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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
That's a big deal to remember. The other thing is you have to deal with side effects of GLPs. They give you heartburn. There is a certain amount of food focus they don't eliminate. Watching TV shows and watching people on them eat tasty foods when you're in prep is not as difficult because you're not physiologically as hungry, but you still have cravings.
Cravings are lower, but they're still there. And you still dream about food and the whole gamut. It's not complete kiboshing of hunger. Now, I hope one day very soon we'll achieve that and that'll be a miraculous thing that'll save, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people from the obesity epidemic. Oh, footnote in history. But that'll be cool.
And then your job will be like, if you have more bandwidth because shit is easier, just push your conditioning further. Get even leaner. That's a big deal that people seem to forget. The other deal is there is a preposterous amount of assuming that work and diligence are the big variables that separate bodybuilders.
Usually that assumption is made by people with elite genetics, and it's just not true. My jujitsu coach, a gentleman named Mr. Will Starks, phenomenal professional MMA athlete, Willie eats a very clean diet, very healthy diet, but he has tons of freebies, potato chips, pizza here and there, no big deal. He trains for mixed martial arts. He's a pro. He has glute striations.
He walks around and lives his life at 7% body fat. That's just how he exists in the world. It would take him one cycle of training to turn pro. He's drug-free. If you look at him in the gym and if he put on some posing trunks and you looked at his glutes, you ask some people in the gym, what's that all about? They'd be like, man, it must take a lot of hard work. Bullshit, took no work at all.
Now, he trains his ass off in MMA. But how many MMA guys do you see with strident glutes? It's almost not a thing. So you would look at that and be like, let's say he diets for six weeks and actually starts resistance training for hypertrophy for the first time in his life, I might add, in his mid-30s. This is our plan for Will once he's ready.
He's going to turn drug-free pro his first or second show, no problem. And people are going to go, man, I must have taken a lot of work. And he'd be like, ha, well, actually, not really. And so if you have someone on stage against him who takes second place, but they started their diet at 20% body fat, and their diet took 18 weeks, who worked harder?
People would tell you the guy was trying to glutes it, and they would be fucking wrong, wrong, wrong. So when you look at people using GLPs... You assume everyone has kind of decent genetics. That's not true. And people who have been fatter before have a much harder time getting leaner for a bunch of different reasons.
They're dealing with the same genetics that got them fat, and they have excess fat cells that scream hunger signaling into the ether all the time. So the idea that bodybuilding is about earning your keep and grinding and suffering is true, but we already use enhancement in so many different ways. Why not use enhancement in this other way?
I never gotten a clear answer on that because most of the people that espouse such opinions don't have the patience or intellectual capacity to deal with such issues. Just something to scroll by on Instagram and go, note it, scrolling onto the next thing or turning my phone off and flushing it down the toilet.
Yeah, most of the people that are morally panicking will tell you why. Most of what they say is that you have to earn your fitness. And if you are lazy and you just take a pill, and you lose all the weight, you haven't addressed the root cause of the issue, which is your poor diet. And there's something to say there, but I don't understand much further about their own logic.
I would say they're not thinking a lot. They're just having a lot of feelings. If you talk to most people about politics, you'll realize that most people are not geopolitical strategists or econometricians. They just feel a lot.
And so this is one of these things where people have a lot of feelings, but if they pulled it back and actually logic through it, they would conclude that like, oh, these modern anorectic drugs are tools to accomplish something. And whatever tools you use that make sense for you. should be a valid consideration for the goal.
But a lot of people use physical fitness, especially external, as a proxy for conscientiousness, the ability to organize your life, to delay gratification, so on and so forth. And the reality is that probably the two biggest predictors of how obese someone is are your genetic hunger drive and your degree of conscientiousness.
So the only thing that the GLPs eliminate as a category of problem is the hunger drive. They eliminate it, but they do a great job, reduce it substantially. So now we're left with people that are leaner, some of whom just have average conscientiousness, but now low food drive, and now they're leaner.
And this especially upsets people that have lost weight themselves on their own, and they took a certain moral worthiness, a certain gold star on their chest for it. Say, I was conscientious and willful enough to do this. And to those people, they're absolutely correct. Like what they did was monumental and ultra impressive.
And they feel sort of ripped off because other people are now doing it by just like taking a weekly injection. But that belief in yourself, that flexing of your conscientious muscle that you did, It's your benefit for yourself to keep. And the other way to think about it is if you had to lose 20 pounds and really focus yourself to do it and to keep the weight off, you're focused all the time.
What you could do is take an anorectic drug, GLP-1, for example, and now you don't have to try as hard to limit yourself because your food, your natural, your appetite is like normal. And you can take all of that bandwidth of willpower and effort and conscientiousness and apply it to something else. business, family life.
If you have to diet hard enough to lose a bunch of weight, your bandwidth for your work, your bandwidth for family, your bandwidth for enjoying your life have to go down. Otherwise, you're just not dieting hard enough.
And if you now have a solution to the hard dieting problem in which you can actually do much better job with less input, that doesn't mean you're on the couch eating Cheetos, though it could if you choose.
Showing 721–740 of 1,094 · page 37 of 55
← Previous
Next →