Episode #5 - Lyle McDonald, BSc.

Lyle McDonald joins me for a wide-ranging discussion on hypertrophy (or muscle growth) research, fitness fictions, and the changing intellectual culture of the industry.

Drawing on decades of coaching, independent research, writing, and arguing with people on the internet, Lyle examines the rise of reductionist explanations in exercise science, the growing gap between laboratory findings and real-world results, and the tendency to mistake plausible mechanisms for established facts.

We discuss volume landmarks, training to failure, stretch-mediated hypertrophy, the influx of “science communicators”, and the (pseudo)scientific claims touted by people like Mike Israetel and the Renaissance Periodization paradigm. The conversation should interest the philosophically inclined too—more broadly, we discuss what counts as evidence, the problems with metanalyses, how fitness fads gain credibility, and why some of the loudest voices in the industry may be the least scientifically rigorous.

Lyle McDonald is an exercise physiologist, author, and independent researcher. He holds a B.Sc. in Kinesiology with an emphasis in Exercise Physiology from UCLA and has spent more than three decades writing about nutrition, body re-composition, and hypertrophy. He's the author of several influential books, including The Protein Book, The Ketogenic Diet, Ultimate Diet 2.0, and A Guide to Flexible Dieting, and has become one of the most outspoken critics of pseudoscience and poor reasoning in the modern fitness industry.

#4 - "Tartaria, Thunderless Lightning & Other Completely Normal Topics" : Campfire Epistemology with Isaac J. Ryan and Mackenzie D. Taylor

Tonight's episode begins with Schumann resonances and somehow becomes a discussion of the Tartarian Empire, fractal antennas, etheric energy extraction, biblical archetypes, gender politics, church communities, and whether Jesus was probably funny.

Around a fire, three Australians attempt to reverse-engineer reality using a mixture of YouTube archaeology, Christian mysticism, personal testimony, quantum mechanics, sacred geometry, and practical advice about chopping kindling.

No conclusions are reached. Several universes are proposed.

Topics include:

• Tartarian fireplaces
• Frequency-based architecture
• Lightning as communication technology
• Why the Great Wall of China is apparently suspicious
• Whether heaven is a location or a state of mind
• The dangers of gronks
• Fire maintenance

A surprisingly wholesome conversation about meaning, community, and the possibility that everything is connected by vibrations nobody can quite define.

Visiting Professor David Bentley Hart zooms in with UWA Philosophy Society to deliver a dynamic, stimulating and interesting lecture on Dostoevksy's The Double. Throughout and in the following discussion we talked about AI, personal identity, Christianity and universal salvation. I speak for the class of 2026 when I say that all of us tremendously enjoyed it. Thank you David.

From DBH:

"Inspired by a comic--though also quite serious--article I published about a year ago at Leaves in the Wind (https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com...,) Mackenzie Taylor, on behalf of the Philosophy Club of the University of Western Australia in Perth, invited me to give a talk by Zoom on Dostoevsky's The Double and on whatever reflections the novella had occasioned in me. I delivered the first part of the original piece before taking my talk in a direction of its own. Along the way, both in my address and in the exchanges that followed, we talked about Dostoevsky's text, but also about Kafka's Metamorphosis, Nabokov's Despair, and some of my own travails in being haunted for many years by my own (online) Doppelgänger. We also discussed the age of AI, the question of artificial consciousness, Richard Dawkins's touching romance with Claudia, our shared sense of personal identity in the virtual age, cultural fragmentation, political contentions, the nature and history of nihilism, Russian Orthodoxy, and even theological universal salvation.

By the way, excuse a misstatement: Christ kisses Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor, not the reverse.

It was good of the club to convene on a Saturday morning (though it was still Friday night at my end) and I enjoyed the encounter immensely.

I was saddened to see that my dear friend Byron the Koala was not in attendance, but he lives on the other side of the country, near Sydney, and he warned me he probably would not be able to make it.

C'est la vie."

In this episode, I interview Professor Robert B. Alter.

One of the most influential Hebrew scholars of the century and tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Alter is best known for revolutionizing the scholarly approach to the Bible with his 1981 magnum opus "The Art of Biblical Narrative" and producing a one-man translation of the entire Hebrew Bible from scratch (published 2018).

Alter accepts the "documentary hypothesis" (DH) - a critical approach to the Bible which posits the books are composites stitched from multiple sources - but argued the DH was incapable of providing (and as he explains in the episode, in some cases actively damaging) analytic value to biblical study; advocating instead for a "literary" approach where single authorship is assumed as an analytic strategy to unlock the meaning of the text.

Alter's approach is familiar to traditional Christians and Jews who attribute single authorship to the Pentateuch (and single divine authorship via inspiration to God) - but differ at the axioms, as Christians - such as myself - accept single authorship as a fundamental truth, while Alter views it as a useful fiction/analytic tool.

Alter and I discuss this in the podcast as well as his motivations for working on the Bible, whether he believes in God, the nuance and complexity of Ancient Hebrew, the difficulty of translating it to English, differences in across translations, and how his particular translation overcomes these difficulties. We also discuss the differences between his and Dr. Everett Fox's Hebrew Bible.

References:

Alter, R. (1981). The Art of Biblical Narrative. Basic Books.

Alter, R. (1985). The Art of Biblical Poetry. Basic Books.

Alter, R. (2018). The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. National Geographic Books.

Buber, M., & Rosenzweig, F. (1961). The Hebrew Bible in German.

Fox, E. (1997). The Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Schocken.

Fox, E. (2014). The Early Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: The Schocken Bible: Volume II. Schocken.

Mahaney, M. (2018, December 20). Robert Alter in his office at home in Berkeley, California. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html

Steinberg, A. (2018, December 21). After more than two decades of work, a new Hebrew Bible to rival the King James. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-translation.html

Welcome to Episode 1 of the Reasonable Doubt Podcast.

In this episode, I interview Patrick O’Sullivan – a Perth-based cinematographer and host of the Wandering DP Podcast where he shares cinematography techniques that he uses in his own commercial and narrative work, news and interviews with some of the world’s most well-renowned cinematographers.

Patrick and I take a step in a slightly different direction – as we approach cinematography from a psychological perspective. We discuss the vital role relationships, networking, and communication play in realising an image in the mind on-set. Whilst we do talk filmmaking, the topics discussed in this episode are relevant to a general audience too and given Patrick’s uniquely intuitive understanding of the psychology, I thought he made for an enlightening guest.

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Patrick's website: http://www.patrickosullivandp.com/

The Wandering DP Podcast: https://wanderingdp.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wanderingdp/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingdp

Me:

Instagrams:

Myself: https://www.instagram.com/mack__taylor/,

Podcast: https://www.instagram.com/reason.abledoubt/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556199074484

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC38k7Vz_AzS_mbJik74oPfw

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References:

• Brest, M. (Director). (1998). Meet Joe Black. Universal Pictures.
• Fennell, E. (Director). (2023). Saltburn. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
• Inarritu, A. G. (Director). (2015). The Revenant. Regency Enterprises.

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Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/ReasonableDoubtPodcast