Mike Israetel
speaker
1,094 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Mike Israetel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the curation is almost as fun as the creation. Like you see an artist draw something on a canvas and a huge amount of Joy comes from creating the main arc of everything you're doing, the main shapes, main lines, main coloring. But you know when artists have something almost complete and they do a little pencil in pencil there?
Once you have something that looks amazing and you're optimizing, oh, there's something super beautiful about that. It's like watching someone take a very finely tuned F1 car and just wrench a couple of the screws in and polish it off. It's just, oh, this is so beautiful. Not that my body is attractive, it's not grotesque, but less grotesque is what I'm aiming for.
And I don't know if it's working or not. My hairiness kind of precludes any of that.
He not only makes it look so easy, he's communicating that.
an empowerment about creating art yes like everybody could be yeah he's like you're doing this with me right right and you're like oh i sure am and he's like you see this cloud in the way we're gonna make it a tree and you try it at home and you're like i just messed up everything this looks terrible if i had to describe my physique and my genetics it would be like a lot of bob ross style having to fix things are like oh that looks terrible let's pretend i was drawing something else
If you have to be mindful of extremes, in almost every case, you have already been on a multi-years long, very immersive, very infatuated, very disciplined journey of resistance training and focused nutrition. And the organization of many variables and parts of your life around that task, it's unlikely to be something you pick up a lifting hobby and just find yourself excessively muscular. Oops.
So that's probably my best answer for that. It's just insanely unrealistic in most cases to wander into that sort of thing. The myth of accidental muscle. Yes. People say more money, more problems. First of all, I've met various philosophical grounds. I think that's absurd, but you don't accidentally become ultra wealthy. And by God, I wish you the best if that happens to you.
I'll cry a tear for you. But in much the same way, almost nobody accidentally becomes hypermuscular to the extent that they're on that side of the spectrum that trade-offs are starting to become apparent. Probably the biggest trade-off in the short to medium term is opportunity cost, things you could have spent doing outside of being in the gym.
But the way the science of resistance training works is for almost all of the health benefits and the longevity benefits and the quality of life benefits, the amount of time you need to be training per week is measured in the one to three hour range with three being like, you're really full sending it one to three hours per week.
If you went on chat GPT and did like a time use question, I mean like, can you list all of the things that typical American does for X number hours a week? Read down the list, top 100 time use cases. You may find that one to three hours a week is somewhere in like the 50 or 60 rank and There's so many things people do that are way more than that.
Social media consumption, television watching, and the list goes on. There are dozens of things you do that take way more time. And so if you really fully invest yourself, like I'm relatively fully invested into getting as jacked as possible, it's going to take some time. It could take eight hours a week, which is still like, well, it's not forever.
People will jog for 40 minutes every morning and think nothing of it. And then when you present to them the idea of resistance training, they're like, well, now that's going to take some time. Well, yes, actually it does not take nearly as much time because the intensity of the effort is so grotesquely high and the recovery demands are so high that you have to be very pulsatile with it.
It's not even something you have to do every day. As a matter of fact, people get incredible benefits. Probably the biggest return on investment the average person can make is to train for roughly half an hour, two times a week, Monday and Thursday. If you do it properly, it can comport an unbelievable amount of benefits just across the board.
And so for most people, the consideration that they can begin to do this excessively, it's just not something realistic until and unless they're really into it like a huge hobby. If you are watching Formula One for 30 minutes a day every other day on your phone, you're realistic considerations of this is taking up too much of your time kind of out the window.
Now, if you start canceling podcast guests because you're following the circuit around the world and staying in five-star hotels and booking the hyper rich guy suite for all the races, someone could say, well, you're really into this. You're like, no nonsense. It's only costing me 3 million a year.
So then yes, but it's obvious when you're going to be so involved, you don't just walk into that sort of thing.
I like to use the term resistance training. It's the general term for going into the gym and applying things to your muscles.
Yes. So you can get some benefits from very submaximal efforts. But resistance training is based on applying high forces and high levels of fatigue as its primary modality of how it makes you better. And so it's kind of when you get into that world, that's what's going to happen. If you're trying to be a special operator, eventually a Navy SEAL type of person, the sound of gunfire freaks you out.
You're kind of in the wrong place. We get almost all the benefits from pushing either very heavy loads or lighter loads, but very close to muscular failure, which people have described as unpleasant. A burn in the muscle, a lot of pain, the weights slow down, so it takes a lot of psychological effort to keep going.
There is not really an equivalent of just getting on the bike and putting in the miles. Getting to a pace where zone two, you can breathe, you can talk a little bit still, that's not weight training. But precisely because weight training is so intensive,
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