This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast and today I'm here with my friend, Alex Feinberg. Sometimes I say people are my friend. And I've never really met them. But I haven't met Alex, he does live in Austin. So this is someone I've met in the flesh. And I can confirm that he does look the way he looks online. Not in like, all the gory detail, like we didn't go into that closely about Alex is he's the real deal. He is. Yeah, I mean, what I know Alex from and I will let him introduce myself, though, is pictures of his, you know, quite toned body juxtaposed against very delicious looking, cut steaks and vegetables and other sorts of things, I think, very, very interesting juxtaposition. And I want to talk to Alex, just so you guys know, he's not just one of those gurus that just comes out of the blue. He has an interesting life story. You know, he did work in tech. He was a professional athlete. There's a lot of interesting zigs and zags in his life that I think we could all learn from, especially those of us who have a difficult time. You know, living in the conventional treadmill, I'm definitely one of those people. And I follow Alex on Twitter. And I follow his work partly just because, you know, I want to get his insights on succeeding outside of that sort of box, so to speak. So Alex, can you introduce yourself, tell the listener in the viewers what you're all about?
Absolutely. Thanks Razib, this is gonna be awesome. So, behind the apps, there's actually a story of an interesting person with a very different background than what a lot of people might expect. You know, looking at someone who ostensibly, is a gym rat meathead, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, wanting to be a professional athlete, I grew up to upper middle class parents who worked corporate jobs. And, you know, because I wasn't around super rich people, I actually kind of thought that there were two paths. As an adult, you either had a job like everybody else, or you got rich being an athlete or an entertainer. And I decided I didn't want a job like everybody else. So I was gonna try to get rich as an athlete or entertainer, I worked very hard in the weight room on the baseball field, to try to get as good as I could get at the single skill that I identified as what could possibly make me unique and stand out in the world. Now, I wasn't actually that good at baseball, when I decided that I was going to work really hard at it, I just decided that I had to be good at it, and I was going to make it happen no matter what. So years of diligent effort, ultimately made me into a pretty decent athlete, where I was getting invited to play in national level showcases in front of Major League Baseball scouts, getting scholarship offers from Stanford's Vanderbilt's of the world as well as getting recruited by Ivy League schools. And ultimately, I decided to accept the scholarship offer that I got from Vanderbilt, because I wanted to leave California, and have an opportunity to compete in the Southeastern Conference, which was the best baseball conference, still is, in the country. So I packed my stuff went to go compete in the SEC. And when I got on campus, I came to the end of the road, that my logical left brain mind had, you know, basically perceive the world to exist in where I started realizing that logic, and knowledge and awareness of facts actually helped in the classroom a lot more than it helped in the baseball field. And if I wanted to be successful on the baseball field, I had to learn how to leverage my intuition. I had to learn how my coaches thought I had to learn how my teammates thought I had to learn how scouts thought, if I wanted to get drafted by them if I wanted to have their respect, and ultimately, if I wanted to be able to cut through the stress that was competing in front of 7000 people in a SEC road night. And so I learned how to listen to my body. I learned that, you know, no matter how much I analyze it, I can't figure out why I can throw the ball accurately across the infield, I just have to trust my intuition. No matter how much I think about it, I can't logically tell you why I can get my hands inside on an inside fastball. I just have to trust that I can do it. And if I try to add a logical process to it, it's just going to perform worse and so I had to trust myself. If I wanted to succeed and I had to develop A sort of arrogance about me where you know, I don't need to fact check this, it's just going to work, because the only alternative was embarrassing myself in front of 1000s of people in public. One of the observations that I made when I was at Vanderbilt was that good looking people are treated a lot better in life, people were in shape, I noticed that most people thought through heuristic shortcuts. And one of the common heuristic shortcuts that I noticed, replicated over and over again, was good looking people were treated as being more responsible, hardworking, and more trustworthy. And I noticed I would do this myself, where I would look at somebody who's presenting to our class in finance, we bring up bringing a banker from Wall Street, he talked about CEOs, or whatever. And I said, Well, I don't really know what he's talking about, but I live by what he's selling. And I thought, well, if I if my brain is steering me down this road, chances are nine out of 10 people's brains are steering them down this road, too. And so when I got done playing baseball, I decided that I wanted to have every advantage - every heuristic advantage that I could possibly have, I wanted to be in shape. So people would give me the benefit of the doubt. And ultimately, after working for a little bit at a global macro hedge fund in Hong Kong, I decided that the tech sector was going to take off because I thought that central banks were going to keep interest rates for low for a very long period of time, which ended up happening. And so I moved back home to the San Francisco Bay Area, and decided I was going to elevator pitch my way into Google using the shortcuts that I learned on the baseball field. Namely, I was going to wear a custom tailored suit, I was going to speak firmly and aggressively and confidently, I was going to introduce myself to a hiring manager and get a job in sales. And people thought that that was crazy. But ultimately, I figured out how to navigate through LinkedIn, get my 15 seconds to elevator pitch myself in front of a hiring manager, and and ultimately got myself a six figure job at Google just by talking and looking good in a custom tailored suit. And so I got my foot in the door in corporate America. You know, after spending years in there, I noticed that there were mechanisms of exploitation that I came to realize were beyond the perceptive, perceptive abilities of many of my colleagues. I continue to train hard every day in corporate America because I didn't want to cede you know, emotional sovereignty, and my sense of self worth to a third party corporation who was trying to get me to evaluate myself based on their evaluations of me, I realized that that was incredibly dangerous for my own self worth for my own life. And so I made sure to continue to compete with myself in the gym. Because the promotional path that Google offered me just wasn't enticing enough for me to want to build my identity around it. So I kept training hard for years, I was not willing to forego eating delicious food because I love eating. It's like one of my favorite things to do, if not my favorite thing to do in life. And I realized after several years that if I just trained to be an athlete, and I eat protein dominant real food, I don't have to count calories, I don't have to go hungry. And I can actually get better abs than I ever had as a college or professional athlete. Eating 1000s of calories a day eating dessert, eating carbs, eating, you know what most people would consider to be cheat meals, pizza, tacos, burgers, fried chicken, most meals, literally, you see my Twitter feed, this is actually what I'm eating all the time. And, you know, look like - oh, I hope I don't knock my camera over. Yep - looking like that year round I don't cut. I don't count calories. I don't weigh things. It's very intuitive. I decided that my intuition knew what I needed to eat more than an app, or some third party coach who didn't know me, I drew upon my baseball experience to, you know, fuck to dig deep and find that arrogance within me, where I believed that my body just knew what to eat, I should be eating carbs, now I should be eating protein. Now I should be eating this now I should be drinking water now. And it just ended up working and getting ripped beyond my wildest imagination was easier than I ever thought possible doing less training than I ever thought possible. And I thought to myself in 2017, if there's one way I could change the world, it wouldn't be through, you know, selling ads at Google or helping Google grow. It would be through teaching people how easy fitness could be. And so I ended up leaving Google in 2017 and joined a crypto exchange in 2018. And at the crypto exchange, I realized that if I wanted to maintain a high paying sales job in crypto, I actually needed a large Twitter following because everybody who has a high paying job in crypto seems to have a large Twitter following. And so I committed myself to building my Twitter account and I found in 2019 that it was much easier to build that account around fitness than it was around crypto. And so I just kept posting all my meals posting a lot of shirtless Pics. basically sharing with people that you don't have to do all the dumb things that a bunch of nitwit IQ people insist you do, in order to look good with your shirt off. Here's how I do it. And you know, since then, I've been fortunate enough to sell recipe books, fat loss books, training guides, to 1000s of my followers, been able to work closely with people, either one on one or in a group setting, you know, helped hundreds of people transform their bodies, with less effort than they ever thought was possible. And more recently, you know, people are realizing that the cheat codes that I use to navigate the fitness world also apply in the corporate world. So I've recently started helping people with salary negotiations, you know, helping people realize that, you know, you can probably get paid $50,000 More for doing the exact same job by simply positioning yourself better to a different company, let me help you do it, check this framework out. I've had multiple people, you know, in the last year, reach out, say, Hey, I'm working less than I was at my previous job and making $50,000 More, thank you so much, you changed my life. And so this is the Alex Feinberg key. It's, you know, performance, efficiency and intelligence. Or performance, intelligence, efficiency, if you wanted to spell PIE. A lot of things in life can be done a lot better, if you think a little bit outside the box and realize that linear progress isn't necessarily the best path to get where you want to go. You can find corners to cut, you can you know, reconstruct, reorder some dots, and ultimately achieve your goals with less effort than you ever thought was possible.
All right. So, Alex, you are very, you know, we have a wide range of podcast guests here, you're very articulate, I'll put it that way. You know, what you want to say? And you say it very well. I'm asking you here, in terms of, you know, your advice, your coaching, all these things that you do to optimize? You said intelligence? I mean, what if you're stupid? I mean, can any human do this? Or is this really something that, you know, like higher IQ people, people that are kind of like higher up there? And then cognitive abilities can really optimize? Or do you think it's, you know, applicable to everybody? I mean, you know, I mean, everybody wants to be, you know, look like you, Alex. But do you have like, a unique suite of characteristics that allow? I mean, for example, like, I know, you say that you have these cheat codes, and you don't count calories, don't do all these other things. The people who do those, they do a lot of cognitive management, right? So is your is your technique, much lower cognitive load is, I guess, is what you're saying? Is it more accessible that way?
It's much lower cognitive load. Right? It's almost the challenge for people doing it is, you know, you've seen the midwit bell curve meme, right? Where the people on the right end of the bell curve, like use their intuition that people in the left hand of the bell curve, use their intuition, and the people in the center of the bell curve, explain why you can't use your intuition. And they end up trying much harder for worst results. Right? So it's almost like if you're on either end of the bell curve, right? If you're either a standard deviation and a half above the mean, or a standard deviation and have below the mean, what I say makes sense. And I actually think the truth behind that is, are you able to tap into the right side of your brain, right, because the people who are able to tap into the right side of their brain, I believe, I haven't studied this in any detail. But I believe that people who are able to tap into the right side of their brain have a greater variance in their IQ. So they're more likely to be represented on the extremely low in the extremely high end of the IQ curve. And it's the people who cannot tap into their intuition that think that the world can be - can only be logically explained and always be logically explained. These are the people who will look at what I'm doing. And think, Oh, this guy, this can't be real, or oh, he's an outlier. This doesn't work. It's like, well, telling me I'm an outlier doesn't explain my results. It just says that you don't want to come up with an explanation for my results.
Yeah, yeah. No, that's fair enough. I, you know, you talk a fair amount about corporate life and you had a job at Google. Most of us have not had a job at Google. I have other friends who have had a jobs at Google. You know, I think, in normie America, shall we say, Middle America? You know, getting and having a job at Google. That's kind of prestigious and, you know, people are like, Oh, my, my nephew has a job at Google. These are the kinds of things people say it's like, my nephew's a doctor. Let's set Dr aside. You know, as a as a young Jewish man, I'm sure with a Chinese mother. You probably had some questions about becoming a doctor at some point not to stereotype You know what I'm saying? I'm gonna get canceled for like the 40th. Time for saying that, but whatever. But so you worked at Google. Tell me, tell me about Google and your I know some of the things you think at Google because I follow your your social media feed. But tell the listener, tell the viewers about Google, and what it's like actually working there now, like, not 20 years ago, but like, you know, within the last five to 10 years,
yeah, it's a very different experience for me going in and coming out. So when I joined Google, in the fall of 2011, it was still mostly a libertarian company. You know, Larry and Sergey were still in control of how things were work, they hadn't pass the reins to Sundar, the organization hadn't expanded to such a size, that they were forced to recruit from cookie cutter backgrounds almost exclusively, so they still have to have some degree of uniqueness, or they're still small enough to operate with some degree of uniqueness in their recruiting mechanisms. And it very much was an open free thinking company. There were elements of bureaucratic challenges. There were a lot of processes in place, because it was still a large company by 2011. And so there still was bureaucracy that made it frustrating. But ultimately, there was a logic behind what was going on. And if you made a logical point, you were almost always listened to that you couldn't always make your point logically, but you Sundar would always consider what you said. And then, you know, that existed for a couple years, but the company kept getting bigger. And by 2014, you know, it sort of felt like, sort of like getting to be like a glorified Microsoft. Like, I don't actually know what the difference between working for Microsoft and working for Google is, they're starting, you know, they give us good perks, and they still give us good perks, but they're, they're methodically trying to cheapen the perks that they're giving us, they're trying to substitute in cheaper vegetable oils for the olive oil that they would give us at lunch, we're trying to reduce the amount of bacon that they're giving us at breakfast, and I sound, you know, this might sound spoiled at the same time, like, I'm an employee evaluating my entire compensation. So I accepted the job understanding that my compensation would be my salary, my equity plus perks, and you know, they might be increasing my salary, they might be increasing my equity. But if they're gutting the perks, all of that needs to be considered in my all in compensation, you know, if they're, if they're putting their finger on the scale like that. And so, you know, I started paying attention to various narratives that became misaligned with reality, where people are saying, Oh, we're not a small company anymore, we need to start making cutbacks for Wall Street. And, you know, I have corporate finance literacy. And I'm like, for Wall Street, like, nobody can unseat you three founding members of the company, have a majority of the voting shares. So as long as Larry, Sergey and Eric, don't want to replace the board, and the board is not going to get replaced. So anything you say about Wall Street wants this Wall Street wants that it's like, yeah, it might affect the share price of the company. But, you know, a lot of those shares are owned by those three people. So when you're talking about Wall Street wants this Wall Street wants that. It's like Who who is Wall Street, it's you guys. And so you know, a lot of narratives are come up, oh, you can make cutbacks for this and that it's like, you guys are growing revenue and margins. You know, and you're like a $40 billion company, what, what kind of insanity is this? And I started to realize that I really, really liked a vast majority of the people that I work with, I thought that coming in and through a majority of my time at Google, Google hired phenomenal individuals, like good dudes, good chicks, like cool, smart people. But, you know, I thought that over the years, the hiring bar, definitely, you know, got lower. And what a lot of corporations do and Google certainly did is they attract weak minded people. And so I say this lovingly, like I like the people who they attracted. But the types of people who would believe narratives that were completely contradictory to what the balance sheet in the income statement are saying, are mentally weak people. And so the corporate narratives are designed to not be true. And this isn't just a Google thing. This isn't every company thing. They will say things that are literally not true. But if you can just count on your fingers, you know, they're not true. But four out of five employees are going to be too mentally weak to read the writing on the wall. And that's why corporations will be able to consistently lie to their employees because their employees just can't stomach the reality of their circumstances. And so, you know, it was this dishonesty that led me to never celebrating a promotion. I never wanted to be under the mental or emotional control of an entity that I was convinced was designed to exploit me and everybody that they employed as much as possible. You know, I mean, there was a lawsuit about wage collusion by Google, I think Intel, maybe Apple, a couple other Silicon Valley companies, and it's like, how this, how this didn't change the perception of 100% of Google employees is beyond me, like, you don't just accidentally, you know, get involved in a multimillion dollar settlement that's designed to erode the salaries of your employees, unless there's, you know, I don't know something bad about the DNA and your own wiring something malignant about your desires. And so for me, somebody who who's a little bit cynical, and low was suspicious, it's like, okay, I get what their MO is if they're, if they're willing to do illegal things, to shave a couple points off of what they're paying people, they're damn sure, able to do every legal thing possible to, you know, maximize the output and minimize the compensation for their employees. So I came to view the world like that. And I came to see a lot of the games they played and understand why they were so effective, and how they were able to manipulate so many of my colleagues for so many years. And, you know, ultimately, I left was able to negotiate a favorable raise at the next job that I took, and ultimately spent my entire surplus of free hours trying to build revenue streams independent of a corporate entity, because that was the only thing that I thought would allow me to live the life that I wanted to live, I just didn't see it possible through third party employment. And I don't even make more now than I would be making if I stayed at Google, but I'm working for myself, I'm setting my own hours, I don't have to go through quarterly or annual performance reviews, I don't have to wait until somebody says I did a good job, right? I have revenue diversity through my clients to where one person pisses me off, the greatest revenue concentration that I have with any single client constitutes about 10% of my revenue. So the so unless there's a mass collusion against me, like, if I piss one person off worst case, it's going to be 10% of my income, not more. And so this is all the freedom that I thought was absolutely necessary. That I attained, due to the anguish that I felt sitting in a corporate desk, feeling punished for being smart enough to see through the lies of a large company.
So we, you know, we heard about your time at Google, and I'm not gonna lie, this is not the first time I have heard this from somebody who's worked at Google, across this time period, the transformation of, you know, what was really an entrepreneurial outfit to something that's, I don't know, much more corporate in a traditional way, bureaucratic, you know, you compared it to Microsoft, like, I do have to say, in some ways, from what I've heard, Microsoft's culture has would definitely had a Nadir, maybe the end of the 2000s, near that the tail on the Ballmer years, and it's kind of comeback. Arguably, Google is where Microsoft was, as we're recording right now, they just came out with Bard, which is, frankly, a really shitty AI chatbot compared to Microsoft's Bing, Chatbot. And definitely GPTs, open source chatbots. So it's just strange for someone of my generation, I'm a little older than you to see Google become this sort of also ran behind the times, and I've gotten some feedback actually from, from social media, privately Google employees, and they're basically like, look, we're like subject to bureaucratic bureaucratic sclerosis, we can't get anything done. You know, you should be impressed with what we do get done with the amount of, you know, reviews and approvals and everything that we have to do. So you stripped all that away. And now you're doing what you're doing now, you know, you're coaching, you're giving advice, you're consulting as an individual. Tell me about that. Insofar as is this more like when you were a professional athlete? How did you have the skills to do this? Because this is not everybody.
Um, well, I just, I try to pay attention to what people want. Right? And I try to be malleable, right? Because you can see the world for what you want it to be or you can see the world for what it is. And I always thought that the benefit of physical training is twofold. Number one, you make your body stronger, but number two, you learn how to grab with things that make you physically uncomfortable, and the things that make you physically uncomfortable, are very similar to the things that make you emotionally uncomfortable. And a lot of times people have challenges. Coming to terms with reality, because they don't want to ingest it very similar to the experiences I talked to you about with my Google colleagues. People will avoid seeing the writing on the wall, because the writing on the wall doesn't tell them what they want it to tell them. And so I always tell people that if you can push yourself through a tough set in the weight room, you can read the writing on the wall, when the writing on the wall says something, read it. And what that's going to allow you to do is it is going to allow you to make more intelligent decisions by offering products that people actually want. And by not pursuing pathways that that actually have dead ends.
Well, so why do you think most people? I mean, okay, so this is like a philosophical question. I actually don't know what you would say to this, Alex. Most people, you know, you have, you have work, you're generating revenue, partly because so many people are in dead ends. So many people don't know what to do and how to do it. Just, you know, let's go to the macroscale. A little bit of the social context, why do you have this opportunity? What is wrong with our culture? Like, where does this ennui come from? Why are we in dead ends? This is like a big, big question. But I want to know what you think because you are very focused person, you know, from what I know about you, I'm just - even when you talk, when you when you talk to you in real life, you focus on the person, and you're very direct. Whereas I feel like our society is not like that. Is it the collapse of the churches? Is that the lack of institutional faith? Like, what is that? Where's this coming from?
No, it's because people are stupid. And the reason? No, and the reason people are stupid is because school doesn't train them how to think. And school trains people had to regurgitate. I tweeted this a couple of weeks ago, a vast majority of people say the dumbest things that you could possibly comprehend, because they don't realize that there's a such thing as understanding an intelligent thought and articulating it. All they know how to do is mimic intelligence, because school teaches students how to mimic intelligence. That's what happens when an English teacher assigns you a 1200 word essay, right? You use larger words than you need to, to convey an idea more verbosely than you would do in a commercial setting. And you end up speaking very indirectly, beating around the bush. And it ultimately ends up clouding your thought process. And that is what gets you good grades. And so people go through 12 years. And they've only learned how to write for a third party or think for a third party. They've never learned how to think and intelligent thought for themselves. And so by the time most people get out of the university system, they can't recognize what intelligent thought structure is. Just like as a personal trainer, I can look at your squat form and say, This guy's squatting like this, because he has this weakness, this weakness, this weakness and this immobility, right, I can look at somebody's thought. And I can say they think that this is true because of this weakness, this weakness, this weakness, and this cognitive immobility. And most people don't, they can't do that. All they can do is recognize credentials, because that's all the educational system trains people to do is recognize what an authority figure says, recognize who the authority figure is and regurgitate what that is. And so guess what, that's not intelligence. And so obviously, you will not have any unique ideas when you've never learned how to think you've never learned how to ingest information and digest it in a coherent manner. And the only thing that you can come up with that you think approximates intelligence is actually an incoherent regurgitation of what somebody who you deem to be an expert said six months ago.
All right, all right. This is what I'm talking about. You're very cogent to think about this, in terms of like, I think a lot of people think what you think but you, you know, you had a pat, like, you know, three, four minutes, whatever you told me what, what's going on here? Do you think, you know, individual self cultivation and focus and self improvement, that kind of thing you've done naturally the kind of thing you teach other people to do? Do you think it was more natural in the pre modern age when you had to be a jack of all trades? You're on farm, that sort of thing? I don't know.
100% I don't think I'd actually be that Intel. Again, compared to somebody 100 years ago, but think about somebody 100 years ago, right, and you work on a farm. Well, if you work on a farm, you see farm animals interacting, you know, and guess what the number one combatant, to gender ideology is watching small farm animals interact. And you realize that, oh, there is definitely an innate difference between boys and girls, males and females. And then you know, what happens when you work on a farm as you take your goods to market. So when you take your goods to market, and you don't have a ti 89 calculator, or an abacus you need to learn how to do math, otherwise, you get cheated, right. And so by the time somebody's 12 years old, some you know, a kid from, you know, 1870, by the time that kids 12 years old, he's learned how to raise chickens on a farm, you know, hop on a railroad train, take the take those eggs to a market, negotiate with buyers for money, right? He's learned all sorts of skills that people don't learn until they get an MBA now. Right, how to count things, how to negotiate thing, how to negotiate, how to cultivate. So life was education for most people, even if these people couldn't read. Right, so now our literacy rates are much higher, right? Most people can read words, but can they do anything with the words that they've read? No. And this is, you know, to me, this is sort of one of the later stages of a capitalist system that rewards people and grows based on specificity of labor. Right? When you have specificity of labor, you will cultivate a society that is increasingly nearsighted. Right? Because labor specificity requires you to be ultra focused and nearsighted. But if everybody or if the vast majority people become Ultra focused and very nearsighted, there's absolutely no way that we can function as a representative democracy, because people just won't have the intelligence to select leaders that will do anything to screw them over.
Yeah, so I mean, I think what you're alluding to here, is everyone's specializing we're cogs in the machine. And many of us do not see the whole machine. And yet we live in a representative democracy that presupposes that we are citizens, and that we are integrated into the body politic. But the reality is, a lot of it. I mean, I'll speak for myself, I'm, you know, I don't go to city council meetings. Like I don't - wouldn't know where it is. I don't know where City Hall is. I know where the Capitol is here in Austin, because you can't miss it. But you know, I work. That's what I do. I work in the capitalist system. I pay my bills, I make money, I spend money. These are things that I do. So I'm not part of, you know, local Austin politics and the citizenry here in Austin. I'm just being honest about it. But I also think this is 98. Literally 98% of people in this city.
Yeah, so,
And it’s like, so, I mean, how do we, how do we? I mean, you have a business, you have a career that's focused on helping people as individuals, right? How do we scale this? You know, how do we, I mean, there's all these self help people, right. I don't want to use that word, because that's, that's the general genre. You know, they're stoicism. It's a huge range of stoicism. There's like transcendental meditation. There's a whole Christian subgroup, whatever. And it's been around my whole life. And now we have Jordan Peterson talking to young men. You know, we have all of these specialists for these particular, you know, subgroups demographically, but we are a society that, you know, is lacking some meaning. I mean, would you be a deep ecology person just be like, hey, we need to like hunt and farm and do that. That's what we're naturally evolved for, like, what do you I'm just kind of curious what your philosophy on this sort of thing is, in a big, big picture, aside from you, yourself, have obviously optimized, right. Like, how do we get everyone- How do we get society to optimize? Like, have you thought about that?
Well, it's a very challenging question. And I'm not sure if we, if we can, because the DNA of our society sows the seeds of our own destruction, right? So capitalism is required for our society to function. But if you have capitalism go too fast, or leverage technology to well, then it accelerates the aging of the machinery that advances with capitalism. And so an example of that might mean you know, capitalism incentivizes producers to create goods and services that are desired by consumers. Right, good. That's a good thing, right? If that didn't happen, you wouldn't have groceries on the shelves. But if they got too good at it, then what they're gonna end up doing is creating addictive products, right? Maybe not illegally addicting products, but products that are just on the cusp of being illegal. And if they're not illegal now they will be in 20 years, right? The most profitable companies are doing something that isn't presently categorized as illegal but probably shouldn't be. Right there, there are monopolies or near monopolies selling addictive goods and services that haven't yet been classified as addictive by like, the medical profession, possibly because they paid them off. And so I don't, there isn't a clear answer to well, this is how we fix this. It's like, how do you fix death? Right? Death is guaranteed the end at the end of someone's life, that person will die, right? At the end of a society's growth arc, that society will fall. Right? You know, what is it tough times lead to strong men, strong men lead to good times good times lead to weak men, weak men lead tough times. It's like, that's circular. And it exists because that's exactly how the human brain is wired. Right. And so we're, you know, we're on the cusp of, of strong men, leading to good times and good times leading to weak men, right? Weak times enable weak men to flourish - or good times enable weak men to flourish. And so how do we stop this as well, the times got to get tough. And we might, we might not have to do anything. We might just have to wait. Right? Wait for banking collapse times, you're gonna get tougher, right? And so when times get tougher, that's nature's way of healing. That's nature's way of washing away the excess. And yeah, there's going to be a lot of casualties. Right? Perhaps myself included, right? Because, because that's, that's a messy process, washing away the excess can mean we're all living around drug addicts who can't get their Adderall prescriptions filled, and end up driving cars next to us. Right. So that's not It's not to say that there's going to be any any order or fairness into exactly who gets washed away. You know, as society resets itself, but there is a restorative process to life. And as a culture becomes, you know, too excessive, too opulent, too hedonistic. It ultimately always collapses under its own weight. And then the strong people pull themselves up and rebuild it.
Alex have you read Spangler.
I don't read that much that surprises people. So no, I have not.
I mean, I just wonder I mean, it sounds like you're saying that societies grow, mature decay, die. Are you of the opinion that our culture, American republic, American civilization, like what do you think are? Where are we at? Are we at the tail end right now?
Oh, yeah, I don't. It's so what I can guarantee is that in 25 years, the United States will not exist in a fashion that is recognizable to people right now. It could legally exist as an entity and may still be be the largest GDP still somehow, but it won't be recognizable to people right now. Because think about it. Would 2023 America be recognizable to people in 1998, where, you know, we're having, you know, drag queen parties that are used as status symbols by a faction of the leading political party to determine how progressive they are in their acceptance of other forms of life. It's like, no, that would be a completely unrecognizable culture, to somebody in total, told somebody from 1998 Hey, the government is going to guarantee all banking deposits 15 years after bailing out every Wall Street bank, four years after creating more money than was created to fight both World War One and world war two combined, after shutting down the economy for six quarters in a row. And now we're, we're in a real recession, that the government's redefining as not a recession. You know, a convicted pedophile was most likely killed in prison to avoid him speaking about the other political accomplices that that he knew. It's like, if he told somebody that in 1998, they’d be like, ‘what are you…’ - Oh, and a couple planes got got driven through the World Trade Center, you know, and everything changed regarding checkpoints going to the airports right after that. And we're letting biological males compete in female sports. So like, if you told somebody from 1998, that all this stuff is gonna be happening by 2023 you be like, uh what?
Well okay, I think I've mentioned this before. But, you know, Idiocracy was made in the middle wasn't it? or in 2005 And, you know, anachronisms Yeah. It's like that flip phones and their their flip phones, but like, let's set that aside, in some ways, the world of Idiocracy, how do I say this is less degenerated than our world. In a lot of ways actually. And the one of the biggest example is in the world of Idiocracy. They give people standardized tests. And they seek out the smartest, they seek out the person with the highest standardized test in the world to fix society's problems. And today, we would just be like, you know, standardized tests don't test anything. Bla bla bla bla bla bla.
No, actually, like, I think somebody suggested we use ChatGPT to figure out like, how to solve the banking crisis, right? That's kind of the same thing.
I mean, I feel like I feel like we don't need artificial general intelligence, because we ourselves are degrading from general intelligence as a society or something, you know what I'm saying, it's the machines don't really have to win. We're working really hard to lose. I don't want to be like, you know, whatever. Sometimes I get like black pill, super pessimistic about things. But it's really hard. Like, we have affluence, we have obesity, we have a surfeit of calories. You know, we have nice things, we have supercomputers in our pockets. But on the other hand, there is this ennui, This kind of just like sense of something is wrong in our society, up and down the class, class ladder, right. Like a lot of people don't know, what the hell is going on in our culture. And, you know, you alluded to some of the things, I guess, like, you know, as we're closing out here, Alex, you are focused on using your life example and scaling that forward. Right. And so, I mean, like, what are your ambitions? You know, obviously, I mean, you know, because you had, like, so, CrossFit, for example, those boxes are owned, I think, you know, by the CrossFit organization, or whatever, you know, or licensed, or as a franchise, I mean, are you happy with just doing your thing individually. And, you know, basically having like a consulting, you know, where you consult for people, and you give people advice as an individual and you capture that value, or, like, you have ambitions into the future of doing other things, I don't know,
I don't know, I'd like to be able to do this at a greater scale. You know, the challenge around fitness is the most lucrative offerings aren't that good, right, because if they were that good people, or they're not selling fitness entirely. Like CrossFit sells community, you know, as much as it sells fitness, I'm not really as interested in selling community, I just want to help people get jacked. And CrossFit doesn’t work. So you know, we'll split fitness offerings into two ones that work and ones that don't work, the ones that don't work, make money, because people continually come back to them and thinking that it's their fault that it didn't work the first time, like I'm a Weight Watchers or something like that. And then the ones that do work, make money because people are actually addicted to the community that comes with it, whether that's SoulCycle whether that's peloton whether it's CrossFit. So if I wanted to make money in fitness, I would, I would either need to make my product work less well. Or I would need to develop community around it. And so maybe I can develop community around it, I don't know if that's, that's a long ways away, I think the first step is creating like, advertising around it. So I can get a little bit more leverage on on the unit economics. Now. You know, I would like to keep working with people as a life coach, I would like to be able to continue to do that I will, I'm already working with several very intelligent type A individuals. And I think as, as they become more successful, and they start referring me to their friends, you I’ll have greater access to higher power higher performing individuals. And I can continue to help people in that regard. I think no matter how much money I make, I would always love to be a life coach. I think the coolest thing that I can think of is like, you know, living maybe not in Hawaii after what they did during COVID. But if they didn't do that during COVID, like living in Hawaii and just having like, really cool executives or entrepreneurs come and visit me for a week, three days, and just we'll just do mindset work for three days. And then you know, work with one person every week. You know, haven't have any real good food, train with me and reset and then go kick ass afterwards. That would be like, that'd be my goal, no matter how much money I had, if I had a billion dollars. I'd love to do that. And so you know if I if I design my life, it’d probably something approximating that.
Awesome. So I guess I’m going ask you one last question. Because it just came to me. I know you've trained and helped out a bunch of different types of people. And you know, your pictures are of you. I'm just curious, like, can you talk the more salient thing about sex differences? I'm sure you've traded some women. So I'm gonna give you like, my minor personal example. You know, back when I used to lift I would lift with friends of mine, you know, female friends, and they would just start like, kind of getting angry, just in a joking way that like, after two or three weeks, I'm showing gains and like, they're not showing any gains, right? That’s just called testosterone. I'm assuming I can you just like talk a little bit about? Because, you know, we're talking about sex differences, like you see it, I'm sure. Very, very visibly, like, what are the biggest things you see?
Well, yeah, I mean, there's definitely a difference in strength development, it takes women probably twice as long to hit strength maturity, as it does for men as far as the years in the gym. But as far as I'm concerned, the biggest difference is actually cravings, where you'll find it much more common for men to just say, I want to eat meat, like I you know, I don't really have that much of a sweet tooth, but I just love eating steak, like, great, I can help you out, where it's much less common for women to say, Yeah, you know, I don't really crave sweets that much ever, like those women don't really exist. And so with my, with my approach to fitness, it is imperative that the people I work with, don't have crazy sugar cravings. Because if you have crazy sugar cravings, you can't eat intuitively, it just it's not going to work because you're just gonna want more sugar. So if you have your sugar cravings in check, you're much more likely it's much more likely that your male right, and, but it's also much more likely that my system is going to work for you. The other thing to keep in mind is when most women should not have abs. Right? And and the standard that is set by Instagram, by fitness models is like, you know, should most men have abs? Maybe not. But I think probably 30% of men can carry abs without doing anything crazy, right? Maybe 50% of men can carry abs without doing anything, probably 50%. Actually, if you just kind of lived a 1960s lifestyle and trained and you know probably 50% of men he abs right, and the ones who didn't like would be kind of close. I think like 3% of women should naturally have abs it's just not something that's like natural to a woman who wants to be like reproductively healthy some women can. But most women just should not be having abs. And the amount of dieting that they need to do to get those abs is not healthy frequently. Whereas like I don't do any dieting in a conventional sense. And you can't convince me that I'm calorically deprived or hormonally imbalanced. But if you found a woman whose midsection look like mine, very good chance that that woman's not doing something related to achieve that.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm just having that thought like, what would I think? What would I say? How would I avert my eyes? You know, like, what is going on with you, lady? You know, ya know? Well, so it's been great talking to you. You know, people can find you and I'll put the links like social media, you have an Instagram, do you have website?
I do. Or my Interesting stuff is on YouTube and on Twitter on Instagram.
Okay, I know about the the Twitter and the actually, I think I have seen your YouTubes before but yeah, so yeah, I'll link to all of those. And you're very accessible. I feel like on social media, you can be a little spicy sometimes. So people don't want to deal with spice. You know, don't go there. But um, you know, it's great. I hope people have enjoyed this conversation. I know I really appreciate your feed. And you know, just learning from each other. That's that's one of my favorite things. And just looking at you, it makes me feel fat and that motivating, I'm not gonna lie. So thank you. Thank you very much, Alice.
No, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for having me Razib
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcast.
