Don’t Fall for MAHA Health Myths, Here’s What the Data Actually Says | Dr. Mike Israetel
Dr. Mike Israetel debunks MAHA health myths, citing Harvard’s 2015 meta-analysis showing no nutritional advantage for organic food and dismissing aspartame fears—diet sodas rank among safest additives. He warns soda’s real risk is caloric excess in poor diets, not sugar toxicity, while advocating full-range weightlifting for beginners and optional cardio (8K–12K steps daily). TRT is defended for men over 35/40 with proper monitoring, despite side effects like hair loss, and Trezepatide is hailed as a "health elixir" for aging risks, though dosing demands caution. Synergy with lifestyle trumps vanity-driven shortcuts like steroids, emphasizing evidence-based choices over absolutism to extend longevity safely. [Automatically generated summary]
I know we're going to somehow, we just chatted briefly before the Caber Saro and somehow everything ends up political one way or another.
And we'll dive into some of that and the Maha stuff and all that.
But it's nice for me to take a break and talk more about fitness and health and some of the other things that I'm interested in rather than bludgeoning people with politics all the time.
So let's do a little just backstory on you.
When did you get interested in fitness, making sure that the muscles were right and caring about body science and all the rest of it?
I went to elementary, middle, and high school in the metropolitan Detroit area.
And when I was in high school, one of my friends who I wanted to hang out with freshman year, I was like, hey, you want to hang out after school?
And he was like, I'm actually going to go to wrestling tryouts.
And I was like, oh, can I come with you?
And he's like, sure.
And so I started wrestling.
And in wrestling, it becomes like really obvious that bodies matter.
Like if you have more muscles and less fat, you're just better at everything about wrestling right away.
And at the time, I was 14.
And you know, like some kids mature early and some kids mature much later.
I was like, you couldn't like, there's not a lot of puberty going on.
Like technically there was, but it was like just like a pudgy little short kid.
And so I really liked wrestling.
The experience was awesome.
But then as soon as wrestling ended, I was like, man, it is, I'm putting stuff together in my head.
And I'm like, how do you get like upgrade the physique?
And so I went to the gym.
I went to the Jewish Community Center in Metropolitan Detroit.
There were two.
There's the nice one, the not nice one.
I went to the not nice one and I began to like lift weights.
And for the first probably year, I just didn't like it at all.
I just knew I had to do it.
And then every season I would wrestle and then I would stop lifting weights during wrestling.
And I'd miss lifting a lot.
I would start lifting again after wrestling season and start liking it more and more and more.
And eventually I'm just, it was kind of lifting all the time.
And I liked lifting so much that when I went to my undergraduate program at University of Michigan, I eventually, I started as an engineer that was like super, super cool.
But long story short, my passion ended up being like, I'm competing in powerlifting at this point.
If you had started a lot of people, my God, it was trippy because our gym owner told us, it was like a private personal training studio.
My now co-founder of RP Nick and I were training people there.
And he, you know, him and the trainers were like, yeah, man, like last year, two years ago, it was like booming.
There was like twice as many members here.
And I was like, why?
And they were like, the financial crisis.
And I was like, oh, it was that big of a deal.
Like, dude, people lost their careers on that thing.
And so one year into that, I was like, I still don't know enough, went to get my PhD.
And then I became a professor.
I was a professor for a while.
So I guess it's one thing, I suppose, long story short, like I get into it for my own reasons, just try to get more jacked for wrestling.
And then eventually I got super passionate about getting stronger.
Eventually, I started reading bodybuilding magazines and I wanted to get like aesthetically super like jacked and lean.
And that just kept going.
And as I accumulated knowledge for my own selfish purposes of building the ultimate 41-year-old balding Jewish man, yes, that you see before you, it doesn't look so good on paper, but it also looks terrible in reality.
So I started basically just try to get myself into better shape.
But then the passion for helping others is definitely a thing that hit me.
One of the reasons I have that passion, I suppose, is like, it just really sucks to see super well-meaning good people have a goal and like go about it orthogonally.
And like, imagine like you play basketball, right?
Imagine you watch someone have like talent and passion, and they were just like two-hand shooting like this.
But it's like, yeah, you want to be like, hey, kid, like, let me teach you how to do this.
And you kind of send them on their way because it's, somebody's in earnest trying something that they think is going to help themselves, but they're making all kinds of mistakes.
You know how to help them.
It's just like, I was going to say a stupid joke.
You feel like Tom Cruise passing someone on the freeway and you're a Scientologist.
That's an accident.
You remember that?
No.
There's like a classic Tom Cruise interview where he's like, oh, this is amazing.
But it's all about, you know, the facial expressions too, who could do that?
The laugh and everything.
Tom.
That idea that you can help people, not the Scientology-related one, it's just dope.
And then all of a sudden, you start giving people advice.
You write a few books, you do a few interviews, make a few apps or whatever, and you end up like, I don't know, on the margin at least, helping some people.
And the big thing with that is like, a lot of people really care, really care about their health.
They care about their quality of life.
My contention, this is something we found over and over with clients, is that they'll care to some very great extent about those two things, but they care the most about how they look.
And that's a thing in economics, stated versus revealed preferences.
Like you say you want one thing, but all of your behaviors say you say you want the other.
The revealed preference of wanting a great physique is like massive.
And so many people invest so much into that that myself and the companies that I'm associated with and stuff like RP, we just want to like be like, hey, do you want to know how to do this like faster with fewer errors?
We don't claim to have all the answers.
We know a little bit better.
And then voila.
Like that's my entire reason for being in fitness is helping well-meaning folks just like get into better shape and not fall for stupid fads and go off on their way, just wasting time, basically.
You gave me so many avenues to go there because if you take your journey and now it's around 2009 and social media is starting to blow up.
And if I can show you after the show, I mean, if I show you my Instagram search page, because I've really been on a fitness thing over the last year or so, it's every other person's an influencer.
Every other person has conflicting information about how to do this or that.
But interestingly, it almost always is about the physique for these guys.
And I don't need to be like, I'm 49.
I don't need to be like jacked ripped like an influencer, but I am more interested in the science and getting my body fully right all the time.
And so that I'm not, you know, doing this.
You know, even when I'm sitting here, I usually sit back a little bit more than I should or whatever it might be.
So how much of what you do on a day-to-day basis is cleaning up the mess of what so many of these other people are putting out there?
On the one hand, there are lots of folks just doing their best and they're making educated guesses about how things work from their own experience, from inference.
And so there are people that in good faith are trying to help, but getting it wrong.
There are still other people that are trying to help, but never manage to first, second, or third guess their approach.
And they're kind of just saying stuff that works for them, maybe.
And it's not what you would call like a completeness of thought isn't there.
And that sucks because you have to sort of say, hey, that's kind of not true.
And people are confused.
Oh, this person says it's true.
There's a third category, which is really unfortunate, of folks that you could technically describe as like grifters or something like that.
And they'll do a combination of two things.
One is push their kind of ideological or whatever money-making scheme.
The other is they'll just supply a demand, but the people who have the demand are not educated enough to understand what they're demanding.
So, for example, a lot of people like organic food and they think organic food is like good.
And it's not like it's an inborn fallacy of humans, the naturalistic fallacy, the argument from nature, to think natural good.
And organic good is just like one, just one house down the street from that.
And people will be like, I want organic.
And there are many people who will just sell them the stuff and be like, here's what you want.
And they're not bad.
But it just so happens that in every single comprehensive review of the literature, organic is in no way different health-wise or environmental impact-wise than conventionally farmed produce.
And so at RP, we have the tough job sometimes of calling out the BS in a way that's like, look, we don't, we need this, feel free to edit this out.
So, yeah, we don't kick dicks out of people's mouths, but we're really trying to say, like, hey, like, respectfully, this is probably more likely to be the truth.
And sometimes, even what people want, like the consumer of health stuff, they don't look at us and go, oh my God, thank God.
They're like, really?
You're saying it doesn't matter if I eat organic?
And we have a sort of tough job sometimes being like, well, here's all the boring studies and science.
So you're saying there's actually no scientific evidence to say that if you were eating, you know, over the course of two years, if you ate just all organic on one side and all inorganic on the other side or sprayed with pesticides and the rest of it, there would be no, there's no evidence that there's any health benefit or health detriment.
But like you can say, well, we just don't know because we don't have the data on organic.
We do have the data on organic food.
Every single time it comes in, I mean, the earliest review off memory is one that was published in the mid 20 teens.
It was like a Harvard meta review.
And it was like, we have tons and tons of studies all combined together.
And like organic has claims about what it does better.
And like it's true to say that some organic produce has some higher levels of nutrients in one category, but then conventionally farmed other foods have slightly higher levels of nutrients in other categories.
And so on the aggregate, there is neither, there is evidence that organic food is not nutritively different.
And there is no evidence that it's somehow better.
There is evidence, compelling evidence, irrefutable evidence of one thing.
It costs substantially more.
And there's another bit of a second order problem that in my mind is like really, really unfortunate is people can't know all the knowledge, right?
So we use heuristic simplified rules to be like, this is that, like whatever.
Like don't speed because speeding is bad.
Like if you're a formula car driver, it doesn't apply to you because 90 miles feels like standing still.
But to the rest of us, like over 90 is really dangerous.
One of these kinds of heuristics that's sunk into the popular culture is that if I'm going to eat healthy, it has to be organic.
And that is actually like really limiting for people who don't have Infinity Rich People Money because they go to the store, they see conventionally farmed produce, looks totally fine.
They see organic.
It's super expensive.
And they're like trying to be on a health journey maybe.
And they're like, well, I don't, I can't afford that.
And then people are like, hey, why aren't you eating healthy?
They're like, I can't afford it.
The idea that healthy food costs more than not healthy food is actually entirely mythical.
It's totally myth.
But because people think organic is great and it's not, again, it's totally fine.
Organic has one big advantage.
Organic, the organic agriculture process tends to not tolerate transport as well.
So organic definition means more local, which means the food tastes like fresher, which is like a legit thing.
Like a strawberry off your neighbor's farm, it's going to taste like, whoa.
So people eat the stuff and they go, whoa, it tastes different.
I could taste the difference.
Even though in blind taste tests, usually they can't.
There's some fun TV shows that have done that where they give you two bananas and like, this one's organic.
And bananas usually the example of people that will tell you you don't need to eat organic because at least you're taking the covering off versus maybe a peach that you'd think the pesticides were totally different.
So pesticides directly have been studied like ad nauseum.
I say this in as many podcasts as I do, or as I can.
One of the number one professions that gets zero love and should get all love in the world is toxicology.
Professional toxicologists do their entire training and their entire practice because their job is to make sure that all the stuff that could poison you is not entering your body in sufficient quantities that it's going to poison you.
They have studied pesticides, pesticide exposure in the United States for like generations.
And believe it or not, it's not one of these things where like some like huge evil agribusiness is like just fucking spraying random pesticides.
And some little 10-year-old 50s kids like, gee, where's mister doesn't have going out?
It's like, ah, kid, whatever.
Like, that's not how that works.
There are like levels of approval for pesticide exposure.
And the total aggregate amount of pesticides that can your body is incredibly closely monitored.
And study after study after study, long-term reviews say that the amount of pesticide the average American consumes is like orders of magnitude lower, like factors of 10 lower that would result mechanistically in any kind of damage.
Also, unless you really cherry-pick studies, which some people are bound to do, you'll see some of those in the comments to this video.
On the aggregate, people who have different pesticide exposures really are just not at any risk of anything statistically that would be like, oh, shit, like pesticides are bad.
So it is true to say that if you go and get pesticides, like you get glyphosate and you just start drinking it, bad.
But all right, sticking with the food side of it, can you give me one more example of something that maybe we're all missing on the food side, nutritionally or otherwise, that is a sort of common thought that we all think we're doing right, that we're doing wrong?
And so it turns out that if most of your food is really like high quality food, lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, some of the shit you probably have in your fridge.
If you eat mostly like that, and like on Friday nights or whatever, you go out with your friends, you have some just nonsense shit at a steakhouse, dude, you're totally golden.
People have a perfectionist mindset and they think in terms of morality versus causality.
They think good, bad.
Like they're good foods.
That means I'm on the side of the angels.
I voted for all the right candidates even.
And then there's bad foods, like the degenerates eat and they're made of literal poison.
And like you can have McDonald's a few times a week in the context of a calorie-controlled diet.
As long as he's not gaining weight from it, and it's not so much processed food that his blood work is bad.
McDonald's, a few times a week, chips, soda, et cetera, a few times a week, is absolutely fine.
The problem with extremism is it becomes radically unsustainable.
So if you tell yourself, I'm a good person, I don't eat bad foods, you tend to do this thing where you get on the wagon, fall off the wagon.
Because as soon as you eat the bad food at a party, because you've had a few drinks, which you also know you're not supposed to be having, and a few drinks every now and again, it's also totally fine.
People are like, they're in there, they do that fuck it all kind of mentality where they're like, well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and then you just go like weeks of like eating total crap, and then like, I got to clean up my life.
They'll do a cleanse or some other stupid bullshit that doesn't work.
And then the cycle repeats itself.
I'm sure you've been around some folks that have done that their entire lives.
There is like a spectrum of how people deal with it.
On one end of the spectrum, or people call the moderators.
They can have a candy bar within their day and be totally fine.
On the other end are the abstainers.
Like it's either on or off for them and they do really well with that.
You can and should be an abstainer if that's just your psychology, but only your internal psychology and preference should guide that, not a misunderstanding of physiology.
Like, well, these are bad foods.
Like, nah, that's not how that works.
It's all accumulation over time.
And your body is incredibly robust.
So if you give it like literal poison every now and again, not enough to kill you, it's totally good, man.
You're totally fine.
And so people have this kind of inbuilt extremism where they think everyone should be an abstainer and that's not true.
Another quick one, because it's on the subject, is diet soda and artificial sweeteners.
So the vast majority of people, if you pull them, know, they don't think they know diet soda is bad for you.
And literally, we'll say, just drink regular soda.
Why not just drink regular soda?
In science, as a whole field, for sure, nutritional science, if you were to rest your hat on anything, hang your hat on anything that was like rock solid, it would be the idea that what are called non-nutritive sweeteners, aspartame, sucralose, et cetera, are the safest food additives ever tested, straight up.
And more testing has gone into sucralose than has gone into the vast majority of chemicals that you eat in natural foods.
Jewish evolution, whatever that looks like, that page of the book.
There are like hundreds of chemicals in avocados and they have absolutely no idea if some of those do not interact with Ashkenazi Jewish anatomy and physiology very well.
There could be some kind of weird epigenetic thing where it's slowly killing you and you have no idea.
But we know almost certainly that does not happen with sucralose because sucralose has been tested into the ground.
But I await comprehensive testing of every single ingredient in avocados, for example.
Nobody gives a shit.
You go to Whole Foods, you're like avocados, they're natural.
Look how fucking green they are.
Of course, they're good for me.
But they're like, oh, oh, so here's a funny thing: Whole Foods is great.
I love Whole Foods, right?
They don't carry any regular brand diet sodas or sodas at all because their customer base, if they saw like Coke Zero, which is inert for your health, it doesn't do anything good for your health or bad for you.
Because as much Coke Zero as you want, as long as the caffeine doesn't drive you insane, it's totally fine.
And so if you want to drink diet soda, and especially if you drink the caffeine-free stuff, because you know, not to screw up your circadian rhythms or whatever, you can have as much of it as you want, and you're going to be 100% fine.
That statement I just made, that was a controversial statement.
When we make reels out of this, people will bitch in the comments the whole thing.
If your diet is all Coca-Colas for carbs, you're not getting any vitamins and minerals, really, because those come from veggies, fruits, whole grains.
So if you're having enough of those and you want a Coke every now and again, there's nothing poisonous about sugar at all.
The way you get in trouble with Coca-Cola is this, not Coca-Cola, specifically every single soda that's not diet.
Its ratio of how many calories it brings to how tasty it is, to how not filling it is, is a giant travesty.
So no one's ever like, can you imagine like, so you're on a plane, like the stewardess is coming around giving you snacks and sodas, and you drink a Coca-Cola and then they come up with the snacks later because this drinks for snacks after.
Can you imagine how nonsensical of a statement it would be if she was like, do you want cookies or nuts?
You were like, oh, I just had that Coke and I got full.
You'd be like, what?
It doesn't make any sense.
Everyone pretty much intuitively understands that sugar in a sweetened beverage is like calories that basically don't fill you up at all.
And they're delicious.
If they have one Coke, you're just going to keep sipping them all night long.
That's how you get in trouble with soda because it's a ton of extra calories that adds to your day.
The reason soda does such havoc to the American health on aggregate is because a lot of people will consume not so great diet to begin with.
They're sure shit not kind of their calories.
And every drink will be soda.
And then their caloric excess, instead of being like 500 extra calories per day, is like 1,000 or 1,500.
They gain pounds every week.
They get obese.
They're also inactive.
And then it's all just super down the drain.
So there's nothing specifically wrong about soda or sugar, period, unless it is used to generate a caloric surplus, an excess of calories that lasts long enough for you to gain substantial weight.
And then it's really bad news.
So one of the things I say, probably nobody, almost no one should be drinking regular soda.
It's so interesting because the only time I ever drink it is occasionally on a plane.
I'll get a Diet Coke.
When they come around the second time, like get a little caffeine before I get off the plane.
But I always think I'm doing something bad one way or another.
Like I know that there's aspartame in it and I'm just like, I'm doing something bad, but I'm willing to make that concession.
And you're totally blowing that out of the out of the water here.
You've mentioned the commenters a couple of times.
I mean, what kind of hate do you get from the other people in your world?
I'm not talking about the commenters.
I'm talking about the influencer class and everything else for saying these things because this is completely the reverse of what you would hear from a lot of these guys.
You know, a lot of times there, you get accusations of being bought off by agribusiness.
Check this out.
Agribusiness companies, I am ready to shill for you.
Please, God, pay me money.
No one, no, they don't do that sort of thing.
And so like, I've actually been to Monsanto's headquarters and Dave, I just like, you know, the jokes are funny at first, then they're mediocre and then they just want you to shut the fuck up and get out.
I got to way beyond that last part because I was like, where's all the top secret poison the people shit?
And they're like, okay, sir.
It's just nothing there.
It's just like folks just trying to do a good job.
There's no conspiracy.
I would like conspiracies are so amazing.
Like every movie I watch, like super deep conspiracy.
The agribusinesses aren't trying to poison you.
They're not trying to like, so a lot of the comments will be like, how much is Monsanto paying him to like nothing?
So there may be some, because people, one thing they'll do on social media is they'll see how someone who's really jacked and super fit works out.
And they'll be like, that's what I need.
But that's similar to a person who's Like a kid who's like, you know, let's say nine years old and really good at math and they really like math.
And they look up like the problem sets that like Terrence Tao is working on.
Like, kid, you're not going to make any sense of that.
That's totally for, that's when you have eight PhDs in math.
You need to start doing simpler stuff.
And so one of the big take-home messages for people involved in fitness is the basics pay massive dividends and they're not complicated.
One of the things that is kind of a universal, which I'll sprinkle the knowledge here for the folks listening, is one of the best things you can do for your physique and your health and everything is to lift weights through a full range of motion multiple times a week, get a little bit sore and tired, really push yourself, rest, and then repeat the process and slowly increase how much weight you can do over time.
It's a thankless process.
Dave, it's just like it hurts.
And then you're like, and it's not that fun.
There's no gimmicks.
Like there's no like the balance board and the bo-su ball.
That's all nonsense bullshit.
It just doesn't do anything that was relevant to getting people in shape.
You can incorporate it into your fitness routine, but it like, if you're like, hey, I want to like win a bodybuilding show or do really well, a good coach would be like, well, that's all you don't need any of that.
I'd be like, I thought this is how you get fitness.
Like, no, that's for like bored housewives and shit like that.
The real way to get fit is to like do squats and deadlifts and bench presses and pull downs and pull-ups and lateral raises.
And to, here's a big one: challenge yourself.
A lot of people, especially wealthier people, I've noticed, tend to think that fitness is something they can accrue just by being around it.
You know, like, I'm like, there's people listening.
Right, exactly.
They're working hard.
They're sweating.
I do some dumbbell things.
I talk to my trainer.
I stop my sets, you know, 50 reps shy of anything remotely challenging.
I'm getting a lot of critiques all the time, which are valid that for like how jacked I am, I don't train that hard.
And that's all totally true, respect.
But we're talking about people in the gym, at least I make some faces when I'm training.
A lot of people want better physiques, they want better health.
And they go in the gym and they never once experience anything like pain or discomfort.
You know, when you're lifting and you're like, I would rather not be here.
That's the stuff that gets you the most results.
And if you consistently get to that place where you're challenged and you're like, oh, I did 10 reps.
That was 95 pounds.
Next week you come in, you throw 100 pounds on the bar.
You get another 10 reps, but that was real tough.
Then you do 102.5 or 105.
And then after a couple of years, you're doing 150.
That's how you change your body.
People not progressively overloading in meticulous fashion and using basic movements is like everything else that they do is generally looks like fitness, but it doesn't get you the results that you want.
And because that part is some combination of boring and painful, it's so easy to be sold on some other shit.
I'm staying in Midtown right now for February or Miami.
Bro, no, no names, but there are so many business concepts, fitness concepts, gym concepts that are just like, okay, I got you.
And I should come up and give them the cynical take.
Like, yes, hello, I'm white and I have too much money.
Is there a way you guys can make me feel like I'm getting fit, but nothing happens?
Like, well, right, this way is exactly what we do.
It's tons of that stuff.
The reality is all you need is a regular gym membership.
Even you could just have barbells and dumbbells at home and just fucking grind and slowly get stronger over time.
Like, imagine someone asked you, like, hey, how do I get better at basketball?
You're like, drilling and team play.
And you just got to get on that fucking court and just get sweaty all the time, days, hours.
It's like, well, I got this like manual about how to do this jump shot.
You're like, shut up.
That's not how it works.
You know, in sports, a lot of times people kind of know, but in lifting and in fitness, none of us are, I'm not, you know, I'm educated in it, but even I'm still learning shit all the time.
It's so easy to become confused.
And there's also this aura of knowing things that you can just buy with physical architecture.
Like if you have a really fancy gym with cool lighting, really good looking trainers, and they're like, I don't know, they're cryotherapy or something.
As soon as you're done with that, you just scoot right over to the underhand pull down and you do 15 reps of that until it's really tough.
Put that down and you go right back to the bench.
Four sets of that, you have trained almost every muscle in your upper body and it took you three minutes.
Then you move in to do something with legs, superset it with something with arms, something with your glutes, superset it does some lateral races.
That's six exercises.
It's whole body.
It is cardio and lifting because you're going to be gassed the entire time because you don't really rest.
You go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
That whole workout takes 20 minutes.
You choose slightly different lifts for Monday than you do Thursday.
And there's your template two times a week, 20 minutes.
That can improve everything about your health, your shape, your mobility, and alter your physique substantially, especially if you diet properly.
For years, that can just be continued compounded improvement.
After two years, you might be like, you know what?
I want to get even more fit.
Drop in a third day, expand the workout to do more sets.
And then you're up to 30 or 40 minutes at a time, three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
For years, again, you will continue to make gains.
Eventually, you can go up to four days a week for an hour.
Four days a week for an hour of proper training is like, man, I'd call that damn near full scent effort.
You're going to radically transform your body.
But the big thing is, when you're just getting started, you don't need to go four days for an hour.
Two days a week, spread evenly apart through the week, roughly, 20 minutes at a time in that alternating superset fashion is like the gold standard of what's called adult fitness.
That's how you get the job done in the teeniest amount of time and the most return on your investment.
I did not say it was going to be fun, but it sure shit works.
And so a lot of times they'll be like, they'll even cut themselves off of their own advice.
They'll be like, oh, I got to get back into the gym.
Yeah, you're great without the gym, but sure, the gym's great.
And they're like, I just don't have time.
You know, I work.
And my joke, one of my friends, actually, he went back home to see his family and he had an uncle, you know, the uncle, the classic uncle that will say audacious shit to your face and you don't do anything about it.
He's like, my friend had lost a bunch of weight and gotten in great shape.
And at the time, he's like the COO of a software company.
This is beyond full-time job.
And the uncle's like, oh, I would do that too, but I have a job.
Friend's like, very well, take a shot, leave the uncle alone.
The classic scenario is people are like, I would love to get in shape, but I don't have time.
And that's a problem because they're kind of imposing this standard on themselves, which like maybe they meet you at a cocktail party or something like that.
They're like, Dave Rubin, he trains six days a week.
I have that kind of time.
I'm not an influencer or whatever.
It turns out that with two sessions, 20 minutes a week, you can do crazy, crazy things.
And if you don't have any more time to add in, don't add in.
Just do that for years and years and years.
Ad infinitum.
If you find yourself loving it or have more time, jack up the commitment by like an extra 20 minutes a week.
Don't be like, all right, no, it's fucking war.
And then go to seven days a week, five hours, burn the fuck out.
And then be like, oh, fitness is a thing that only people with a shitload of time do.
But so what's your general philosophy on cardio and how much you should be almost exactly with lift, like is with lifting, the minimum bar for cardio is real low, but the maximum recoverable cardio you can do if you train up to it is psychotically high.
There are no wrong answers in between.
The wrong answers are the incredibly rare people that will do too much that are almost mythical.
The people that don't do enough cardio and lifting and eating right, I mean, you know, huge fraction of the world, Americans for sure.
So for cardio, if you don't want to do formal cardio, like get on a machine or run around, just eight to 12-ish thousand steps a day as a minimum bar, eight to 10,000 is like a real good start.
I mean, it's an excellent, excellent thing.
The mortality and morbidity statistics on that are like really solid.
So if you're above 8,000 steps, like then you're really in the clear.
Three, four sessions a week of 20 to 40 minutes in duration for this kind of hardcore cardio.
And there's just one rule: two rules.
One, do anything you like that's fun.
And two, if you can have a conversation while you're doing it, you're not getting the best health benefits.
It's got to be like huffing and puffing, not like emphysema, but tough.
It's got to be some shit you got to psych up to do.
If you do that several times a week in addition to that core lifting, and in the context of eight to eight, there's no top end of steps as long as you feel fine, you're good to go.
8,000 plus steps a day with good nutrition and sufficient sleep.
If you just look at the epidemiological literature, epidemiological literature all together, there's really nothing else you have to be doing for us to be like, yes, at modern sciences of early 2026, you're doing, you're checking every single box that you need to be checking.
The other thing about sleep, and this is a really recent, been making the trend on social media.
It's good to call out.
It's a really good thing.
Humans can psychologically get used to not having enough sleep, but performance-wise and health-wise, all the markers are still there of not getting enough sleep.
You know, those people, like you've been involved in politics, you know, the beltway lifestyle of like, oh, sleep, that's like a thing I used to do in my 20s.
So most of that research is in people who are intentionally like underslept or something like that.
We don't have a good body of data to say that there are like real big cognitive benefits for people that aren't very fatigued, but wouldn't rule that out.
And creatine is like the opposite of poisonous.
So like taking 15 grams and oh my god, absolutely not.
Back in the 90s, like the school nurse would be like, you're not on creatine, are you?
It's going to kill your kidneys somehow by no mechanism known to man.
So creatine is really dope.
If you want to take protein powders and stuff, that's cool.
You can just eat all that protein anyway.
People in northern climates don't get a lot of sun like everyone in Michigan where I'm from may benefit from vitamin D supplementation.
And there are a couple odds and ends there that are very situational.
But honestly, if you eat a mostly healthy diet and then a multivitamin, multimineral, supplements become this thing that's like, man, like in some contexts, it works, but it's not like a universal world.
Like everyone has to be an X-Rozy.
Like fish oil is really nice, but its effects are like super small in the grand scheme.
What I will say is here, Sierra's, I'm on my bullshit.
Here, Dave, I'm giving you good viral clips.
It'll go completely insane because I'm saying insane shit.
I think in the modern world, folks, women of perimenopausal age and postmenopausal age and men generally of any age, but especially over 35 and over 40, should be pretty interested in hormonal replacements there.
So for females, a combination therapy of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone is going to have usually phenomenal outcomes on everything.
There, again, the naturalistic fallacy comes in.
And as a woman, let's say you're postmenopausal and someone's like, oh, have you tied, you know, talked about hormone replacement therapy?
Like, no, like the changes going on in my body are natural, and I'm just going to let nature take its course, right?
Sweet.
Go visit an old people's home.
That's what nature looks like.
It's fucking brutal.
There's no justice to it at all.
Your genes care about their own replication into the generations.
You are butty vessel for your genes.
That's how your genes see you.
And as soon as you've had some kids, or as far as your genes are concerned, exited the reproductive age, they're like, sweet, that coil we're throwing off.
You are the mortal coil.
They're the immortal coils.
And then your body just starts to degrade from mostly like planned obsolescence from the genetic perspective.
And also just like there's no evolutionary pressure for the genes to keep you upright.
And so if you want to feel amazing, like you have to like, if you're like, if you're an older woman listening to this, you ever watch like a 22, 23 year old woman just vibe.
She's just around, just energy, all that shit.
And you're like, ah, that shit, that youth shit.
Well, that's nothing more than like physiology.
And a lot of that is like, that girl has progesterone, estrogen, testosterone in the right concentrations.
Your uterus has stopped functioning.
It no longer makes any of those hormones to nearly the extent that it should.
Replacing will make you feel unbelievable.
And for men, at least replacing testosterone to get it to a level where your blood work, your physique, your performance, your psychology all align for their best is like a really big deal.
I had a friend who, same friend is from the other story with the uncle, actually.
He went to his doctor and he was like, you know, I've got injuries and all this stuff.
I lift.
And his doctor is old school.
He's like, well, that's just called getting over 40.
And my friend's like, yeah, second opinion.
And the other person was like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff we can do.
He got on testosterone replacement therapy and like his numbers were not hypogonadal.
They were just at the low end of the range, low, moderate.
He got to high, moderate.
It revolutionized.
I've had like five friends who have gotten on TRT.
I've only like only one of these people was one.
I was like, hey, you should really consider it.
Mostly they just went about it themselves.
Every single friend was like, this is a revolution.
And they're like, I feel like I'm 25.
And Dave, that's not an accident.
Like, why do you think 25-year-olds feel like they're 25?
Because they have fucking enough testosterone.
And if your shit falls over time, you can raise it and just do better.
No, you can take some drugs that keep your balls going.
And then when you come off of TRT, your balls are like totally fine.
If you insist on having balls, then you can never lose your balls with TRT.
For sure.
That's a solved problem.
TRT is, here's how I would look at TRT.
It introduces a certain level of testosterone into your body.
If your testosterone is too low, you'll have problems.
If you have certain kinds of genetics and your testosterone is an average range, then that's too high or too low for your genetics and you're going to have problems.
If you're at the very top end way above the normal range, you're probably going to have problems.
But for pretty much every single human male on earth, there is a level of testosterone that will optimize your health as far as testosterone can.
Whether that comes from your balls or that comes from the needle is almost completely irrelevant on the effects for your body.
Proper TRT isn't just being like, oh, the doctor gave me TRT and it drove me nuts or it caused XYZ.
It is titrating the dose, communicating to your doctor over time to get to the level where your blood work is the best it's been, you feel the best, and you're dealing with all the ancillary effects.
So it's like testosterone by itself for some males will cause bald ache, right?
So there's like, if you really want a full head of hair and you're prone to baldness, even the small amount of testosterone you have naturally will continue that process.
If you raise your testosterone to where everything else in your life is amazing, but you're losing your head of hair, there's stuff to do about that.
Or just say fucking YOLO and look like Jeff Bezos.
No big deal.
So testosterone supplementation is no different than naturally produced testosterone.
It's just finding the right level for you.
That's a big deal.
Tons of side effects on all the other ends, but there's a level.
So when you hear about all those things, your argument basically would be as long as you are checking the numbers consistently with your doctor, you could do this for 20, 30 years.
It's almost like the beginning of idiocracy where they show you why humans fell off and it's because they spent all their time for hair loss drugs and owner pills.
Just before we get into the last couple of things here, how worried are you that when you promote these things or just the general talk about these drugs?
Like, you know, it seems like every drug, 10 years, we think it's good.
And then in 15 years, we're like, oh, well, it did have all these other side effects and everything else.
Like, obviously that has to ring in your brain at some level when you're talking about these things.
So the question is not, if I don't take trazepatide, I'm totally fine versus if I take it, there's these big risks.
The certainty that your body will degrade, you will age and you will die is 100%.
What can we do about it then is a difference?
Like, you know, you pay attention a little bit probably to like the AI risk situation, right?
Like if we make super intelligence, it could kill us all.
Absolutely, it could.
If we're not as smart as we can possibly be as a species, a wandering black hole will fucking kill us.
We're not safe at all.
As a human in your own mortal body, the assumption that your health is totally good as you age is wrong.
It's dead on arrival.
So the question isn't, oh, do I stay completely safe and not take Trezepatide?
Do I take these big risks?
You're at risk without it.
With Trezepatide, you're absolutely at risk for many things, mismanaging the dose, having a bad time.
Some people, it just doesn't jive with their physiology for sure.
This is why you don't just go and buy it and just do this.
They're like, I did the Trezepatide.
You go talk to your doctor, ostensibly.
But the alternative is for sure you're going to have a bad time.
With Trezepatide, the probability you'll have a better time health longevity-wise is already like evidenced in the scientific literature.
There's actually a big study that just came out that shows all cause mortality for older folks on semaglotide and not semaglotide.
And it's a big difference, man.
Like these drugs just keep you healthier and alive longer.
Is there a probability that we'll find out later that they do crazy shit and just you fucking just like in your 40s, you're good and you hit 50 and you just die.
And the old 50s detectives are, yeah, it was trzepatide again.
Like, yes, there is a probability of that.
The probability of that is lower by a 10 or 100 times than the probability that not taking trazepatide will for sure fucking kill you.
In the context of working with a medical professional, monitoring your blood work, monitoring how you feel.
And here's a big one, especially for Trezepatide, doing all the other health stuff is huge.
If you had to have a bad time on these drugs, somagamatide trazepatide, soon-to-be refatratide, just eat like total shit.
These drugs slow how fast food processes.
And if you eat like two double cheeseburgers, you're just going to, the shit's just going to stop and your stomach's like, well, I can't throw this up.
I can't poop it out yet.
I'm just going to sit here and do nothing about it.
And then you're going to go get admitted to the hospital and they're going to have to put the tube and the machine.
If you eat healthy, not only do the drugs work better because now you're in a great calorie place, you're getting all your nutrients.
Because some people take trzepatide, they don't eat anything for days on end and they pass out.
No shit, motherfucker.
You need food.
But if you take the drugs and you eat healthy, you radically lower the probability of bad side effects and you enhance the main effect.
That's one of the beautiful things about drugs like Trezepatide is there are some drugs that like, at least visually, if you take them, you can have shit habits and still look better, like a crapload of steroids.
But with Trezepatide, it works synergistically with health habits.
And some people, their food noise is so high, they're so fucking hungry all the time.
They're like, dieting is just not for them.
They take Trezepatide.
All of a sudden, they're like, I could just not eat.
Well, if I don't have to eat anymore, like it's not pulling me in and I have to eat because I know I need fuel for my body.
You're just like, I know this could kill me, but I'm not just going to stay in my house.
For me, my impulse, my drive to look like sort of like my own weird version of an action figure is high enough that I have made a calculated trade-off by using some substances like steroid and growth hormones, et cetera, that are like not great to use at the doses.
And absolutely, it's reducing the probability that I'll make it to old age.
Last one over your right shoulder over there is my Copal tequila, which I launched in June.
I love tequila.
I don't drink a ton, but I like to have a good time and I go out with my guys here all the time and I enjoy it on the weekends and occasionally a weekday.
Very rarely am I like absolutely shit faced or anything else?
Well, I think you're basically going to say, as long as the calories aren't going to blow you out and there isn't too much sugar in it, which tequila has the lowest sugar of it.
I would say alcohol is like way closer actually on the other end of the spectrum and is like steroids in the sense that it is an unmitigated fucking poison.
That being said, if you do it on occasion, a few times a week, it's not every day.
It's not three, four, five, six drinks a day.
If it's a very moderate amount, the total negative effect is that same conversation is like, do you still get into vehicles that go on the freeway?
It's not an all or nothing.
The dose makes the poison.
If you have some really awesome tequila, congratulations, by the way, and it tastes amazing and you have a couple drinks here and there, a few drinks a few times a week.
The level of study we would have to do to even demonstrate that that's having a negative effect on your body is incredibly precise.
It's a trade-off for sure, but it's a trade-off that if you're having alcohol all the fucking time and you're drunk right now, they've started interviewing people together pretty well considering.
Dude, you're the man.
Holy shit.
I thought you were going to piss yourself.
I've already pissed myself.
And you're totally fine.
Typical for me on podcasts, by the way.
I mark my territory.
It's an alpha thing.
So if you're, you know, just a few drinks a few times a week, it's totally cool, man.
Am I going to say it's good for you?
No, it's bad for you, but it is a little bit of bad.
And if you're interested in entertaining like total absolutism of like, I'm not drinking anymore, I love that it's dope.
If you want to, on the margins, drink a little bit here and there, cool.
People who say, like, no one should be drinking ever, like, I love that vibe, but then you got to say shit to be concordant with it.
Like, never go out into the sun.
The sun is a giant thermonuclear bomb.
It just radiates like harmful shit all the time.
But it's tough to say, like, never go out in the sun.
And if people really like drinking and like the vibe, it's really good.
I'd say another big part of drinking is if drinking really relaxes you, you know, you can have your tequila and you're like, ah, long work week.
That, ah, that relaxation, that pays massive health dividends psychologically, physiologically.
So if drinking is something you can unwind with and it doesn't take eight beers to unwind, then it might be on the net balance pretty much neutral.
If drinking is something like you don't like to do, your friends do it, you do it with friends, and you're like, should I be doing this?
Isn't it like healthy?
No, we used to think, and I used to repeat this claim that like a little bit of alcohol is good for you.
Turns out that's probably not true.
It's just too not bad for you to detect.
So that's kind of the verdict on alcohol in the grand scheme of an otherwise incredibly healthy lifestyle that you're living.
I might not know about some other crazy shit you Hollywood people get into.