 10 people is not so I'd say 10 people are probably ruthlessly competitive against each other sure it's a very competitive landscape another thing is to the point of behavioral genetics one of the reasons that NEP netism actually Still can be tracked statistically is because nepotism on average works because if you're a

real smart dad and you had a great company yeah your son might suck relative to everyone else at the company because they're all studs compared to the average person your son's a killer and so over time I think you see this effect that can be labeled as purely nepotistic but in reality we're just tracing the effects of behavioral genetics like people related To really smart really capable people are on average smarter and more capable than everybody else and so huge degree of nepotism can be accounted just sheerly based on that and over long historical Trends

nepotism has a way of not working out so well because private Enterprise does not care about nepotism so like uh the Paul Brothers I don't know which one of them made the prime drink you know the prime drink sugar water Logan Paul um it's not sugar water Actually it's sugar water sweet sweet tasting water with electrolytes and stuff so um whose brother just attacked me two days ago actually attacked and physically how uh social media oh my God even worse yeah uh well good you've you had it coming what was the attack about now I'm

curious he called me a book thumping sheep doctor what does what does mean sheep doctor oh like sheep he judged me for reading books I guess oh I got you I'm not big on the thinking that Man very well yeah uh wow I didn't think we would have like Middle School level bullying in adulthood but here we are I found it interesting like if you were what did you say that made him upset I'm sure he didn't reach out for no reason Politico posted that President Trump wrote that he wants to hire RFK for HHS

and he confirmed it and I wrote it's a sad day for us in healthcare I see and he took offense to that yeah politics makes the mind go a little crazy at Times um yeah book book reading is good makes you smarter so well apparently not apparently makes you a sheep doctor and he said I was indoctrinated but the doc was in quotes lots of indoctrination going around I see he probably mislabeled you but lots of indoctrination so you got to take the good with the bad but I I I digress yeah yeah so you're

saying the Paul Brothers prime prime the prime drink it just tastes really good man you like it I I Don't particularly like it I think it's fine it's not how are you saying it tastes good uh everyone I've ever talked to around me says It's amazing like absolutely and like they're makit yeah yeah yeah sure like so it tastes good enough for lots of people to buy it and there are no Pepsi Cola hardliners left to defend Pepsi's Enterprise if something's better people just buy a Tesla with Elon Musk what do you mean RFK just

tweeted that he's going to Remove high fructose corn syrup and Coca-Cola and put cane sugar and and that's going to fix our problem thank God finally someone looking out for the people uh I mean like come on like we're talking about science yeah yeah so and hold on the whole RFK situation isn't that the prime example of terrible nepotism in success I don't think RFK is a nepotistic thing I think RFK just really like um connects with people in a really simple and plain way Mike come on I I'm I'm dead serious like seem to

like there's lots of other cities which are really annoying and people there A lot of rfks walking around right now that are not in the level of where he is simply because of his family what do you think his family did for him to help him out specifically money look what did he use the money for how did he use the money to become famous how did he run his presidential campaign how did he get media how did he he used private Kennedy Money for that of course I thought it was fundraising he lived yeah

how do you get fundraising how do you get attention how do you create people to want to pay attention to Sure born famous I guess just because you're a Kennedy it's real tough to get a lot of things going behind you I think he has uh some special qualities I think he comes off as incredibly uh genuine when he's conversing which is super important uh he doesn't have that Hillary Clinton uh you know that Illuminati stare where you're like there's there's no one in there is there yeah I don't know if that's a good thing

well um people seem to like it uh and so I think that's probably mostly why now obviously the Kennedy name doesn't hurt and and nepotism and politics is a much bigger deal than in economics well wait go back to the Paul Brothers of it all I want to see where you're going with that Prime the prime drink is good because It's good and people don't care they don't care who made it they're not trying to honor anyone's memory the four the you don't think they're buying it because they want to support Logan or they love

Logan or they think he's cool oh there's not enough people that like him to make the economics work for like regular stores and stuff hell no most people that people that are going in to buy Prime that made it what it is don't know who Logan Paul is oh my God tons Yeah I barely know who Logan Paul is I think him is was about brother named Jake or something like that I I couldn't pick him I couldn't tell him apart I mean like almost a 100 million people watch Jake fight Mike Tyson fight Mike

Tyson I mean I watch a lot of shows with lots of famous people I don't go running to buy their drink all the damn time because social media creates a par social relationship which is much stronger if if their drink Sucked and maybe it's not that great and maybe time will tell no one gives a no one's buying a drink because it sucks you can say you like a bunch of stuff you're not going out if you were to drink a shitty drink you might do it once or twice like oh I really wanted to

like Jake Paul's drink didn't work out if it's good it's good and over the long term people who are able to innovate and create great things rise to the top of uh the ability to have great wealth and Influence and it doesn't happen quickly in all places but a relatively more free economy like that of the United States it happens at a substantial rate so nepotism is still a thing over the long term nepotism is really difficult to hold on to unless there's an aggregate effect of nepotism actually making better products and services for people

which is why when you run a Fortune 500 company and your ass is on the line for all the stock does nepotism becomes a Really faint whisper if someone's like a Google had a bad year and someone in Google like hey you need to hire my son The Bard is going to be like are you out of your mind we need Killers we need people to turn this thing around when everyone's ass is on the line nepotism becomes a cruel joke and what people really want is raw ruthless greedy capitalism people that can make stuff

happen and over the long term that means that most of the people that can Make stuff happen end up being a real schmorgus Board of individuals most of whom don't have an epismooth that's not amazing and everything I don't give I don't know they're very distantly genetically related to me I don't care they're just awesome what do you what do you take away from the fact that most family businesses fail after two or three generations I forgot what the exact ism is not that great then huh well the question most businesses in General fail within

several years so I'm not sure how to put that statistic in line with the family statistic I think about nepotism and how it demotivates but those people still have gener generational wealth that continues to earn the money so I don't know but let's let's move on off the nepotism topic because I do want to discuss about the topic that you brought up obesity yes and how it's impacted by perhaps Genetics social standing and I've had tons of conversations about this with food industry experts food political people uh just last week it's not public yet but

we had an interview with a bariatric surgeon who's a director of danyu bariatric program here endocrinologists to talk about glp1 medications and they all kind of have a slightly different take on all of it so I'm curious what your take is well they're all wrong I'm just the smartest Obviously you're Dr Mike and the most handsome there's no Dr Mike that's wrong when you when you arrive at the Dr Mike status you're just that's an nepotism yeah that's like get on in here Joy enjoy the wealth um so this has been a passion of mine

for a long time because I'm um an astute dilatant delusional recreational student of Economics was a lot of verbiage I failed sat excellent keep up that same so I just made up a few words And um I have been poorer than almost every American because I'm from the Soviet Union it's a level of poverty that is difficult to comprehend I was um high on edible marijuana one day and I had this Revelation that back when I was uh younger and still to this day I have like an oddness Nostalgia for the 50s in the United

States say you know like the good old days Mad Men that kind of and I was like you know I think I figured out maybe why it's because in The 1980s in the Soviet Union we were kind of at economically a similar level as the 1950s in the United States maybe not even so bro exactly I asked chat GPT and it's like it's usually really polite it was slightly less polite and more like God no the Soviet Union in the 1980s was like America in the 1910s or something I was like oh my God so

that was thrown out entirely so um you know levels of poverty to where like people say like there people say like I'm Struggling to eat and you look at them and they have a BMI of 35 and you're like that can't possibly be true in a way that you're describing it that's linear but back in the Soviet Union like yes like getting food was by no means clear a thing that you were able to do every day so then you know I had all these experiences growing up and then I was taught later in various

school programs that poverty was a cause of obesity Mhm and um I found that to be baffling and I've been trying to digest it ever since okay and I have been perusing various fields of literature to try to align my ideas on the subject and I've Come Away with some maybe take home to prove and to prove not just to prove myself right but to give me that feeling inside that I just got it all figured out you know me me a little cognitive reassurance generally I just stare at a picture of Myself and that's

good enough but sometimes ideas get in there so I uh um didn't like everything I found out so the following is heavily caveat to say I need it all in the best possible way Don't Kill the Messenger sort of situation we're going to kill you don't worry oh oh God there's a few people in the studio which one is it coming from so uh as long as I'm sacrificed for big Pharma all is well and here's kind of how it looks to Me the typical argument or arguments for poverty causing obesity if you ask a

next level of questions about them things start to fall apart level one of questions is like how do people with more resources with which to buy food um end up buying less food can I play Devil's Advocate on all those questions absolutely every single one because I have many retorts to every Single advocacy Point you're going to so say say the first question how do people with more resources sorry how do people who are wealthier seem to be consuming less of a thing that costs money than more um it is at least requires a more

complicated logic and as you know with aam's Razer the more complex your logic becomes just on very cart blanch levels of thinking it becomes less likely to be true so if someone says okay you take someone from the 1600s and you go when People get richer they get fatter they're like fact and like just kidding it's actually the reverse they're going to be like what it is at face value seems to be very confusing sure and so you have to there's a lot of that in science though sure of course of course and then you

have to start walking down of like well what are the intricacies here and we can address all the intricacies in turn and they start to paint a little bit of a different Picture a picture that is not super politically correct but also can be I think more closely lined with reality because one of the big stumbling blocks in reasoning that people have on this subject is you don't want to be the person that is derisive to the poor as a social class um it's real fun to make fun of rich people it's actively funny it's

within the Overton window it's safe it's safe okay not so with poor people it's considered Unbecoming in the same way if you say well rich people uh exhibit XYZ qualities because it's their fault people are like that's right them you say that about poor people a lot of people don't like that because it gives them very sad feelings inside we should not be bound by how we feel about things to be able to elucidate what is actually going on so that in that third order we can help everyone including poor people navigate difficulties better so

the idea That we're going to pretend that poor people are sort of like um protected against any kind of moral reasoning on our behalf I think just needs to be discarded right up front well let's get more specific with it than talking about abstract like let's say the notion of access of healthy food and the preponderance of processed food in someone's cabinet that is poor sure much higher likelihood to have cheaper food that is likely to be ultr processed that Is likely to create a habit of overc consumption less satiating food and as a result

potentially lead to their obesity true or false true so then what's the retort for it highly processed Convenient Food is by no means the cheapest kind of food there is not by a long shot the cheapest kind of food there is by a long shot is largely unprocessed basic food like bulk bought rice not even bulk bought any kind of white rice canned vegetables reduced Price high fat meats and other such products canned beans are almost free calorie per calorie and nutritional content per per nutritional content they're undefeated there is a uh how do you

know that through looking into it substantially what are those people not doing which people the poor people oh boy so that that's its own thing but just just just to finish the thought really quick um the the real cheapest way to get the Best nutritional food is to buy those kinds of essential Basics and not convenient snack foods uh personal story time not that this it's just personal stories or mostly just like oh I'm an N of1 just for the people that'll be like this guy's Rich whatever my parents were highly conscientious when we came

to the United States and the first time we had McDonald's was like two years into being here and uh it was considered an an unbelievable treat yeah same right that Is like I remember being with my dad and my friend and I wanted a burger really badly but I knew my dad would have to pay for a burger for my friend and was like I'm not going to ask for it cuz I'm embarrassed I don't want him to pay for it 100% yeah so like that clashes substantially with the conventional Narrative of like but burgers

are cheap like compared to what my parents and your parents were buying Basics type of food I suspect uh mine were for sure I Can't speak for you but it seems like they were and so that already puts a little bit of a situation because people like to Envision that poor people are all relatively homogeneous that's absolutely not true we can at least bifurcate them into two categories so we earlier poor people of higher conscientiousness poor people of lower conscientiousness if you say they're all the same that's the only factor it's hard to say those

that's the one Dividing Factor it is probably by far the biggest dividing factor into how life outcomes occur for almost everyone short of intelligence so social experiments like the marshmallow experiment the delayed gratification of it all do you believe that that is a signal of cons conscientiousness Jesus Christ took a little while yeah um yeah why has the replication of it been a disaster well that's the one like done On like four-year-olds and right uh yeah they had the kids come in and they track them for their lives to say like those who exhibited delayed

gratification were able to have higher SAT scores decreased crime rates like basically what you're saying that they were able to exhibit this one factor at this age and that on the whole projected a greater success in their life what we deem success and then when we try to replicate that we a don't see that same Pattern occur and B when we relook at the past data we see that the poorer kids who didn't have marshmallows just grabbed at the first marshmallow and then had lives that were in a position where they had less access to

education to proper discipline to those things that perhaps poor kids don't have access to then have worse outcomes M so it was like are we really looking at the delayed gratification or are we looking at a more systemic issue here and that's An interesting point the amount of evidence for trait conscientiousness impacting human lives throughout the lifespan is like a million times stronger than the marshmallow experiment of which I'm not familiar with any serious behavioral geneticists that sites research to that effect for how important conscientiousness is psychometricians behavioral geneticists if you re look up trait

Conscientiousness how to express itself in life the evidence for its enormous power in guiding people through their lives is overwhelming when do you measure it say it again when do you measure it and how do you measure it um you can measure it at any point in a person's lifespan the problem with measuring young children is that the correlation of whatever traits you have when you're very young to when you're old is actually quite low And so like you know when people have like a four-year-old that's like he's the genius for his age like a

lot of times that just ends up being quite regular later he just got there earlier but you can measure conscientiousness through a variety of behaviors in an ethnographic context you just watch people do what they do and take very diligent notes you can do it in an anthropological context you can do it in a cultural context studying different Cultures you can do it with a variety of validated tests like the Big Five personality uh the ocean scale uh the ocean scale is probably the most common one and you could administer various tests of that nature

to people of very many age ranges and situations and they all give you a hint as to what's going on but in on aggregate they paint a very very similar picture overall so it's not the fact that there's a correlation between that trait and something else Societally in their lives that's going well it's both but there's a causal effect as well because conscientious people over time make different choices highly conscientious people make different choices than low lower conscientious people we also know that conscientiousness is profoundly genetic maybe 50% of conscientious behavior is accounted for entirely

by the genes the rest of it is a little bit mysterious as To how it Aggregates we're not entirely sure how that happens there seems to be no very dependable way to massively improve conscientiousness with any kind of top- down intervention that we have done before having a uh peaceful communities that give you a decent degree of Education probably has some effect on that but seemingly not as big of an effect on how we want we also know that what your common home environment was Like how you were raised by your parents has almost no

effect on your conscientiousness as an adult if any effect whatsoever it's actually a little controversial to say almost no effect well what about the effect of emotional regulation if you have a higher levels of what we call adverse childhood experiences your emotional regulation is lower than that of someone who has less adverse are those studies uh controlling for genetics because almost of how do You control for genetics twined adoption studies because when you look at the twined adoption literature A lot of that stuff completely disappears yeah I haven't looked at it specifically within the twin

world but um knowing that you just said it's 50% genetic and 50% something else that we don't know sure what does that mean for the fact that those who are poor are more likely to be obese yeah so I can split it I can simplify the matter uh two kind of Different kinds of poor people one kind of poor person has all of this kind of social burden foisted upon them and they're doing their God damn best they're scrimping and saving they're thinking longterm they're concerned about their health they're concerned about their body weight they're

concerned about the choices of what kind of foods they're putting in their bodies how it affects other things they're trying to raise their children in a very Diligent way way they don't spend excessively and so on and so forth like I said earlier those people don't tend to stay poor over the long term sometimes through a variety of unfortunate circumstances they stay poor like someone who's incredibly conscientious but is incredibly financially burdensome medical condition will contines to stay poor and conscientious which is a tragedy obviously but there is another kind of Poor person who is

also poor but exhibit very low trait conscientiousness which means they just have a one day one minute at a time what I feel like doing massive bias in their thinking and their choice structure the emotional regulation of it all sure the emotional regulation presupposes there is a desire to regulate emotion there are two ways emotional disregulation can present itself one Yeah I mean the ability whether or not they want is different but conscientiousness speaks to wants people who are conscientious but have let's say profound attention deficit disorder um know they need to be making better

choices desperately pray to God they can make better choices but just keep getting off track because they can't maintain their attention have a high degree of impulsivity people of low tra Conscientiousness don't care about making good choices nearly as much as they care about what's going to be fun and pleasurable for me to do now and it's not even a value judgment it yolo is a way of life bro and it's a it's a decent way of life but it's going to lead to different outcomes so if I am a poor person in the United

States have a high degree of tra conscientiousness I can easily make a variety of choices that will entirely Prevent me from becoming obese in many circumstances there's another component to this which I'm uh excising for now about food drive which is also mostly genetic which is critical to this discussion I'll leave that for just a little later if you are poor and someone tells you well I don't expect you to be fit because it's impossible for you and you have high trade conscientiousness and you've thought this through for like 15 Minutes you're going to be

like Planet Fitness costs $10 a month it's also irrelevant to go to a gym because you could do body weight exercises and have a high degree of physical activity for free anywhere any food you eat you can just eat less of and become however much body weight you want and if you're struggling with Hunger you can buy less palatable actually more expensive foods and buy basic beans and rice like abua raised you to eat and all of a sudden Like you just don't overeat that because it's just just not that good we've seen that this

one of the sole explanatory factors for the rise in obesity is the ubiquity of high palatability Foods everywhere super cheap if you don't access those it saves you money and you become more fit so the actual impediments to achieving fitness and health to poor people essentially almost don't exist if you have tra conscientiousness very highly if you Have low Trea conscientiousness it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor because you're just going to YOLO the you whatever you feel like eating that's what goes in and McDonald's just tastes better now you're not getting spaghetti steak

and shrimp because you're not a rich but you can afford very high palatability Foods you know chips and soda and ice cream that's all very affordable to you and that's what you want and if people say Like what about your fitness and health generally your opinion is like eh and that's a totally fine opinion but it's going to lead to some kind of outcomes if you're ultra wealthy you and low conscientiousness there's a high probability you're going to end up exactly as fat as someone who is poor un low conscientious there was a study that

came out about 10 years ago studied food deserts I don't like that term highly insults people have actually Dealt with real food insecurity you went to the Soviet Union in 1988 that's a food desert right um and they they they took a look at the data and they said that people who had Vehicles access to vehicles to leave the food desert to go to Mega conglomerate grocery stores became and were fatter than the people that didn't because they had the same low conscientiousness uh and not a distinct desire to be fit and healthy and lean

so when they went to The bigger Mega grocery store they just got even better versions of the same fun snacks that they had slightly less access to inside the food deserts so a person's individual proclivity of how they want to eat and what they want to put in their bodies whether or not to what degree they care about it is something that's not discussed much in the medical community because again like first of all what are you going to do about it telling low conscientious People they have to care about their body weight and their

health and think forward it's usually very ineffective it's insanely pedantic and paternalistic and doctors usually have a very realistic approach I'm going to try to help you in the way that I can and if I tell you to eat healthy and you don't listen to me we're going to medications is just the only thing I can do so when you take a look at the two sort of very artificial groupings of poor people if You have high conscientiousness and you're poor all of the systemic factors keeping you obese seem to disappear almost entirely and if

you are of low conscientiousness whether you're rich or poor you're and and you have a high food drive you're going to be obese 99 times out of 100 eliminating highs and lows 50th percentile people they're the ones we're talking about when we're talking about Generalizations so why are we talking about High conscientiousness versus low yeah because let's talk about middle sure where the majority of people live yeah yeah because within one standard deviation totally that's a great question um on average on average poor people tend to exhibit lower trade conscientiousness than richer people than which

could be due to social factors maybe as you said maybe uh this social factors are definitely a Component of that but we know that genetic factors are a massive component of that as well and whether or not they're social or genetic the conscientiousness is such a huge Factor variable for everything else that that's kind of where the rubber meets the road so are you saying we need to Target the conscientiousness of people in order to actually make change not actually the food deserts not what they're eating the the trait is what we need to figure

out Ways to impact is that the takeaway of no uh that's I think that's a fine idea my uh contention is that if we target food deserts if we target uh big evil food companies we are not targeting the core onus of why obesity is higher in poor people and the reason it's higher in poor people is a two-factor situation uh this is really explains I think probably 80 plus per of the variance Theory hypothesis yeah theory is a gravitation Evolution Etc much lower Than Theory right I say theory in the non-scientific way yes stop

doing that yes um so the biggest determinant of your body weight and proclivity to obesity in the modern world is going to be a two- Factor system your trait conscientiousness degree of that and your degree of food drive how much do you like food how much do you like to eat how big of a deal is tasty food to you you no doubt have some friends that Like they'll eat uh like three and a half chips and they're like it's pretty good they just sit there you're like the I get into some chips I eat

the whole bag food is amazing not everyone is like that right sure so if you have someone is a relatively low tra conscientiousness and they have a high degree of food drive even if they're poor they can still afford to be grotesquely obese no problem in the modern context back in the day that was Not the case if you have someone who is wealthy and has any given food drive they definitely have more of an Arsenal to shoot they can buy foods that are more filling but are still tasty like very the Trader Joe's Whole

Foods type of that definitely has an effect but they have to have some impetus to go buy those also Pharmaceuticals uh because access of pharmaceuticals especially these days is A big just recently for sure just recently cuz like just two years ago we just no one knew about OIC and no one even used it well bariatric surgery existed totally yeah that's you know very extreme situations again most people people of low conscientiousness usually are not interested in bariatric surgery because they're like why hell would I go do that uh it doesn't make sense to them

why you would do that because they don't seem to have again We're talking about low consci versus the average cor correct so again on average you have many more a larger fraction of low conscientious of people that are poor than are rich but the reason for why they're there we yet though we know some of it but we don't even need to postulate that because we have this thing of poverty causes obesity that's the notion actually a combination of high food drive and low conscientious cause obesity food dri Just so happens that people who are

less Wealthy on average also have lower trade conscientiousness it's like the situation with vitamin D that those who have lower vitamin D levels have higher rates of certain illnesses but then supplementing the vitamin D past the norm doesn't actually reduce the outcomes of those diseases so much in the same way when we talk about food drive and you're talking about someone as that being one of the two variables That decide whether or not someone is obese food drive is so impacted by social situations one if you're depressed which if you're poor there's a chance that

you're not getting help for your mental health situations because we don't have great access to that in America if you're poor you have worse likelihood of developing uh adverse childhood events that lead to mental health conditions you are likely to have been Targeted by big food companies in their advertising which has been proven through research for Addictive products like ultr processed foods cigarette companies will specifically Target their advertisements based on zip based on yeah that's curious I have a reason for why those people like those things better right they buy them more correct and that

could be an education component that could be a genetic component it's probably a multifactorial component but Why I find that interesting is because once those people are hooked on the product in a way where not that that food is addictive and yes it's true it is addictive and once you consume Ultra processed foods you're constantly hungry not satiated you're craving all that stuff but also once you become obese your epigenetics change of the fat cells there was actually a recent study that came out Eric toppel shared it on Twitter where again in mice so I

have to Give that uh prerequisite 92% genetic similarity to human you can extrapolate but still I generally don't like jumping from mice to humans but it it is not illogical to see how the creation of fat cells for storage then can impact your behavior as years go on mhm and the difficulty of escaping from those circumstances so if you're child that is born in an area that's poor these are the things that are likely to happen and they not going To happen in every circumstance worse education more targeting by big food companies worse social situation

from a mental health component High likelihood of being fed ultra-processed Foods by parents which then raise your risk of being obese then sets you up as an adult to regain that weight even if you try lose it in a much easier way than someone who never had that issue that grew up wealthy and then you're saying here that The only reason is because of the trait conscientiousness definitely not I was explicit it was not the only Reas the food drive and the trait they probably account for I think something like 80% of the variance yeah

over what we just said yeah so all the other stuff you mentioned is insanely influenced by Tre conscientious as the Baseline variable the reason that people have let's say a more crime ridden environment is because more people around are low Conscientiousness the tie between conscientiousness criminality is insanely High correlation so some of those same people are more likely to be criminally prone they're less likely to take care of their communities leaving trash everywhere they're more likely to make rapid choices based on desire and thus uh make you next to them the proxy Target of big

food advertisement big food didn't try to Target poor people just because you'd much rather Target Rich people with every product that you sell because they have more money to spend curious why they would Target the poor because there are some large fraction of them that are low conscientiousness to begin with that want these sorts of things they are attractors for them and they are the progenitors of many of these bad circumstance trauma doesn't come from The Ether trauma comes from people being nasty around you most nastiness in Humans is because people have a high degree

of impulsivity and just kind of do what they want that is the same variable of low conscientiousness uh basically in some large component not totally describing why things are the way they are with very poor communities let's say in the United States I think our the difference in our hypothesis is that I see how you've gotten to see such a strong correlation between low conscientiousness and outcomes in Obesity causation that that's what I was going to get to I see the very strong correlation that exists there but at the same time I see the very

strong correlation as well as poor education difficult circumstances all those variables that are also very strongly correlated and I want to know how you jump to the causation without having a trial that imp impacts the trait and then seeing a better outcome when you said that that trait Can't really be changed yeah behavioral genetics twin and adoption studies uh genealogy heritability studies that show that your genetics is profoundly important as to how your life lays out in front of you everything else becomes usually secondary unless it is extremely extremely different from the norm which uh

definitely explains some of the variation with really nasty growing up circumstances but not as much as many People would think so if you ever dip into the behavioral genetics literature and I encourage everyone listening to give it a a shout um don't expect to be very cheer at the end of that dive um it's a real thing man it's a real thing I I certainly believe it to be a real thing at the extremes at the highs and lows but I think when you look at 75% of the population I can't imagine it being a

causitive factor to the degree that another random variable is I got you so I'll cite a couple of offhand random studies just for uster of purposes um there's at least one study that showed that past the age of about 12 or 13 your common home environment where you grew up has almost no effect on your eating habit because they did it with twin and adoption research and they found out that if you came from a genetic stock of people that were prone to obesity or Prone to making food choices that were more snacky junky kinds

of foods if you were adopted into a home that gave you healthy foods as a child child up until teenage years you ate what Mom and Dad made you healthy food the whole thing then as soon as teenage years hit and you were able to make your own food choices you Veer so far into the average predictive of what your parents used to like that the degree of influence of your parents uh adoptive parents healthy Eating instructions are almost undetectable insanely rigorous research keeps coming up over and over again any parents who have had children

listening to the show if You' had one child you can attest to the fact of how great of a parent you were and how your effects made them who they were soon as you have child number two you realize holy we're shooting in the dark kids kind of become sort of whatever the hell they were supposed to become and we have Barely any effect and anyone who thinks they have a large degree of effect on a teenager is I don't know insert joke here is large degree of delusion the conventional wisdom on how Education Works

and how upbringing Works cannot possibly survive the rigorous data that shows that for example as I stated just now food Choice proclivity is almost nothing to do with a common home environment after age 12 correct people what about before it before it it has a Ton to do because you don't make the choices that you have like they put stuff on your plate and you eat it and don't you believe that if you're set up before the age of 12 with bad habits that potentially created a childhood obesity that you're going to have worse outcomes

as you get older yeah for sure so then how are you saying that those social impacts are not equally as causitive as the trait because when you look at the behavioral genetic data the Social outcomes at the extremes can absolutely have an effect but most of what you think are the social outcomes is literally just the expression of people's genetic proclivities over and over Mom and Dad had the same ones you have the same ones and if you try to get kids to eat hyper palatable food all the time when they're younger it definitely affects

them when they're older on the margins 100% but it doesn't affect their proclivity to make the same Choice as When they grow up they're going to start eating healthy and thinking of the future as soon as they become teenagers just like their actual mom and dad did and then they're going to have extra adiposity and struggle with it however unless you become profoundly obese as a child childhood uh overweightness generally resolves itself as teens mature unto adults Because unless you continue on the path of egregious over Ting more or less you can grow out of

Considerable chubbiness as you get older I would like to see the data sure how many like kids that are obese and what their rates into adulthood are I don't know what sure sure do you know what they are not off hand no but um it's uh things that happen to your childhood can affect you long term but don't seem to affect you long term nearly as much as people would think because your genetics become more and more an uh an effor variable that's better and better Detected as you get older in deciding causation right we

think about changing a variable randomizing it and seeing what happens if I could wave a magic wand right now and stop food companies from advertising to children hyper processed foods especially in poorer areas if I create access in food deserts I know you don't like the term but in areas where there's less fruits vegetables for sale and I sell more of those Foods less of the ultr processed Foods even through an authoritative method if I greatly improve mental health support maybe even medication in poorer areas what's the mental health thing have to do with it

the mental health thing is that some people overeat as a way of coping through difficult moments because they have high food drive and that's a very happy thing for them to do that's profoundly genetic many people in their most stressful time cannot eat sure but it still doesn't Change the fact sure that when they're sad they eat and if they're more likely to be sad in an area where they can't get help for mental heal think these people also eat when they're happy celebratory eating is a cultural Universal it is but I'm talking about the

poorer outcomes where there's worse social outcomes and there's worse mental health support yeah what I'm saying is people with a high food drive don't need any stress to eat more they don't need Any less stress to I don't like doing the highers or lows because that's not representative of the average we're not talking about the average we're talking distinctly about High and lows because we're talking about poverty versus wealth and its effects on Obesity is a conversation exclusively of highs and lows because in the average actually you can't disaggregate anything and who knows what's going

on yeah I'm saying in the average human not let's say you Don't know and you're blinded to what people's uh poverty level is you have to create a graph of what the average is sure so you're saying a lower degree of mental health on average causes people to become more obese yeah I think it's a factor is that is that I think it's a correla factor okay is there like a thing where like well Aces that's like the emotional regulation of it all correlates very strongly with people who Have issues of crime issues of overeating

higher rates of uh blood pressure elevations so those variables are there I don't know about the twin studies because I've never looked at those but my point was that if you wave a magic W and you fix all those issues that I discussed you don't think there will be a significant Improvement in obesity in poor areas I think the Improvement in nearly all factors would be very impressive and hugely helpful Locally not systemically because you have all sorts of really nasty side effects like drug dealers who deal in food and not actual drugs because now

tasty food is illegal and well I didn't say make it illegal I said reduce and improve education how do you reduce it if you don't make it illegal um you limit targeted marketing okay because that's so influential and that's outside of our control there's ways that food companies change what we Eat without ever us even realizing that they're doing it it's the Invisible Hand yeah so I guess changing government policy food food companies wouldn't be people wouldn't know as much about tasty junk food because food companies don't advertise them so you only have people who

take advantage of that and let's say in the ghetto and bring two young children for sale healthy treats they've unhealthy treats they've never seen and kids are like well what is that like Che Cheit you ever had Che I'm sure I'm sure that'll happen it'll happen but the question is what will happen to the number yeah I think it'll go down I think this these if they magic wand it it'll be helpful for sure here's here's my contention there are a huge fraction of people usually on the political left or just moderate reasonable people who

have been educated in the United States or the Western World who believe that these variables of social effect food Companies Etc are if not only the only variables that very close to the only the predominant variables they expect the magic wand of external social factors to be waved and fix almost the whole problem if not the whole problem entirely what you're going to get is almost an inversion of that reality well you'll get like a very serious Improvement 5 10 15 20% of improvement in the problem and you'll have like 80% of the problem still

left Over and be wondering why since we have these amazing educational programs these amazing programs of reducing food advertising Health mental health enhancement so on and so forth that some people are still demographically much more likely to be obese than others it is because we ignored the two most primary causitive variables which is conscientiousness and food drive if you have really quick if you have low food drive it doesn't matter how Conscientious you are or not you're probably not going to be overweight because like food just not as big of a deal if you are

have a very high food drive and you're very wealthy you can employ quite a bit of Technologies and personal chefs and all that stuff you'll almost certainly be significantly more overweight than otherwise but maybe less so if you have very high food drive and you have a low degree of conscientiousness you're going to be Very very very overweight and all of the sociological variables in the world cannot help you to a huge extent they can help you to a moderate extent we're going to have so much left on the table they're going to be wondering

why so what I'm proposing this is why I'm so uh passionate about the subject is I like to take holistic approaches I like to understand the landscape of the entire issue we're dealing with before going and rendering very very confident Conclusions for example if you look at uh the British public schooling system there's some public schools that are not so great I guess and some public schools that are just unbelievable MH and the recent uh this is quoting Robert plowman's work behavioral geneticist uh behavioral genetic analysis of childhood success in school and after especially after

school has there's the quality of schooling quote unquote by ranked school systems in the United Kingdom that you received has almost no predictive effect on how successful you become and when you see that and this is insanely rigorous data what do you have to shake off the page to make sense of that because when I read that for the first time I was like I almost stopped the car it was an audio book and I was like the how like it was supposed to be a thing that you inject education into people and they just

get better and all of a Sudden when gradations of public schools explain almost no variance for outcomes after and there's there's programs where they rotated kids to different schools all lots of variation it has almost no effect if you knew behavioral genetics and its aggregate before that you could have been like I could have told you that and then you would have been like okay we should have predicted this wasn't going to be a big deal how do we really address these issues and Understand what is the realism with which we can approach the situation

if you didn't know about behavioral genetics you would have been like dude we need tons of funding for all of these programs maybe that's a good thing but then you would have expected it to work and when it worked on the margins but not in its entirety you would have had to contend with the fact that we got I think we've severely misunderstood the problem a quick analogy just for folks Who are listening if you are under the guys under the myth that genetics are not the biggest factor in athletic performance you can take a

scrawny little Jewish kid and try to get him into every single soccer camp in the world I'm a billionaire my kids going to get learn soccer from like the Brazilian national team themselves day one you poured millions of dollars into your kid and he's like 16 years old he's the worst person on his non-select soccer Team and he's like I want to play the violin and you're like the I thought I could pour athletic Talent into you and any sport scientist to quote paraphrase Jordan worth their salt it's a hilariously Canadian expression uh would say

like that's not how that works sports science is about identifying talent and then improving on the margins sort of cultivating it that if you don't have the talent you ain't doing a whole lot you can get better but It's a similar thing to the poverty obesity thing if we addressed all of the sort of endemic issues that you were talking about the systemic ones external social cultural ones we would get some decent traction yeah you coach a kid in soccer with a braan national team his whole life he's going to be pretty godamn good at

socer ER but he ain't going to the Olympics no way unless he has mega mega Talent the same is true about poverty and obesity in those Relationships where if we don't address the food noise which luckily pharmaceutical companies are addressing now with OIC which I think one of the best things we can do is make anorectic drugs like OIC epatite Etc um ubiquitously cheap and available to everyone that needs them that's going to make a big hit why because it addresses directly the variable of uh food drive trait conscientiousness remains there is no drug you

can take that improves it Unfortunately and it's going to remain this kind of sand grain inside inside the that makes the Pearl it's a constant nuisance that will constantly be there and we can have a lot of sociological oh we're just not doing enough you know education didn't work that well we need more education to your point earlier like vitamin D once you get enough of it 10 times the dose is technically toxic over the long term sure doesn't help so we have to understand the entire Topography the landscape of what we're dealing with and

have to accept straight up that many of the core most explanatory reasons for why poverty and obesity correlate with each other are outside of our ability to have traction on them in the modern timeline and going from there we should make all of the changes that you recommend which I'm absolutely 100% on board you know depending on how they're executed of course uh uh that all stuff matters but It's going to matter aot a lot less than many people think I can't speak for you and tell you how much you think it's going to matter

but because of what we know about behavioral genetics and how causal Works in this case it's going to matter substantially less than you think and if anything else it's disheartening you did all this stuff and then what happened almost nothing I think that's the only point we disagree on I think the trait matter of it all The food drive of it all you created this 8020 uh guesstimation formula I I can't even argue against it cuz I don't have the evidence to argue against it and I don't think that you would even fight if someone

said it's 7030 right because it's an almost an arbitrary number CU we don't have exactly yeah but I do believe that these traits matter the way that I think about it as a practical clinician because I'm not a researcher is you hear that we can Change the 20% with that magic wand that I was talking about and you say that's not the 80% that is really the issue and I view it as 20% decrease and obesity rates gets us under the average person in America being obese that's a monster win for me cuz if we're

let's say at 60% obesity in the United States if we get 20% drop off we 40 we're less than the majority yeah the the way I'm contextualizing it it's going to be 20% of 60 so it's going to be whatever Fraction that ends up being I don't know what the exact number is Sam can you actually look up what percent of the United States is obese right now no no no that's not my contention I'm saying that if obesity is the problem and you solve 20% of it you don't get an absolute 20 Rel but

so any like um I I I really love that point I think the I'm looking at it from a little bit of a sellan pessimistic take of um well gez like We're not even addressing the two biggest factors in the room and it and it's totally fine to address all these other factors well I say as a society or whatever and also just to put in perspective from like the bar bariatric surgery side of things which has been ongoing for 30 years plus more than um the gp1s the reason bariatric surgery works is partially because

how it impacts your food drive oh uh yes almost entirely why it works that way yeah so This is not new medicine trying to impact food drive this has been going on since before I started practicing medicine yeah and that's number one number two medicine usually practices on the fringes yeah like when we talk about vaccinating kids and we talk about saving hundreds of lives someone might look at that and say I don't find it worthwhile to vaccinate kids to save hundreds of lives sure but we do and science does so yes there's Very little

control that we have of ultimate human outcomes because controlling one two three four variables in the grand scheme of life is usually ridiculous in thinking you control the ultimate outcome yeah which is why I don't like protocols that say like oh if you ice bath you can create X Y and Z I'm like come on man one variable especially such a small variable is not going to have some meaningful substantial change that we Should give it this much air sure but those issues to me that if we can change those issues a we get some

benefit even if it's not the majority of the benefit B the Obesity change isn't the only benefit that we get when we change those things if we change education if we change their ability to what do you mean by education I'm curious that one I have a lot of IDE okay when someone walks in uh to one of my men on the street interviews and I ask them a question of Like what nutrient is most prevalent in your banana and I and they say protein the odds are that they are from a worse education background

from a health literacy standpoint is higher fair to say MH that happens very often in lower economic schools education systems because there's not as much motivation to learn about those things so the sales of a 64 ounce Slurpee is much higher in that Area than it is in Greenwich Connecticut some really wealthy area why partially because of Education nutritional education is a perfect example of a variable that is talked about as a preeminent variable here's one of my beefs with this coming up through the educational system in all of these fields you're not really taught

that we were never taught that food drive was a thing that was largely genetically correlated this is never Talked about we were never taught about conscientiousness we were taught about things like nutritional education empowerment to make better nutritional choices monetary limits adver I think we weren't taught about those things because we didn't know how to impact them when I learned about these things they were taught as a theoretical basis for why happen whether or not you can impact something is very different than theoretically does it caused by Something else and so I think the reason

that they theoretically were not taught is because most people in in the field didn't ask the question because most people in those fields are intellectually biased to the political left to begin with and do not to like to look to genetics and deep social forces outside of our control as because because it makes them um very sad about the State of Affairs and it disempowers them they believe in human malleability They believe that no one can be blamed for anything that it's social forces externally all the way up and down and those are the if

not the only the by far predominant reasons why people end up different is because of social forces that is like uh but don't you think they always like barring the extremes most people would say that it's a mix of Nature and nurture I'm not talking about most people I'm talking about the educational establish the educational Establishment you don't think they would say that it's a mix no no it's you can lose your job for saying it's a mix if I was still working at the University I would never give this interview because saying that poor

people on average have lower conscientiousness I'm still worried about this going out holy that's insulting if you're nuanced then you're smart you can understand how it's both real and not insulting but if you're Anything else and if you're very politically motivated it's going to be a nuclear bomb you're blaming people for their problems even though they're in private everyone know people I don't know if you're blaming I think you're trying to establish a cause for why something is developed I don't think you're necessarily putting blame on an individual totally whether that person is conscientious especially

as you put It genetically you're almost not blaming them you're almost dissolving of the blame that that's a very interesting way to look at it um but aren't you is that fair because you're saying genetically you have this pred position to this trait therefore it's not up to you I think the concept of is one that the longer you look at it the more it falls apart anyway I don't like to deal in blame I don't even know what that means I like to deal in causality instead of Blame uh blame is like an emotion

you have inside from ancestral times when the police and court system were not there to enforce things and by blaming someone you could paint them in a negative light and interact with we're going to get into this no matter what do you believe in free will uh no oh cool and I think that yeah sure but I think the concept of Free Will is preposterous on its face because people will say well what about quom mechanics and Randomness Because that's random will it's still not free will uh so I I don't think there is a

space for free will as most people understand it in a modern intellectual landscape but at the same time in your brain you have a machine that decides what you're going to think which is out of your control entirely and you have a part of that machine which reviews all the contents of your mind and uh Ides on aggregate am I going to make this decision that I just Thought of or not and so the combination of having self-awareness and uh uh an ability to take all the information you know and aggregate it to not just

my recent proclivity but also everything else I know um certainly makes a system that acts as if it has free will but you really lens down into it it's not free at all it's entirely mechanistic so what would you say people watching this that you're afraid of that they'll say about you I don't give a that's why no But you're saying that you're worried about it going out what are you worried about um or why would you get fired yeah Mike a Nazi come on for real no I'm serious check your comments check them now

but in in reality you think they would call you a Nazi yes and why would they call you a Nazi because the Nazis took the idea that people had genetic differences that impacted their behavior and decided the endr Run best way to deal with that was to kill Millions mhm I think there's a really big problem with the kill million part do I have to do I have to answer directly yes Israel that'd be a fun Nazi name um I am a politically very closely aligned with Libertarians I'm a secular humanist and so I think

anytime a complex human being dies it is an unmitigated tragedy MH I think that uh killing people and putting them into into camps is abysmal but you can reason yourself through sociological effects Only do the same thing evidence Joseph Stalin and Maad dong they didn't believe genetics had any effect on anything they believed it was all sociological what did they do put people into camps toast them by the tens of millions you can weaponize any philosophy oh yeah sure any extreme but if you're on one extreme or the other you tend to weaponize the uh

opposite yeah but you're still extreme still weaponized it just so happens that most of the community the Intellectual Community United States the Collegiate intellectual Community is wildly leftwing by biased for a generation and for three generations now the problem is getting let's see if it's a problem that's getting worse it's becoming more and more of a thing that the campuses are attracting more and more left-leaning people and so when we're talking about looking at this from a grander landscape of what really is the cause and effect such anation and For why poor people tend to

be obese more on average you're getting a very very biased view from most of the academic establishments they NE teach the basic theoretics of it if you bring it up in class you're lassad as like having border like not thoughts and the if you bring up food drive people will call you a Nazi I don't understand how that happens if you say food drive is mostly genetic the right wiers will say you're excusing people's willpower thing And the left-wingers will in some situations be like see but then when you tie genetics to other factors let's

say racial factors they're like holy Hitler reborn MH there are lots of people the world has many beautiful things about it has many ugly things about it and when you go hey this ugly stuff we should be looking at there are lots of people that go yeah and there are lots of people that go you son of a how dare you and as intellectual You know every college campus says they're for intellectual curiosity and freedom of speech and freedom of thought and in the United States almost none is or isn't you and I could sit

here and really get make fools of ourselves and get canceled by going what was Hitler right about you know he was right about a lot of right he was a murderous animal who was wrong about the core tenants of his philosophy but he had all the stuff that was correct order Social responsibility personal responsibility pride in the greatness of your nation that's awesome stuff we don't need to jettison that but people tend to feel so much more than they think in many regards that like soon as you bring up oh I'm doing free thought I'm

doing cost benefit analysis let's look at Churchill Hitler and Stalin and see how their philosophies differ you know uh cost benefit pluses and minuses that intellectual exercise Is in damn near Forbidden on college campuses today uh so so the idea that we have free thought is largely been jettison like I went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad a phenomenal institution but damn near a propaganda machine when I went there they're like trying to get you to believe a certain version of the world that felt really nice for people on the political left to

believe and so they jettisoned entirely entire classes of introspection uh and And and uh trying to figure out what's going on such as behavioral genetics such as uh true cultural differences and where they stem from they had an idea that you could rearchitecturing you can change society and make people's lives better even if they're the same people but what you should expect out of that is a much more mixed picture there's a lot of situations where you think the core variable of social you pour tons of social resources into it it Changes up to a

point that it doesn't change anymore and your answer is like we just need more social stuff and that is the wrong answer but if you're not willing to admit that this other thing even exists what the hell do you do afterwards that's a real Curious situation yeah I guess the real research that I would like to see is what can we do to impact this trait like uh food drive and conscientiousness respect well food Drive we kind of have some uh at least beginnings of evidence for correct yeah but for conscientiousness as an example you

ask the same thing about intelligence probably the single most beneficial thing you can have I always go back and forth in my head as to which one is more um effectual conscientiousness or intelligence but together they are the single biggest effor variables for everything else that happens in your life if you are Intelligent and conscientious above average you're going to be doing some really interesting if you are significantly below average in conscientiousness and intelligence there's a high probability you're going to be in jail or highly unaccomplished and poor and making terrible decisions all the time

if you ask the question of how do we increase people's conscientiousness and increase their intelligence some of the answers are Very straightforward a cultural reinforcement of high conscientiousness like hey save your money um it you know it's it's better to think of the future things like that but now the political left and some extremes is so insane that even trying to say that to people is considered paternalistic and entire there exact opposite happening on the right wi side where it's weaponized in the other direction totally equally as unhelpful what I probably should have Asked very

early on in this conversation that I didn't is when you say that there is a genetic tie to the trait of conscientiousness what is that Gene that you're looking at that you're describing because to me when we look at a trait that is something that we've sort of elucidated on tests but what actual Gene are you looking at so it's almost certainly uh polygenic which means hundreds if not thousands or more genes are responsible This is true for intelligence there's no intelligence Gene but there are lots of genes that have small fractional mini percentages effect

on intelligence and in the aggregate they make you much smarter or much less intelligent conscientious is the same you can track a lot of what conscientiousness is and how it acts by um analogizing to Child Development every single 2-year-old is the least conscientious thing you'll ever meet in your life they don't have The neural architecture to think of the future mostly because they don't have a well-developed prefrontal cortex sure so prefrontal cortical development is probably really really tied causatively to conscientiousness so if you had some wacky idea that genetically engineered people and you found a

way through 150 genes to push the prefrontal cortex into more aggressive development accounting for skull size Etc then that would probably be something that would be a Fruitful uh you know like it's if someone's um profoundly athletic and has a aming sense of balance they probably have a larger more well integrated cerebellum because that is the seat for that kind of action so these are all just like the brain as a computer these are all computer properties of the brain thinking about traits like this historically has been problematic you mentioned the Nazis yeah not what

they did that was a problematic thing what They did was just killed millions of people right based off of that logic sure again their action is the issue yes uh self-esteem era of the 1990s elucidated that having high self-esteem was a a big contributing trait that led to success from childhood so we instituted participation trophies praising children even when they're failing creating a higher level of narcissism that perhaps didn't exist before and largely we've seen it as a Failure of modern psychology of trying to in very well intentioned and very from the political left very

well intentioned and frankly I don't care which side it comes from just to keep in mind the idea that this is not the first political left thing to come up to the surface to where there's an Orthodoxy that you're supposed to accept but there's a rightwing version of that in the past right people do not run the Universities there are two types they run the government now do they well they literally every part of the government supreme court congress senate we won't get into so something like 90% of actual government workers uh not accounting for

police and military uh politically on the left just to keep that in the discussion so the Deep State on the extreme is an insane right-wing conspiracy but in a more reasonable take like yes most people who actually work In government of all levels are Democrats and so when Republicans are in charge they're dealing with a largely antagonistic Workforce which is great because checks and balances are awesome when Democrats are in charge then it's bad right the coral are has to hold true I don't think that's necessarily true because I feel like the pendulum swings in

both directions but it doesn't in the actual running of the day-to-day government yeah I don't know What is the actual predominance of government work it's 90% I'm curious yeah but just just to say like well we did the well-intentioned self-esteem thing right yes I read a book by Roy bow Meister about the power of willpower have you looked at any of his work so there was a thought that it's not self-esteem it's willpower that's the thing that if you have good willpower you actually get better outcomes and that's the one factor we need to focus

On boosting willpower and there's little things that we can do to impact our willpower throughout the day throughout our lives etc etc and that's also fallen out of favor because we've seen that artificially trying to change this trait doesn't really help no okay so does it not help does not work like is willpower enhancement actually not something we can gain traction on or is it the fact that the people have substantially improved their willpower in a robust way That lasts and that doesn't still improve their lives that I don't I think that it's probably the

we don't know what the which of the two it is we just know on a clinical practical sense it doesn't yeah so that comports back to the whole behavioral genetics thing there's only so much you can change for a person's expressive psychology with external factors even from childhood definitely in adulthood so the idea that you can change someone's General ability To yield willpower um which we express as discipline is uh Curious and the behavioral genetics literature would be like you probably can't make much big much of a difference that's the thing is both intelligence and

conscientiousness seem to be deeply genetic and if we have a robust plan to genetically engineer anyone who wants it now we got to real solution going short of that we should do our very best in every regard that you expressed on providing social Services so on and so forth we cannot expect Miracle resolutions to many of these societal issues because and I'll say it very plainly it's dope to talk about nutritional education and it helps many people on the margins but when you try to educate someone who doesn't give a about what goes into their

bodies who cares it doesn't matter and The reality is that many people like to engender ideas of who they're helping having met very few or none of the people who are actually trying to help if you talk to a lot of people who are very substantially overweight a humongous fraction of them sometimes in words depending on the context almost always in action don't really proximately give a to do anything about it many of them do and those are the people who you're going to Be able to help a lot but a lot of them don't

and the thing that that Revelation that you get from behavioral genetics and sort of multifactorial analysis that reveals like some people just kind of want to do this stuff and they like eating junk they're not going to be bothered by it because there are hundreds of millions of them that exist in the world and tens of millions in United States at the extremes even the optimism you have to have for your Ability to change the situation has to be brought down to reality and your bandwidth for how to think about addressing the problem has to

expand to think okay we got people nutritionally much more educated it helped a few percentage points we thought nutritional education as we were taught in school was maybe a third of the issue but it it had a 6% reductive effect and we're at the saturation point for nutritional education where people can tell you and Here's my been my experience almost everyone who walks through the door at McDonald's and out comes with a shake and burger you you think that's healthy almost everyone will go no hell no what you give people a bag of chips or

a green apple which one's healthy all 90 some per of every American is going to be like this is a I said this not on the podcast this is a trick question right no no no legitimate question they're like you're with me it's the Apple duh every all ask that to Dr gundry he would disagree with you he says grapes are basically the same thing as Hershey's so you know how like once you it's like the Monk on top of the mountain the simpleton and the monk agree gundry is that smart that he's come back

around wow okay you're giving him a lot of credit Dr gundry by the way I'm so sorry I said gundry how insulting um I do you want to do a cigarette break really quick to enhance Our health no I I want to live a shorter life I almost broke my phone in half when I watched the cigarette clip by the way uh but I decided to smoke a cigarette instead because I care about my longevity and something nicotinamide something other the British study you know the rest oh man that was painful um if we control

food drive does conscientiousness not matter for obesity oh man I would like to agree with That it won't matter nearly as much as it does now so if you control completely food drive MH so conscientiousness expresses itself in fun ways you give people ubiquitous access to anorectic medications let's say 7th gen in 2013 to they're just just Ultra the better version for the 10x better version you still got to take the pill and there are people who even if it's a onetime genetic enhancer shot you Get the shot your genes change you're just going to

be skinny with your jeans some people aren't going to take the shot some of those people are just like hey did you get to the treatment center to get your shot they're like nah how many people what is the correlation between conscientiousness and doctor's visits Mike it's real high some people just don't give a you've ever deal with people in hospital setting who like haven't been to the Doctor in In Living memory of course so when you're conscientiousness is low short of us violating your civil liberties look I have patients that are nihilistic that end

up in my office for a variety of reasons and I can't really help them right right right so but the food drive thing is for all the folks with low conscientiousness that take the food drive medication and or get the shot or whatever they're going to see enormous changes however even if you Have relatively low food drive junk food is still fun to eat and your ability to think of is this good for me or bad for me if we get you back down to like normal food drive you can still be substantially overweight though

not obese because you just really like to snack and someone's like are you hungry and you're like not really I just EA bodily autonomy is everyone's right so like I box and that's terrible for me and I know it is and yet I do it yes yes Exactly I have taken grotesque amounts of anabolic steroids and all the bad things I talked about last time on this the show so it will have a huge effect it won't have % it won't have 100% who's looking for 100% I feel like with one one variable controlled you're

not going to get 100% no for sure but you're going to get a lot because a food drive is absolutely the quintessential Vari because if so if you're going to get a lot why even talk about Conscientiousness it's not you can't really change it as you said yet yet if you control for the other variable that you talk about within the poor communities about food drive it pretty much gets you almost all the way there not not a lot of the way there a significant majority why talk about it yeah easy so you're going to

have a situation in our Magical Mystery pretend World here where the difference in obesity rates between poor people and Richer people used to be let's say 10 imaginary units of obesity and now there are two imaginary units of obesity right we we made an 80% reduction in the difference between wealthier and poor people we've addressed everything you suggested and everything I suggested short of conscientiousness food drive medication access to everything everyone's no longer experiencing stress and Trauma relatively same rates so on and so forth like look at Japan for Example it's actually just not true

to say that poor people in Japan experience more crime stress and traum than richer people because there's just no statistical differentiation hardly between them like there's just not really any crime in stress and drama anywhere in Japan uh relative to us right I have no idea so yeah well you could look at the statistical data but if you go to Japan all of a sudden it seems like okay where are all the Violent people I'm going to Japan in a little bit so I'm trying to bring violence to them I'm kidding Japanese people please all

jokes so um if you look at that situation in the future that we could have where we reduceed the problem an unbelievable amount but differences still exist you're going to have the Temptation especially with the ideological bias of most of these institutions that we have that actually make these changes like Institute the regulations for food advertising so so the people behind them and the people politically who voted in those people very well-meaning Americans who want the problem to be resolved because anything that's a difference between wealthier and poor people including money itself is kind of

gross right like what the like just because you have less money you should have like shittier Health that's up like we all want the Difference to be zero when the difference used to be 10 units and now is two holy to your point like what the that's it problem more or less solved problem solved no no but like we did it why do I still give a about conent here's why because when you have that smaller difference people are going to be like all right we're not doing enough on the regulation side we're not doing

enough education far that's your conc they have In almost every other regard that's just what they do and um you know soon is like you know the oppression Olympics situation that has happened recently in politics as soon as you could no longer statistically detect different levels of Oppression among different genders and races in United States which probably was mostly the case about 1980s depending on what literature you look some ear in 1970s definitely 1990s the '90s you think like dude like overtly Insanely like racist homophobic like in the old Alabama way people they just like

they they teeny teeny tiny fraction and they can't possibly explain all these systemic differences and stuff people went way overboard for 30 years trying to address these issues not coming back to being like okay what's the base reality here so for the conscientiousness situation if we kashed every other variable but we still have this 20% Which absolutely is much lower But relative to someone who comes of age during that time and sees like big differences you know what I mean like imagine someone from the year 1600 Coming to America and you just give them a

tour of New York City and they're like What's that person like it's a poor person like he's overweight and he has a cell phone in his hand like right that's what poor people are like but it's real bad like he has no place to sleep like he has a place to sleep it's warm he's a Gigantic color television he has access to the internet he gets uh essentially like f functionally through the city really really good health care like what's that mean like was nobody really dies of infections anymore unless they really untreated all the

diseases you know about don't exist anymore and they're like I don't understand why we even care about rich and poor everyone's rich but to us growing up today even small differences can seem quite Stark Mhm and so what we'll do in the future then if we don't account for conscientiousness being a relatively large variable then we're going to have this thing where we got to do all this other stuff and the reality is none of that other stuff is going to work because it's completely saturated we're going to be attacking a problem from completely the

wrong angle because we've never ad uh we've never sort of taken the test the real crutch uh kind of the Crux of the issue a quick off-hand example if you've had some relatives who you deal with who you've had not so great relations with you think it's the way I'm speaking to them it's the way they understand me we have to have a come to Jesus talk we have to really do we have to do the therapy and it turns out years later like they have a psychological condition that's endemic and they have to be

on drugs and therapy for it but you never addressed that Because you didn't want to be like hey Uncle Bill I think you're crazy like crazy crazy and think you need pills cuz you were like oh that's not cool I'm not telling them that you would have been like you know what I'm just not kind enough to Bill next time I'm bring an even bigger Christmas or Hanukkah present or whatever the and every year you bring a bigger present he's just the same kind of dick now it was better than when you didn't Give him

presents at all but it hit a Baseline and you're like what am I doing wrong and the answer is nothing that's just who bill is people with a very low conscientiousness can only be helped to a certain point they just make different choices it's like um trying to expect your toddler to be formal with greetings and go to school on time by himself you're like that's a kid you can't expect him to do that people with low trait conscientiousness are going to Live their lives in different ways and face a a cacophony of problems that

don't occur to people of High conscientious problems that even exist for an adult and if we don't have an understanding that that's a real thing that we should expect we are going to spend a lot of time and resources that could have alternatively better spent in 50 other different ways on that problem and they're going to have no effect for Generations we've already done this with Education in the United States we've already done it with a ton of different factors what I'm saying is let's get a full understanding compassionately of the problem at hand try

to understand what fraction of what is accounted for by which variables definitely address the variables we can but then when people say like how come there's still room left over I would like future universities to say look look you can help people a lot externally but a lot Of it depends on the person thems and we haven't found a way to change that yet and if you bright students of today have any great ideas about how enhanced your conscientious of people we need you to think that through but so far we've kept away from it

but we know it's a factor versus saying why would you even care about that you Nazi and then all of a sudden we're back to square one where we're like we've deployed all these strategies we need more strategies Imagine we are to a point where tra conscientious in isn't accounting for all the Obesity differences and you're like we need more anorectic intervention through drugs we're going to drive people so high in the antic scale regular people who don't have low conscientiousness and who could just say you know snacks I don't need any snacks they're going

to be like the government's going to be like here's the average dose of you know fusure OIC we Need you to take they're going to be getting very low in body weight they're going to be getting osteopenic and you're going to say like well more they need more and you're like no no no no no we're actually having real nasty side effects from this now the thing you're trying to change is a thing that can't be changed because you're not even looking at the right variable it's like how much more basketball training do I need

to give you for you to be able to Dunk you're like dude I'm 5'3 there is no amount of training that's getting me to dunk you're like no no no no it's got to be something with the calf tendons you need to go to Bulgarian basketball camp 247 you've just pissed away a child's life changing an an unachievable goal you are worried about the future trying to create perfect scenarios that perhaps don't exist because of some in say yes no no because in in the Future that's the concern it's not an issue now you're saying

like right now think about the social things but like once you get the benefit of that then don't think that you need to do more I don't know any people that I've ever talked to who are genuinely concerned to try to make social changes that think they're working on a 10 to 20% Factor almost all of them think they're working on an 80% factor and they're not so I think today does that matter again in The present in the present yeah oh yeah because how uh the government has finite resources and if you think you

have a huge degree of traction on a really big problem then you're going to pour a lot of resources in that problem and it's going to take resources away from other problems whereas if you realize like okay we can pour some resources into this and to be honest we're doing pretty much as much as we can now and the rest Is kind of not up to us then you go okay we're doing decent here let's switch to an alternate way of affecting other variables we don't have free money coming out of the ground if we

start getting free money coming out of the ground it spend money on everything we just have people eat money at that point you know what I mean why do you think that when the self-esteem movement came about and people labeled that as the trait to focus on no one called them Nazis well it's the opposite of a Nazi ideology a lot of conservative thinkers called them socialists and Communists when they said the selfesteem oh yeah yeah yeah you're going to you're going to make up a bunch of entitled and you're going to pfy a whole

generation there was all sorts of nasty things said about that but fundamentally when you say look who's against people having more self-esteem kind of nobody you know I mean somehow if you could Really improve people's self-esteem people generally think that's a good thing but if you say like look like some people the number one cause of the problems in their life is them and how they behave from a largely deeply cultural and genetic perspective like there are entire subsets of American society with nothing racial by the way uh every race has subsets of their of

their culture that is like YOLO culture like live for today everything Else like don't you think that matters whoa whoa whoa no we're going to we're not going to go judging people's cultures it seems nasty to judge people's activities it seems nasty to blame the victim and that's why you don't get as much push back about it and that's why I'm here embarrassing myself to push back on it for for reasons of again trade-offs of what issues you attack because if you think something's really tractable and you have the money To spend and it's worthwhile

you spend the money if you think something's ooh not so tractable we've already spent a lot of money it's not seeming to have marginal effects at this point you got to ask cuz like from a grander perspective the kind of issues that affect the rest of the world make us look like spoiled children there are parts of Asia and Africa that are destitute they need our help and being a humanist I don't give a about Borders or nations or any of that it has huge value in other regards but we got to help real people

and when you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars into nutritional educ ation where you now know that the Returns on investment are teeny tiny and you could be sending hundreds of millions of dollars in development Aid properly administered in Africa and South Asia oh my God like you have a 100 to1 lifesaving potential that you're too Well in politics with that message I'll tell reason I'm not in politics um you wanted to talk about muscle can I tell you my take on it and then I want he because I don't want your thing to influence

what I'm going to say oh of course my thought about muscle is that right now muscle is talked about as a longevity organ because like for example someone will get an invite to a podcast and They'll say what's the most important organ and they'll say your thighs because if you have good thigh muscle you could stay independent you can go see your friends you can exercise increase in muscle tissue decreases rates of hip fractures and balance and they'll point to all these things and I think muscle is incredibly important and there's even a protective factor

in muscle from obesity and uh regaining weight after losing weight if You were once obese but I think it's just another phase of excitement to talk about it obesity in a new way that's my thought yeah yeah I agree okay uh you said it all all right cool podcast wish all of them were this easy no but what's your what's your thought or how does it differ from mine so I think there are two components that in the real world are enormously enormously effectual for Health longterm longevity and a massive reduction in morbidity even more

than an increase in longevity and that is the balance of muscle and fat that you have Fat's the more important one of them by a factor of like eight or some like that but muscle is also important and so at any given body weight if you have more muscle and less fat you you are profoundly more healthy in every measurable way and if your body weight is also relatively lower you're also Profoundly more healthy so when we are seeing people who are let's say in their 50s or something their blood works good health outcomes are

good no concern a regular and I don't want to ascribe any opinions to people so this is all Fantasy Land nonsense which is really should be the title of the podcast Mike's a delusional idiot comma and a Nazi in parenthesis Hitler himself Reborn so when people in a traditional medical establishment which I don't ascribe you to being um I am yeah but you're one of these modern thinking doctors you don't even smoke cigarettes when taking patients what are you doing you know Dr gundry said now I'm becoming angry at various clips of gundry in my

head so when people see 50 55 year olds in their office regular health screening and all The blood work is good they're like sweet have at it you're great see you next time if I'm a person who's got you know a little Periscope to the office and I see them and I see that that person has a relatively low amount of skeletal muscle mass and a high degree of relative adiposity relative body fat is higher you know people that are like normal weight but kind of made of mush skinny fat or whatever like me right

now I've been looking at your body for quite Some time I haven't seen anything I've disliked yet so well thank you no problem for your objective measure okay can we like stop the podcast and get it popping yes the cameras can stay on by the way that's a different show Mike oh nice I heard that's going well as well mine is also mostly feet I digress um when I see that person and if I'm that doctor and I'm not a medical doctor but if I'm like a consultant to the medical doctor like hey Sports scientist

what do You think I'll be like we got to try to talk to this person about resistance training consistently eating a diet of enough protein to make a difference and trying to get the balance of their fat and muscle through whatever ways decrease in fat increase in muscle usually it's much more decrease in fat because muscle doesn't muscle gain doesn't go as high as fat loss is capable of I want to see them next time in the office looking just thinking of Older folks you know like a William defo do you know who that is

of course it doesn't matter what age he is he's lean and he's kind of jacked not Jack jacked but he's like wiry a person 55 years old of William defoe's body composition to me is a person who is outside of crazy whatever drug habit or whoever the hell knows for real people in the real world at just the value of their body composition as a predictive variable for future morbidity And mortality I would say like if you're in really good health but you have a high degree of adiposity a low degree of muscle mass even

if you're of a healthy weight you need to get to work on making your muscle mass higher and your fat Mass lower because that is going to have a huge effect on how your health is later and so if I'm a consultant to Medical Doctors I don't rest until every patient I see over the long term eventually Comes back to the office with visible muscularity and no grotesque aggregated at deposity like massive spare tire thighs this Etc or if they Flex their arm there's some hard stuff in there versus just goop now none of this

is a personal judgment whatsoever I actually don't value people more or less based on how Jack and lean they are to any extent I don't care at all most the best people that I look up to in the in the world I don't even know what their body comp is I don't care but as far as an individual perspective the more muscular you can be and the leaner you can be especially the latter but definitely the former the healthier you will be long term and the strength of these uh variables as a factor variables is

so massive that I don't want that doctor after letting people out of his office with good blood work in their 50s who have very little muscle mass but a lot of atopos relatively and just be like you're good To go I want that doctor if it's in the scope of practice and polite conversation to them to be like hey you're doing good now your dexa scan has you doing just fine the bones look strong but you'll benefit really really greatly if you do some resistance training here are the resources for that he the resources for

diet to work with a registered dietician to bring the body fat down and the muscularity up and the person's going to be like my blood works Good you're like see it's good now but the thing that makes it good is largely how much fat and muscle you have over years and years and years that's my big contention you're walking at this moment sitting oxymoron how dare you I've never been accused of guys what word does that what did he say I'm not a oxylean was a great product do you know why I say that uh

I have my suspicions we had this whole two-hour Conversation and the Takeaway on your end it seemed was that the social issues require so much work but are not going to give you the majority of the benefit does that sum it up somewhat fairly from an obure sideway and then you want in the limited time we have in our offices to change human behavior by telling them hey lift more and you think that's going to lead to actual human behavior change when we look at recommendations of diet and Exercise for weight loss 95 98% failure

over the long term talk about getting little reward for the time spent sure the thing you're talking about which I agree with by the way yeah of course is the thing that actually Le yields the worst results yeah I didn't claim it was going to save Humanity the other thing is if you deal with highly conscientious people it is possible to have it it sounds like you have a bias for conscientious people I Do okay well at least you said it yeah cuz you said you don't judge people based on their body mass but you

probably would judge them based on their conscientiousness we could have a long philosophical discussion what judging people actually means I appraise everyone I ever meet like you know I've been on dates before with the girls like are you judging me I'm like absolutely are you the guy in the room that talks about what discrimination actually means Yeah hell yeah can you tell the audience oh I'm not trying to cancel myself anytime soon discrimination is the ability to tell things apart yeah Thomas soul on my t-shirt man I can't do that any I read discrimination disparities

and he did a great job talking about if your discriminatory taste with wine or with your sexual partners yes you will be a a fine describer of wines yes exactly so basically first uh yeah if you tell people of low conscientiousness To like hey lift weights and eat better reduce your body fat who gives a um so people are high conscientious they'll have a better time of it and and be able to do better but this brings me to the next next part of my talk where this kind of social effect is going to hit

some people but it requires so much effort in our modern food environment to constrain your adapost to increase your muscularity that a lot of people just don't find it um something that manages To squeeze in in their schedule and I think that if you have a situation where you tell people like really doctors Across America are really pushing resistance training they're really pushing lowering atopos even relative atopos if BMI is not too high you're going to have a substantial effect that's in that 10% of solving the problem but that's like tens of millions of people

whose lives have been extensive it's wonderful exactly like I Think that your sociological stuff is wonderful it's great right but you don't like it no I love it I just think it's just not super powerful so I agree with I'm to Total given that your career is about the nons superp powerful thing really my career is about like Sport Science it's it's a hobby I work in the entertainment industry legitimately Sports is just entertainment so um that being the case I think the next step and this was described in a review article Re recently written

we need uh to really seriously consider the development of a non-androgenic anabolic drug so we've now have the modern anorectic drugs the GPS gips glucagon agonists that have allowed us to kick down to any body weight reasonably as as we tolerate the drugs any body weight you want you just crank the dosage eventually get to that body weight as long as you're just remotely interested in eating sort of the right things not Necessarily the case I'll debate you all day it was it's not my take uh again the bariatric surgeon said that once you're in

the bmis of 50 and 60 the glp ones are not getting you where you need to be alone and that's why multim modal multimodal therapy is now the Forefront of the research where it's both both what bariatric surgery with a gp1 after oh sure well yeah then you have like also like an insane number of fat cells at that point that are screaming really Loud and they just can't dial up the dose enough to so that's why I mentioned side effects if you could m side effects and dial up the dose you could get people

in the 5 or 600 lb range to weigh 100 lb within a matter of years but they're going to look like like skin bags or whatever which I will say of man I have to say this as much as possible the skin removal techniques as an industry Surgical and non-surgical are the trillion doll question for modern Medicine in the late 2020s early 2030 so whoever the is listening hit me up I'll invest in your company JK please uh well I don't know feel free to give me a sh out I don't know if I'll see

the email but it's a big deal right because OIC and all those drugs are helping so many people lose weight and a lot of people think like I'm going to lose weight I'm going to look like whatever like the celebrity I like and they're like oh skin just doesn't go away And so skin removal is a big big deal in the future but so maybe as bariatric surgery drops off because the latest study that came out showed 130% rise in glp1 prescriptions and a 30% drop off in bariatric surgeries so maybe as they have more

time when I asked the bariatric surgeon about that she said that they have spent their time where they're performing less bariatric surgery performing general surgery interesting also maybe they Could do SK for sure and also like as is a very different thing from like developing medical techniques that are effective if you you're in a very Niche field of medicine it's just not a huge environment with a lot of like uh total part of the economy going into in total amount of thought going into how to resolve those problems there's lots of people thinking about heart

disease very few people thinking about like you know AER monogenic conditions or like there Just those three guys in the world that study your condition I'm really sorry hopefully we'll get more AI about it in the future but think that as literally tens of millions of people become candidates for skin removal surgery that side of plastics is going to be like exploding cuz it's like oh my God like anyone who figures out 10x cheaper and more effective easily recoverable and aesthetically more pleasing skin removal technique bro bro the medical companies That do the tech and

the doctors that do best surgeries in any case I digress yeah I was going to say it's the exact opposite of what the future looks like for food companies well I oh boy that's a whole other thing the oh I have a question because I love your philosophic answers on these name one industry that benefits from societal significant weight loss uh that that benefits from Significant societal weight loss like if we were to create like a better version of OIC OIC 10.0 that is better no side effects no issues and we can get everyone into

a healthy weight what industry benefits from the junk food industry benefits yeah hugely how does it benefit because now you can eat junk food and doesn't matter get less junk food yeah less you're not going to eat zero and now you can eat tons of junk food and as long as you get your Protein and all the healthy foods in you're not going to be excessive on calories because you fill up so fast so now junk food become junk food companies want you to believe that junk food can be part of a healthy balanced diet

and they're completely correct for small fraction of people that have very low food drive in the future with mon ectric drugs being ubiquitous everyone's going to have low food drive and it's actually true to say like dude get a bag of Cheetos and people are like well I don't know they're going to lead to no they're not half a bag of Cheetos you're good no one ever got fat from a bag of Cheetos now hundreds of thousands of bags of Cheetos over the lifetime that's thing the junk food industry is going to adapt and Make

Junk foods that are maybe some of the similar ones today that also maybe make ones that are slightly healthier or higher in protein so an industry that's going to I think Absolutely blow up is the uh High Protein healthy food but fun snacking industry you got a lot of people now they're losing weight they're empowered by these beautiful new drugs but they're like I still kind of want to eat some fun foods but I know some of the shit's not good for me and I these medicines have put me on the right path because there

any way I can eat like potato chips that aren't going to kill me healthy junk food is a just glazed With glory and profit I think but junk food in general I don't think think more so than the current junk food that exists like there's higher profit margins in that than what in Healthy Junk Food yeah hell yeah because more people are going to be right now the foods are so hyper palatable and so addictive that whatever Healthy Junk Food you have there's no way someone's going to buy 10 backs right so I do have

an interesting prediction there's uh not A real war not a hot war no no shots exchanged there is a war between hyperpalatable foods and monor anorectic medications the response for Foods development now is going to be like okay people are eating less with OIC how do we make our food so tasty even with OIC that they continue to eat them in large quantities it's a cool thing eventually it's just going to make a lot of food really really amazing and really really cheap and a lot more people who Want to be just as lean as

they like eating those amazing cheap Foods in moderation but if in like 10 years you're not on a modern anorectic drug and you're like the average food drive and you just eat sort of whatever shows up to your mouth the probability that you're going to be obese is insanely High same prediction it would have been in the 1950s like think about the 50s right not a lot of hyperpalatable foods going around just regular people with Normal appetites that today are 300 lb were like 75 lbs back then you're going be like dude in in the

2020s you're going to be fat like no way like food is going to be so good and so cheap you have no idea fast forward the 2020 are like dude you're right I can't stop eating this that trend is going to continue so the Olympic stuff haven't ended they're just another Salvo in that fight of Corporations bringing you Pleasure but ideally the best corporations bring you all the pleasure with none of the side effects which is why I think healthy foods that are super tasty but are good for you and fill you up my God

imagine a bag of chips you could to buy that was very nutritious unbelievably delicious and was uh uh super super affordable you would just eat that regularly and because that company continues to sell you chips and has nothing to apologize for and can Advertise like you can make this part of your diet can you name one food like that right now oh I have a really good example Fairlife uh shakes the dairy based protein shakes correct they are unbelievably delicious and really really really nutritious as well all right are you sponsored by them no God

no fair life please sponsor us I love them I love you I'll sing your Praises dude Fair life's amazing yeah uh there's lots of like uh cool chicken sausages they Have now that you can get at the store and Grill up that are incredible macro super high protein lowfat and they're Ultra delicious and super healthy so he iron say that again heem iron what's that dangerous component of meat based foods oh yeah sure yeah well let's make a sausage together that's like the prime drink or the what's that lunch Le of sausages I'm kiding lunch

it's it's terrible what you did on Twitter by the way what did I do on Twitter I'm kidding You had that one post about Twitter misrepresenting all of your uh oh on YouTube make make belief tweets of yours remember is that's so fun yeah alls fair in love and thumbnails and titles so no that's not right I don't agree with that well that's my opinion not yours what the hell were we talking about earlier when you took me off track on the philosophical oh yes yes no no no I got it so it's all the

same so doctors offices and telling people hey You should lift more weights and do this nonandrogenic anabolics we've already started to solve the problem of food drive and appetite with with medication but uh now we have an even bigger problem in the muscle mass side used to be muscle mass low muscle mass was something that affected predominantly older individuals individuals of certain ethnic groups more than others people from Southeast Asia struggle with low muscle mass and You've seen a lot of the metadata on their health stuff people in their late 20s who were type two

Di itic and you're like you're not even overweight like muscle to Fat ratio is all wacky right and so what we can we had and this is going to be worse and worse of a problem over time is the only thing keeping many many overweight Americans nonsarcopenic which is to say enough muscle mass to not cause activities of daily living or metabolic Disregulation the only thing keeping them having high enough muscle mass was their enormous food intake because if you eat more food you gain muscle and fat MH now they're going to be eating less

food but they're not getting into fitness and activity not all of them so you're going to see these new modern anorectic medications driving new wave of sarcopenia junk food and overeating has just been covering up that wave of sarcopenia cuz like a lot of overweight Older adults they're not sarcopenic but ass soon as you get them down in body weight oh my God they're sarcopenic we desperately need the development of a non-androgenic anabolic because anabolic steroids they build muscle real well but they come with like 18 trillion different side effects or just non-starter if you

have a non-en I anabolic potentially attacking the myostatin regulation system which is ultra powerful you ever see those like Cows that have like two times the muscle of the regular cow or the Greyhound or the mouse or whatever that is already a monogenic vector of attack we could be developing and uh who knows you know I'm not in the pharmaceutical back end but I guarantee you some companies are working yeah oh yeah so these are all tractable problems and as soon as we get a nadrian anabolic going we can prescribe dual therapy so instead of

coming into the office and saying you should lift Weights and eat better and they're like okay you're like all right see you next M dual therapy it would be single pill that would be dope the thing with okay so I'm not pushing back I'm just I'm just thinking out loud two Jews get together and talk like oh you're wrong um single ejection would be dope the thing is people have different genetics for muscularity and and food drive and so a single injection would kind of do a real a ton of good but I think two

pills Can also make sense because like some people don't need much more muscle but they need much less food drive the other way around is also the case but in any case let's just go with uh one p right to make it super simple people come in today we're like hey go resistance train and eat better they're like dope see you never and they don't do it nowadays now some of them do and that's great but now maybe in the future when we get a non-ic anabolic developed That's safe and effective and really very targeted

then we have the situation where people are taking a medication that not only lowers let's say God damn it back to two two medications just to keep this right clear they're taking a medication that lowers their overall body weight osity they're brought the fat down now they're taking a medication it does two things one it brings the muscularity up and if they want to engage in resistance training for Mobility for health for strength for enjoyment for connective tissue stuff it makes that a much more fruitful Enterprise I can't tell you how many people I've consulted

and trained and seen over the years who people tell them resistance train it's great these are people with good genetics they're often young these are older people with not so great genetics for muscle bro they're in the gym weeks and weeks and weeks something happens but not much if you Look at the exercise science data directly you'll notice there are a group of people maybe like about 1th of everyone who's in an exercise science study they don't lift weights and all of a sudden for 16 weeks they make them lift weights for three times a

week something like a fifth of those people gain undetectable amounts of muscle like if in the first 16 weeks of a program you don't gain detectable muscle people talk about Noob gains you know like you Gain Mo a wildly disproportionate totality of your muscle in the first few weeks if that ain't happening for you man MH can you imagine your doctor says lift weights you do you come back a year later you like three days a week I've been doing an RP hypertrophy app I did it all and then you they measure the do the

deck you're like uh you lost a pound of muscle that legitimately happens so just to cut this off at the pass I'm not saying we need to replace resistance Training in gyms with uh modern non-androgenic anabolics they're going to be empowering for everyone and look if you never go to the gym hey they'll be empowering for you too and then we can get to this world where people are in their 50 607s and they are lean and they have lots of muscle mass not a ton just a decent amount and it's going to impact disease

across the board in an unbelievably profound way because when I look at folks that are in their 50s 60s Etc and they're soft they're not large they're soft I'm thinking man five or 10 years you're going to break something or your di type two diabetes is going to go up and what do I do about this you know eat better and try to make better choices they already eat pretty well they just don't have enough muscle to there's no glucose sink you solve that problem it's enormous now the first wave of AI power drug Discovery

is already cresting they're they've been The most pharmaceutical companies pretty open with what they're working on it's not that because they're working on look Alzheimer's diabetes crazy killer problems that Millions have this I think is hopefully going to be next gen and when it happens it'll be a big deal I think that's your most reasonable prediction that you made this far it's a more of a hope than a prediction really actually but I think it's the most reasonable cuz when you look at a lot of The medications that exist in dual therapy in that they're

almost counteractive so for example there's some medications that have an nset and then a sucrate to co stomach to reduce the side effect or an opioid medication plus an anti-constipation medicine with it so like they're always trying to pair two things that take one of the problems and solve the backand side effect yes and I think this is just insanely obvious and Usually you're very good at push back I haven't heard much from you in this regard cuz it's like it's a real thing right it's and um I think so many people don't know that

having higher muscularity within a given body is so Health promoting and if you have a non- androgenic anabolic in the mix via nutrient partitioning most of what you eat now goes to feed the muscle because it's so hungry all the time and so it actually is a second order effect is to Keep you leaner so for any amount of food you eat if you're on a uh decent dose of non-androgenic anabolic you're actually going to be leaner because muscle simply occup iies more of that space and takes more of your food like you know when

you're lifting a lot and you're jacked and lean and everything you just eat tons of food and people are like don't you get fat you're like I don't know man I lift weights so much and I have so much muscle it just hungry And eats all the time and my Fat's like damn it feed me and there's nothing left that is such a profound thing that I think I'm really excited about that future development and I hope folks listening that maybe work at a pharmaceutical company can like I don't know talk the co or something

tell them me there's there's money to be made here I'm surprised you think that right now people don't think muscle is a big component of heal I think they do but I Think they're like an order of magnitude away from uh how big of a component they they like uh how important it is there's a thing about recognizing the importance of something nominally and there's a thing about like well how important is it like pretty important like no very important I think people need to shift more towards this is really important okay muscle's very important

you're a Nazi there's great takeaways from this podcast I had fun I had fun too I Actually wanted to talk about like 10 other subjects and we got none of them so that sounds like part three maybe we can do it on your show I'd love that yeah if you you know I'm still waiting for the invitation so you're too important to invite we've invited you 10 times and your your Butlers keep saying that that mail's going to some other part of the compound they call it okay let's let's make it um what do they

call it a smart goal so at least let's be Specific when I come on your show what topics are we talking about jeez you're making brainstorm live live people are going to see how that mind works sure no problem Flex the Jew brain got it I would love to talk to you about if I am a male in my 30s and 40s and 50s I lift regularly I eat well but I don't know anything about doctors and medicine and pills and what I could be missing and all this other stuff maybe I'm on trt maybe

I'm not when I go to talk to my doctor what labs do I need to be curious about what is A1C what does that mean how do I know that what I'm doing today is setting me up for Health and Longevity and muscularity later versus like dude you're on the real wrong path I know you lift and eat well but like you missed this whole thing that real doctors know about because I teach him about exercise Stuff and general Health stuff but I know almost nothing about the medical side I would love for you to

fill in the blanks of like how do you talk to your doctor about blood work what other measures can you take what really are the most profound things are there any medications I need to be taking another one is this what multivitamins and multiminerals should I be taking can I ask my doctor to test me for deficiencies because the big thing is The the the the great Cannon has been so far if you're eating a well-balanced diet you don't need a multivitamin and that's true but still millions of Americans have various vamin and mineral deficiencies

lowgrade ones but if you fix them you're going to get some Roi is that a thing I talk to my doctor about because unfortunately there's you can talk to doctors about it you can go no offense to the local health food store and they're like yeah yeah you can Fix everything we got all kinds of stuff to sell the whole premise of that like just to touch on it so briefly to end this podcast is validation of when you change something whether or not it creates a clinical impact and whether or not it's valuable to

spend the time as we said in in how important it is with limited time to make a change is the same way that I think about protocols from Gary Brea from huberman from Peter AA and there's nothing there's no down The scale of like uh empirical believability yes but the problem is all three of them function in the same world where they create individual protocols that they set themselves as experts in their own right and I say experts like this because it's a clearly a wide variability one has a bachelor's degree one is a PhD

one is an MD so there's variability and expertise and yet they have their own protocols expertly derived and here's why I don't buy into That when they disagree with an organization like the CDC American Heart Association AFP the American Academy Family Physicians because the recommendations that those groups give me as a clinician is validated so what's the current world record for bench press well I broke it yesterday in my own home so was I think it's just shy what is recorded I think it's just shy of uh 800 lb yeah okay if I was to

tell you non- jokingly that I bench 950 what would you say to me being that you are you and look like you are yeah everything I mean powerlifters will find this funny I'll be like oh what federation and with what triple ply shirt but that's an auster reference um so uh I would say oh that's cool and then I would tell my friends you're insane right and why do you jump to the conclusion that I'm insane can you prove that I'm insane uh with the way I understand Proofs to work in philosophy probabilistically through inference

yes probabilistically yeah oh yeah but not with 100% certainty no no you could just be a total freak totally so I can't disbelieve their protocols just like you can't 100% disbelieve that I'm saying but there's enough reasonable certainty and probability that they don't have the validated bench press shirt Federation judge whatever watching you form yes whatever it is that minua that's Incredibly important to judge whether or not that thing is true and validated that I can't buy into that and recommend it on a general scale because it might be true but they need to go

and validate it for me before I start telling it to people and that's my issue with the protocols totally and what my audience would like to hear I think are not protocols they get those plenty from those other folks um I think what they would like to hear is how to think about The situation of I'm an adult who's pretty healthy who exercises and eats well but what about on the medical and diagnostic side do I need to be aware of and talk to my doctor about yeah I think a good thing for us to

talk about would be how doctors are trained to go into a visit when they think about prevention treatment catching Things Early what we're trained to do versus what I'd like for some doctors to do more of yes and what to do if your doctor's not huge That really is it because the sub that a lot of times doctors will do that thing I told talked you about earlier where like 55-year-old who's made of mush they're like your blood work looks good see you next time for Fitness people it's extra more of that conundrum because they're

like their blood work is great I mean it's just Stellar for their age but they want more they want an extra insurance policy of health and fitness and because the doctor deals Only in generalities because that's how they were trained and that's most of the population they never get the care and attention they need and another thing I'd love to ask you about in the future is like how do I go about selecting a doctor that Works more with Fitness people and knows okay you want extra A+ attention because you're willing to do it then

what he look for because here's a big problem most of the people that are looking for the A+ in Fitness go end Up being like my doctor is a 70-year-old man who thinks that because I lift weights I'm going to hurt my back and even though he's okay with my blood work and everything he says you're fine you're fine you know lots of doctors be like you're fine everything's fine see you later 15 minutes are up who's left over to go to if we can't find an evidence-based practitioner that can give them that extra boost

like look let's look at your vitamin D levels over Every 3-month time span things that aren't worth most the general population but are worth it to you let's do it in an evidence-based way that makes sense but there are so few of those people around and so difficult to find I'd love to ask you about how to find them how to get to know because usually these people end up going to like quacks and they're like well this guy's the only one talking about enhancement you know like the human whatever the Gary Brea says I'm

a human biologist like oh usually speak to primatologists about this but I'm just being a well to talk about Dr gundry again and give him a nod he kept telling me about how great only eat fruit during parts of the Year therefore we should not eat fruit I don't know but that he kept telling me that and I'm like I don't really know what to make of that it sounds profound he said we shouldn't be eating fruit all Year round and I'm like everyone knows that I'm like well clearly humans that consume fruit are really

the problem in our country that's the who the least healthy people are is the linear correlation the people who eat fruits and vegetables disgusting animals yes I actually can can I do know a little bit of something about this um the sort of like annual variations in food consumption you see Mike when the Sun hits the Fruit I got nothing that's honestly refreshing cuz saying I don't know is sometimes more powerful than creating a story about great apes it's the story of my life thank you Mike I appreciate you I love it thank you so

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