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
It's a, I want tasty food that's in front of me and I'm going to eat it problem. You interview people coming out of a McDonald's. What fraction of them are going to tell you that's healthy food they're eating? Almost none. Regular people. No particular kind of education. We'll be like, yeah, this is burger and fries. What's that, health food? They're like, come on, man, stop.
And they'll walk away. And you and your camera guy are like, this guy's not going to talk to us anymore. He thinks you're joking, which surely you are. And so the reality is like somewhere here we lost the personal responsibility situation. The reason most people are over fat is because of the amount of food coming in. And I don't want to lay blame. There's no one at fault.
These are mechanistic things. But now we have a class of drugs that can radically reduce your appetite and radically improve your long-term health. In addition to that, as both because of your appetite reducing and you're losing weight and in total independent mechanisms, there are like eight independent mechanisms by which these drugs are really good for your health.
And so when we have something like this and we do the appropriate work to drive the cost down, We have something that's just way more powerful than nutritional education. Even if you take nutritional education and somehow manage to propagandize and inculcate everyone into always exuding their best practices, which no one's ever succeeded with.
Here's another piece of interesting literature for you. The absolute best predictor of how teenagers eat is who they're genetically related to. There are twin and adoption studies where they have identical twins separated at birth or siblings separated at birth, adopted to different families. And so they know the genetics of their birth family. They know the genetics of their adoptive family.
And they know the genetics of the individual, which the individual, because they're adopted, genetics are no more likely to be the same as their adoptive family by chance. And it's shown that after about age 12 or 13, the variance explained in that individual teenager's eating habits
that can be explained by what they learned in the home growing up with their adoptive family is between zero and 10%. The best control studies show it's closer to zero. So I'm gonna say a crazy thing here. As a parent, you can 100% make sure your child is eating really, really well in the home when they're there because you have total control. And it's a good thing to do.
As a school program, you can make sure that kids are getting healthy lunches. And healthy lunches are something we just don't have much of in the United States. And it's not for mysterious economic reasons. It's just for preference. Most people like pizza and burgers. That's what the school serves.
And I think because it's school and we want to keep people healthy, 100% we should be doing healthy food. In a cheap way, but an effective way. There's tons of ways to do that. But once those kids are off doing their own thing, Mostly it's their genetics that explains what kind of food preferences they'll have, and it's almost nothing else.
So once people turn into adults, all of that awesome nutritional education you got in the home and in the school seems to fall on relatively deaf ears. And then it's really like, what are you as a free adult interested in doing and how are you interested in changing your life? And at that point, the onus comes all the way back. It goes right by the schools. It goes by the parents.
It goes by the pharmaceutical companies. And it comes right out of your mirror and hits you right in the face. Crap. It's me again. You know that Spider-Man meme where they're pointing at each other? You. No, you. It's you again. Or the villain is unmasked Scooby-Doo meme where it's just you as an anime. You're also the villain.
And that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or bad or terrible, but fundamentally, the reason you are currently over fat is because some of your food choices or the quantities in which you eat those foods are inappropriate or excessive. And it's really straightforward to make good choices. Healthy food is not rocket science.
It can actually give you all of the several, just five or six food groups that... That's all healthy food. And if you do that and you watch the scale, and if the scale isn't going down, you eat a little bit less food, keeping your protein up, of course, then you're just going to have very predictable results. Am I saying that's a fun process?
Not necessarily, but it's predictable and we understand it really well. And there's just no reason to suppose that any other kind of nefarious forces are involved. And if you want to do this by yourself, listen, that's awesome. But if you want to do it with these modern obesity drugs, there's no reason to suspect they're particularly deleterious or dangerous.
There is no conspiracy to get them, you addicted to them or something like that. There's not some kind of evil corporation manufacturing them ulterior motives. They're just unbelievable breakthrough medicines that are, again, probably healthier for most people to be on rather than off.
The biggest factor is genetics by a long shot. They're Japanese people in Japan. And Japanese people just don't develop as high degree of adiposity. It's usually because they just have a lower food drive and experience less of a pleasure response and a reciprocal reinitiation of food drive after eating tasty food than the rest of us do on average.
They're like, um, you know, I went to school with a ton of Asians when I was at the university of Michigan, tons of Asian friends. And like, they'll eat like three pieces of sushi and be like, oh my God, I'm so full. will just like exist for eight hours longer.
And I'm like, oh my God, I could inhale three pieces of sushi, not even through my mouth, like just through my nose and that I can eat the rest of the sushi bar and they'll kick me out for overeating. Like, that's just a thing I can pull out of the hat anytime. It's genetics. You know, like there are absolutely physical differences between major human subpopulations and they're real.
And if we try to over index on the specific ways in which they're living their lives and thinking that's what's doing it, but we fail to address the confounder of genetics, which is going to be quote unquote learning a lot of stuff that probably either has much less of an impact.
And there are certainly things that Japanese culture does that are better than ours, but there are other things that Japanese culture does that aren't as great as ours. Like they're, they're older adults don't seem to engage in resistance training nearly as much. They have a much more muted gym culture than we do, for example.
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