1209: Michael Israetel | The Future Belongs to the Medically Enhanced

23:37Well, he was in World War II and he went to Japan and let's just say it wasn't a vacation. And then when he found out later that she went to Japan, he was like, you were around all those people. They're a bunch of murderous psychopaths. And it's like, Japan? What? But yeah, like World War II, different Japan. Different Japan. Kind of a different situation. Yep. You ever notice how you plateau in the gym? Then you go on vacation, you eat croissants, you drink wine, you do nothing, somehow you look better in the mirror. That's not science. That is witchcraft. Fortunately, supporting the show and saving some cash at the same time does not require witchcraft.

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27:08You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course. Again, no shenanigans. I don't need your credit card number, none of that nonsense. It's free at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Dr. Mike. All right, I'm curious about the steroids and roid rage stuff, because last time we talked, I mentioned roid rage and something like that. And you were saying the earlier you take steroids, the more it messes with your brain. And I wanted to ask about maybe damage isn't quite the right word, but the changes it makes in your brain. And you always hear like, oh, steroids amplify your personality, but that doesn't really make sense to me because like, if I'm a curious, naturally curious person who's really empathetic, are steroids going to make me more like that?

27:50Or does it only work if you're an asshole? Like what, what exactly are people talking about here? That's exactly the point. I mean, you made half my point for me. I love it. Steroids amplify the male part of your personality and males and females have different personality trends on average. There are many exceptions. And so if you take more and more androgens, more and more steroids, you begin to think and act more male-like. So for example, you are more likely to become less verbally communicative. You are, you know, the strong silent type, like, meh, see, get away from me, see? Right. Like, meh, why won't you talk to me, see?

28:25You know, shit like that. Right. What'd you do this weekend? Ugh, chilled. I was with a boy, see, none of your business. But like, oh, he's so manly, which he is, but you know, the strong silent type is a male characteristic. Right. Another one is proneness to egotistical, aggressive responses. If someone butts up to you and you're female, you're like, eh, I'm just going to talk shit about this bitch later. If someone butts up to you and you're male, shit might get into fighting territory real goddamn quick because that extreme maleness means you don't take shit from people and your ego is a little bit more fragile than normal.

29:00You take things as kind of assaults on your identity more often and a bit more of a hair trigger. So that definitely happens. the aggression in general goes up at extreme doses irritability goes up because testosterone gets you super fucking wired and you're always kind of like and you know like imagine having the sensation of being ready to go wrestle someone in competition but like half of that all the time yeah shit gets real old and your way of interacting with the world is like just no longer appropriate for most pursuits and so when people say oh you know steroids amplify your characteristics they amplify your masculine characteristics, and they reduce oftentimes your feminine characteristics.

29:40Your ability, for example, to be compassionate is reduced when you're on lots of steroids. Your ability to be empathetic to see someone else's point of view, your ability to communicate your own emotions and understand other people's emotions go down. Remember, autism spectrum disorder is not totally, but a predominantly male disorder. It affects way more males than females. It is almost the extreme male brain personified. And so if you're on enough steroids, you begin to exhibit more autism-like traits, which means that you no longer really know as much about what people likely feel and think in their heads, and it makes you more difficult to interact with in society.

30:15It is not an enhancement of your ability to do this. And if you take steroids early, like you're still a teenager and you take them in high doses until you're in your 20s or something, you can permanently lock your brain in to more egotistical, more aggressive, more sexualized, by the way. It's another thing is androids make you way more sexual, but sexual in a risk-taking and physical way, not sexual necessarily in a compassionate, touching, loving, super emotional way. And so, yeah, steroids do kind of make you more of an asshole, or they make you more confident and more expressive and more vibrant, but you take enough of them, eventually they make you an asshole because at extreme doses, everyone becomes a dick on steroids.

30:53So it's one of those things exactly to your point, they do accentuate characteristics, not all of them, male-like characteristics. And every characteristic at its extreme becomes toxic. And so when you take lots of steroids, you're literally multiplying your normal testosterone or testosterone equivalent, other molecules that act like that, you know, dianabol and things like that. You're multiplying them by two, five, or 10 times the normal amount. Imagine someone who was so compassionate that they were being bit by mosquitoes and they wouldn't use bug spray because they, well, mosquitoes need food and who am I to, you know, like get them off of their food supply?

31:26Be like, dude, you're going to get fucking malaria out here. And they're like, well, good. You know, it's the least I have coming. Like at some point, even compassion becomes toxic when it's so extreme, it biases you into irrational behavior. So that's what steroids do it to people at the extremes. There's a religion, I think, somewhat based. I don't know if this is like Buddhism offshoot or something where they sweep ahead of them when they walk because they don't want to crush little insects or whatever. I mean, that is mental illness codified into a religion. 100%. And I love the vibes. Like, it's such a great intention, but it makes working through the world and solving even bigger problems and eventually saving every single insect by, you know, uploading them into the fucking simulated cloud for AI, much less likely if you just don't have your priorities straight.

32:11You know, you got to eat food, you got to walk around, and trade-offs have to be made at extreme emotional valences. You're no longer able to make rational trade-offs, which is definitely true with steroids. It's like road rage, for example. Normally, road rage, someone's like, you're a piece of shit, and they cut you off, and you're like, ah, that guy must be having a bad day. And on steroids, you're like, that guy thinks he can challenge me. I wonder how scared he would get if I got out of my car. Let's fuck around and find out. That's not good, because one of several things can happen. One is you win that interaction, and that person pisses their pants, and then you just humiliated a human being, and you gave them trauma.

32:46Good job, you piece of shit. The other way, that's the best thing that can happen. That's the best outcome, yeah. Yeah. The second worst outcome is the police get involved and you go to jail for physically intimidating someone or at least go to court for a few months and spend a shitload of money. And the worst thing that can happen is that guy also has an attitude and a fucking license to carry and then you're dead. Yeah. So, you know, like that kind of thinking on extreme doses of steroids get you in real deep shit. Yeah, it's scary to think about. And I see a lot of younger and younger people using, well, actually, maybe that's just a bias.

33:16Do you see a lot of younger and younger people using steroids? I feel like I do now because of Instagram, or is that just I'm seeing it more because of Instagram? You're a very sharp individual, and it's great that you're preempting most of these questions with your own hypotheses, which tend to be correct. I love it. It makes my job easier. So awesome. Thank you. My best answer is there is no statistically rigorous way we have yet devised to be able to tell if steroids use in younger populations is increasing as a fraction of the population. Like in absolute terms, it's just 300 million people in America.

33:44And in the 80s, there was 200 million people. So if it got to come from like a new people, you know, your absolute levels of steroids are going to go up. But as far as fractions, I don't know. You're completely correct in diagnosing the asymmetry there with social media. our view into other people's lives is like many, many, many times greater than it was ever before. Yeah. Like if you wanted to see how someone was doing in a suburb of Kansas city in 1988, you would have to travel there and follow them around. Nobody talked about regular people in the news. You just would never see it. Never in a million years.

34:15Now people voluntarily post a huge fraction of their lives on social media. And so when people are like, oh, XYZ problem is so terrible. You're like, well, maybe it was terrible this whole time. They just started talking about it now. In the 1980s, for example, mid-80s in Detroit and actually all around the nation, violent crime was like so much worse than today, it's difficult to express. You just didn't see it because if you weren't in downtown Detroit, inner city Detroit, you could just like avoid it. You were just somewhere else. Now you have police, body cam, YouTube channels that show you tons of crime and you could very easily think, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever.

34:49Crime is at a huge increase, so on and so forth. So with steroids, I just don't know. If I had to put my gear to the street, I would say to me, like on just pure vibes, the problem doesn't seem any worse than ever because there's lots of TikTok teens that will click, like, and share and joke about steroids. The number of teens I know who's actually tried steroids is profoundly low. Most TikTok teens are like, LOL, trend. I'm like, oh, cool. How much trend are you running? They're like, I wouldn't even know where to get it. And you're like, exactly. Steroids are very difficult to get. I still have to get my steroids in wacky ways I can't discuss for legal reasons.

35:24And so like, you know, if you're 16, you're like, I want to buy steroids. All right, kid, hit it, do it. They're like the internet. Like, I don't know. That's not going to work. Good luck. What is steroids.com? That doesn't fucking work. And so all of a sudden, I don't know if kids are using more. I suspect the answer is probably not much. Maybe there's an increase in use. And if there is, that's definitely a bad thing. I just don't think it's like a cataclysmic, like, oh my God, we've lost our children to steroids. Highly, highly unlikely. And also kids get two views of things. They get the positive views from the tech talk teens that are flexing their muscles, but then they get like the views of like guy with a hundred pimples per square inch on his back they see liver king going through his arc and a lot of teens are like dude fuck that i'm not taking steroids this shit is insane it used to be like in the 90s and the 2000s the only exposure you got for steroids really was baseball players would use them in the news to get really good at baseball bodybuilders use them to go look amazing on bodybuilding magazines now on social media you get like the whole spectrum so if you want to be like hmm what are the downsides of steroids from real humans oh my god dude you can go down a rabbit hole after two hours man you're never fucking taking steroids again.

36:23That information was only available from the government back in the day. And the government would do that really convincing thing. You and I are both children of drug education in the 80s and 90s, no doubt. Yeah. Just say no. And you're like, why do people use drugs at all? Yeah. And they're like, don't do marijuana. You're like, is it fun? They're like, no, it's not fun. It's terrible. It causes hallucinations and you hate it. Look at the reefer madness. That makes you die. 100%. You just get like addicted to it and then you can't stop. It was never an amazing time. And nowadays people are like, yeah, like steroids are awesome in 50 ways and they're terrible in 50 ways.

36:52And when you're a teen, you're like, ah, fuck, man, I don't know. And it's kind of scary and it should be kind of scary. I remember a middle school science teacher asking us all why people did drugs. And it was like, because they're bad, because they're stupid. And then he was like, guys, it's because they're fun. Did he get fired after that? I remember being like, like Mr. O'Donnell has something to say. And he was like, the other day when I said drugs are fun, I was speaking hyperbolically Because the administration was just like, you know how many calls we got from parents that were like, Mr.

37:23O'Donnell said drugs are fun. I personally really like to talk to younger people about things that have trade-offs. Because I have like maybe, I don't know, a knack for keeping shit real as fuck. I can swear I don't care. No one is going to fire me. Right. And I think when you talk to younger people about things and you go, they're bad and there's no trade-offs. And when they try these things by themselves and they experience basically none of the side effects, they're going to be like, wow, people lied to me. Yeah. They said these things were bad. And I'm just not going to listen to them and I'm going to do drugs.

37:48The thing is, you have to cut people the real deal. So you go, listen, kids, a lot of drugs are really fun. Super fucking fun, bro. And some people can do them and they just really don't have huge downsides. Then they stop doing them. They go on with their lives and it's great. But for a lot of people that do drugs, they're really fun. And they come with hideous, hideous fucking consequences. And they're like, well, like what? Like, you ever seen a meth head before? And they're like, no, you drive him over to the fucking part of the trailer park where there's meth heads. And they're like, what happened to that guy's mouth?

38:12Like, methamphetamines happened to his mouth. They're like, oh, I would say like the best drug education ever would be to show some like a class of seventh graders the movie Trainspotting. Oh yeah. Bro, Jordan, could you imagine watching sitting there through that movie and ever trying harem again? I saw that movie when I was like 19 and I was like I don't know why you ever fuck with that. Ever. Like the babies crawling on the ceiling and their own baby dies of AIDS or whatever and you're like nope. Yeah that was categorically not. Horrific. Like real drug stories are fucked up and that also means different drugs get different takes.

38:42So you're like alcohol is really fun but you're very likely to get in legal trouble you're going to be emotionally dysregulated you're going to get into fistfights, you might die of alcohol poisoning. There's real serious risks. Marijuana, way less risk, but you can get addicted to it and not psychologically, but psychologically. And then your sleep gets weird. It's not super healthy for you. It's not great for developing brains. It's more nuanced. Do it responsibly. Do it a little less than you think you might want to. Maybe you're good to go. Caffeine's a drug. Sleep loss is a bad idea. You can be so wired on caffeine that you're actually danger to yourself and others on the road, but you have no idea because you've been awake for a day and a half, that sort of thing.

39:18And all the way to like, you know, what about crack cocaine? You'd be like, crack cocaine is going to fuck up your life. Okay. Any other questions? Like, no. What about regular coke, like China White at a party? Like, some people have a lot of fun with it, but it gets really addictive really fast. It's expensive as fuck. You never really know if it's cocaine. And you can just OD on some crazy ass pink cocaine that's not even cocaine anymore. They're like, okay, so this is kind of risky. Like, yes, correct. So if you give people the real deal like that and you really layer in the real life, gnarly downsides and the upsides, then people can make an informed decision, even if they're teens, because you just, you don't want to tell people half the story.

39:51When they find out you're lying, they're going to believe the other half. Yeah. That would be a real bad idea. Yeah. The whole like, just say no thing blew up in our face, right? It just didn't work. 100%. Speaking of drugs, there's so many angles I could go with this, but I'm curious, why can't, why can't I just do lines of cocaine instead of cardio if both get my heart rate up? One is way more fun until you die. than running. But like, why do I need to do the running part? Yeah. So when you do cocaine, your energy expenditure goes up a little bit, but not a ton. So you feel wired, but you're not actually moving around.

40:27And so the moving around is what burns the calories, which draws the fat cells down in size, which gives you all those health benefits. So if you do cocaine or you do caffeine, you do get a little bit of a thermogenic effect, but not a ton. And so that basically running the system really fast without reducing substrate is going to lead to a lot of health problems. Whereas if you run the system a ton and you physically move around, then it is wildly good for your health. That being said, modern exercise mimetic drugs do jack up your cellular activity. They don't jack up your heart rate. And they actually do burn fat and make you way healthier.

41:05And so drugs that do much of what exercise does are just a few years away in a pill. That's really, well, awesome. crazy to think about because in fact, this is maybe like a, as a bodybuilder, you might just disagree with this take and that's why you're here, but people work out a ton, but the real results I think that the average person wants from working out, if they're honest, most of that comes from being leaner, not from having much bigger muscles. A little bit bigger, yeah, but like most of us don't really actually want to be that big. We just want to be lean enough that we look muscular.

41:41Does that distinction make sense? I'm not explaining it super well. It makes perfect sense. I agree with you completely. Okay. Well, good. I was not sure where that was going. To your earlier point here, those drugs are incredible because now instead of trying to get like really giant and then do a diet and lean down and all that stuff, a lot of us could just take whatever helps us get lean and do cardio if we wanted to, if you are into that kind of thing, which no one is. And there are drugs already in testing that do both. So there are drugs like a zeloprag, for example, which is an exercise mimetic, which slightly increases your muscle size, almost completely prevents losing muscle when you're in a fat loss phase, and increases your daily caloric expenditure and repartitions your fat down.

42:21And this is like one drug that can make you substantially leaner, substantially healthier, and you lose zero muscle doing it or even gain a little bit. That idea of gaining a little bit of muscle and getting way leaner and healthier means that the potential market for a drug like this is insanely high. It's like everyone. It should be insanely high. It's like, damn near everyone. That's right. That's right. Wow. When can I get that? Asking for a friend. That's incredible. How far away is stuff like that? So like there are dozens of drugs like this already in various stages of development. Oh my God.

42:51A ton of them have already passed animal trials. A ton of them have already passed several human trials. In the next several years, a couple of these are going to be coming out. Imagine reading the trisepatide literature a few years ago before it was out and be like, if this shit's really coming, like, mm-hmm. It has all these benefits? Mm-hmm. And now that people take it, we see like, oh shit, it really works, and a ton of people are on it, and they think it's fucking great. And so in a few years, more and more of these drugs will trickle out, but there's something really, really big happening in the pharmaceutical space that bears mention, and it is the AI revolution.

43:21So with artificial intelligence, here's how drug discovery works. Chemists and drug scientists sit around, and they come up based on how much they know about the body and receptors and types of activity. They come up with hypotheses about what drug could we make that could have these beneficial effects and low side effects. They come up with some candidates. They have to test them directly in animals. A lot of the times the animal testing, the animals croak, or the animals have bad outcomes, or the outcomes are good, but they're really small, and the drug is too expensive to make. And so it ends up costing years and years and millions and millions and sometimes billions of dollars and gets you sometimes somewhere, but a lot of times nowhere.

43:59Nowadays, and I mean literally today, and as of several years ago, and now this is better than ever, you can get artificial intelligence to model out these drugs, model out the receptor class you're targeting, and go through hundreds and hundreds of thousands of drugs, changing them a little bit by bit to see which one would hypothetically work best to have the best positive effects and the fewest side effects. This is done entirely on computer chip. And so by the time you have candidates that you're going to test in animal trials, you are already 99 % of the way to the truth. And so the five candidate drugs you train, you're testing rats or mice, are not just like your five best guesses from a team of scientists.

44:40They're your five best guesses after having deleted out 500 ,000 other really good guesses. This is like instead of taking smart people and having them learn a subject, You take smart people, you push them 500 ,000 of the smartest people through grad school, and your top five scorers and most best scientists, those are the people you go through and teach that new subject. They're going to be way better at it than just regular smart people. And so this AI drug revolution is just starting to create candidate drugs today that are starting to enter animal trials today, which means that in 2027 when they start to enter human trials, you're going to get instant blockbuster drugs that are like 10 times more beneficial than any drug we've ever made with 10 times fewer side effects.

45:23We already have drugs in the pipeline now, the Regeneron drug I was talking about, Travagramab, Garetasmab, the ones that increase your muscle mass, reduce your fat mass, Azeloprag, those are drugs that were developed without AI. They're already killers compared to today's drugs. But there's going to be a leap to that next level. and here's how it works. Drugs come in certain different types from way difficult to make it administer and really expensive all the way to profoundly easy. Some of the drugs that are the most promising right now are called biologics. They're like incredibly, incredibly fragile.

45:55A lot of times you have to get them infused into you in a hospital as you can't even administer them yourself. They cost like$10 ,000 per dose. Fuck every single part of that. No, I'm good. I guess you have a life-threatening disease. It's worth it. Anything other than that, you're like, hell no. Then there are drugs that are injectable and they're peptides, for example, and like you have to store them in a refrigerator and you have to inject them with a needle and you have to inject once a week. They're really effective, but they're a little expensive. They're tough to get. And then there are drugs called small molecule drugs, oral small molecule drugs, which means they're incredibly stable.

46:23You put them in a pill. The pill's good for two years. You put the pill in a fucking container in your cupboards and you just like take one a day and it does everything that the biologic does, but like one cent per day and it doesn't go bad. And so as we have these biologic drugs being researched, A lot of them will never even see the light of day. This is the same company that researched the biologic drugs and paid a shitload of money to have them go through trials. They are already, some of these companies have small molecule drugs that are oral that are, as soon as they start getting tested, they're gonna blow through everything.

46:52That's the drug you'll see in the market in 2028, 2029. So my prediction is that in the late 2020s, the spigot of unbelievable drugs to make you leaner, to give you every benefit of exercise or almost every benefit, to make you sharper cognitively, to give you more daily energy and to make you more muscular is going to open up into a fire hose. And at that point, the world will start to change. Another way to see this is look at the app space. What is there not an app for on your phone? There's a fucking app for everything. 15 years ago, there was an app basically for nothing. And the drug space today is there's not a whole lot of apps.

47:30The drug space in five years will be like, what do you need? We got drugs for that. And they're damn good. And you're better off taking them than not. Where this is going is eventually a lot of people are going to be on five or six drugs daily or weekly or monthly. And these drugs are just going to make you in every conceivable way better than you would be without them. And then the people who don't take drugs, they'll be kind of like the equivalent of Amish people today where you're like, oh, you don't have electricity. That's kind of weird. Okay, cool. There's going to be an interesting gap for 10 or possibly even 20 years between people who have like a telehealth doctor that's going to be like, Jordan, you want to try to use hepatitis?

48:09Sure. I saw your last blood work. All right, cool. Mail it to him. And then, you know, the people who can afford that because it's going to be like$800 a month or something. I don't know what it costs. But, you know, telehealth, they mark it up because it's kind of like wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I'm making sure you don't die on the thing. But do you need it? Need it? no insurance is going to cover that. And then there's going to be like this whole 10 or again, 20 years where people are like, oh, I don't know about that. It's not mainstream enough for me to take it. My doctor doesn't know anything about it because he went to medical school in 1997 and he hasn't really learned much since then.

48:41That whole sort of like curve of early adopters, then we'll see like Denmark prescribes it to everyone in the whole country because, and then it's like, well, this is America. We're not doing that because your insurance company has to pay for it and they don't want to do that. It's going to take like 30 years for us to get there. Yeah. I don't think it'll take that long. I think your concern is very valid on principle. It'll take longer than it should, but I think in about 10 years, almost everyone will be taking advanced drugs. Wow. Actually, in 10 years, I think the landscape could be substantially more different.

49:11So, so far we covered those. There's biologics, which are really, really difficult to make it administer, super expensive. Peptide drugs, which are somewhere in between. Oral small molecule drugs, which are super easy. There's one step further you can take, And that's DNA modification. If we're giving you a drug that is a certain molecule that makes one of your proteins express higher, and that gives you all these benefits, we say, okay, why is a protein expressed lower? And the answer is like your DNA just codes in to make only so much of this protein. You can ask the next question. What if we change the DNA to make more of the protein?

49:42That's an interesting question. It's like replacing the drug with your body makes the drug now instead of you having it in oral form. And so eventually DNA modification will probably replace almost all pharmaceutical intervention. Wow. So like you just get the DNA modification once and all of a sudden you're in several months way leaner and you stay leaner indefinitely or you're more jacked or you have more daily energy or you're a little bit sharper cognitively. The other thing why I think resisting these drugs is going to be very, very short sighted or short-sighted short temporal phenomenon is that vanity wins against every opponent.

50:19As soon as you have drugs and DNA modifications for age reversal and skin quality enhancement and hairline enhancement, so many people are going to take them that all of a sudden it's going to be the status quo bias that we were talking earlier is going to shift to, yeah, of course you take them. And then status quo bias fights for us and not against us because someone's like, well, I'm not taking them. You're like, why not, idiot? Do you like being bald, for example, there's a drug currently finishing trials. You put it in a cream and you rub it on your skull. It like rewakes your senescent hair cells.

50:50It's phenomenally effective and it's local only. It doesn't enter your whole system. You got to be real careful about where you put it because wherever you put it, you're going to get really awesome hair growth like for years and years and years thereafter. This drug, and no doubt the second and third generation of this drug in the next few years, is just going to straight up solve hair loss. I mean, solve hair loss. And then at some point, you'll have a guy at your work who's bald like me, and you'll be like, dude, why haven't you fucking taken the cream? And when the cream is$900, and it's risky, and no one knows if it works, maybe there's good reason.

51:20When the cream is$35 and available by prescription, and all you do is go to your doctor and be like, I don't want to be bald. He's like, yeah, no problem. Let's get this fucking cream. I mean, imagine going to your dermatologist right now, and you're like, hey, I've got this thing on my face, like this discoloration. He's like, yeah, we have cream for that. They're like, are you sure I can have it? He'd be like, Yeah, this cream has been around for fucking 15 years. Of course you can have it. That same thing is going to be there for baldness, for low energy levels, for not enough muscle mass, for too much body fat, and all the way down the line.

51:45And at some point when people are like, wait a minute, you just take these things and they just make you better. Enough humans in, here's another one, Jordan. When people are in your real life experiencing these benefits, it hits different. When you talk to your best friend's dad and he's 75, but he looks 55 and he's leaner than you and his face looks kind of younger than yours you're kind of like what the fuck's going on he's like yeah i'm on all these drugs you're like aren't you worried like worried about what motherfucker look at me and you're like right yeah no okay and then you go home you're like am i the last person i have one remember when the iphone first came out it was just rich people and tech people yes and then two years later it was for literally everyone because everyone's like why the fuck don't i have one of those yeah that is going to happen with drugs people worried about pharmaceutical companies pushing these drugs nobody needs to push this shit on you and i personally i'm a politically, like pretty close to a libertarian.

52:31I could give, please, for the love of God, don't ever take anything you don't want to. I just think people are going to want to because who the fuck doesn't want to look younger, be healthier, look leaner and all that stuff. It's just like an open and shut case. All right. Steroids and cocaine bad. Okay, kids, invest your money in something else, such as the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by LinkedIn. When you run a business, you don't get to clock out at five o 'clock. Your business is on your mind all the time. And when it comes to hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do.

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53:30Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn Jobs. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash jordan. That's linkedin.com slash jordan to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is also sponsored by Quince. Cooler temps are rolling in and like every year, we turn to Quince for the stuff that actually lasts. They're fall staples, cashmere and denim. They hold up season after season. The prices blow us away. Get 100 % Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just$60. The denim and real leather jackets give you that clean, classic edge without the premium markup.

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54:34Go to Quince.com slash Jordan for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Jordan. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash Jordan. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Years ago, we tried finding therapists the old-fashioned way before, and it was always a hassle. The scheduling, the back and forth, half the time it wasn't the right fit. It got really frustrating. We could never really stick with it consistently. BetterHelp has been the solution for us. The matching process makes it easy to find the right therapist. If it's not a good fit, you switch any time.

55:08And because it's all online, scheduling is not a nightmare. You can actually keep it up week after week, and for us, that's been the difference. Therapy has been a constant part of our routine. We're genuinely grateful for that. and BetterHelp has been doing this for over 10 years. 30 ,000 licensed therapists who've helped over 5 million people worldwide. They got a 4.9 rating out of 1.7 million reviews and from our experience, it's really clear why. We all run into challenges in life and in relationships. BetterHelp makes it possible to face those challenges with real support week after week.

55:37As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at betterhelp.com slash Jordan. That's better, H-E-L-P dot com slash Jordan. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do whatever smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. They make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

56:10If you can't find a code, you're not sure if the code exists, feel free to email us. I'm jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Mike Isretel. People will say, yeah, but Jordan said people who can afford it. Man, you're going to figure out a way. You ever meet a broke person who has like an iPhone 16 and you're like, I'm still in the 50. Every single broke person. You go to the gym and you see that gal who's got like a Birkin bag and like a Dolce Gabbana onesie.

56:42And you're like, man, she must be a lawyer. And you talk to her and she like doesn't have a job. She's just dating a rich or like doesn't even date a rich guy. Just like, what do you do again? And it's like, I spend all of my money on these things because I want them. And no, I can't afford rent. I live with my parents. You know, it's like, yeah, you're going to find people who bag groceries and are like 19 and they're going to be on these DNA modification things because it's way more important for them to be jacked and have abs than it is for them to like, yes, move out of their parents basement or go to college.

57:09Yes. There are two vectors that work to enhance that. One is the vector of competition. There is not one pharmaceutical company. There are many. And when one pharmaceutical company has a blockbuster drug that costs$150 a month, every other pharmaceutical company is like, how can we attack that same receptor site, but at$50 a month? And there's one company that's like, what about$10 a month? Because if you sell something for$10 a month and your competitors sell it for$50, you instantly have market dominance for the next fucking day. And no one even bothers to buy the shit afterwards. Imagine if someone tried to sell you a Toyota Corolla for$150 ,000, you'd be like, are you out of your fucking mind?

57:41It's just a non-starter. And so competition is a big deal. Another big deal is that when we see from whatever our healthcare system is going to be like at this point, if it's AI assisted healthcare system, this is going to be solved because AI is smart and not biased like us. We have a stupid healthcare system. But even if we don't, at some point it's going to be obvious that like, okay, if we have people on these drugs, it saves us like 10X the medical expenses over the next 10 years. And so insurance companies would be like, it's free, give it to everyone because they save a fuckload of money.

58:10Remember, insurance companies, health insurance companies are more on your side than you are because they really give a fuck if you get unhealthy later because they have to pay for it. They don't want to pay for it. They're greedy people. And so what they want to do is be like, oh, hold on. If we have this person approved to go on super cheap drug that saves us$100 ,000 heart surgery in 10 years, why, you fucking God, give it a go. We're going to figure out how to make you take this thing. Like, we're going to try and lobby for laws where you have to quit smoking with this drug. Yes, it'll be like, we don't even have to do that, but here's how it might work.

58:43You might apply to an insurance, a medical insurance. Let's say we have a free market insurance company, which I think would be a really good idea. You have one policy, you could do another company, do another policy. When you look, you scroll through, you have, you know, Chachy Beasy help you pick a policy. And you're like, dude, wait, this policy is like full spectrum health insurance for$100 a month? And you're like, uh-huh. How does it work? Like, well, they'll do your blood work for you, and they'll ask you what medications you're on. and if you get on to certain very awesome approved medications and your doctor says it's okay, every single medication you get on, they charge you less money, like a lot less money every month.

59:14And if you get on all of them, you could be paying 50 bucks a month. And you're like, wait, but they're making me take these medications. No, you could just not buy the insurance. But if you get the insurance and you demonstrate you are taking the medications and your blood work is good, when you have car insurance, nowadays, if you have a Tesla, the safer you drive, the lower your insurance premiums are. I did not know that. Because they're like, why the fuck would we charge you a lot of money? If you're not going to cost us any money. We're going to save you money. So you stay with us and keep putting money into the bank.

59:38That same thing can happen with drugs interventions, where at some point you absolutely will be able to buy insurance, having taken zero drugs. You're like, why is this insurance$500 a month? Because they know you're going to die, you dumb motherfucker. And they're going to have to spend a fucking hundred thousand dollars treating diabetes and cancer and heart disease, which no one else gets anymore. Because you insist on taking no drugs. You have to pay the cost to be the boss. You have to pay your way one way or another. And insurance companies, if they see drugs that really are beneficial for long term, they desperately want to help you pay for them so that you save yourself and them, well, yourself a fuckload of problems and yourself and them a lot of money down the line.

1:00:11Yeah, that'll be interesting. A free market approach would actually, I'm sure there's downsides that people will email in about, but that would be so interesting to see because you're right. Then they would finally have an interest in keeping you healthy. They do have an interest in keeping you healthy. They already have an interest in keeping you healthy. It's just really hard to keep people healthy. People say, well, preventative medicine is good. Like, all right, you got any good ideas? Like eating healthy, like how the hell is an insurance company going to make you eat healthy? Yeah, they can't.

1:00:36And they also know you're probably not going to do it. She's like, fuck that. Like, what about like working out? How the hell are they going to make you work out? How are they going to enforce that? It's already true that for many insurance companies, like if you have insurance through work, the insurance company will pay for a gym in your office so that you go work out. But they also know that most people won't use it. So you're like, oh, like I save$10 a month if I work out. Like, yeah, it's because most people don't do it. Most people lie about working out. They have no way to verify that you're doing that.

1:01:02But if you're taking medications and your blood work is good, insurance companies absolutely will save you a shitload of money. Yeah, because they could verify, well, what does his blood work say? It says he's taking the drugs. All right then, well. Or he's working out like crazy and he has the same benefits of taking the drugs. Yeah. If you continue to demonstrate really good health, the insurance companies have every reason to charge you very low money. There's actually in Michigan, there's a policy called My Young Blue, which is for people under the age of 26. And it's like a full spectrum health insurance, it costs very little money.

1:01:28Why? Because people under 26 typically don't get into really expensive health shit because their bodies aren't falling apart yet. If you're taking drugs that make you as likely to get into health trouble at age 45 as you were at age 25, everyone's health insurance goes down. That's fascinating. And this is all just a few years away. I mean, AI just, it's crazy. You have Chad GPT-5. It's so much better than four. It's insane. Yes. It is a wisdom generator. It is. It's crazy to me. And yet everyone's like, oh, the energy cost and oh, it has like false negatives or whatever. Because people don't, you know, I got, yeah, I got so much pushback because I said, put all the supplements and all the medications you're taking into chat GPT five and ask it if there's any interactions or if you're taking it at the right time of day or if you should change something.

1:02:09Because I did that with all my supplements, all my medications for me and my mom. And it was like, hey, your mom's not taking these two drugs together, is she? And I was like, mom, are you taking these two drugs together? And she's like, I don't know. I just take a handful of these drugs. And it's like, ask your doctor if you can take these two together. And the doctor was like, no, you can't. And my dad was like, you could have told us that. And he's like, oh, I must have. And it's like, that's not written on any of the things. Oops. You negligent a-hole. And for me, it was like, oh, you're taking fiber with this.

1:02:35Are you drinking milk or fat with this? Because you need this as fat soluble. And I was like, nah, I'm fasted when I do that. And it's like, oh, well, you're probably absorbing like 30 % of this instead of all of it because it's fat soluble. And I was like, crap. So I had to change up what I drank in the morning. and people are like, well, chat GPT can give you a false negative and say that something is safe when it's really not. And it's like, but before you were literally not checking this at all. Yes. So what the hell? Yeah. It's not perfect, but it reduces your risk substantially and enhances your benefits substantially.

1:03:04Also, there are ways to reduce your risk way, way more. Here's what you do. You parse your medication situation with chat GPT, tell what your medications are taking, tell what your supplements are taking, ask for a recommendation of how to modify. It'll give you one. The next prompt you enter, because it is a huge context window, it remembers everything you talked about in the whole thread. You go, hey, I'm skeptical. Can you red team? Red team is like basically like looking at something from the most critical perspective you can. Can you red team your own analysis to find holes in it? It'll do that.

1:03:33You do it once, you go, can you red team that analysis to find even more holes? It'll do that. At some point, five red teams later, it'll be like, this is all pretty solid. Now you have the most powerful thing ever created, the most intelligent machine ever made, the most intelligent entity ever made, 5X checking its fucking logic for you. At the end of that, which is like literally five prompts. I mean, it's 10 minutes of your time. At the end of that process, you don't have to worry about hallucination that much because holy crap, the thing checked itself a ton. And every time it checks itself, it runs new logic loops.

1:04:02So it's fresh every time. By the way, this thing is inherently unbiased in a way that humans absolutely are not. Right. And GPT-5 erases the best doctors on overall medical knowledge and diagnostic criteria. It's not even close. It's just smarter than your doctor. It just is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That sounds rude. It's smarter than me. It's smarter than everybody else. And so does it make mistakes? Fuck yeah. Is it good to keep a human in a loop? Absolutely. Should you ever take anything ChatGPT tells you that you can parse through your doctor? Absolutely not. But is it a great way to catch what your doctor might be missing and come back to them?

1:04:36God, yes. Why wouldn't you want excellent advice from an expert? I know. I just, I thought it was comical that they were like, it's going to give you a false negative and it's really bad. And all these doctor organizations or pharmaceutical organizations recommend not using it. And I was like, oh, the people that recommended the drugs to you that it says you shouldn't take together because it might kill you. Those people say you shouldn't be using ChatGPT to check their work and that you should just rely on them. I'm going to get a second opinion from a machine and maybe another human because that person almost killed my mom.

1:05:04Thank you, though, for the recommendation to not use this because it might find a mistake that you made. Dude, here's another thing. These machines have done a lot more research than your doctor. I'll tell you how. How many medical textbooks has your doctor read cover to cover and remembered with almost 100 % fidelity? Yeah, zero. One, maybe. How many has it read? I mean, every publicly available medical textbook at the same time. There's no human doctor that's ever done that. The other thing is like, how many variables simultaneously can your doctor juggle in his head? The answer is roughly three to seven, depending on how smart your doctor is.

1:05:36what about Chachapiti? Like 50 at the same time? That's a qualitative lease, the super intelligent machine. It's insane. It'll spot things. You're like, no one's ever spotted this. And by the way, there's stories all the time of like, I told Chachapiti what was wrong with my dog and my dog. And it said like, you need this now. And it saved my dog's life because none of the veterinarians even knew that was a diagnosis because none of them had ever read that weird thing about ticks in suburban Missouri that we have a species of tick. But here's another How many case reports of various medical conditions being resolved and misdiagnosed, undiagnosed has a doctor read?

1:06:08I mean, a bunch, dozens in medical school and their history. I mean, he has ChatGPT read in its training arc. I mean, God, fucking literally millions. Like, it knows so, so deeply what we barely know at all that it at least needs to be our teammate in figuring out how the world works. I'm not saying just give your whole life away to this thing. That's crazy. If you ask ChatGPT, it'd be like the last thing you want to do is trust me 100%. 100%. But do you want a super, super wise advisor in your ear when you make shit like happen in your life? Or do you not want a super wise advisor? No one said perfect advisor.

1:06:40You know, can you imagine being like, all right, I'm going to play like the shoot them up game. Do I want a Navy SEAL to tell me how real combat works so I don't get killed in this game? Or do I want to just shut them out completely? Like, well, the Navy SEAL is not perfect, right? The Navy SEALs have had missions go wrong. They've lost guys. Okay. But is it better than nothing? Like, well, of course it's better than nothing. That's that whole like, oh, don't trust chat GPT because it makes mistakes. If your standard of reference is perfection, you'll never use anything ever again because there are no perfect systems.

1:07:07If your standard of reference is better than what we have now, oh my God, AI is an immense tool that you should be using if you're a logical person. It just reminds me of when people said, we don't want to get rid of elevator operators because what if something goes wrong in the elevator? And it's like, oh, you got a call button in there and then people can come get you out and there's a box downstairs you can shut it off and they can open the doors. And it's like, nah, I want a guy in there with me. I don't feel like this is safe. Nobody would argue that in 2025. If you have an elevator operator, it's like a tourist attraction because it's so weird, right?

1:07:37Yes. But when they got rid of elevator operators for computerized elevators, people lost their minds. They lost their minds. They couldn't believe that you would do that. You would let me into an elevator all by myself to operate this machine that could kill me by snapping off the cable? Unbelievable. There was a point over a period of years, my friend did a whole podcast about this, where there was a period of years where they had elevator operators just pushing the buttons in an automatic elevator because people were like scared to use the computer. Yeah. That was it. 100%, which in retrospect is absurd.

1:08:09It is. And we have to have transitional phases like this, but let me, well, put you on to some shit now that you started this conversation. Right now, it's mostly your doctor and a little bit with the help of AI. In a few years, your doctor is going to be going to AI for almost everything. They're going to be a team. A few years later, something else is going to happen. Because remember, AI is exponentially improving its intelligence. Humans improve their intelligence at a very low linear rate as society gets better about nutrition and education. And if you already have good education and good nutrition, your intelligence just follows this normal curve during life and it doesn't really change much.

1:08:40AI is multiplying by 10 in its intelligence every like, I don't know, six months or some stupid shit right now. It seems totally absurd. So by the late 2020s, you'll have a thing that's already been seen in some of the literature. There are some studies now that, for example, in diagnostic imaging. You show AI a bunch of images of medical shit, and you're like, what's wrong? And you show a human doctor what's wrong. Now, the AI has been beating human doctors at medical imaging for like years now, but what's been happening is AI plus human team has been beating everything until recently. A few studies came out recently that shows the AI actually beats an AI plus human.

1:09:13Why? Because the human will say, nah, I don't think you're right here, and the human's a lot dumber than the AI now, and he'll just get it wrong more often. Like, imagine that in order to do your job, your co-podcaster was someone with an IQ of 65, like could not graduate high school level of intelligence. And he just generally agreed with you. But you're like, hey, if the gain on my mic is off, he's like, no, it's fine. You're like, but it's not. He's like, no, I get the final decision. It's fine. You're like, this guy's made a fucking mistake. Why the hell am I listening to this person? I'm so much smarter than them.

1:09:41I'm right. This person is wrong. That's where AI is headed. And we don't need to somehow religiously worship AI and be like, oh my God, like you have to believe everything it says. But I'll tell you this, Jordan, This is how I think about it. If an AI system is roughly as smart as a human doctor, I want it in the room. I want it part of the conversation. If an AI system is 10 times smarter than a human doctor, I want the doctor to have to sign off on life and death things and be fucking uninvolved otherwise. If an AI system is 100 times smarter than a human doctor, I don't want any biasing by a human doctor.

1:10:11I want only what the fucking AI says. If an AI is 1 ,000 times smarter than a human doctor, I have no idea why we'd ever consult a human like you would maybe consult your dog for if you need a surgery tomorrow. That same level of intelligence difference. The exponential growth of intelligence through artificial systems is something that's going to change society more in the next five or ten years than anything ever has by factors of ten and factors of ten and factors of ten. And that's going to lead to wacky stuff. Currently, we're asking the question of do we trust these systems? And the answer is incrementally more, oh yeah, actually, they're really good.

1:10:43In a few years, the question will be like, we need to be pulling humans out of a lot of shit because we don't need them around. Here's an example. Right now, my wife and I just got a Tesla, first time ever, and we have full self-driving. Oh, it's so fun, right? Bro, it's categorically more safe than you for two reasons. One, statistically, it's been demonstrated to be more safe. And two, it's just better at navigating the world. For example, the Tesla pulled up to a T-intersection with my wife and I were in the car, pulled up to a T-intersection. So pulled up and there's like cars this way, cars that way, right?

1:11:13Going both ways. How do humans parse that? They look this way, they look that way. And when they look one way or the other, they update their mental model to be like, no cars here for a few seconds. No cars here right now, that means I turn. And everything they remember about what's happening on that side when they're not looking is mental modeling. And a car could have turned or accelerated, and that's not in your mental model. You're not literally aware of it because you have binocular vision that has one focal point. Very small focal point, I might add. Guess what Tesla's camera system sees?

1:11:40Everything. It's a 360 degree view of perfect awareness 100 % of the time. It sees it all. And so like you can't beat it at driving. It's just not going to happen. There are edge cases it can't do. Those are falling exponentially. And so here, let me ask you a question. In five years with the acceleration of AI self-driving systems, why the fuck would you let humans drive a car? They're death machines. From your lips to God's ears, man, I have been saying for years, self-driving cars, because look how many people die from car accidents. 50 ,000 people a year. And it's insane. And you look at insurance rates and it's like people doing risky stuff all the time.

1:12:15And in X number of years, I've said this before so many times and it always pisses everyone off. It does. The people who are like those libertarian, like hardcore libertarians who are like, I should be able to have a bazooka and a tank in my backyard. And you're like, OK, bro, whatever. Go back to bed, grandpa. Those people, the 2045 version of them are going to be the people that are like, I can drive better than any goddarn machine. And you're like, no, you can't. You also used to say you drove better drunk than sober. And we know that's not right because you have three DUIs and you just got out of prison.

1:12:45I love that. I've literally been told that by people. I had a guy tell me that he drove better drunk because when he was sober, he took things for granted, but he was drunk. He was extra focused. Yeah. Like, I'm actually careful when I'm drunk. Sure. Your reaction time is 30 seconds lower than, yeah, just delusional. And it's like, oh my God, you're just walking around the world with that level of cognitive bias all the time. All the time. Please don't ever drive anywhere near me. Don't vote. Please don't vote. Yeah, don't vote. Exactly. I guess my best way to kind of summarize the gist of what I'm kind of trying to get across and you and I are sort of vibing on is this, don't just assume science and tech are amazing and there's all the answers.

1:13:23Never fucking do that. That's stupid as shit. You're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble. But when we have tools like advanced drugs, in the future gene editing, self-driving, AI-assisted doctor stuff, ask yourself, like, am I better using these tools a little bit than not? And the answer is typically yes, but don't just carte blanche. Trust them. Have a human in the loop. As these tools become better and better and better, just continue to be open-minded and go, hey, like, I think, like, more and more, these things are really awesome to use. And then eventually, you're just using all the good stuff that you're supposed to be and giving yourself all the best advantages.

1:13:54I mean, imagine someone in the 1980s, I should imagine someone today having like an opportunity to use immune mediated cancer drugs. And someone's like, okay, so I have cancer. Like, right. No other treatment is working. Right. There's this new immune centered therapy that has 90 % hit rate for this kind of cancer. I probably live. Okay. How many years has it been tested on human? None. It's two months in. You're one of the first people to use it. Why? I don't want to take the risk. What risk motherfucker are you going to die of cancer? Like, right. Okay. Let me try it. And so 10 years later, when the doctor says this is a standard of care, that's because it was new at one point and risky.

1:14:30Everything that you do today, status quo bias, used to be risky and new, but you do it all the time. Dude, do you want to think about why people get into cars at all? Imagine going back to the year 1900 and telling someone like a housewife, like a suburban housewife is going to be able to get behind the wheel of a machine in the year 2005 that has the equivalent, I think it's really difficult to explain how this works, but we took 200 horses and we condensed them into this machine that's the size of like kind of like a person. We put it inside of a chariot and then you just have this wheel that you operate it with and you tell the horses where to go and they pull you anywhere you want to go.

1:15:05So what if the horses run really fast? Like, oh dude, they can go like a hundred miles an hour. Like when they get you killed, like, oh yeah, I can get you killed. Okay. So what's going on? Like, oh yeah, in the 1920s, it's going to be legal for everyone to have one of these. They'd be like, what the fuck? Why would you ever do that? And of course they missed the benefits of driving completely. And they missed the idea that a statistical risk driving is actually really, really, really, really safe, and it's highly unlikely. It's also a lot of it's in your hands. You don't have to go 100 miles an hour.

1:15:30You can go 20 miles an hour and just get to the store on time. So every time new shit comes up, people get this reflex of like, oh, new stuff's bad. Everything was new at one point, and a lot of it ended up being good. So don't carelessly run into shit and just start using it. Be mindful, be conservative, but if something seems like it's doing really well, it's got research behind it, the actual data means that it's doing really good stuff. Hey, man, give it a shot. You don't want to be the last guy with a fucking smartphone. You could be, but not for health. Right. You know, like smartphone or not, you're still good.

1:16:00That if there, you know, if you get a cancer diagnosis when you're 55 and it turns out that you could have never had the cancer had you taken the drugs that are already available five years ago, you're going to feel real fucking stupid about it. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of a Steve Jobs situation, right? Hey, we can treat this. No, I'm just going to eat fruit. Oh, well, that didn't work out too well, did it? It's fucked up. Yeah. It's super sad. And I'm not trying to make light of that. I mean, it's a real and sad example of somebody who like overthought this and is dead now because of it. I know we're running out of time.

1:16:28I'm curious if you can solve this mystery I've had for my whole life in the next five minutes. But explain what is happening when I diet and I plateau and then I'm like, I'm frustrated. And then I go on vacation and I stop working out and I eat whatever the hell I want. And then I come back and I'm like, I have lost fat and look better in the mirror. It's been 10 days. What is happening? Why is that happening? The number one explanation is that as you diet and you diet extremely and for long periods of time, your level of stress hormones goes up substantially. Cortisol, for example, skyrockets.

1:17:01And stress hormones have a tendency to keep your body water high. And so you're bloated all the time. And body water is real difficult to tell apart from fat. It typically goes to the same areas as your fat stores. So for weeks and weeks and weeks, it could look like you're losing no weight on the scale, but because you have a calorie deficit and you're training really hard, you're actually losing fat all the time. The fat looks like it's not going anywhere because it's really just being replaced with water and you still look jiggly and like shit. Really demotivating. Fuck it. You go on vacation.

1:17:28You eat normally. You get a lot of rest. You eat lots of food. Your stress hormone levels drop precipitously. During the time that you're on vacation, you gain two pounds of fat. But during the time that you had your diet, you lost 12 pounds of fat, but it looked like you lost six pounds of fat because it was like the last six of them were completely blurred out by the body water problem. And so if you gain two pounds of fat on your vacation, but you completely delete out all your extra body water, then it looks like you are four pounds down in fat from when you started your vacation, which is why you look way leaner and you feel amazing because you're not super fucking tired and stressed out anymore.

1:18:03That's why that's a thing. Fatigue management, the ability to reduce your diet fatigue intelligently every now and again, take a week of much more food eating to reduce body water can be amazing for physical results and also emotionally amazing because you don't have to get demotivated all the time, looking like shit and grinding through at the end of the diet. That's a big deal. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. The stress hormone thing makes a lot of sense. I'd be in college, I'd be at Michigan, right? And I would be like eating in the dining hall and I'd be working out every day, sometimes twice.

1:18:31And I'd go home and my mom would be like, I bought Cheetos. And I'm great. I'm eating a bag of those every day, sometimes to not move from this couch at all for seven entire days. And then I'm like, oh man, this is going to be bad. And I get back on the scale at the CCRB and I'm like, how did I lose three pounds? What is happening? I'm tightening my belt. Yep. Body water reduction. Huge deal, man. Huge deal. Now that doesn't mean you need to go eat Cheetos after a diet. You can just return to mostly healthy eating with a few snacks, keep lifting weights. And then after about a week, you won't lose four pounds.

1:19:02You lose six or seven pounds of body water and you won't gain any body fat. That's the real unlock. And we've been preaching those kinds of maintenance phase and fatigue reduction phases at RP for like literally 10 years at this point. It's really, really sharp. I think a lot of people just try to like gung-ho everything they can. Like, yeah, I'm on a tough diet. Let's make it even tougher and really needlessly difficult. And then they end up looking a little bit like shit. They get off the diet, then they get much better results and they think, oh man, it's something mysterious here. And this mystery resolved.

1:19:30So going forward, it's a good idea that when you're really, really stressed out and you've been dieting for weeks and weeks and weeks, it's a good idea to reduce the caloric deficit, eliminate it actually, mostly healthy foods, but eat at a maintenance level. Over the next several days, you'll see your body water drop, your energy levels will come back up, your sleep will get better. That's another thing that's a big deal. Sleep changes body water a ton, but it also literally like keeps your muscle mass up and burns fat like crazy. If you get worse and more sleep as you go through a diet? Because as soon as you get into a caloric deficit for long enough, your sleep goes to hell, which means you start losing muscle and you stop losing your fat.

1:20:04If you fix your sleep with a good diet, you reverse that process and you're like, oh my god, I'm fucking rejuvenated because you are. Pushing your body is really good until you push it so far that it starts to malfunction. Push it that far, stop, get out of the deficit, treat yourself right, then get back into it later to lose more fat. Things have to happen in sequence. I mean, The same thing is true about almost every other process. Imagine you had a big project for work you had to do. If you're awake for four to six hours, you can do amazing work. Take two hours of break, do another four to six hours of work, have dinner, go to sleep, wake up.

1:20:33That's a great work schedule. Dude, if you were like, fuck, I had to keep going. 36 hours of work later, straight with no sleep and no rest. Dude, you're fucking making nonsense instead of like discoveries or whatever that you do at work. And then it's just really bad. And then after a day off, tons of sleep and tons of food, you're going to come back and be like, oh my God, I have like a miraculous mind. I've figured out eight problems in an hour that I had at work. That's because you were pushing the system too hard. There is understandable and good element in our culture of like valor. Like I'm going to fucking succeed.

1:21:01I don't give a fuck how hard it is. The grind. And the grind is cool until the grind grinds you down. Remember, you need your body to be in tip top performance and tip top shape. So push it, recede. Push it, recede. Push it, recede. Instead of push, push, push, push, three giant question marks about what the hell is going on, completely get off the diet for months and never see any of those results to begin with. Mike Isretel, thank you so much, man. Always super fascinating, interesting, varied conversation. I really appreciate it. I love being on your show. Thank you so much for having me. What a master of the art of communication.

1:21:34Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators, reveals key strategies for enhancing your connections and conversations in this enlightening podcast episode. Why do some people manage to connect with everyone else so effortlessly. And then there's times when I'm talking to my wife and like we cannot connect with each other. And it turns out it's just a set of skills, right? Like it's just literally a set of skills that super communicators know and that any of us can learn and become super communicators ourselves. Looping for understanding. It has three steps. The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question.

1:22:04Secondly, repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words. And thirdly, and this is the one everyone always forgets, ask if you got it right. And the reason why this is so powerful is because it proves that I'm listening to you. It's really easy to stop thinking about how we're communicating. It's really easy to stop thinking about what's going on until we get in the habit of it. Communication isn't something that happens just one-to-one. Sometimes it's one-to-many. But the same principles still hold up. You're still having practical or emotional or social conversations. Laughter is actually one of the non-linguistic ways that we connect with other people.

1:22:44There's been studies that show that in about 80 % of the time when we laugh, it is not in response to something funny. It's because we're basically in a conversation and we're saying to someone, I want to connect with you. Nobody is born a super communicator. That's what feels tiring is when you feel like you want to connect and you can't. Right? This isn't a behavior. This isn't a personality type. This is a tool that once we learn, we can use when we want to use it. Learn how to categorize conversations, improve active listening, and overcome communication barriers to build stronger relationships.

1:23:17Tune in and transform your interactions into meaningful connections on episode 963 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Dr. Mike, second round, third episode, maybe? I don't know. Certainly not the last one. The guy is super fun to talk to. All things Dr. Mike will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser, the idea behind it is to give you something specific and practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, in under two minutes, just about every Wednesday.

1:23:53If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

1:24:24The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in health, fitness, steroids, GLP-1, drugs, whatever it might be, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.