Longevity, Muscle, Fat Loss & Staying Sharp for Life - Dr Mike Israetel

Dr Mike Israetel is a Professor of Exercise and Sport Science at Lehman College and the Co-Founder of Renaissance Periodization. As technology advances at an unprecedented pace, the idea of humans living forever feels within reach. But what’s the truth about extending our lives? What does the latest science reveal about our pursuit of extended lifespan? Expect to learn the biggest determining factors to increase longevity, the role of genetics, whether fasting is the ultimate hack, how steroid usage impacts lifespan, the best exercises for living longer, the biggest predictors outside of your body that determine how long you'll live, the biggest myths for extending your life, the truth about Blue Zones and much more… - 00:00 What is Longevity? 05:23 The Biggest Factor of Longevity 07:30 The Role of Genetics in Longevity 12:22 Is Environment a Significant Factor? 15:15 Dieting Principles for Longevity 23:40 Does Calorie Restriction Help or Hinder Longevity? 26:02 Role of Muscle Mass in Longevity 38:25 Sleep for Longevity 44:58 How General Daily Activities Impact Health 53:30 The Two Sides to Stress in Longevity 1:03:54 Why You Need to Relax More as You Age 1:08:15 The Benefit of Passionate Engagement 1:13:51 How Important Relationships Are For Longevity 1:23:32 The Biggest Longevity Myths 1:28:54 Is Intermittent Fasting Worth It? 1:31:23 Secrets of the Blue Zones 1:37:47 The Exciting Future of Longevity 1:58:48 Where to Find Mike - Get $250 off your CAROL Bike at: https://carolbike.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 300,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with any purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - Get the best bloodwork analysis in America and bypass Function’s 300,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  My kids are telling, welcome to the show.

• 0:01Mike Israetel?

  Chris, thanks for having me again.

• 0:04Chris Williamson?

  In a barn this time.

• 0:06Mike Israetel?

  Yes, the person who picked me up, blindfolded me, put a shot in my arm. I woke up in a helicopter being rappelled down to a barn. I have no idea where we are, but interestingly, I do have some ideas about longevity on the brain.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  And an erection.

• 0:20Mike Israetel?

  Always.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 0:22Mike Israetel?

  Just kidding, never.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Talking about longevity, bit of a buzzword, especially the last sort of five to 10 years on YouTube.

• 0:28Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  How did you come to think about longevity constituent parts? What is it?

• 0:35Mike Israetel?

  Um, longevity is kind of the big concept. And there are two underlying concepts at least that are important to chat about.

• 0:44Mike Israetel?

  One is the duration of your life, how long you're alive. And the end run of that is mortality. Like if you die at 97 versus you die at 57, then you lived 40 years longer, whatever, you had more longevity in that sense. And that used to be kind of sort of the only way longevity was discussed a generation ago or so and times before that. But there's an important subcomponent, sort of part two of longevity that has to be in the discussion for it to be the most meaningful discussion possible. And that is a variable, the end run of which isn't mortality, but it's morbidity.

• 1:26Mike Israetel?

  And that is quality of life. So the two parts of longevity are how long do you live for? And what is the quality of life that you're experiencing during that time? So mortality is how soon you die. Morbidity is like, what are the last five, 10, 15, 20, 30 years of your life like? Because it is a very, very different situation to have two people live to 90 and croak summarily at 90 and one day at the same time, holding hands, very romantic. But one of them up until two years ago was living life to the fullest, active, independent, uh, healthy, generally speaking,

• 2:12Mike Israetel?

  could travel, maybe could drive all the way up to

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  Few restrictions on

• 2:16Mike Israetel?

  Very few restrictions.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:18Mike Israetel?

  The alternative is there are people currently in their late 40s that suffer from morbid obesity, that if you somehow just kept them alive and with technological innovation, that is increasingly more possible, that they kick around for a while. Let's say magically you got someone like that to their 90s. Let's use a more realistic example. After age 70, a person is mostly bedridden, requires the care and attention of many people, is bereft of family and friends, and lives in a nursing home, tended to hand and foot. Very identical mortality, same day of death, very different degree of morbidity. One person experienced

• 3:03Mike Israetel?

  almost none, one experienced a significant amount. So for the rest of the discussion we're going to have here today, we're attending to variables that don't just enhance the probability that you live longer, though they will, but they're also going to enhance the quality of life you experience as you age, which is really, really important. Because if someone's like, do you want to live longer? And you're like, yeah, they're like, in a nursing home with tubes everywhere. You're like, oh, how much longer? Like years, decades. You're like, cash me out. I'm good. Some people want that sort of thing. Some people don't. So very important distinction. Is it a trade off between the two? Almost never, but almost. Sometimes there is a trade off between the two. For

• 3:43Mike Israetel?

  example, in very difficult athletic pursuits, there are some data indicate that if you really grind it as an athlete, especially into your later years, you could technically be throughputting so much through your metabolism, the total human metabolism and the amount of sort of damage and chemical alteration your body takes is kind of like, like a candle. If you burn it really fast, it burns out a little quicker. And just, just low key, there is a situation like that.

• 4:17Chris Williamson?

  This is at the extreme end though.

• 4:18Mike Israetel?

  Very extreme.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  Cause I think Donald.

• 4:20Mike Israetel?

  Coming out later as well.

• 4:20Chris Williamson?

  Donald Trump made a comment about, uh, you have a limited number of heartbeats in your life and life, uh, exercising speeds them up.

• 4:29Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  Not quite right, Donald.

• 4:30Mike Israetel?

  One of the many ways in which Donald Trump is more wise than us all. Uh, he does have a little bit of a point there. So if you are a hardcore athlete, you may not live quite as long as if you cooled off on the training a little bit. However, if you're a hardcore athlete, you'll probably just not suffer nearly as much from mobility restrictions, morbidity things, various health maladies. You're just gonna croak a little sooner. And by a little, I mean, maybe on the order of months to a few years sooner. But your quality of life is going to just be completely different, especially in your later years. Those distinctions are very rare and there are almost no cases in which mortality and morbidity contradict each other.

• 5:14Mike Israetel?

  Usually it's roughly the same stuff. Like most of the recommendations we'll have talked about today are going to be like a lot of column A, column B, both checked off.

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  When it comes to longevity, quality of life, what's the biggest movers? Or the, the number one, what's the biggest determining factor? Do you know? Is that a question that can be answered?

• 5:37Mike Israetel?

  Technically in the literature, so it, it's difficult to say what the biggest factor is by far, because the way you ask that question has to include what is the degree of variation you account for? So if you say that, uh, nutrition is the biggest variable, but you're dealing with a, a hundred people being examined for their nutrition or trying to correlate lifespan, but most of them are eating decently well, it probably won't be the biggest variable. But, uh, it, it, the kind of raw take, to be completely honest, in our current environment is probably the degree of adiposity that you carry, how much body fat you have and

• 6:20Mike Israetel?

  how heavy you are beyond what you were genetically designed to hold. So. Like the Great Dane effect, or the, you know,

• 6:29Chris Williamson?

  Big things don't live as long.

• 6:30Mike Israetel?

  Large dogs are designed with similar systems as small dogs, and they almost always die like half sooner. Humans are all designed on very similar systems and subsystems. And when you get a human to weigh four or 500 pounds, it strains everything like crazy.

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  That's like a reliable way to shorten your life. One of the most reliable ways to shorten your life would be.

• 6:53Mike Israetel?

  Probably one of the most short of extreme drug abuse, like just doing crack or coke every day, stuff like that. Extreme prolonged stress and sleep deprivation.

• 7:05Chris Williamson?

  Absolute Hunter Biden stuff.

• 7:07Mike Israetel?

  Total laptop type of shit, right? But, um, yeah, as far as things that we see humans alter in the real modern world today, it's difficult to reduce both your longevity, how long you live, your lifespan, and wildly increase your morbidity in a more dependable way than being severely overweight.

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay, you mentioned a word there that I thought would maybe be the biggest one, genetics. What's the role of genetics when it comes to lifespan, longevity, quality of life?

• 7:39Mike Israetel?

  Central. And, uh, I, uh, it's interesting that the way you asked. Genetics

• 7:49Mike Israetel?

  is insanely, insanely pertinent to how long you live. And explains almost all of the variants for those wacky stories you hear, which are often false and sometimes true. Well, my grandfather, he lived till 98, he smoked 10 packs a day and he mean son of a bitch, barely slept, drank all the time, and somehow he lived to 98. And usually people trot out these stories to try to reduce the apparent benefits of improving your lifestyle. Because there's kind of a fatalism associated with like, dude, if, if my grandpa lived till 98, just eaten raw meat, you know what I'm saying, and smoking eight cigs in an hour, who, why am I gonna go eat kale? That's stupid, I'm not gonna waste my time.

• 8:33Mike Israetel?

  If the thing is, grandpa probably had just the right stuff genetically. And if you tried at any given age and you tried any given level of genetics that you may have, maybe you're closely related to grandpa in that regard, maybe not so much because you might only be a quarter related to grandpa. And if the gene shuffled pretty decently, maybe only an eighth. And you might have other people in the family that like croak at 55. All of a sudden, you're like, ah, whatever. So genetics matter a ton, but they are still altered. So genetics gives you an average of everything's average in your life, average nutrition, average sleep, average, everything. Genetics will say you're gonna die probably about 72. But if you do everything right, you might die at 82. If you do everything wrong, you might die at 52,

• 9:14Mike Israetel?

  62, something like that. Very big differences abound. However, that settling point of longevity, very genetically informed. However, the reason I said that adiposity is probably the most pertinent variable, the biggest one explanatory wise, is because it's a variable that you can push all the variables to extremity. You can push your sleep down, you can push your stress sky high. But it's unlikely you're gonna do that to yourself for very long in the free modern world. Like, if you work any decent job in the US or any of the Anglophone countries, modern Asia, etc., Europe, like, you're probably not gonna like, die because you overworked voluntarily in a coal mine. Unlikely. But boy, are a lot of people voluntarily overeating like

• 9:57Mike Israetel?

  crazy. And being that we're, are we allowed to disclose the filming location? Being that we're in the Austin, Texas metropolitan area, lots of people are eating to such high extents that, I'll tell you this, if you weigh 400 pounds, and you trot out the genetics bullshit to me of why you haven't lost weight, I'm draking you like, I don't even want to hear this shit. Because, you know, like, you can really do unbelievable damage and shorten your life substantially. It kind of doesn't matter where your genetics are at that point.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  If you're talking genetics, does that mean? All grandparents and both parents seem to have lived for quite a while. Most people haven't done a full genome assessment or whatever. I don't even know if we've done a polymorphic trait. Like here's the long living gene or here's some of the long living, long living groups.

• 10:46Mike Israetel?

  I can spare the expense. It's going to be polygenic. But there are.

• 10:50Chris Williamson?

  You mean, there's not one gene that I can just.

• 10:52Mike Israetel?

  The age gene. That people only live to 55 or 95, no in between. It's very bimodal, right? If you look at it, you can look at genetics from two different perspectives in this regard, at least. One perspective is there are no doubt genetic variables about a person that under the hood caused them to live a long time or live a short time. You might be able to clear mitochondrial damage faster or something like that. Your genome, the actual like strands of DNA are kept like less methylated than otherwise. There are a variety of molecular machines that do that. Some people have more effective variants or more of them, so on and so forth. You would never be able to look at a person and tell that's what they have. They just have that shit. That's what grandpa had when the coal mining days, when he smoked a cold chimney every hour or whatever the fuck he did.

• 11:34Mike Israetel?

  He was, he was literally a cigarette, Chris, a giant walking cigarette and he wouldn't die. So that is factor number one. There's a bunch of those kinds of things. But the other kind of genetics, and this is straight up still genetics that affect your lifespan, is the genetic propensity for the secondary effects that affect it. For example, if you have a fucking appetite for very tasty, very not good for you foods, and you have genetically hunger signaling, that's just like kind of you're always hungry or whatever.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  No pleasure from exercise.

• 12:07Mike Israetel?

  A hundred percent propensity to do addictive drugs, a propensity to take preposterous risks, a propensity for poor sleep. That's not under the hood stuff. It's going to affect what's under the hood, but it's expressed in other measured variables. So there's two ways to look at that.

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay, environment.

• 12:24Mike Israetel?

  How does that impact longevity? Yeah, basically, in the current, modern world, environment impacts longevity a very small amount because all of our environments are generally kind of really good, good enough that the variance produced by environment is very small. However, in the developing world, environment has really big effects on longevity. Still, one of the top killers, straight up all around the world, is indoor air quality. There are still countries and cultures in which you burn for food and fuel, like sod or some shit like that, inside.

• 13:06Mike Israetel?

  And it sure goes out the chimney, but believe it or not, some of the molecules stray to the sides and you inhale that shit. You do that for thirty, forty years, it's going to impact your longevity like crazy. If you've ever been to developing nations like India, for example, you land, the internal circulation of the air stops, external air comes in and you're like, the fuck happened here? And that does not stop until you leave India or go way into the jungle. Because like Mumbai has an air quality that like, if we had that in Austin, there would be like, um, like do not travel to Austin, Texas for the next two months kind of shit. Like, I remember the California wildfires are a really big deal and the air quality was like, oh, it's really bad. And I remember being there and I was like, fuck the fuck, because I had been to Mumbai a few times. I'm like, man, I could live the rest of my life in this, it wouldn't affect me at all.

• 13:51Mike Israetel?

  I've been to Mumbai. So, outdoor, indoor air quality, polluted water, contaminated food, things that we just really just don't deal with in the modern world. You go to Japan, Taiwan, the UK, Germany, the US. It's all free and clear, pretty much. And so, and the environment doesn't have huge effects in that sense. There are other things about the environment that can produce or increase longevity, stress and things like that. I don't like to call that environment, you could be more specific with those things. But generally speaking, environmental factors just aren't a big deal for us living in the modern world. Modern world, how rude, everyone's modern. In the developed world, it's not a big deal. In the developing world, yeah, it's a huge deal. And one of the ways to increase human well-being and human lifespan

• 14:34Mike Israetel?

  is to help the developing world clean up, like in the literal sense. Just have cheaper, cleaner energy. Cheaper, cleaner energy, cheaper, cleaner abilities to clean up. Look, cause like if you get a lot of energy, you don't exactly clean up your air doing that. If you have five nuclear power plants, you still have to make sure that your production facilities of all these goods are not spewing toxic shit. You have to have regulatory framework to make sure cars are increasingly expected to have different standards. Cause like in India, there's like diesel, regular, small cars in the road and they put out some smoke. And I'm like that, our cars at home do not fucking smell like that. They do not pass our regulatory burden. And obviously, of course, like good governance, largely free markets, enough ability to generate wealth, all that stuff. So.

• 15:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Diet. Touched on body fat, body weight earlier on.

• 15:20Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 15:22Chris Williamson?

  Does it matter what you're eating? Does it matter how it impacts you? How should we come to think about diet from a longevity standpoint?

• 15:30Mike Israetel?

  Great. A diet that can keep your muscle mass at decent levels and does not make you excessively over fat or overweight probably is something like 80% of what we mean by diets affect on longevity. So if you take two people and eat two very different diets, but one, they're roughly the same body composition and size, et cetera. They're gonna get longevity differences from diet alone, but they're not gonna be enormous. On the order of probably five years or less, just on a heuristic basis. We're not talking about 20 or 30. If someone weighs 600 pounds, yeah, it's 20 or 30 years, if not more, you know.

• 16:11Chris Williamson?

  So stop arguing over vegan versus carnivore and instead look at how much they weigh.

• 16:15Mike Israetel?

  Oh my God. By a long shot. Let's put this in perspective with some characters so we can make up in our heads. If a vegan or carnivore, it doesn't matter. Uh, say, you know, they're 350 pounds at five foot seven. And they're like, well, I'm vegan, so it's not a big deal. You're gonna be like, bro, that ain't it. Now, if you eat mostly healthy foods, lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, and mostly unprocessed foods. If you do that, whatever body weight you're at, it absolutely matters for longevity.

• 16:50Mike Israetel?

  But it matters a little bit, and that means you should do it. But the biggest thing that you get out of those foods is the ability to do weight control, because if you are grotesquely overweight, you could be eating fuck all. It matters, but not by a ton.

• 17:06Chris Williamson?

  How much mitochondrial damage and stuff like that is coming from junk processed foods, or is your concern with avoiding ultra-processed foods that they're just more palatable than eating the whole of food version?

• 17:17Mike Israetel?

  It's probably another 80, 20, or 90, 10 situation, where mostly they're just a portal to being really fat. But yeah, there is some decent research that says very processed meats, very processed various other foods do have chemical effects, cellular levels that are absolutely not ideal, especially if the preponderance of your diet is composed to those foods. But if you eat not so healthy foods a few times a week and the rest is healthy, they cannot statistically differentiate you from someone who eats healthy 100% of the time in the mortality or morbidity.

• 17:49Chris Williamson?

  Assuming that you maintain a similar sort of weight.

• 17:51Mike Israetel?

  Correct.

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 17:52Mike Israetel?

  So, yes, exactly.

• 17:53Chris Williamson?

  But again, we're fighting with ultra-processed foods are more palatable, often more calorie dense. Go back and watch the fat loss episode that we did before, if you want to learn more about that.

• 18:02Mike Israetel?

  That's it. So, that's really important stuff, but I think the big takeaway for me is this. If you, kind of two extremes, one we already mentioned, if you are following some ultra healthy diet, either ostensibly healthy or actually healthy, and you have gotten up to 400 pounds, and you're not losing weight currently, but you're like, I'm good, I'm eating the new way, it's great. You got a bad thing coming your way. On the other hand, if you happen to be in a position where you are of a healthy weight, you're physically active, et cetera, all the other variables we'll talk about are

• 18:41Mike Israetel?

  pretty well in line, and you are looking at a plate of nachos at a Mexican place with your friends, and they're like, eat some, and you're like, ooh, but they're kind of gonna kill me because they're made of chips and those are bad, sorry, crisps, does that make your English?

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  Ah, anglicizing everything.

• 18:59Mike Israetel?

  Yes, yes. That's also probably the wrong move, and it's a wrong move for at least two reasons. One, if in moderation and with all the other factors aligned, you eat some junk every now and again. It's a very difficult story to tell yourself that anything very much matters about if you eat a few chips or zero chips, or even two bags of chips every now and again. The other way in which it matters is the, and this is a little bit more about how you approach food. If you approach food in an erotic fashion, anticipating dangers everywhere, trying to curate your lifestyle to only get the organic vegan superfood shit, and really worrying a

• 19:40Mike Israetel?

  lot about what goes into your body, you almost certainly will live less time than if you just didn't give a shit and ate mostly good shit, but every now and again, just had 10 burritos, no, no problem.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of the stress of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections.

• 19:56Mike Israetel?

  Depending on the degree of imperfection, but if you're doing a decent job and you're worrying more than that, you're just going insane.

• 20:04Chris Williamson?

  I did a Jeffersonian breakfast with Brian Johnson a couple of months ago.

• 20:08Mike Israetel?

  Okay, what is, I don't know what that means.

• 20:10Chris Williamson?

  So you, everybody gets, I think, a minute to speak. You kind of go around and you've got a topic that you're talking on. And it's a way of, I guess, fostering a discussion of some kind.

• 20:22Mike Israetel?

  Okay.

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  And he was talking about some of the research that him or his team had done. I don't know where it'd come from. And he said that eating a McDonald's kills you 12 minutes earlier. That was some of the, and I do wonder, you know, I like what Brian's doing in the same ways I like having a scout in a army that goes and sort of climbs the really dangerous.

• 20:46Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, but I'm not climbing that shit.

• 20:47Chris Williamson?

  I don't want to go up there, but I'm glad he does. And maybe tell us some interesting stuff when he comes back down.

• 20:50Mike Israetel?

  Totally.

• 20:51Chris Williamson?

  However, I do wonder, this is one question I haven't got to ask him yet, which is, how are you, or any of the people that are really obsessed with longevity, Reddit, or whatever other versions of that, the NAD discussion forum, the resveratrol discussion forum, all of this David Sinclair stuff from years ago. I wonder whether those communities have got to the stage yet where they've tried to mediate the longevity induced stress reduction.

• 21:19Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean?

• 21:20Mike Israetel?

  Yes. Now, there are a few ways you could go about this. If you are a person who's obsessed with longevity in a glass half full sort of way, you're looking at the variables in your life and you're like, ooh, I want to optimize for longevity. I love my life. I love science. I love being intricate and meticulous. It's just my nature. I love organizing all the variables and being very strict. You're not really stressed when you're doing that. You're actually involved.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  It's part of your oddliness.

• 21:50Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. And so not only do you get the benefits of being a perfectionist on never eating any junk, but also you get the benefits of being super involved, which is another big variable we'll discuss later, as seems to have some promise for longevity. But if you're a person who, if they are told, listen, just eat mostly healthy foods and you're good to go, and you're like, oh my God, thank God. But if I tell you, look, every fry you put in your mouth is like 30 seconds less life. Like you're telling your wife something just beautiful about how much you love her on your deathbed and you're like, and my favorite part of you is, and she's like, that stupid fry from McDonald's. Oh, my husband's soul.

• 22:30Mike Israetel?

  If you are a person whom that idea and the pursuit of perfectionism tends to give higher stress levels, I'm going to tell you right now, it's probably not worth it. Just do a good job. Don't try to aim for perfect.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Dr. Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Carol. I first heard about Carol bikes from Brian Johnson, of all people, who said that this is the best way that he managed to get his heart health improved. I think he's got the heart of an 18 year old, maybe an 18 month old. I'm not sure. But he told me that this was the way he was doing his high intensity training. Dr. Rhonda Patrick also has been harping on about it. And Carol bike gives you the shortest, most effective workouts, actually backed by science, scientifically proven to deliver superior benefits in less time compared to regular cardio. There's no super magic going on. It just uses AI to personalize resistance based on your unique ability, delivering maximum results in minimum time. And making you work very hard. So if you're tired of wasting hours on ineffective workouts,

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  give Carole Bike a spin. Right now, you can save on Carole Bikes by going to the link in the description below or heading to carolbike.com/ModernWisdom. That's C-A-R-O-L bike.com/ModernWisdom. What happened to all of the research saying that if you cut a rat's calories by 50% or 30% that it lives tons longer? Whatever happened to the intermittent fasting side of the, you haven't mentioned once calorie restriction for longevity extension? Why?

• 23:58Mike Israetel?

  Because it's almost completely encompassed by the variable of body weight. And I'm going to tell you something completely insane, Chris, you might not believe. But when you feed a rat a little less food or a lot less food, it gets a little or a lot lighter in body weight. And if you factor that variable of body weight, it already accounts for that. So it's absolutely true that if you input fewer calories on average, in a certain margin, you know, starve, you get starve yourself to death and you've like always been starving to death and you're a skeleton, but like on 110, you're like, I'm still hanging in, fellas. Can I get a brownie? They're like, no, no, you would die. Like, I kind of want to die with a brownie in my mouth. So the body weight basically absorbs all of that variance for us. So let me put it another way.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  Does that not mean that we should all be fighting to be as low body weight as possible? If we want to live?

• 24:41Mike Israetel?

  There's an optimal body weight, but it's not one number I can give you because it depends on a bunch of stuff. Internal genetic variables, I can't possibly predict because I don't have an AI scan of your whole genome. It's coming, I'm sure, but it's not here yet. Another one is frame size. Like someone who's six foot two, you're like, yeah, yeah, like, and very broad shouldered in the interchromial distance for the bones. You're like, yeah, you gotta weigh like 115 pounds and then you're going to be super like longevity, like, yeah, until they die of starvation summarily one day later. So a lot of variables play into that. But as far as body weight is concerned, you're generally going to take the average recommendation of what most of the governing bodies in medicine agree is the statistically healthiest body

• 25:24Mike Israetel?

  weight. And you're going to err either at that body weight or a little bit less. You start going much less than that. Not so great. So for example, if the insurance tables say that you're probably in your best health at 150 pounds, given your, they don't usually do frame size already. This is fucking shit. The 150 pounds, you're good to go. Anywhere between like 135 and 150, that's probably your super golden zone. You can weigh up to 165, 170, 180, if you're more muscular and it'll be almost the same result. But if you get into like the 120s or the 110s just to live longer, it might not work out so well for you.

• 26:01Chris Williamson?

  Is holding muscle mass from a diet perspective, well, actually, just what, what's the role of muscle mass? Talk to me about how muscle mass plays a role in, in longevity. Is it important?

• 26:13Mike Israetel?

  Muscle mass plays, makes sort of two appearances in longevity. One appearance that muscle makes in longevity is that having a decent amount of muscle has secondary health effects for your rest of your system. Muscle is a glucose consumer and it keeps your blood glucose chronically lower than if you didn't have plenty of muscle. And excessive chronic high blood glucose is a surefire way to just croak fucking early. That's it. And so there are a few other ways in which muscle has these great systemic effects and those are awesome. And that's actually the primary driver. The second thing about muscle is when you look at the statistical literature on people with a certain level of muscle mass and their mortality

• 26:53Mike Israetel?

  predictions, you see these massive correlations. Correlation is not causation. Most of the variance of muscle mass or most of the relationship between muscle mass and mortality has to do with, uh, muscle mass isn't what's keeping you alive. It's just a really good indicator of your overall health.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  It's like healthy user bias signal.

• 27:12Mike Israetel?

  A hundred percent. So like, if you give me an 88 year old woman who is walking on a cane, where she's super jacked, destroying skyscrapers and shit. She's like, you ever seen someone who's not overweight, but they like reach for their luggage and it's like skin and bones and like the muscles are like, her biceps, like the width of my finger. And you're like, the fuck is that person moving? And they're barely moving. She's going to croak probably in not so long a time, but it's because she's eighty eight and because all of the other health factors have precluded her from building muscle, not as much because if she built a ton of muscle, it would keep her life longer.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  If she had a good bench press, she'd be sweet.

• 27:53Mike Israetel?

  It's true. If she had more muscle, it'd probably be healthier for her. But a lot of times, people who are bedridden, people are suffering from chronic illness, people are suffering from chronic physical inactivity, like your hips are totally fucked. So you lose a ton of muscle in your legs. And then like people like when you die, they measure your muscle mass in a study and they say, well, it's low muscle mass. It's not the low muscle mass specifically that killed you, although it did have a small effect. It's the fact that like, oh shit, you weren't really poor health in order to get to this.

• 28:19Chris Williamson?

  Muscle mass is downstream from what you've done.

• 28:21Mike Israetel?

  One hundred percent. And there's a couple of things going around the internet. People are talking about jump height, your ability to jump high related to your mortality and grip strength. And like, if you try to train to jump higher or grip stronger, thinking it's going to keep you alive, uh, reverse causation, not the best use of your time.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What about too much muscle? Lots of people listening who maybe were worried about that. They spend all their time in the gym, you as well.

• 28:44Mike Israetel?

  Somewhat.

• 28:45Chris Williamson?

  Large guy who's competitively body built, body built for quite a while.

• 28:50Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Body built.

• 28:50Mike Israetel?

  So technically, as soon as you get to be considerably ten or fifteen pounds heavier than what the insurance tables predict will be the body weight that lets you live the longest, um, you're probably not doing yourself any favors with longevity. However, this is one of those instances where quality of life and longevity can be a little bit antagonistic to one another. So that definitely has to be stated that no, you can't be as jacked as you want and still live as long as you want. But if you're not using anabolic steroids and growth hormones to get that extra muscle, the amount of muscle a human can gain naturally, as long as they don't have a high degree of body fat, is just not going to make a

• 29:33Mike Israetel?

  huge difference in longevity. And so if the quality of life trade off is worth it to you, it's going to be a very small effect, less than five years end of life, maybe even less than that.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 29:43Mike Israetel?

  If you use a ton of steroids to get this jacked, then you're going to be doing some time at the end of your life.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  What are you, what are you talking about with a? I don't know, take yourself the sort of course you've done, which I would guess is in the upper range of what most people, even non-professional bodybuilders would take. What sort of life price do you think people are paying?

• 30:05Mike Israetel?

  As far as my back of the envelope calculation for myself personally, so there's a big caveat so that I don't embarrass myself posthumously when this is released.

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  When you die tomorrow or die in a hundred years' time.

• 30:16Mike Israetel?

  Huge stochastic element about death. Like I can, anyone can just die fucking tomorrow. Like, ah, blood vessel in his brain just blew up.

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 30:22Mike Israetel?

  Turns out his head was too big. That kind of weird shit aside, on average, I would have expected myself to probably take about 10 years off of the end of my life.

• 30:31Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 30:31Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  Wow. What is it that the drugs are doing that's speeding up the dying process?

• 30:39Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. What aren't they doing that speeds up that? They're growing your heart muscle in a way that makes your heart worse at pumping blood. They are consistently presenting you with cholesterol levels that do nothing good for your arteries. They are elevating your blood pressure. Now, many of those variables I have kiboshed, so I could be lucky and be looking at less than five years, but there's also an element where carrying that much excess body weight

• 31:06Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 31:06Mike Israetel?

  starts to be a stand-in for the muscle. When you weigh, I'm 5'6" and I currently weigh 235. You weigh 235 pounds at 5'6", you are, I'm like one obesity category away from the highest one all the time.

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  On BMI.

• 31:22Mike Israetel?

  Correct.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 31:22Mike Israetel?

  But like, the amount of weight you carry around, the amount more forcefully your heart has to pump blood, et cetera, that still fucking counts.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  Fatiguing.

• 31:31Mike Israetel?

  100%. And so, to quote Donald Trump on the heartbeat thing, again, is not 100% wrong, that definitely is a factor. So, if you happen to have used lots of steroids, but you kept most of your health values in check, and you just had dogshit genetics for being jacked and you never got really big, you're probably looking at less than five years off your lifespan on average. But I've been pretty big for my size for a long time, and my parents are both teeny tiny people with very small frames. I also have a very small frame. I just have a lot of muscle on it, relatively speaking, and a lot of weight I have had for years, and that's absolutely a big fucking problem.

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  Do you, I think about Chris Bumstead when you talk about that, someone who's just retired, age thirty.

• 32:16Mike Israetel?

  Okay.

• 32:16Chris Williamson?

  Six two, six three. I think he steps on stage at like two twenty, two thirty, something like that. I'm not too sure.

• 32:23Mike Israetel?

  Very mysterious what the classic guys actually weigh, but yeah, two twenty to two forty or something.

• 32:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, I think about him, you know, trying to get in and get out. He's like, you know, Navy SEAL Team Six, like kicking a door down, shot someone in the face six times and then like, you can't get me anymore. I don't have any more Olympia trophies.

• 32:40Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Chris Williamson?

  All right. Uh, I wonder, wonder how much he's been able, obviously genetically elite.

• 32:49Chris Williamson?

  I wonder how much he's been able to get in and get out, so to speak.

• 32:52Mike Israetel?

  The more you can get in and get out, the better. Um, I never used preposterously high doses, mostly because I was like, I don't exactly want to die like tomorrow, tomorrow. But also because for me, high doses were just not so great for my psychology and stuff. Yeah. But, uh, for someone like Chris Bumstead, I mean, his degree of muscle mass and body weight that he carries for his height and frame were never like insane. Do you know who Big Rami was?

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 33:22Mike Israetel?

  Like is, um, that's gonna put you in the grave a lot sooner because you are carrying.

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  Can you do the just one? Isn't he like three forty off season?

• 33:31Mike Israetel?

  Correct. See, he literally is one hundred pounds more than Sebum at probably a slightly shorter height. Like that's the kind of thing that's going to affect you. So just to review this.

• 33:39Chris Williamson?

  That's real tail end.

• 33:40Mike Israetel?

  Hundred percent. Yeah. So to review the muscularity part, if you are very under muscled, it's probably not a huge deal for longevity, but being of at least normal musculature for the average person of your sort of height and frame and age is probably your best bet at longevity. Having a little extra muscle can help, can hurt, probably cancels out on average. So if you're jacked as a natty, unless you got super fat to do it like I did when I was natural, no big deal. Yep. And then as you use drugs, if you use drugs to get jacked, but you're really good at controlling your health variables, you never had excessive cholesterol, you never had, uh, chronic high blood sugar from mismanagement of insulin and growth hormone, shit like that. If you did a good job managing that and you never got enormous, enormous.

• 34:23Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, like the drugs definitely kill you faster, but not psychotically faster. I mean, there are dozens and dozens of golden era pro bodybuilders that are still alive today. They're in their seventies and eighties. Arnold's still kicking it like if this shit was remember one of my mentors. Dr. Mike Stone told us something about the steroids when we were in PhD program. He's like, you know, we in the eighties knew that the media was lying because you just went into locker rooms and gyms. You just didn't see any dead bodies because you know, like eighties anti-drug hysteria was a totally different level. I want steroid injection, you're criminal, you're in jail, you're addicted to heroin somehow also. And you're for sure dead like tomorrow. That absolutely doesn't happen.

• 35:03Mike Israetel?

  However, last category is if you get very, very large, stay large for a long time, stay on tons of gear for a long time. And don't attend to the various health consequences. At that point, you're rolling the dice and the only way in which the dice are loaded is with your genetics. Because there are juiced up people that have been jacked for forever. They're beet red and they just like, don't die and they live into their eighties. Not the great model for most people because they just have baller genetics. One of my friends, a mentor of mine, Broderick Chavez, he had to believe like a grandfather or an uncle. Who like worked literally in the coal mines. And he had like some kind of chest condition. This is an amazing story.

• 35:45Mike Israetel?

  It was the 1960s and he like went to the doctor and he's like, oh, something in my like some lungs or shit. And they're like, oh yeah, here Diana ball tablets, D ball tabs, oral steroids. He just got a script for oral steroids and he was on them for like a generation straight. This is an oral drug you're not supposed to take for longer than like six to eight weeks. He was just on it all the time. And I was like, all right, so what was he like? He was like jacked and mean. And he lived like well into his like late sixties or seventies and fucking coal mining, right? And Brad said once he was like, I think he just died because he was just like, God, fuck this. Don't want to be alive anymore. The thing is, most of us do not have genetics like that.

• 36:26Mike Israetel?

  So really important to say, like, if you know someone that's lived a long time in spite of everything. Do you want to take that chance on yourself? I wouldn't.

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  Anything else to say, Musa Musa?

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  Actually, that's a question. There is something else to say. If I want to take a non-bodybuilder, but longevity approach for training for this.

• 36:47Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 36:48Chris Williamson?

  Very rough hewn. What do I need to do?

• 36:50Mike Israetel?

  Yes. Training two to four times per week for 30 to 45 minutes at a time. Mostly compound movements, large muscle mass movements, underhand pull downs and pull ups, rows, close grip bench presses, dips, overhead presses, squats, deadlifts, et cetera, stuff like that. Obviously vanity shit you can do, usually with relatively short rest breaks for sets of 10 to 30 repetitions per set, alternating muscles that aren't involved in one movement with those that are involved in the other. So do some close grip benches, take a quick 10 second breather, do some underhand pull downs, quick 10 second breather and back and forth and back and forth. That should constrain your workouts to a small amount of time. Interestingly enough,

• 37:33Mike Israetel?

  if you're working out exclusively to get more life at the end of your life, like you're also consuming a lot of life being in the gym around sweaty, nasty people. So you have to integrate that in.

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 37:44Mike Israetel?

  But this keeps the duration of you spending time in the gym lower, but also because of the short rest intervals and the higher repetitions, it allows you to have some of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise that are sort of enhancing to both quality of life and how long you live. And so that's probably the best way to do it. It's very minimal effect on your schedule and it has probably as much as you'll ever need to extend your lifespan or make it higher quality. If you're training in the gym like two hours a day, six days a week and you're like it's for longevity, like it's not, it's not bad for you necessarily, but it's overkill.

• 38:23Chris Williamson?

  You're overshooting.

• 38:23Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  Sleep. What about sleep?

• 38:26Mike Israetel?

  Sleep's a big deal. Sleep is the ultimate stress reducer in everyone's life. Like that's pretty much the, one of the main purposes of sleep is to kind of reset the whole system. And sleep is a thing where again, that 90, 10, 80, 20 rule comes in handy. If you're mostly sleeping enough to feel well rested, which means if you need like. Fuck no tonic. I need eight cans of Monster to keep me awake after 2 P M. You're not getting enough sleep. But if a can or two of no tonic throughout the day is all you need to be your sharpest, then you're good to go and you're probably getting enough sleep, seven to nine hours for most people.

• 39:09Mike Israetel?

  As good of quality of sleep as you can manage. Keep the room dark, keep the room cool, few distractions, no blue light a few hours before bed. All the general sleep recommendations that are really awesome. If you just checklist that and you usually get really good sleep. A night or two every few weeks, you stay up all night or you get, you know, really busy with work. You only sleep a few hours, no big deal. Generally, that's the recommendation. Chronic low amounts of sleep in a way that has you feeling it is a big deal. Some people just don't need as much sleep as others.

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  Jocko.

• 39:44Mike Israetel?

  Uh, is that true?

• 39:46Chris Williamson?

  Supposedly. So the 4:30 A M. Thing, which I'm reliably told by some of my friends that are fathers that they beat on an almost nightly basis.

• 39:54Mike Israetel?

  Easy. I'm never asleep.

• 39:55Chris Williamson?

  They've got dad shit to do. Yeah, exactly. Um, but yet, I mean, there's that genetic mutation that I think the same likelihood of you having that that requires you to only sleep maybe four hours a night and feel okay. Is the same likelihood as you being hit by lightning twice.

• 40:11Mike Israetel?

  Holy shit.

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  It's like super, super unlikely. So a few, very, very rare. Anyway, um, Jocko is one of those people that I've heard. I think basically what most special forces select for are people that can deal with sleep depth very well.

• 40:25Mike Israetel?

  Very big deal because if you, if you need lots of sleep consistently and you also degrade very heavily in your cognitive and physical function, you just won't make it through selection, even if you're a straight up killer. That's the kind of guy you want to be like an elite bodyguard for someone like the president who sleeps normal hours. You have a decent rotation for your bodyguarding shifts. You can be like a Delta Force level shooter. You're just like, look, if I don't get my sleep, I'm, I'm good to know when after a few days.

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  Tim Kennedy told me this story. Maybe you ask him about it tomorrow if you're chatting to him. Ask him about the time he ran out of ammo. And he'll know the story. And I think he said he was awake for, that the only time he slept was only was concussed by an IED going off.

• 41:09Mike Israetel?

  Holy shit.

• 41:09Chris Williamson?

  In like forty eight, maybe more hours. He's asleep for, awake for two full days, runs out of every different platform, every different magazine, every different piece of ammunition that he had. And you just realize that, okay, that's, that's what the job demands of you. Ross Edgley, who I think wanted an intro to you to have a chat at some point.

• 41:29Mike Israetel?

  Oh, Joe.

• 41:31Chris Williamson?

  I asked him, you know, he's done all of these crazy swam or did a triathlon, holding a tree, triathlon. He's the first person in history to ever swim around Great Britain. He did six hours on, six hours off for basically seven months. He's just done the longest single distance river swim in history, three hundred miles.

• 41:50Mike Israetel?

  Oh, my God.

• 41:51Chris Williamson?

  Fifty five hours without touching land, without sleeping, without anything, fifty five hours straight through. And I asked him what his superpower is, and it completely makes sense. All of those things together are him allowing to deal with sleep deprivation and to digest food in very strange situations.

• 42:09Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, some people's digestion will shut down and ultras and stuff.

• 42:12Chris Williamson?

  So he's able to have piping hot porridge to keep him warm when he was in the Yukon swimming in in Canada, piping hot porridge like a internal hot water bottle, heating him from the stomach out. But then get back to moving and being horizontal. If you feed me food, I need to be vertical for at least forty five minutes afterward, just the way my digestive tract is put together.

• 42:32Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  I don't like being horizontal.

• 42:34Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  So what I'm saying is certain people deal with digestion, sleep in very, very, very different ways.

• 42:40Mike Israetel?

  Yes. So for those people that don't need as much sleep, don't feel like you have to get it. But if you're genuinely not well rested chronically, you're doing some reduction of lifespan and and life quality, one hundred percent.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  What about regularity of sleep? I've heard that the regularity can impact longevity as much as the duration.

• 43:01Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Mike Israetel?

  That's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, though maybe not by much, especially in extreme cases, it can be pretty nasty.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  Shift workers, firefighters, nurses.

• 43:10Mike Israetel?

  Correct. Sleeping roughly with the day and night cycle.

• 43:16Mike Israetel?

  And getting to bed and waking up at roughly the same time on most days is probably a good idea. For some people that like that Brian Johnson robotic lifestyle. Every morning you wake up at the same time, every night you go to bed at the same time, dope. But for most people, they're gonna take a hit on social quality of life factors. And yeah, if you stay up a night or two a week, a little later and wake up a little later, it's just not gonna be a big deal. But regularity is a really, really good thing. It's a thing that should be built into your life anyway. And violating it every now and again is okay. Always being in the mix of God knows when I go to sleep and wake, probably not ideal for longevity.

• 43:58Chris Williamson?

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• 44:42Chris Williamson?

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• 44:57Chris Williamson?

  Modern wisdom. Going back to the exercise portion, realize we touched on muscle mass, like the bro side of exercising, but what about more general activity outside of that?

• 45:08Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Walking.

• 45:09Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 45:10Chris Williamson?

  Stretching and cardio and all that stuff.

• 45:12Mike Israetel?

  So stretching, no reliable mechanism by which it'll let you live longer. But generally, a moderate to high amount of physical activity has a good combination of promoting the longest lifespan and the longest health span. I think that's a Kepita Tia book title I just said by accident. That, you know, the keeping the morbidity low, having the higher quality of life. Because, so something like, just for people's reference frame, six to 12,000 steps per day for most people is totally cool. But a better way to put that is probably if you're doing a lot fewer than five or 6,000 steps per day all the time, and you don't get a lot of physical activity otherwise,

• 45:55Mike Israetel?

  you could be living longer if you did more physical activity in most cases.

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  Just to touch on that, I think I'm a good avatar for the gym bro who goes quite hard for an hour and then is sedentary for a lot of the day.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm doing some exercise. I'm doing probably significantly 95th percentile intense exercise. And I'm also not moving quite so much. What would you say? I imagine a lot of the audience fits into this particular bracket.

• 46:26Mike Israetel?

  I think you're doing really well for yourself. If you wanted a small but meaningful enhancer to quality of life and longevity later down the road, you would break up your periods of physical inactivity at least another one time in the day for a serious bout of some kind of aerobic output, be it walking, as easily as that, all the way up to pretty difficult aerobic activity. And so if you lift weights and you do all that, and if you get, you know, roughly 10,000 ish steps a day, very roughly, huge variation for individuals.

• 46:58Mike Israetel?

  You're pretty good to go, but there's probably almost certainly a morbidity reduction way of doing it and probably increases your lifespan by a little bit. If you have several sessions a week, two to four sessions of thirty to sixty minutes of intense cardiovascular activity. And for most people, a really easy way to measure that is can you have a conversation with someone while you exercise? I don't mean a few words here and there like, oh, I'm doing good. See you tomorrow. Like, not that. I'm talking about like consistent conversation like you and I are having now. You and I can have this conversation on a walk, no problem. If we're in really good shape, we could have it on a jog. But we're not pushing the pace with aerobic exercise if we can talk.

• 47:43Mike Israetel?

  So if you can't talk and you're huffing and puffing, doing that at least twice a week for thirty minutes on end and all the way up to four times a week for sixty minutes on end or any combination therein is probably that extra cherry on top for longevity and quality of life enhancement. So if you really want to live as long as possible, I would say some pretty intense regular aerobic activity is probably a good thing and unlikely to be a bad thing.

• 48:10Chris Williamson?

  Is that something that you're thinking about now that you're out of? I just want to be as big and lean as possible world. Are you, or do you see your Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as, is that contributing in that sort of manner?

• 48:23Mike Israetel?

  My Brazilian Jiu Jitsu definitely counts as that. And I do BJJ now roughly five times a week. And at least a few of those sessions have me huffing and puffing. So I'm probably taking good care of that. Um, I am absolutely not the model for longevity and quality of life. I'm in a very perverse, very strange path, a very understood, very chosen path.

• 48:45Chris Williamson?

  I think you've, uh, at least partly ejected yourself out of that or sort of gently come into land.

• 48:52Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, I stopped, uh, abuse level steroid.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it just makes me think again, I have this idea called the manual pause. Uh, guys at some point between twenty eight and forty five that have just wanted to get as jacked and lean as possible. Maybe they have or haven't abused PEDs. Maybe they have or haven't ever tried to do different training modalities, realize that they're, they become chronically aware of their own mortality. And they think, hey, I shouldn't be out of breath going up those stairs or whatever. I can't touch my toes or my shoulder hurts always.

• 49:22Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 49:24Chris Williamson?

  Just again, thinking about people pivoting out of that. And it seems to me that if cardio, which for some people is fun, apparently, but for other people, you need to game it like you have, which is choke the guy. Oh, my heart rate's high. I was trying to choke the guy. My heart rate got high. For me, pickleball is a good example. I'm chasing a ball around a thing.

• 49:44Mike Israetel?

  Very British, very British way of engaging.

• 49:47Chris Williamson?

  That would be, yeah, maybe not bulls, bulls or polo. But yeah, just trying to think about some of the easiest ways for the non-cardio lovers to get themselves to that place.

• 50:00Mike Israetel?

  For sure. That's a great, great question, Chris, or great statement, because we know from the exercise participation literature, in the physical activity participation literature, I actually used to teach a class dedicated pretty much to this.

• 50:14Chris Williamson?

  That is encouraging people to participate.

• 50:16Mike Israetel?

  Exercise and behavior. Yeah.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay.

• 50:17Mike Israetel?

  Health behavior is a trip. Like, we know pretty well what to tell people to do, but then they're like, and you're like, okay, they won't do it. How do we get them to do it? A big part of that is a two-factor thing. One is your physical activity should be pretty fun, and it should also hopefully be something that involves you with other people so that the community reinforcement part is in play, and that you have the situation where if you just don't feel like it someday, your airsoft team is still meeting up to shoot airsoft pellets at each other. You better be there. And so you just end up falling in. And if you fall out of activity, that nobody gives a shit because you're just on a treadmill at home

• 50:59Mike Israetel?

  and you have no friends and don't want to talk to, you're maybe kind of done. But if people are like, dude, are you going to make it to jiu-jitsu again? I heard you healed up. You're like, that, I do, I should go back. I love jiu-jitsu. Okay, I'm going back.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  Fucking social pressure usefulness. That was the thing that I realized when I started doing CrossFit and any fighting, that, you know, most training for most people, unless you have a really cool gym training buddy.

• 51:24Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  Is you steeping in your own neuroses as you stare in the mirror, listening to metal or dark thoughts, if it's you.

• 51:31Mike Israetel?

  And or nothing.

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  Um, and I realized, oh, this is awesome. I'm like outsourcing all of my exercise motivation to this group of people around me.

• 51:42Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 51:42Chris Williamson?

  Lightens the burden of me having to do this thing that I kind of probably didn't want to do.

• 51:46Mike Israetel?

  Yes. And I don't want people to misinterpret that as being like, you got to bully your friends into exercise.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  See that?

• 51:54Mike Israetel?

  That was good. Have you considered playing American football?

• 51:58Chris Williamson?

  I played cricket for a long time.

• 51:59Mike Israetel?

  Excellent.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  That's it.

• 52:00Mike Israetel?

  I don't want people to misconstrue this as us saying you need to bully your friends into exercise. There's a latent assumed expectation that people have that you're gonna come back to aerobics class, that you're gonna come back to the pickleball situation, jujitsu, whatever it is. And that internally to people without anyone ever saying anything, you have this thought of like, well, all the guys are at jujitsu, I'm gonna go.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Social pressure is a hell of a drug.

• 52:27Mike Israetel?

  It's a big deal. And also, to the early point, like, it should be something that you ideally look forward to and that it's fun. You don't want physical activity, nutrition, everything and longevity pursuit to start feeling like medicine, to start feeling you just swallow the horse tablet and then you're good to go. People generally don't tend to stick to that sort of thing. And the discomfort of it, the less enjoyment that you have, the less involvement that you have, already actually x's off another longevity variable we'll discuss later, which is like life involvement. So if you like what you're doing, you're doing it with friends and it's healthy for you, fuck, man, you got a real good thing going.

• 53:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose there's a few times where a more nuclear option is required. If you're Ethan Suppley that you got to meet the other day and you have 530 pounds and you're gonna get down to 250 or something.

• 53:15Mike Israetel?

  You gotta do the thing.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you eat the horse tablet all day. But yeah, for most people, there are easier ways to kind of increase compliance. I love that. I didn't even know that exercise behavior, was it?

• 53:26Mike Israetel?

  Yes, health behavior in general.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  Health behavior, I didn't even know, but it makes complete sense.

• 53:29Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Chris Williamson?

  What we spoke about last time on the last episode, which I really loved, was my favorite of the ones that we've done so far about stress management, recovery. What is the role of stress in all its forms on longevity, lifespan, morbidity?

• 53:46Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. Stress has what has been described, I'd say, pretty accurately as a hermetic response or association. Too little is not great, too much, definitely not great. So if you never have challenging times in your life, times where the best of you is required, times when you have to focus, times in which you struggle both mentally and physically, you're unlikely to have as high of a quality of life and by a little bit, as high of a duration of life. As if you have times of life that require you to get tired and beat up and stressed and overwhelmed.

• 54:26Mike Israetel?

  However, because there's a lot of really cool shit that happens when your body's overwhelmed and a lot of the crap it secretes when it's overwhelmed are actually like molecules they're studying now that have like longevity enhancing effects. However, if you're so stressed all the time or much of the time that you're like lips just above water kind of stressed. You know, like the gasping for air in a pool that's almost your height. Then that is overwhelming your body systems and chronic high psychological stress will put you into the grave early. Almost every single time. There's another consideration here of how you perceive stress.

• 55:07Mike Israetel?

  Because you can look at some successful business people, athletes, whoever, whatever realm they're in, mothers, five children to raise. If it looks like they're in high stress and to the outside observer, but they're engaged in loving every minute of it. They don't really pay the cost longevity wise and it's actually a bit of an enhance. But if you, no matter your stress level, feel totally overwhelmed and like, when will this end? Type of situation and you hate it, just get me out, you know, like you see a celebrity getting asked for the 50th time, well, your new movie, are you excited about it? And they got these glossed over eyes, it's not just the heroin that time that's glossed them over.

• 55:48Mike Israetel?

  That kind of constant overwhelm, that's not really great for longevity or quality of life. So what you want to do is sufficiently challenge yourself in life and also get the recovery. That balance is tough. I myself have had a real hard time striking that balance in my life. I blame my wife for this entirely. Because she's Asian? Oh yeah, well, I'll get to that in a second. I'll get, so I blame her just for many things in my life, most really, even stuff that like happened to me when I was a child. She wasn't even around because why not at this point? But she is a person who is, her industriousness is like off the charts. And she needs to in many cases be doing something or else she goes insane.

• 56:33Mike Israetel?

  The problem is I'm also like that. So when we're together. We just work a lot and we get guilt trips in our own heads about not working enough. And so we're really, really bad about taking time off and time to rest. Nowadays, we're a little better at it because per the recovery podcast we did. It's a priority for us as professional work athletes, like athletes rest. The funny, uh, that I can say this in a space where millions of people will see it. My wife sent me, so, uh, sorry, our, uh, the joke is super old. Our adopted son, Jared Feather, IFBB Pro, um, he is like on exactly that level of crystalline eyes psychosis about work.

• 57:18Mike Israetel?

  But probably worse, which he considers a great honor, uh, and it is, but also it comes with a trade off. He's a very amazing pro classic physique competitor and you've seen Jared in real life. Like you're going to see Jared, you're like, why do we even train? Like there's people that this exists, I don't even belong in the gym. But Sebum, who's in the same division, but has won six Olympias and Jared's placed like top five, type six in some shows, but has never cracked that. I think he will in the future, but, um, it was your podcast. You had Sebum on that my wife sent me that clip just like yesterday. And she was like, this is funny. And the clip was what does Sebum do in the average day? And he was like, I wake up, I, I do some cardio. I go back to sleep after breakfast.

• 58:02Mike Israetel?

  I wake up, I chill, I eat again, I take some pre-workout, I train, I come back, I eat. I might take another nap, I chill, do family stuff, eat, chill, do family stuff, eat, go to sleep. And it was like, if Crystal was like LOL and I was like LOL, I sent it to Jerry because, and he responded with LOL. Like, cause we guilt trip Jared for wanting to be as good of a bodybuilder as he can be. But Jared does all our RP social media bullshit. All the help with like app stuff and software. In addition to that, has a full roster of coaching clients for whom he travels all the time across America and the world to help compete. And so like I recently, he had to take a little time away from training to recover. And he was like, I don't know what to do with myself. And I was like, what do you do for fun?

• 58:46Mike Israetel?

  He's like, uh, uh, work typically or plan to work? I'm like, anything else? He's like, I've got nothing. And so it's like, Jared, if you don't pull back on all the work, how are you going to be stepping onto the Olympia stage? You don't have the recovery timeline in your plan to do so. And so for all of us folks that are super grind kind of thing, and none of us are like, man, grindset mentality, we never say that because we're just like, isn't that just what everyone does? Isn't that normal? For those of us in that position, pulling back is a good idea. But if you're sitting on the couch, if you're bored, if you're on your fifth doobie and it's kind of life for you all the time, you're never challenged, never stressed, you will live longer if you stress yourself, especially with things that you're passionate about, involved in and can progress at.

• 59:31Mike Israetel?

  That kind of stress in combination with an equal amount of rest and recovery is the joie de vivre, as the French are inclined to say. I don't even know if that's a term.

• 59:40Chris Williamson?

  Middle of the bell curve stuff.

• 59:42Mike Israetel?

  Yes. Which is tough because so many of us that are prominent for whatever the fuck, in your case, massive success and intellect, in my case, my curious head shape. You know, we just kind of work a lot and we're like, this is great. And here's the thing, if you love it and you're not overwhelmed all the time, it's pretty good.

• 59:58Chris Williamson?

  If you're compelled to do it.

• 1:00:00Mike Israetel?

  If you're compelled to do it and you feel both overwhelmed and this sneaking suspicion that you're a little bitch and you just need to go harder.

• 1:00:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Mike Israetel?

  You're not going to live as long as other people.

• 1:00:09Chris Williamson?

  So funny. So I had a call this morning. I had my first full genomic test done.

• 1:00:14Mike Israetel?

  Whoa.

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  Everything. Uh, I can, I can show you at some point unless you clone me.

• 1:00:19Mike Israetel?

  So you're out of the closet now.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, exactly. It turns out it is genetic. Who knew? That, uh, we went through and you talk about snips, different snips. We've got this snip, we've got this snippet, et cetera. And this is correlated with dot, dot, dot. This allows you to methylate better. This allows you to do.

• 1:00:35Mike Israetel?

  Sections of DNA, right?

• 1:00:36Chris Williamson?

  Yep. Yep. The C six, seven, seven T and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then next to it, there's a percentage number, how rare it is.

• 1:00:42Mike Israetel?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and presumably this is across population data or whatever they've got, uh, to compare it to.

• 1:00:48Mike Israetel?

  They have a lot of data now.

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  Dude. I was sat listening to my doctor go through this stuff this morning and it was, okay, so you've got two copies of this gene, 6% of the population. You've got two copies of this gene, 4%. You've got one copy of this gene, 18%, two copies of this, every single one of them. Dopamine, drive, ruminative thoughts, epinephrine, norepinephrine, don't clear adrenaline well, like, all of the things that will just make you very compulsive, very motivated, very industrious. And it's the first time that I've ever looked at the genetic side of behavioral genetics. So you think, my parents have these traits, we know that heritability is a thing, therefore you will have these traits too. But at no point did I ever actually think,

• 1:01:35Chris Williamson?

  okay, and what is the mechanism by which this is passed down? Well, it's the genes, it's the actual genes. And given the fact that we've now got genomics to the point where we can start to see a little bit of the code in the matrix, or matrix in the code, we can actually look at it. So I was like, reading the language of me, the building blocks-

• 1:01:53Mike Israetel?

  Crazy, right?

• 1:01:54Chris Williamson?

  -that I was made for. Dude, it was so fucking interesting.

• 1:01:56Mike Israetel?

  I needed to get that done, man.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  I can send you the link. It was like, not that expensive. It happened in a week. You just swab the inside of your cheek from your home, send it off. And I was like, this is... But also, the other thing that I realized, I was like, yep, see that, yep, see that. And what's really funny is where you go, you've got two copies of this, I'm like, yep, in mom and dad. You go, got one copy of this, and you can determine which parent-

• 1:02:18Mike Israetel?

  Holy shit.

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  Because you go, ah, yeah, that's dad, that's not mom, or whatever the other way. I was blown away. I just can't stop thinking about it all day today. So, um, yes.

• 1:02:27Mike Israetel?

  Do you get to the genes that predict what you're gonna be like when you're older?

• 1:02:31Chris Williamson?

  They'll be in there, or at least they will have captured them, but-

• 1:02:34Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, you keep reading that genome, you'll see some really crazy shit.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Yeah, it was cool. So stress, don't have overwhelming periods.

• 1:02:43Mike Israetel?

  Have overwhelming periods, but make sure they're periods, not- Years at a time or decades at a time, or like always.

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

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• 1:03:32Chris Williamson?

  like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it is only $500. Function has a 300,000 person waitlist, boo, but every Monday, they open up a few spots for Modern Wisdom listeners. Yay. Right now, you can get the exact same panels I get by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. That's functionhealth.com/ModernWisdom. You mentioned about engagement, some sort of passionate engagement thing, a thing you like to do. What's that?

• 1:03:59Mike Israetel?

  Let me say something super, super quick about the stress thing. You can have days and even weeks of extreme stress and it probably won't reduce your lifespan, as long as you can commentantly afterwards, take days or even weeks of much lower stress until you feel like, yeah, I could deal with this fucking stress. Whereas like, you know, day three of a vacation, after a really crazy period of work, you're not even relaxed yet. Something that folks might want to know is that seemingly, and this is just based on my inference, as you get older, the amount of time it takes you to unplug during a vacation, or as you say in the kingdom, holidays, to us, holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, et cetera.

• 1:04:46Mike Israetel?

  It it goes up. That amount tends to go up.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  And takes longer.

• 1:04:50Mike Israetel?

  Longer to unplug.

• 1:04:51Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:04:52Mike Israetel?

  And so I remember I had met a gentleman, is a very nice man, who was a a doorman in New York. When I was on vacation with my parents, I was like my early twenties, went to Dominican Republic. And we were there for like a 10 days, which we thought was a really long time. He was on vacation for three weeks. At an all inclusive in the DR. And I was like, dude, are you serious? He's like, when you get older, as you get older, it takes you longer to unplug. He's like, so the first week I'm unplugging. The second and third week I'm relaxing. And I was like, that's weird.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  I need a one week warm up to my holiday.

• 1:05:25Mike Israetel?

  Dude, seriously, because like, it's just not true to say that you're relaxed immediately after any stressful activity. Like, it takes some time. Like, imagine someone finishing a 15RM on the squat. And as soon as they rack it, you're like, all right, good to go. Let's get in the car and drive off.

• 1:05:42Mike Israetel?

  Hold on a second. My sweat hasn't even started coming out of me yet. Like, there's a process. And so if you're, as you're getting older, it's important to note that what used to be enough duration at a time of relaxation for you may not be, and that it's good to take a little bit more time to be a little bit extra recovered. The best way to know if it's time to start grinding again, you start getting itchy for the shit again, not compulsively, like you want it again. You want some stress. You feel like a lazy asshole and you're way beyond relaxed. If you haven't even gotten relaxed yet, you need more vacation.

• 1:06:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is why it's so important to work out whether you're a like a type A person with a type B problem or a type B person with a type A problem.

• 1:06:21Mike Israetel?

  Sure.

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  Right, then, again, the patience determines the dose of what is required. It's like, yeah, I've been thinking about this all the time, the just work harder, bro. Advice thing. It's been in my head pretty much since our last podcast. White knuckling creativity and how you can't do that. The fact that you don't just get to switch on or switch off the industriousness.

• 1:06:44Mike Israetel?

  Drive?

• 1:06:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, motivation. It's a super interesting. I think it's a really important thing. Also. Do you really want to look back and just see that all you did was work like an absolute motherfucker the whole time?

• 1:06:57Mike Israetel?

  It would be the honor of my life to die at my job.

• 1:07:00Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:00Mike Israetel?

  But that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Mike Israetel?

  Some people, they look back, you're totally right, all facetiousness aside. For me, it would be an honor to die at work and having been known as a very hard worker. But for most people, they're like, man, there's all this life to live. I remember, uh, I was in an English class at, in college, uh, sorry, in uni.

• 1:07:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:20Mike Israetel?

  And, uh, I, um, there was like a short story we read about a guy who was like always super smart and got super straight A's. And he like, uh, had an opportunity to go, it was in the late sixties. He had an opportunity to get on a bus and go to like Washington DC to protest something, but he didn't because he had exams coming up. And he gave like a speech to a, a, a college graduating class when he was like 60 or something, super successful career. And he was like, oh, you know, Mike, my one regret was that I didn't get on that bus. And the only thing I thought at the time was like, yeah, but you got these millions from being a career man, didn't you, motherfucker? And you did that, passing some exams, didn't you?

• 1:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Mike Israetel?

  So, but for whatever it is, as far as how you want to live your life, which transitions into that next topic of enjoyment.

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:08:06Mike Israetel?

  Make sure you're taking breaks. Don't be stingy with the breaks, but if it's all breaks all the time, put yourself through some difficult shit. It's gonna help you.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Passionate engagement.

• 1:08:16Mike Israetel?

  Passion engagement. I'm not an expert in this subfield of longevity by a long shot. So you can probably have someone on the podcast at some point, which I would consider fascinating. I would at least watch the episode. You get one view from me.

• 1:08:28Chris Williamson?

  Hey.

• 1:08:29Mike Israetel?

  I do run a robot farm in China that will give you a hundred million more views, but you have to pay for that sort of thing.

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:08:34Mike Israetel?

  So at least we have this robust correlational data that shows that people who are passionately engaged in one or multiple sequential or overlapping lifetime pursuits seem to outlive most other people. We know it's correlated. I'm aware of no causative mechanism through which this occurs. It strains my brain to imagine one. And maybe the causation data is already around, they're just not up to date on the stuff. So please ask ChatGPT about this.

• 1:09:13Mike Israetel?

  Ask ChatGPT or Claude or whoever about is there mechanistic presupposition or good evidence of how passionately engaging with anything in your life can increase your longevity and quality of life. There that data may exist, but at the very least, we know the correlations are pretty fucking airtight. And there's just so many people that have lived much longer than you would expect because they were passionately engaged. And so many examples of people that were like, eh, and they don't live a long time. So at least as a check the box just in case sort of thing. Yep. It's probably worthwhile to have in your mind, if you want to live the longest,

• 1:09:58Mike Israetel?

  not to have this perspective, and this goes back a little bit to the stress discussion of like, if I'm going to make it really far, I gotta chill all the time and never involve myself too passionately in anything because passion gets the heart rate going and that's bad. On the other hand, you want to consider it as a balance, but also it's at least worth a shot to get into that passionately engaging with something. What do I mean by that? Let's say you are just huge on World of Warcraft. Think about it day and night, you play it all the time, you have friends that play it, the game evolves all the time. Even something like that is statistically as a correlation likely to keep you alive for longer than if you have nothing about your life that really gets you going in the

• 1:10:43Mike Israetel?

  morning, nothing you're building. Another thing is creating something. People who create inventors statistically outlive like almost everyone. It's really kind of strange. Composers outlive almost everyone because it they have a mission.

• 1:10:59Mike Israetel?

  And it keeps them seemingly so engaged that it may have some benefits.

• 1:11:02Chris Williamson?

  Bit of an longevity game in some ways.

• 1:11:04Mike Israetel?

  Some is maybe, this is a maybe, but here's the thing, on the longevity side, it's a maybe. On the quality of life side, it's 100% certainty, which is why it also categorically belongs in this discussion. Cause even though the longevity stuff, the lifespan is correlated, maybe it's causative. The causation element of quality of life is 100% a thing. Your quality of life is measured in a bunch of different ways, but one of them is like, do you, are you really involved in what you're doing? Do you really like what you're doing? Like imagine you had to describe, you know, you meet someone on a plane, sitting next to them and someone's like, what do you do? And you're like, uh, oh, like I do podcasts and stuff.

• 1:11:47Mike Israetel?

  And they're like, do you love it? And you're like, ah, it's all right. It's a, it's a living. Like you were clearly being facetious because if I may guess, Chris, this is a deep involvement for you. Having conversations with mostly intelligent people, occasionally sprinkling me in. This is a thing you do and a thing you really give a shit about. That is probably going to be good for your quality of life, simply because it's even just a sub definition of the quality of your life. You're in 100% on something for hours a day. It's a really huge benefit in the statistical literature that we see. And so at least worth a mention on two grounds of might causatively enhance your lifespan, but almost certainly will make your quality of life much higher.

• 1:12:30Chris Williamson?

  Is this the effect where we see people who retire from their job at a particular age? And then there seems to be this sort of drop off towards death. People that retire earlier, people that retire later.

• 1:12:42Mike Israetel?

  Part of that. The other part, as a big proponent of science, physically big, not smart, just big. I want to say that there's almost certainly a big feature of that dynamic. It's a true dynamic is reverse causation or a causation of an underlying variable. If you just don't have it anymore at work, cause you're fucking dying. You quit work and then you die.

• 1:13:06Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 1:13:07Mike Israetel?

  Uh, but, but there may very well be this situation where even if you still got it, if you quit work, your life drains of meaning and then yeah.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  It's probably multifactorial as well, providing you with uh, community, providing you with structure every single day. You're maybe moving, maybe you're on your feet with some sort of job, you're getting your steps in, it's blah, blah, blah, blah. Like it's, you know, to all of these things. Work will set you free. Ah, shouldn't say that to you.

• 1:13:32Mike Israetel?

  Huge. You know, uh, I quoted my dad once on the internet who said, work will set you free. And I had a friend reach out and be like, you do know that was like a sign above like Auschwitz or Burkinow or something. And I was like, it's still right though. And like, you know, my dad is as Ashkenazi as it gets. So tell him that shit.

• 1:13:49Chris Williamson?

  Aye.

• 1:13:50Mike Israetel?

  Right.

• 1:13:50Chris Williamson?

  Uh, okay. Other people, I've heard that all of the people.

• 1:13:54Mike Israetel?

  Don't like them, Chris.

• 1:13:55Chris Williamson?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:13:55Mike Israetel?

  They smell, they look at me funny. I think they look funny. What else is there to say?

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  That's true. But apparently you need them to live longer.

• 1:14:03Mike Israetel?

  Yes, through vampiric consumption of their body fluids. Ideally, you get them in infancy, but infants are so hard to find nowadays.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  Birth rate decline will do that to you.

• 1:14:14Mike Israetel?

  That's right. That's the real tragedy of birth rate decline. No more infants to suck the spinal fluid out of. What is Hollywood even doing to stay young and healthy? Um, a very, very similar statistical picture here as to the involvement stuff. Passion involvement with something you like is seen in this situation with community and social relations. Family, friends, community involvement are very tightly correlated with your longevity. And because most people like a certain amount of them, they are in that subdefinition of quality of life. So we could just say that is really great. Um.

• 1:15:00Mike Israetel?

  It's a big deal. And in many cases, people will get all of the socialization they want and no more. Like, I'm in Austin right now doing a bunch of podcasts. If you text me to hang out and I'm interested in hanging out, I'll be like, where, when? If I'm not interested, I'll make up some bullshit excuse like, hey, I'm super busy catching up on something. Anyway, see ya. I'm good to manage my own shit.

• 1:15:29Mike Israetel?

  So that's totally cool. Most people are doing a fine job at that. However, there are many people that have two things going for them. One, is they're not extroverted in a way that outreach is to get other people to hang out with them. And two, they simply are not aware of at least the correlational relationship between that and quality of life and longevity. And so some people are totally fine being hermits. But simple or some people are also totally fine being hermits. But when they actually engage in social interaction where it's foisted upon them, they have like a breath of fresh air go through them. And those people specifically need to be keen on making sure that they do at least the bare minimum to continue to involve themselves with other people.

• 1:16:12Mike Israetel?

  Now typically, in many cases, it's just not a problem. Middle school, too many fucking people. High school, same people. College, uni, a lot of people. You can be ostracized in those situations. You can be a loner, but a lot of times that's either by choice or by you just don't like those people. As you get older, many people report that their ability to form new friendships or sustain older ones, it falls off. And this is some kind of like doom and gloom scenario or like, you know, everyone leaves you and dies. That can happen, but there are many, many, many ways in which you can get yourself involved. There are community centers, there are various games and sports and involvements and everything. At any age, it's possible for you to reach out, connect with people and regularly schedule hangouts.

• 1:16:57Mike Israetel?

  Be it with family and friends, be it with other people, be it in a volunteering capacity, you don't have to have like deep close ties, even if you just interact with other humans, like at a soup kitchen, for the love of God, several times a week, that seems statistically better than just completely walling yourself off, if you're a kind of person that's inclined for some sociality. So make the effort is what I'm saying.

• 1:17:17Chris Williamson?

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• 1:18:02Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can try it completely risk-free and get a free sample pack of all eight flavors by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What do you make of Dr. Robert Waldinger's stuff, the Harvard's longitudinal life study? So he came on the show and he had found that the single biggest variable in how long people lived was the number of close connections that they have. It was more than smoking, it was more than going to the gym, it was the single biggest determinant. Why would you posit that that might be?

• 1:18:46Mike Israetel?

  I wonder if that factors out age. I haven't seen the actual data. If it doesn't factor out age, it's probably partially correct as causative mechanism, but probably only partially, because when you're 88, most of your friends are dead and you outlived all of them. And the reason you die soon isn't because they died, it's partially that, but also

• 1:19:03Chris Williamson?

  Mostly because you're 88.

• 1:19:04Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, it's just clocks ticking. So.

• 1:19:08Mike Israetel?

  It, like I said, the correlational stuff is a big deal. There are other ways in which it might not be causation driven. If you are a curmudgeonly piece of shit and you're bad to yourself in your own head, and you're bad to other people, you just won't have a lot of people around you. If you are very isolated, you're not economically very productive, you're not very involved in things. Most of those things give you more friends, having more money, having more social connections, having hobbies in common with people. They all independently likely correlate or drive longevity because like when you have more money, you can just afford better healthcare in many cases. And also, if you have a lot of money, you're probably high in trait conscientiousness.

• 1:19:53Mike Israetel?

  And so you probably care about your health and also eat well and exercise and all that shit. Those people just tend to have more social connections than otherwise. But there's, there may very well be an independent causative part of community. I'll say another thing.

• 1:20:10Mike Israetel?

  One of the hypotheses that I like, not saying it's true. I just, it feels like a nice thing that makes sense to me. Is that a certain given level of social interaction is something that the human individual organism has been primed to see as a base level. Because if you look at our ancestral history, like lone humans just die real soon. I'm a fucking lone wolf, bro. All right, here's a spear, just kidding. Your, the females of the tribe actually picked the plant that wraps the head of the spear. So you don't have a spear anymore, you have a fucking stick. And there's a buffalo, it's just one of you, and that thing weighs 1600 pounds. And it's interested in getting upset at you if you try to kill it.

• 1:20:56Mike Israetel?

  You're not doing shit by yourself. In all of our ancestral history, the loner shit is just like, I love that fucking lone samurai bullshit. Like vibes wise, it's awesome. Like I hate when psychotic leftists are like, you know, whenever does anything by themselves. Like, shut up, you just want socialism, get out of my face. But in the real world, you're just drawing your own samurai sword by yourself. This is not how it works. And so humans are pre-built. Primed for living in groups and you're just unlikely to as a human have an evolutionary history behind you, which makes the act of being alone for a long time.

• 1:21:31Chris Williamson?

  Beneficial.

• 1:21:31Mike Israetel?

  Relatively normal, like fuck beneficial, totally, right? But it's just so abnormal that if you expose humans to one closet, no sound, no light, a little bit of food and water, just to keep going in a hole in the floor to poop and pee, they're also going to die real soon because people need all those variables just because they're normal. And so, social interaction at a pretty high level is normal. Remember, all of us evolved in very communal circumstances where you walk outside of your hut, which might have your wife and your three children in it, but the rest of the village is always every night, every day together, everything's together. Hmm. We're seeing increasingly more as societies get wealthier and older, a, an atomization

• 1:22:14Mike Israetel?

  of individuals, like the average Japanese sixty year old has nobody. But here's the thing, how the hell are they alive? They don't need to kill bison with spears anymore. They have supermarkets, they have food delivery, they have online work so you can generate value at home, consume media at home, you just never need to leave. Now, watching television shows and listening to music almost certainly will increase your longevity and quality of life, if you just have no choice of anything else. But being around real people, I don't think we have to suspect it as some kind of magic fairy dust effect where like it's the socialization that's good for you. It's the fact that when you don't have lots of socialization, it's such an unusual thing to your human systems, your brain, that you're like, this low key, subconsciously, something is off.

• 1:22:57Mike Israetel?

  And then your ability to generate passion, to have meaning, to have purpose, is largely gone because you just weren't built for the shit.

• 1:23:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Passionate engagement will go up. Maybe you've got people around you, so if you get too fat, they're going to say, hey, Mike, you're getting a little bit fat.

• 1:23:10Mike Israetel?

  Totally.

• 1:23:10Chris Williamson?

  You aren't waking up at the right time. So there is sort of correction mechanism for a lot of other shit.

• 1:23:15Mike Israetel?

  Having grandchildren and children around for whom you maybe take care of, maybe you imbue them with wisdom, that's a lot of meaning and a lot of purpose. You're living for more than just yourself.

• 1:23:24Chris Williamson?

  Do parents live longer? Do you know?

• 1:23:25Mike Israetel?

  I have no idea. Almost certainly they do.

• 1:23:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Mike Israetel?

  But I wouldn't, I don't have the data in front of me to say that, but.

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Okay. That's the things that do impact longevity. What are the biggest myths in the world of longevity, in your opinion?

• 1:23:40Mike Israetel?

  Again, as in all of our myths discussions, this has to be highly curtailed for the purposes of time. There are a few things that come to mind and maybe you can remind me of a few. One is that in 2024, October, am I allowed to say when this was filmed? Sure. Yeah, fuck. We don't have any supplements that you can take that are like strong main effect for enhancing longevity? And have been approved or that main effect has been illustrated in a wide variety of studies done by different laboratories around the world. And we have a deep understanding of the causal mechanisms behind that. I take NMN, nicotinamide mononucleotide.

• 1:24:23Mike Israetel?

  And I was, my clip appeared in some other longevity podcast where I went on a longevity rant on one of my other videos. And this longevity expert dude who seemed like a sharp guy knew what he's talking about. He kind of clowned me on the NMN thing. So I took another look through the literature and turns out actually there is some very decent data for NMN having some longevity effects and actual mechanistic effects as well. But the total number of studies on the breadth of populations it's been studied on is just not enough for me to go singing its praises all the fucking time, which is why I mentioned it now twice ever in public. Pulled up for it both times. Right, yes. And, and so it's just something I take as a hedging mechanism of like maybe it's something. Uh, I just swallow it. Right.

• 1:25:08Mike Israetel?

  But I swallow a lot of other things. Most, in any case, I won't get into it. So shut up again. So if there were these pills I could take that reliably increase longevity. I would love that. I would love if there were supplements like that. There's rosveratrol, there's a few other candidates, but none of them have that like, dude, is this really worth my money for sure? Like if someone's eating only 80 grams of protein per day and they're like, I can't eat any more real food. Should I take supplements? You're like, yes, like, will it help with must have asked? Yes. Like, how many studies? Hundreds on everyone. There's nothing like that for longevity supplements. So in 2024, if someone's selling you longevity supplements, they could be onto something and there could be some valuable

• 1:25:52Mike Israetel?

  stuff people have in their formulations that actually works, but nothing that we can be ultra super sure about. And really quick, no small number of shady fucking supplement companies will tell you, you gotta take this, it's gonna make you live longer. And to every single one of them are, if their claims are extreme, they're bullshitting you.

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  What about Metformin?

• 1:26:14Mike Israetel?

  Metformin is not a supplement. It's a drug you have to have a prescription for. However, Metformin is a life extension drug. Here's the thing, it's a very small effect. The only way we really know Metformin extends lifespan is because so many people take it for diabetic outcomes that from that mechanism alone, we have just like ungodly numbers of the N size is huge. So with a huge sample size in a study, you can zone into real tiny effects and see them. So if you take Metformin versus not, you're gonna probably live a little longer with Metformin than not. But it's not this thing that's gonna take like five or 10 years and slap it onto your life. That's what I'm really excited about for the future of medicine. What I'm here to say is in, is in mid to late 2024, it's just not here

• 1:26:56Mike Israetel?

  yet. And Metformin is not something you just should go out and take. It should be a conversation with your health provider. Not everyone reacts very well to Metformin. And again, the longevity benefits are quite small. There's other tons of side effects you can have with it. There's some really good main effects. Tons of people are on it for diabetic control, but it's not some kind of anti-aging wonder drug. I will say, there's literature coming up a little bit now, but some of the mechanistic effects that you see with Metformin are even higher with semaglutide and a lot of the new anoreptic drugs, the fat loss drugs. So when people say like, well, I'm gonna take this drug, but when I get off it, wanna regain the weight? And like, yeah, probably. And they're like, well, so I just gotta be on it forever? Like, uh huh. And they're like, but isn't that bad for me? Like, no, it actually might be better for you to be on these drugs than not on these drugs in like seven out of 10.

• 1:27:39Chris Williamson?

  Is that a direct mechanism from the semaglutide? Or is it that it's stopping you from your weed addiction and your food addiction and your fucking porn addiction?

• 1:27:46Mike Israetel?

  Low, there's at least one mechanism offhand I can, I talk about. It lowers your blood sugar. Your chronic area under the curve of blood sugar substantially. And that itself has like five different ways in which it doesn't toxify your organs over time. There's definitely a thing. So there are some things like metformin, semaglutide that are in the conversation for like, oh, neat. They have little, little longevity boosting effects. But there's just unfortunately no drug or supplement currently yet made. That's like, this is the thing you need to take for longevity. And here's the thing, like, there are people that are, dare I say, anti-capitalist, anti-fitness industry, anti-supplement industry, that will say the same things as I'm saying, and it'll be true. Uh, I'm the opposite of all of those things. Insanely capitalist, supplement optimist, et cetera.

• 1:28:31Mike Israetel?

  I, I just happen to think like, I don't, first of all, I don't want to lie to people. I also don't sell supplements. I wouldn't make any money off that. Now, if I have to lie to people to make money, holy shit, welcome. But it, it's just one of those things like I really wish was true, but it's just not true yet, yet. And that doesn't mean we're not several years away from massive, massive changes in how drugs and other things can affect longevity.

• 1:28:53Chris Williamson?

  One of the other most common pathways, intermittent fasting. We spoke about calorie restriction earlier on.

• 1:29:00Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Chris Williamson?

  But intermittent fasting is a very specific type of that with, what's that thing that it does?

• 1:29:08Mike Israetel?

  Autophagy.

• 1:29:08Chris Williamson?

  Autophagy, autophagy.

• 1:29:10Mike Israetel?

  Auto-phagy. There's another way to say that, that's slightly a slur, so.

• 1:29:14Chris Williamson?

  Ah, which we both are.

• 1:29:16Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:29:17Chris Williamson?

  I wake up in the morning and the switch has been flipped.

• 1:29:19Mike Israetel?

  Always. My switch broke off through violent homosexual intercourse.

• 1:29:29Mike Israetel?

  It was great time.

• 1:29:32Chris Williamson?

  Got a world record on grinder.

• 1:29:34Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:29:35Chris Williamson?

  Fasting.

• 1:29:36Mike Israetel?

  Fasting is awesome for a bunch of different reasons. Sometimes it fits people's lives better. Sometimes it lets them control hunger better. If you get enough protein, it's probably not going to lead you to become emaciated or whatever. It's not the optimal way to get jacked, but it's not that far off. However, fasting had this thing a few years back where people were like, this is the thing for longevity. But it turned out that comparing models of fasting versus not fasting, if you keep the caloric restriction as the variable that's at play, there's no way to statistically differentiate fasting versus not fasting. Mano Henselmann has some really good insight on this from a compilation of studies. And so it's not really the fasting that's probably keeping you alive longer. It's the fact that you're eating less food

• 1:30:19Mike Israetel?

  overall and the fact that you are now at a lower body weight lifetime overall.

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  So is there no truth to autophagy?

• 1:30:26Mike Israetel?

  Autophagy happens all the time. Autophagy itself can occur in the presence of food or not the presence of food. And if your caloric input throughout the day is the same, the amount of recycling of your own nutrients that has to occur is also the same. So autophagy is a thing that you can see very big spikes of and very big declivities of if you fast and then feed. But if you just eat regularly throughout the day, you get these little spikes and the area under curve ends up being like very, at least very similar.

• 1:30:58Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:30:58Mike Israetel?

  And so if you want to fast, if you suspect that your reading of literature shows it actually has slight longevity benefits, I'm absolutely not going to stop anyone. I think maybe that's the case. Just at a, just a cold reading of literature, I'm not inclined to believe that fasting has like-

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  This is the holy grail.

• 1:31:13Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. Right. Like, because some people, like, they're on the longevity kick. They're like, so you fast, right? And you're like, no. They're like, you're just a fucking idiot. Like, nah, that ain't it.

• 1:31:22Chris Williamson?

  What about blue zones?

• 1:31:26Mike Israetel?

  Um, I don't like the color blue. I like red zones.

• 1:31:30Chris Williamson?

  You're wearing blue.

• 1:31:31Mike Israetel?

  I hate shirts. Awful. GPRS. Terrible. Is this blue to you? I don't know what it is to me. Maybe I'm colorblind.

• 1:31:37Chris Williamson?

  Sort of blue, blue, green.

• 1:31:39Mike Israetel?

  Teal.

• 1:31:40Chris Williamson?

  Teal. I love teal.

• 1:31:43Chris Williamson?

  I love teal, Bennett.

• 1:31:44Mike Israetel?

  Why are various of your staff members laughing at that?

• 1:31:47Chris Williamson?

  Regularly when we do these shoots, what it looks like to you, the untrained, unwashed masses, is just that there's light coming up from places, right? There's light. But everybody doesn't know, there's a fake sun outside, and there's fake light underneath all of this.

• 1:32:04Mike Israetel?

  It's not even actual photons.

• 1:32:06Chris Williamson?

  No, fake light, fake light.

• 1:32:07Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Chris Williamson?

  And you can make these tubes any color that you want. I like them to be teal. He said that we're not allowed them, so I'm being abused.

• 1:32:17Mike Israetel?

  People who know about video things say teal sucks.

• 1:32:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they do. But you're here, in your shirt.

• 1:32:22Mike Israetel?

  Yes, sorry.

• 1:32:23Chris Williamson?

  Blue zones, blue zones.

• 1:32:24Mike Israetel?

  Also, the fans are kind of bluish.

• 1:32:25Chris Williamson?

  They are. All of these Japanese people keep on living forever.

• 1:32:29Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:32:31Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. So people in the blue zones do a lot of things right. They tend to not overeat to the extent of being grotesquely over fat. They tend to have a high degree of community involvement and personal involvement. But, um, and that stuff we can take away from them. What we categorically cannot take away from them is the ultra specifics of their diets. Because here's how it works in fantasy internet land. You pick a blue zone culture whose diet you seem to like. And you go, it's the olive oil with the Italians. Or it's the fish and rice with the Japanese, or whatever the hell. That's probably not it. So the big myth here with blue zones

• 1:33:14Mike Israetel?

  is there are ultra-specific foods and diets that you eat. They're going to just really radically enhance your longevity. And ultra-specific other foods and diet types that you eat, they're just going to croak you out real fast. That's just not it. The other thing about blue zones is tons of the blue zone effect is just straight up genetic in nature. So.

• 1:33:34Chris Williamson?

  People that live long live in areas where their children live long.

• 1:33:37Mike Israetel?

  Strange. And they're genetically related to those said children. Also strange. And geographically in proximity. The.

• 1:33:46Mike Israetel?

  I gotta be careful. I say this.

• 1:33:50Mike Israetel?

  Within

• 1:33:52Mike Israetel?

  any two compared species or hundreds of species. And oftentimes even within a given species that has subspecies. You can categorize most animals on a spectrum of what's called a life history analysis. Um, it's on the one hand called an R selected group. Our selected animals don't have long lifespans relatively. And they produce, they're very fecund, so they produce a lot of offspring per individual. The offspring typically don't mostly survive. A few of them will not very long lives, not very fun lives in many cases. And like spiders, spider mommy has. Uh, you know, I, if it, it seems to me that that gigantic spider just offset is in roughly the same space.

• 1:34:37Mike Israetel?

  It was when we first looked at it an hour ago.

• 1:34:39Chris Williamson?

  It's not a prop. I promise it's not a prop.

• 1:34:41Mike Israetel?

  Here's, here's my problem. On the one hand, if it had moved, the supposition that can move. Infect my brain with the idea that it's going to move up my leg here in a bit. And you're going to hear me scream and break the table and jump out of the barn. But also here's the, here's the problem. The supposition that it hasn't moved at all is equally disturbing because then it's plotting.

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  Waiting.

• 1:34:58Mike Israetel?

  It's Chris, it's waiting for me. They say that insects don't have the neural network size and depth to experience emotions like we do. But I can tell you that spider sure looks like it's experiencing hate.

• 1:35:10Chris Williamson?

  Malice. Yes. Michael Malice. Michael Malice. Uh, blue zones are.

• 1:35:17Mike Israetel?

  So are selected.

• 1:35:19Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:35:19Mike Israetel?

  Very many offspring, not long lifespans, few offspring survive spiders. On the other end, you have whales, very case selected, which means that they have very long lifespans. Individually, each whale is one hell of a survival machine. It tends not to die super often. They don't have a ton of offspring. So that's just how they live their lives. You can categorize. All human subpopulations, which we used to call races, but that was racist or something. On average, into more trending towards R-selected or more trending towards K-selected. No way. That is the last thing I'll say in depth about this specific topic. Yep. Because anything I say further will get me banned. Yep. And with all the best intentions, I love every human race for all of its various different qualities.

• 1:36:05Mike Israetel?

  But there is a lot of politically incorrect shit that is both true and really kind of, in some sense, like damn, that's fucked up kind of shit that you can take away from this. There are books you can read. But another thing, there's tons of really great shit you can take away from it. Tons of explanatory power, but one of the things is almost every single, every single blue zone group, as far as I know, is just coming from a have like a known K-selected population. Wow. Just this, this is live a long time. You throw Japanese people anywhere, they live a fucking long time. This is what they do. And so we have to be careful not to conflate genetics with, let me, let me bring up a, a different example, slightly different example. This gentleman, I forgot what this guy's name was a while back.

• 1:36:49Mike Israetel?

  He was like recommending really ancestral diets and kind of a lot of raw foods. And he was saying they have an effect on your dentition and like how your teeth are, teeth health, jaw shape. And he was citing a lot of like African subpopulations that they have such healthy teeth. And it's because of what they eat. And I'm like, motherfucker, black people just have better teeth than everyone. Like he just went to Nigerians or whoever have perfect teeth to begin with. And he was like, see, it's their diet. Like, no, it's because they're Nigerian. Their diet could play a role, but I was just like, the total absence of a discussion of genetic variation in this was just like, disheartening to say the least. And so when we talk about blue zones, et cetera, if we forget the fact that like, yeah, like Japanese people, et cetera, just outlive everyone.

• 1:37:29Mike Israetel?

  Uh, where if you factor out the genetics, the blue zone shit starts to shrink down to like, okay, it's mostly just community involvement, generally healthy eating, et cetera, et cetera, socialization. When you factor those things out, the blue zones, if you're looking at like, oh, kale, we have to eat kale or seaweed. That's the thing you're doing the shit all wrong. You mentioned it earlier on.

• 1:37:49Chris Williamson?

  What you're looking forward to from a future of longevity standpoint, I imagine some of it's probably got to do with AI. Some of it's probably got to do with computers and uploading and all the rest of it.

• 1:38:00Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:38:00Chris Williamson?

  Can be human brain interface thing.

• 1:38:03Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and I imagine that some of it may be able to do with actually reversing aging as well. Drugs, AI, I imagine AI also makes the drugs that are going to reverse the aging.

• 1:38:12Mike Israetel?

  Yes.

• 1:38:13Chris Williamson?

  What are the most promising areas when it comes to the future of aging, research?

• 1:38:18Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Chris Williamson?

  Et cetera.

• 1:38:19Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. I'll probably do this, I'll try to do this in order of how it's likely to appear in the future. I'll probably get all this wrong, so you can just take it for what it is.

• 1:38:29Mike Israetel?

  AI powered drug discovery began in earnest, full bore earlier this year.

• 1:38:39Mike Israetel?

  The ability of AI to discover new effective drugs to address various disease conditions is for most people who have thought about it a little bit, as yet unfathomable. It's a quality leap. It's nonsense. If you went back to 1985 in a time machine, forget that the time machine is also impressive in this case, and you gave someone an iPhone, fully charged, and somehow the iPhone worked through the time machine to access the modern internet. It would be to the very best engineers, fucking baffling, damn near magic. But now we take it totally for granted and kids like jump in the pool with their iPhone and they're like, ah crap, it fried out. I'll just get another one. Who cares?

• 1:39:21Mike Israetel?

  So what I'm about to say, all these crazy things, remember that most humans do linear extrapolation, but the arc of all of history, all of history, including prehistory and biology and physics and chemistry, chemistry, then physics, is exponential in nature. This is not up for debate. It's just, it just is. Every single human or not human biological or geological event that you plot on a chart, you need to plot on a log chart so it gets rid of the exponent, and that's still an exponent. So this is a real thing. And so when we, people are like, what is 2035 going to be like? They mostly do a linear approximation, extrapolation, but it's also a linear extrapolation with

• 1:40:04Mike Israetel?

  a very low slope because most people have an inborn pessimistic bias, which makes sense in the Paleolithic era in which we evolved because shit sucked. You expected shit to suck like, yeah, your uncle probably got gored by a bison every other day. Shit was off.

• 1:40:18Mike Israetel?

  Things are going to get much better, very quickly, and then even faster. Short of machines killing all of us or World War III, crazy shit's gonna happen. Here's roughly how I see the most likely timeline. Again, huge, just eat the whole salt shaker for this shit. Buck a grain of salt, all the salt. That's not good for longevity, so don't do it.

• 1:40:37Mike Israetel?

  As long as your blood pressure is fine, you're good to go. Okay, so probably one of the first things we're gonna see is kiboshing entire categories of disease with insanely powerful drugs. We're gonna see in the late 2020s, early 2030s. Like, heart disease, gone, cancer, gone, Alzheimer's, gone, just gone. Like, don't take my word for it. We already have a category of viral and bacterial diseases that we've kiboshed. Who the fuck has, you don't know anyone with polio? Like, a human. These people just don't get polio anymore. Who dies of like rickets and shit like that? Like, it's just, we laugh at it now, but it used to just kill everyone. Can you imagine the 1600s, you're like, dude, scurvy? Not a thing in the future. They're like, you're kidding. Like, no, like, this guy's drinking the Kool-Aid. There's no way. Like, also, Kool-Aid's in the future. Like, what's Kool-Aid? You're like, it's, it's great. It's okay.

• 1:41:21Mike Israetel?

  It's red and it's sweet. And it's based on some berry? I'm not sure. So, when you kibosh entire categories of disease like that, you just take morbidity down like crazy. Cause living with like chronic cancer or some shit or chronic heart disease condition, it's a different kind of living than living truly healthy. And in addition to that, it's gonna bump up longevity a ton. And like, nowadays, the average person lives into their late 70s. That might still be true in about eight years or so. But, uh, the distribution is gonna close substantially. Yep. And so the average person might live into their mid 80s, not a ton higher, but like way fewer people are dying in their 50s and 60s. The bottom tail just goes right up. Yep. So that's probably gonna be a big thing.

• 1:42:06Mike Israetel?

  Probably a little bit later, maybe sooner, who knows? We're gonna get some traction on reverse aging. Uh, David Sinclair has spoken about this at length. He was real early to the reverse aging thing. And the way it works in social media and news media is when you have one rat study that does cool shit. People are like, this is it. When's it coming? And it's like, we need some more time to get this going. But there's nothing about aging really that precludes re-altering the expression of your own DNA to just do better cleanup and reverse your age as you present biologically. Chronologically, no time machine yet. Biologically, it's a tractable problem. There's nothing theoretically about it. That's like, that's just impossible. Cause again, it seems like, like the shit the genie from Aladdin wouldn't even do.

• 1:42:51Mike Israetel?

  You know, like, how do you reverse aging? It turns out that your body mostly ages because the ancestral evolutionary pressures to stay alive and healthy and well for a long time. We were just too R-selected for. Like, you're probably gonna die by the time you're 27. So if we put one half of your metabolic pathways into doing constant DNA cleanup, you just suck at everything else and then you die when you're 18. The world is not sufficiently stable for you. And, uh, there's not enough providence in the world to keep you upright so that you can fuel your body for shit like that. However, if we get age reversal right, both through therapeutics and genetic engineering, we can have a situation where your body's actually like, oh, I'm just never gonna like,

• 1:43:36Mike Israetel?

  get lazy about these anti-aging effects. And you essentially just continue to live in a roughly 22-year-old's body. They've already done this in cell cultures. They've already done it in a few small animal models. It is not a huge leap to do it in grand scale in humans at large. With AI power type of shit, that 10 years from now might be a legit thing. I did a whole, on my other philosophy channel, I've done a whole thing about the implications, philosophically, conceptually, socially of what reverse aging is gonna be like. But Chris, can you imagine taking 100 million elderly Americans in 2037? And three months later, they all present as age 22. Physically, 22 years old.

• 1:44:20Mike Israetel?

  Cognitively sharp, like 22. Energy like 22. Titties up like 22. What happens to your dick and balls? Something like 22. Bro nightclub scene, you gotta go back to your old job. Like holy shit.

• 1:44:33Chris Williamson?

  Gold rush.

• 1:44:33Mike Israetel?

  So all this other stuff could very well be on the horizon. There's a chance it just never works out. I would assign there's a low probability that. So aging reversal is a big deal. They talk about this thing you brought up earlier, I think off camera, longevity, escape velocity. When true robust aging reversal comes in, that's the spaceship leaving the fucking atmosphere. Because short of getting hit by a bus or getting eaten by a crocodile, you might just never die because you're biologically just always 22.

• 1:45:00Chris Williamson?

  So the most important thing for everybody now to live longer is to live longer.

• 1:45:04Mike Israetel?

  Okay, so that's a huge statement. It sounds like a tautology, but it really is a thing. If you can just make it to the mid 2030s, there was a high probability that the the great gentle, powerful arms of biotech are going to lift you the rest of the way. Just just go to 2035. That's where you need to reach to, right? You know, when the hero grabs the heroine's hand and lifts her in the helicopter, that type of shit. So because people are often like, okay, I can have a lot of fun smoking cigarettes, eating hamburgers, smoking hamburger flavored cigarettes, a cigarette shaped like a hamburger, every permutation thereof. But like, I don't want to be 88 in a nursing home. Who gives a shit? Up until quite recently, that was like a valid trade off you could make. Like, I'm not going to live forever.

• 1:45:49Mike Israetel?

  I'm going to fucking rock out. Dope. And spirit energy wise, I think that's great. However, it's getting to be pretty clear that into the mid and late 2030s, the power of biotech is going to be so fucking absurd. You probably want to make it to see that because you might just be getting a whole different level of ability to live longer at a healthy presentation. So we got that. The next thing after that, somewhere in the mix, is genetic engineering. There are genes in your body that make proteins that make you age slower or faster. We can just select for the genes that make you age slower

• 1:46:30Mike Israetel?

  or reverse aging or whatever else you want, or make you just not susceptible to entire categories of disease. Like, we already know the genetic variants that basically like you'll just never get Alzheimer's. And we know genetic variants that you're probably going to get Alzheimer's, probably really soon. If we just rewire your DNA as an adult human, you take some pills, you take a shot and over the next several weeks, feel kind of look a little different. We can do that. The big problem with that is one is a vector problem. How do you introduce the thing that but but CRISPR makes these enormous leaps that you almost never hear about in the news is bullshit nerd talk, but now they have a pretty good control of the bacterial genome where they can trade in and out.

• 1:47:08Chris Williamson?

  Switch it on, switch it off.

• 1:47:09Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, and it's just a few orders of magnitude more complex, but the way AI and biotech go is they just leap orders of magnitude every two years or so. And so we might have in the 2030s, some I should have a book called in the 2030s and it's just blank. It's like whatever the fuck you want. Magical bullshit's coming and a picture of my ugly face. But there's a situation where so there's one is a vector problem, probably not a big problem because it turns out we can vector almost anything into your cells at this point and we're going to get better at that. The other problem is a combinatorial problem. I tweak this gene, I tweak that gene. This one makes you live longer. This one makes you live extra long, but their proteins interact in high concentrations to poison you and you die at age two. Fuck. How do we even predict that? Well, AI can start to predict a lot

• 1:47:52Mike Israetel?

  of stuff and will eventually be able to predict more or less all of the major functions and metabolism of the human body. And because if you simulate like the the the layer of phospholipids around your cells with a simulation that takes in most of the variance of how they are, you don't actually need to simulate every single quantum interaction to get a 99.999% like

• 1:48:12Chris Williamson?

  Functional.

• 1:48:13Mike Israetel?

  Functional functional simulation. So AI, this is absolutely intractable for any human brain to do or any number of group of scientists on earth working together. But for AI, 2030s AI, it would, there is a way if you just run the numbers, which like Ray Kurzweil has done, for example, and many others, it's just like easily tractable. It's like if you ask a human nervous system at age one, can you kick a soccer ball into a goal? You're like, no, fuck no, it's not advanced to do that. What about a 15 year old? You're like, something's wrong with you. If you can't do that, like, really? Do you know how complex the biomechanics of kicking a soccer ball really are? Like, fucking really complex. But for 15 year old adult nervous system, it's an easy task. Same for AI, taking the human body and being able to essentially unfold all the DNA, figure out what everything

• 1:48:55Mike Israetel?

  does, figure out the interactive effects, and then fold it back up and go, here's what you need to change to get this effect. Once we get that, a completely different era of humanity. You want to be blue? Sweet, you're blue. You want elf ears? You got elf ears. No problem. What the fuck you want? Of all of the variation that humans can have genetically. All of humans ever alive occupy a fucking drop in an ocean the size of the volume of the earth. So it's not like everything in there kills you and humans are the only things that are alive. It's that mostly, most of human genetic variation is completely unexplored. And if you just manually through biotech engineer that you get to a point where people don't age and they don't die of disease and they're just kind of fucking dope and they

• 1:49:36Mike Israetel?

  even could be really hardy. Like for example, they could take a genetic variant and change the structure of your bones and double layer your skull. So you get hit by a bus, you die. Now you get hit by a bus and you're like, ow, and you just walk off. It's totally possible to do all that stuff. But here's where the cool stuff happens. At some point, and Jared Feather and I have a little running kind of inside bet as to what happens first. We don't know. At some point, cybernetics is gonna come in. What the fuck is cybernetics? You get your arm cut off today. They can give you a replacement arm, but it kind of sucks compared to a real arm. However, in 2024, the arm they can install already can ambulate, it can grab some objects. You have a little bit of feeling in there, interacts with your nerves. That shit that in 1990 was like straight up science fiction, like total insanity.

• 1:50:21Mike Israetel?

  In the 2030s, maybe 2040s, but maybe earlier, you'll be able to, when things fall off or don't function anymore, replace them with robot parts. Now, I want to be on record saying this. I'm getting the whole fucking thing done. I want to be a robot. If I get like my leg hurt and they're like, well, we can also replace it all. They're like, well, we can't replace your heart yet. I'm like, okay, fine, but everything else. So the ability to cybernetically replace things and enhance things means that you're in the situation where, let's say, you can no longer ambulate because your quality of life just totally sucks. You can't walk because your knees are too fucked up or something. If you get bionic knees and bionic lower limbs entirely, all of a sudden, social interaction, community, all that stuff, you have access to it. So that's gonna be a big deal. It's gonna happen.

• 1:51:03Mike Israetel?

  I'll tell you specifically at the point where you're gonna see a revolution where most humans, not all, choose enhancement over just staying biological. And I'll tell you when this happens. Look at the trajectory of how much cell phones have gotten better or TVs have gotten better over time. It's the improvement trajectory of technology versus biology. Radically fast, measured in decades prior. Now it's measured in like every year, your current iPhone sucks and the new one's way better. That is going to be the paradigm, it already is, to artificial limbs, for example. So whatever the best-

• 1:51:35Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna merge technological progress speeds with biological progress, or at least technological progress speeds are going to drag you along for the ride.

• 1:51:42Mike Israetel?

  Yes, and here's the thing, if an bionic arm is roughly the same ability set as your natural arm, very few psychotic weirdos like me are gonna go get their natural arm cut off and put a fucking bionic arm just for vibes. But if a bionic arm, three years later, is 10 times better at everything that your arm used to do than your real arm, a few of your friends got it, you're like, dude, you're nuts, bro, you cut off your own arm, like, yeah. Like, do you get tired at work? Nope, it never gets tired. Like, dude, I saw you hiking, aren't there a lot of, like, lions and shit around? You're like, my arm is-

• 1:52:19Chris Williamson?

  Not anymore.

• 1:52:19Mike Israetel?

  I can punch one lion and it just dies. And like, I have lasers, whatever, the lasers thing is a joke. But at some point, when technology gets so much faster than biology and the arm is 100 or 1,000 times in every possible way better, people will choose to excise their limbs and various other body parts, eyes. Think about this, have you ever seen the movie Ghost in the Shell, the-

• 1:52:39Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:52:39Mike Israetel?

  Cinematic rendition, it's Scarlett Johansson's in it, so it's nice even if you put it on mute. But this one dude gets his eyes fucked up through an explosion, he's like a special forces dude, and he gets bionic eyes implanted. And one of the features he talks about, he's like, yeah, they got this, they got that, they got mile zoom. I had to like rewind and go back, mile zoom, you can see one mile ahead. If those eyes are real and they look like human eyes, or even like a little bit cyberpunk, but not exactly human, dude, I'm getting that shit, I wanna fucking see a mile, I wanna see in the dark. And if you're 22, or if you're 35, or 45, you're not taking your real eyes out for shit. They're like, well, there's a 0.001% that surgery goes wrong and you die, you never can see again, fuck that.

• 1:53:19Mike Israetel?

  But if you're 87, and you need a fucking, you know, you can't even see anymore, I'm getting the fucking cybernetic eyes. So the cybernetic stuff is gonna start this process, which has a distinct end. And that process is replacing human parts with machine parts until we can scan your brain, know exactly every detail of your brain that we need to simulate your entire you, because everything about you that's you is entirely enclosed in this, period.

• 1:53:46Mike Israetel?

  Once we have the scanning technology and the AI tech to do that, you can take your brain and download it into a robot body and have a separate copy of your brain doing one of two things. One is sitting dormantly in the cloud. So that when your robot body gets crushed by a boulder because you decided to climb Mount Everest, you wake up in a bed and you're like, what the fuck? Where was I? And they're like, yes, you do. I, this is not a philosophical debate at all. This is a, this is a giant red herring. I'll take this one on the chin. I'm getting really pumped.

• 1:54:15Chris Williamson?

  I can tell this is the most animated you've been.

• 1:54:18Mike Israetel?

  What happens if you have a biological you? And someone scans your brain and puts that brain in a robot body and turns it off. Which one's the real you? There's a categorically correct answer to this question. Both.

• 1:54:31Mike Israetel?

  There's two of you now. They're both you. They're both going to feel exactly like you did just before they copied the brain. So if the real you dies fucking on Mount Everest, and then you get uploaded to a new robot and you wake up in a hospital bed and they're like, hey, you died on Mount Everest. Congratulations. Here are pictures of you dying. You're like, oh, that's dope. You won't remember that. Unless you were uploading to the Tesla cloud and then you will. Uh, you will be the real you in every sense of the word that feels like the real you. You're absolutely the real you. Cause you're not even the real you. You used to be all of the molecules of your brain got replaced. The cells replace every few days. Anyway.

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  Do you think you'd have psychological continuity from that? Obviously not from the dying thing. You're not going to like transport your sense of self from the guy under the boulder to the person in the bed.

• 1:55:14Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Chris Williamson?

  What do you think here for getting into philosophy?

• 1:55:17Mike Israetel?

  Yeah, there I've hypothesized a thought experiment in which you will have continuity. So what we do is we put you in a kind of giant MRI scanner live sort of situation. And it starts scanning your brain and it already simulated your entire brain and your current thoughts. And then it clones the thoughts and now there is an, a you that lives in the cloud that's looking over your head with the camera systems installed going, holy shit, I can see into my own fucking, it's me right there. But the you in here, you're just looking up and you're like, okay, is there a me? Did the copying work? And remember it's scanning everything live. And so what they do at this is very morbid. They'd probably do it in a better way. But they go, okay, you ready to? For full transfer and you go, uh huh. And they go, they just cut your head right off. So you biologically you dies.

• 1:56:00Mike Israetel?

  But every part of the brain activity, including your experience of your own death, is modeled and experienced live by cyber you. It's like, oh my God, I'm dying. Right. Holy shit, but then I'm still here in the cloud. So once we can do that, and again, it's tractable for AI to do this. This is no mystical stuff involved. Then when you can live in a robot body or live in the cloud, there's going to be a couple of different ways people will go with that. Some people will just never do it and God bless it. Fuck it. It's weird. I believe in the soul. Fuck that. The other thing is some people might embody themselves in robot bodies to do things in the physical world. And then maybe like spend some other time in the digital world entirely in simulation. There are many, many people, I'm convinced that will just be like, I don't need a robot body. I just want to live in the fucking cloud.

• 1:56:44Mike Israetel?

  Cause in the cloud, phenomenally easy, small amount of compute, you could just live as the hero in a permanent Lord of the Rings fantasy that never ends. You could speed up your brain to go a thousand X. You can live as a pirate. You can live as a clown. You can live as a whatever. Infinite lifetimes of modeling. That is super futuristic post singularity type of shit. But that's where that's all headed. So TLDR for this insane rant. The, for me, the thing that keeps me at least to my extent of trade offs, interested in promoting my longevity and quality of life, specifically the longevity part is I want to make it to that dope AI medicine part. And once you make it to that, your probability of death shifts down considerably.

• 1:57:27Mike Israetel?

  You make it to genetic engineering, it shifts again. You make it to age reversal, it shifts again. You make it to cybernetic, it shifts again. If whoever makes it to when we're regularly uploading people into the cloud, short of the earth getting hit by a comet and all the computer systems going, you're never going to die. Never. You know, at some point the protons decay, whatever. One times 10 to the 126 million years in the future. So for the first time, it's realistic, optimistic, but realistic to say.

• 1:57:57Mike Israetel?

  If you're ever interested in longevity and quality of life improvement, 2024, it's a fucking big deal now. Now's the time to gather shit, especially if you're older. Look, if you're 22, you want to smoke a shitload of cigarettes? Fine, you'll probably still make it. Who gives a shit? You're like, hey, you're in the cloud smoking cigarettes. I never quit. I never quit. X that one out. Jesus.

• 1:58:19Mike Israetel?

  Yeah. So, but if you're in your 40s, especially if in your 50s and 60s and 70s, now's the time to do all the right shit we've been talking about because the payoff might not just be you live 10 years longer and it probably will be. It might be that weird as it seems to say, you might just not die at a human time scale whatsoever. And then you're, you know, you're into some cool shit.

• 1:58:43Chris Williamson?

  Dude, what a hopeful way to finish a conversation about longevity and dying.

• 1:58:47Mike Israetel?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Chris Williamson?

  Mike Israetel, ladies and gentlemen, dudes.

• 1:58:50Mike Israetel?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:58:51Chris Williamson?

  You already know that I love all of the stuff that you're doing. It's been the best period to watch you guys crush. RP Strength, I've been using my training at the moment, the last nine, 10 months or so. I told you when we trained together, it's been the, the best gains I've made in probably a decade using the app. Uh, so I highly recommend people go and check it out at the website, which is.

• 1:59:12Mike Israetel?

  Fuck if I know.

• 1:59:13Chris Williamson?

  Don't say that. You say that.

• 1:59:15Mike Israetel?

  RPstrength.com.

• 1:59:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's it.

• 1:59:17Mike Israetel?

  But also go on our YouTube and follow all the links and we'll kick you to the site sooner or later.

• 1:59:20Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Mike, I appreciate you.

• 1:59:22Mike Israetel?

  Chris, thank you so much, man.

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:59:40Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9.0 without parent.