Mike Israetel's PhD is a Joke

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

4 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Really, bodybuilding is a stupid activity. The intelligent thing is to exercise for health and focus on other matters.

Realistically, working out for health is not very motivating. And nobody actually works out for health. You gotta have some other goals such as beauty, strength etc. otherwise it is never going to stick or you're always just half ass it, so it'll end up not helping you too much, imo

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Vali2003 said:

Additionally, he has now started going down the cosmetic surgery train. First one is done and the next couple are already planned. I see this getting quite ugly (hopefully not literally). 

I know.

[Leo Gura]

32 minutes ago, NewKidOnTheBlock said:

Realistically, working out for health is not very motivating. And nobody actually works out for health. You gotta have some other goals such as beauty, strength etc. otherwise it is never going to stick or you're always just half ass it, so it'll end up not helping you too much, imo

Eventually you will become mature and conscious enough to see through the fantasies of strength and beauty.

There is no need to be strong. This is a fantasy.

There is no need to be more beautiful, this too is a fantasy.

But exercise is great for health. So that's the only valid reason to do it. You don't need crazy motivation and crazy lifts. Just moderate lifts and exercise is good enough. Years of lifting get boring regardless.

It's like people can't do gym unless their ego is all over it. Here's a crazy idea: how about do gym with zero ego?

Edited October 7 by Leo Gura

[Jannes]

The first time you go into the gym without your ego:

 

[Jannes]

Reconnecting with the gym in a non-ego way is seriously tremendiously difficult. I tried it myself. 

[Rigel]

17 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Frankly, this whole PhD thing is irrelevant. Mike gives good fitness advice regardless. His videos are great if you are looking for fitness advice. Being a good scientist is not needed at all for making YT gym videos.

His advice is very specific to muscle building & unholistic. The dude can’t even broad jump or scratch his back. There are better fitness people out there. The whole appeal of his stuff is that it’s funny.

[Jannes]

I am going to the gym with crocs like its vacation, enjoying the pump and sometimes going there with people to socialize. On my way to reconnect with the original fire dragons. 

 

[NewKidOnTheBlock]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Eventually you will become mature and conscious enough to see through the fantasies of strength and beauty.

There is no need to be strong. This is a fantasy.

There is no need to be more beautiful, this too is a fantasy.

But exercise is great for health. So that's the only valid reason to do it. You don't need crazy motivation and crazy lifts. Just moderate lifts and exercise is good enough. Years of lifting get boring regardless.

It's like people can't do gym unless their ego is all over it. Here's a crazy idea: how about do gym with zero ego?

Yeah man I hear you. I wish I was thinking the way you've described

[Socrates]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Eventually you will become mature and conscious enough to see through the fantasies of strength and beauty.

There is no need to be strong. This is a fantasy.

There is no need to be more beautiful, this too is a fantasy.

But exercise is great for health. So that's the only valid reason to do it. You don't need crazy motivation and crazy lifts. Just moderate lifts and exercise is good enough. Years of lifting get boring regardless.

It's like people can't do gym unless their ego is all over it. Here's a crazy idea: how about do gym with zero ego?

It is rare to find people engaging in externally perceived "egoic" activities solely for the love of the game. But it still happens. Mastery is only a product of the love of the game; otherwise, it is always a means to an end, and you will always be mediocre with the second attitude.

[Jannes]

27 minutes ago, Socrates said:

It is rare to find people engaging in externally perceived "egoic" activities solely for the love of the game. But it still happens. Mastery is only a product of the love of the game; otherwise, it is always a means to an end, and you will always be mediocre with the second attitude.

I think you can be lost enough to master something for egoic reasons. 

[vinc3nc]

Lots of these fitness influencers are on gear, including Mike, and when you're on gear, you have not only more motivation but also higher energy levels to workout. You can push in the gmy for hours. When youre natty, it's way harder to be disciplined.

I've been working out consistently for 10+ years. I've had 2 leg days per week for more than a decade. Imagine how hard it is to be that disciplined. I dont skip workouts, and whenever I have to do a leg workout I dont want to do it, because it's fucking hard. It's pure suffering. And trust me, on most of those days, I dont feel like working out. But i still do it, no matter what, Because the benefits I get are worth it (health + feeling better, being more energetic). Looking better is secondary.

To workout for a decade consistently, just caring about how you look is not even close to being enough.

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, vinc3nc said:

I have to do a leg workout I dont want to do it, because it's fucking hard. It's pure suffering.

But see, this isn't needed. If your ego wasn't in it you could optimize your excercise for fun and enjoyment vs pure suffering.

You don't need to do crazy leg days. This is just some bad programming you got from these gym-rats. Your legs can be healthy and strong without that extreme workout.

Moderate exercise is enough. And then the key is to optimize for enjoyment. Playing a sport might be better than boring and painful lifting. Racket ball is a great workout and fun. That's intelligent vs crazy lifting.

Edited October 7 by Leo Gura

[PenguinPablo]

On 10/4/2025 at 3:39 PM, Leo Gura said:

Even if it was just a draft, the substance of the research is shit. It doesn't matter how well it is written or how accurate the math is, what matters is that nothing new was discovered or said. It is 200 pages of pointlessness written just so you could call yourself a doctor.

You can't draft your way out of that problem.

This shows the hollowness of sports science. They will write 200 pages of jargon just to tell you that eating donuts makes you fat. This is an aspect of the larger issue of the corruption of science and academia. Science and academia are used to bullshit. And scientists do not understand this problem deeply enough because they are in on the racket.

This doesn't just apply to sports science. 

The same goes for the vast majority of research conducted at universities. 

That's a big reason I always thought it was such a waste of time.

Why would I devote myself to decades of research and work just to say "water is wet".

I went to my old uni recently and basically everything was just replicating Andrew Huberman podcasts into a study.

Nevertheless, it is such a fucking waste of time and resources.

I can't understand why so many people devote their lives and studies to this. 

It's not interesting. And it's extremely fucking slow in terms of personal development and learning. 

[Carl-Richard]

16 hours ago, Vali2003 said:

He’s even said that he hates training. Why does he still do it? Ego.

Meanwhile, those who ironically get accused of "ego lifting" and are critical of the "science-based" self-torture training Mike does (e.g. Sam Sulek and Eric Bugenhagen), say they love working out. And they don't exactly have worse physiques either. Funny how that works.

What's more ego-based than "you gotta drop the weight bro, you just want to stimulate the muscle, that's how you get big, if you hurt yourself you lose muscle, it's not good for hypertrophy bro" vs "I just like lifting heavy ass weight"?

 

 

Edited October 7 by Carl-Richard

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, PenguinPablo said:

I can't understand why so many people devote their lives and studies to this. 

It's not interesting. And it's extremely fucking slow in terms of personal development and learning. 

It is group-think and conformity. People get slowly boiled alive into academia like a frog. After 12 years of schooling + 4 years undergrad your mind is so brainwashed and paradigm-locked you can't tell up from down without a double blind placebo controlled Harvard study.

That's how the Matrix gets ya!

[Carl-Richard]

3 hours ago, PenguinPablo said:

It's not interesting. And it's extremely fucking slow in terms of personal development and learning. 

I once held a presentation about a study I found that looked at people who had an addiction to cigarettes and happened to get brain damage and their addiction disappeared. The study collected a bunch of these people and determined which parts of the brain seemed to cause the remission of the addiction. Then they did follow-up studies testing out treatments using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to target those brain areas, aiming to decrease the activity of those areas and simulating the lesions of the brain damaged patients. I think that's pretty interesting.

Also, I know people who have done research on music treating Parkinson's symptoms. There are many videos out there of Parkinson's patients trying to walk with music and without, and the difference is quite remarkable.

[Yimpa]

7 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

trying to walk with music and without, and the difference is quite remarkable

 

[Carl-Richard]

19 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Genuinely.

I think we have a lot of the same takes on reality, meaning, truth, mechanisms. So when one of us regurgitates an anecdote or hashes something out - its triggering a thought tangent that naturally runs off from the main topic. And that thought tangent is shared. Channelling maybe? WHO KNOWS, NOT GONNA THINK ABOUT IT. LETS ROLL WITH THE INSANITY

Maybe its a crossover in how we perceiving & decisions? INTJ here 

When I typed myself with my ChatGPT-5 prompt, INTJ was among the top contenders. I generally land in INTP and INFP/ENFP land, which if you take them as a group and we're being reductionistic MBTI fiends, they do resemble INTJ in some places (Nx > Te, Fi). But really, all introverted intuitives can probably become very similar if they have similar interests (philosophy, science, spirituality), similiar background (e.g. some form of STEM) and similar experiences (meditation, health focus, meaning from work).

I also thought maybe our work specifically can be a contributing factor (but I don't know how much): you're managing high-tech construction projects (often in the medical field), I'm managing "high-tech" behavioral science (using neuroscientific methods, which also overlaps with the medical field). You have to not just deal with technical challenges but also people. I had to recruit 77 participants all on my own and run mental health screening meetings, teach them how to use the behavioral interventions in the RCT, and then measure their brain before and after the study.

So while we're working in quite different "fields", we're really working with the same things. We're kinda both in the "construction field", just slightly different things are being made 😆

Edited October 8 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

11 minutes ago, Yimpa said:

 

 

 

Edited October 8 by Carl-Richard

[Rigel]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It is group-think and conformity. People get slowly boiled alive into academia like a frog. After 12 years of schooling + 4 years undergrad your mind is so brainwashed and paradigm-locked you can't tell up from down without a double blind placebo controlled Harvard study.

That's how the Matrix gets ya!

I am so glad I had you before getting into uni. I feel like a wizard participating in that while seeing the dynamics from a distance. It’s fun, it’s like monopoly. It’s pretend importance but it generates a bunch of interesting experiences.