The Deserved Downfall of Mike Israetel | Internet Anarchist

0:00If you've ever wanted to see someone's overinflated ego get crushed overnight, then there's no better example than what's happening to Mike is retail right now. He went from raving about how he was the smartest person in the world. I'm both on a raw IQ scale smarter, almost damn free coach, maybe every coach. With an outrageously high IQ, Pegged at scale high, so you get every single question right, and so my IQ is above 160, we don't know how high, because they don't do standardize the Q test above them. To having the documents that form into the foundation of his entire career, be destroyed in a couple of days. Instead, Dealing lasting damage to the glowing reputation he spent his entire life building, and at this point he has no one to blame but himself. He could have avoided this entire controversy by coming clean to his audience,

1:01but his ego and arrogance prevented him from admitting any fault. I guess technically I submitted the wrong to have to be graduate school. And so that's been, you know, being rectified now, but yeah, my PhD was one as a Jair father likes to say, 100% fine, which is a euphemism for it happens, and it was okay. And now he's on the verge of losing his status as one of the most respected fitness coaches in the world, and turning into the laughing stock of the internet. Hi, I'm the internet anarchist, I create weekly YouTube documentaries, and today, we're diving into the monumental embarrassing downfall of Mike Israel. How his life's greatest achievement towards exposed to be a sham, the horrible defancy prepared to try to reclaim it, and how even after coming clean, he's still continuing to lie to everyone. But you know what I'll never lie about wanting you to subscribe, so hit that subscribe button and let's dive right into the video. Though to fully grasp why everyone in the fitness community is so mad at Mike Israel,

2:02we have to understand how he rose to become such a leading authority in fitness in the first place. Mike developed his passion for fitness and bodybuilding during his high school days, when he joined the wrestling team, but not in the way you'd expect. It was actually his frustration with how wrestling was taught that pushed him towards training instead. So how did you get from wrestling and how did you get into bodybuilding? What was that transition? You know, so my wrestling experience wasn't actually great, because we went through a bunch of different coaches, and they didn't super like, they kind of used exercises punishment for us. You know, for some reason I just didn't, I was an exercise addict in training, so I couldn't understand exercises bad. Like I have a full soft school realization early in wrestling, where I was like, okay, if training makes us better, and we want to get better, wouldn't rewarding us with more training be more intelligent than punishing us with more training? This passion turned into an obsession by the time he went to college, with him studying kinesiology at Michigan University, and getting a master's from the Appalachian State University in exercise science.

3:06These qualifications would have been enough for him to easily bag a job as a trainer, or even a professor, but Mike had a site set on a bigger milestone, a doctorate. So he decided to enter into the Sport Physiology PhD program at East Tennessee State University, and after three years of rigorous academic research, he earned his doctorate in 2013, with the dissertation titled, The Interrelationships of Fitness Characteristics in Division I athletes, which compared a total of 80 Division I athletes across four sports on various factors, including strength, power, vertical jump height, and sprint speed. Once completed, the doctorate opened plenty of doors for Mike, allowing him to become a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, and the University of Central Missouri, teaching courses in sports and exercise science. However, Mike wanted to share his expertise with a wider audience, and so, with the help of his old college buddy, Nick Shaw, Mike launched Renaissance periodization,

4:08an online science-based fitness coaching company later renamed to RP Strength, in an effort to boost marketing for his business, Mike also created the RP YouTube channel back in 2012, a decision that ended up changing his life forever. The channel started with fairly generic workout videos, but as he gained more of an audience, he started sharing his expertise and exercise science in these videos as well. It doesn't affect the volume as a little tough to ask to me formally, because we have a book, How Much Should I Train? It's about the training landmarks on RenaissancePriodization.com. It gets very technical about how to find your MEV, and really finding a mirror effect of volume means analyzing an entire several mesocycles of training, where you intentionally train with as little volume as possible, and seeing which volume finally results in no growth. So, if you grow from 14 sets per week, great, if you take it down to 11 sets per week, and you still grow, great, that's definitely 14, was not your minimum effect of, because you're growing from 11. And, because this level of credibility was a rarety and fitness content at the time,

5:11it resulted in more and more people gravitating towards his content. Both beginners and even seasoned pros started seeing him as the foremost fitness authority on the internet, but above all, what really set Micapart was his confidence in his own ability and teachings. So much so that he even critiqued some of the greatest physics in the world, like Ronnie Coleman, the 8th time Mr. Olympia. But, it pays to remember that Ronnie didn't grow basically any muscle like this. He grew it doing more conventional things, like squats for sets of 8 sets of 10, hacks, squats, leg presses, often with a very large range of motion, and multiple sets of those kind of moderate reps. That's how you build muscle. That's how Ronnie did it. That's how grandma did it. That's how grandpa did it. That's how you're going to do it. This sets of two and sets of four in the squat, the deadlift that Ronnie's really really well known for, you can file this under just for swag. This is just live in life and being the man. Confidence like that coupled with his seemingly more intelligent fitness advice,

6:14grew RP to over 3.8 million subscribers, and with RP's success came more success for Mic himself. His label as an exercise scientist, along with the monumental growth of his channel, earned him invitations to some of the biggest podcasts on YouTube. This success continued with the success of his fitness mobile apps, and books, all of which reinforced the idea of him being one of the best fitness experts in the world. However, once you're at the top, often the only way forward is down, which is exactly what happened when Mic became the target of criticism, from another popular fitness expert on YouTube, Greg DuSet. The drama started on the 5th of December 2019, when Greg uploaded a video titled, Jeff Nippard's first Jeff Kabbalair, is volume killing your gains. In it, Greg criticized Jeff Nippard's science-based approach to building muscle, and called it the wrong way to work out, arguing that the average person is better off simply working as hard as they could.

7:16People are lazy, people don't train hard, and so to tell someone to hold back when they're already holding back is Moronic and Astinine. Tell them, work harder, how hard, harder than you work! Now, this video didn't have anything to do with Mic, but being a science-based lifter as well, he was asked about his thoughts on Greg's video, and he did not hold back. I'm pretty sure I saw the entire video, Mike Greg. You never actually answers the question of how much, he just says go harder, and he yells a lot, which is funny, but it's precious little to learn from that, other than go hard, and he may have very good critique, that you people just need to train harder, because this straight is out here, and they may very well be true, it's some people that's true, some people that's not, it's definitely true for a lot of people. But even once you know, okay, I'm fucking training hard, do you do three hard sets, do you do six, do you do nine? Greg, however, wasn't convinced by Mike's take, and just three days after this interview,

8:17he posted another video this time, directly challenging Mike's views. Two things, thing number one, is that coming close to failure, about two to three reps away, if you take the net balance of the evidence, it doesn't seem to provide any more stimulus than going all the way to failure. So they're arguing if going all the way to failure, or if it falls apart right there. Two to three reps shy of failure is close to failure. Come on, no, it's not. Two to three reps shy of failures, a warm upset for this boy. I don't train like a- Greg argued that Mike's comments would be misunderstood by people, to mean that they should take it even easier in the gym than they already do. And despite his explosive delivery, there were many that agreed with him. With comments like, I'm heading back to the gym, I definitely didn't train hard of this morning. Nobody inspires me like you, do Greg, mad respect for you. And you are such a legend, I agree with every single word. I love your approach to training.

9:17Noticing this, Mike decided to take Greg on in a face-to-face debate on the 18th of December 2019, hoping to prove him wrong. But unfortunately for Mike, this backfired big time. An important point to note here is that Greg didn't bring his loud persona to the debate with him. He patiently listened to everything Mike said, and then offered a respectful rebuttal, which looked like it caught Mike off guard, who appeared disinterested, and was even caught yawning throughout their back and forth. As for the debate itself, neither of them budged from their stances, and ended up disagreeing at every turn. Even on things as simple as the definition of training volume. I'm not sure Greg is defining, he's called mathematical volume, it's when you do all the multiplication, sets times reps times weight times distance. And that's a very, very good concept, but I think a slightly one that does a little bit more for us in training is talking about the number of hard sets that you're doing, because the number of hard sets,

10:17as you do anything from five to 30 reps roughly close to failure, it's a roughly effective as far as hypertrophy for all the rep ranges within there, because as the weight goes up, the per repetition stimulus for hypertrophy goes up, but also you have fewer repetitions. However, for most of the people watching, there was a clear winner. Greg, with many people getting put up by Mike's standoffish and this interested attitude, as the top comment under this video stated, Greg left his ego at the door for this one, Mike didn't. What none of the viewers knew at the time was that this was nothing more than a teaser for Mike's, I'm right about everything attitude. The download spiral began in mid-20023, when Mike announced that he'd be getting back into competitive bodybuilding. To get his IFBB pro card, unfortunately, going pro requires the use of steroids, something Mike knew as well, but given his PhD in fitness, people expected him to know how to use them safely,

11:19but even if he wasn't able to regulate his usage and escape the nasty side effects. I don't want to live like that, it's terrible. Violence all the time. This is when Greg picked up Mike's story on his channel once again, and started uploading videos, urging Mike to stop pursuing his dream of going pro at the risk of his health. I have severe anxiety disorder. What this is a side of is some form of a chronic illness. This is not good, it's not healthy, and somebody with all of these health markers combined probably shouldn't be competing. Why is Mike risking his health, risking his life in order to get up on stage?

12:20Though this seemingly genuine concern was also topped off by Greg's signature rage-bait roast sessions. Let's see how those methods actually work, you know, in the real world. Thank you Greg. Is he, in fact, the master trainer that you believe, the master, dieter, or is he just the master baiter? Why do you just work on a lobster ship like Coach Greg? And is, in fact, the master baiter? This continued to July 2024, when Mike announced that he was stepping away from competitive bodybuilding after doing poorly in a competition due to insufficient tanning. Something Greg called him out on as well. After getting into objectively the best shape of my life, I placed out of the top five at my most recent show, in large part, sort of hilariously, because of insufficient tanning. It wasn't a tan. It wasn't a tan. I'm sorry, telling you what you need to hear, we're not what you want to hear. Yeah, I get it. A tan can help, accentuate the definition. But if you're off, if you're soft, if you have ten pounds to lose,

13:23tan can't offset that. For Mike, who was already frustrated from not being able to achieve his goal, this was his last straw. He had finally had enough. So in an interview with Mike Talandar in October 2024 titled, Why Mike Is Retail Hates Greg DuSet, he decided to clap back in the most explosive way possible. Back in the day on Omar Isouf's channel with Greg DuSet, who is a two-faced lying sociopath, sugar. He then went on to explain how Greg tricked him and made him look bad during their first debate. He talked magic in his videos with his fake voice about how stupid I was and how wrong I was about volume or what I was about. And I was like, oh, this guy wants a shot at the title. So when we got face to face in a debate, I mirrored that energy. And he turned off his parrot voice and went straight into nice guy-agreable mode. And almost all the comments were like, oh my god, this Mike guy's a asshole. And this guy just came to the conversation to try to learn. Oh, he didn't.

14:24He's trying to learn. Now, many of Mike's fans praised him for putting Greg in his place. However, what none of them expected was how Mike would continue doubling down on this newfound attitude. After that point, Mike seemed to adopt a, no one is better than me, attitude. He constantly claimed that he was smarter than every other coach. I'm both on a raw IQ scale smarter than... almost a three coach, maybe every coach. And um, I know more about physiology, body responses, etc. than they do. In most cases. Had an IQ of above 160. I've taken the Raven's advanced progressive matrices test, and I pegged at scale high. So you get every single question right. And so my IQ is above 160. We don't know how high because they don't do standardizing Q tests above them. Which again made him better than almost everyone else. And also in every category of behavior, I'm tough at the new. I could print closer to failure than you. I can do it for longer.

15:25I have more willpower than you. I'm just better than you while. And claimed that no one could challenge his methods since no one knew more about fitness than him. If you think you know, you are pursuing, you know, more than me. About the thing I am one of the top experts in the world in, and also the thing I'm literally involved in myself. So whatever ideas you have about how I can improve, just right off. This eager, testicle and brash attitude rubbed many of his supporters the wrong way. With them stating things like, eager is why he hasn't come and shredded at a show. Wow. And Mike has accomplished a lot with YouTube and RP. I do think he is knowledgeable about training, but it cracks me up by how much Mike thinks to himself when it comes to bodybuilding. He knows his body better than anyone else, yet he has been out of shape at every show. Him doubling down on his credentials also made some take a closer look at Dr. Mike's PhD thesis. Just to see if he was actually as credible and intelligent as he claimed to be. What they found was shocking to say the least.

16:26The first to properly review and to present his findings about Mike's thesis was a YouTuber named Solomon Nelson. Who posted a video on the 29th of September 2025 titled, Mike is Retell's PhD, the biggest academic sham in fitness. And as you might be able to judge from the title, he didn't have any good things to say about it, with him going as far as to call his entire thesis, the shallow, sloppy and confused. So naturally when I got my hands on Mike is Retell's PhD thesis, I expected a masterwork and intellectual tour de force. Instead, I have perfectionist appalled with a PhD. Yeah, oh yeah, that's why I say like that. Dr. Mike, geez, that's a big deal. And I've noticed that carried a lot of weight. Like all I feel is rage and frustration. What I got was a document so sloppy, shallow and confused. It could only pass in a system that it already failed. For those who don't know, for a PhD thesis to be accepted,

17:27the research has to offer a significant contribution of knowledge to the field they're working in. And in Mike's case, he completely failed to do that. In fact, all his thesis boiled down to him proving what was already well known at the time. The stated goal of Mike's thesis was to explore interrelationships among fitness variables that he claimed were less clear in the existing literature. However, the core findings that stronger athletes are more muscular and powerful, that more powerful athletes jump higher and sprint faster, and that leaner athletes perform better in these tasks are not only unsurprising, but also extensively documented in prior research, even by 2013. As a commenter puts it, people who are more fit are more athletic. Dr. Mike PhD. But what's ironic is that not even Mike believed any of his findings were original, which is evident from him mentioning and citing multiple studies that had already proven these same findings in his paper.

18:29For instance, in chapter 3, Mike explicitly notes that the finding that stronger athletes produce higher rates of forced development has been previously well supported in the literature, and that the finding of higher power generating abilities being associated with stronger athlete is well supported by previous data. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, because while not being able to come up with a significant contribution is bad enough, not being able to clearly state the results he've achieved, one of the core skills PhD students learn is even worse. Across the thesis, Mike presents impossible and contradictory data, inflates simple points with jargon, and allows hundreds of basic grammatical, typographical, and formatting errors to remain incorrect. He makes careless data entry mistakes in almost every single table in his study, which turned what should be fairly normal values into something that makes little sense.

19:31Thought that for the 20 lowest performers, the mean body masses were 73.9 kilos and 75.3 kilos respectively, with standard deviations of 71.8 kilos. Virtually equal to the means themselves. This is a statistical absurdity. Standard deviation measures the spread of the data around the mean. A standard deviation this large relative to the mean is nonsensical in a biological context. For this to be true given a normal distribution, it would mean that roughly one third of the lowest performing athletes in table 4.6 had a body mass either greater than 145.7 kilos or less than 2.1 kilos. The weight of a newborn. This prompted Solomon to dive deeper and what he found made Mike look like even more of an incompetent fraud. These are numbers so fundamentally wrong that they could only result

20:35from incompetent data entry, which is exactly what happened here. Mike appears to have simply copied the mean figures of the highest performers and pasted them as the standard deviations of the lowest performers. To have made this mistake just once would be damning enough. But Mike makes this exact same error in three separate tables. These mistakes invalidate the entire tables and any conclusions drawn from them. His habit of lazily copy pasting content didn't end there either, as he continued doing so throughout chapters 3, 4 and 5, often without even checking for typos. The method section in chapters 4 and 5, a near verbatim clones of those in chapter 3, reproducing the exact same typos, the exact same formatting mistakes and the exact same structural oversights of which there are many, which is strong evidence that large portions of the thesis

21:39would duplicated wholesale without even a cursory proofread. In some places he even copy pasted the same section twice and somehow both his supervisor and examinar missed it. Mike doesn't just copy past across chapters, he even does it within them. On page 74, the exact same passage appears twice in a row verbatim. Then there's the nonsensical jargon that only makes him look worse. Mike's tendency to overcomplicate sometimes backfires. Consider page 14, where Mike defines fitness characteristics as theoretical constructs that obviate the input of any sport specific technique or psychological variables. Not only is this phrasing clumsy, obviate the input is nonsensical in this context. To obviate means to make unnecessary or to avoid or prevent, but Mike misuses it here to mean something like exclude consideration of.

22:42There were literally dozens upon dozens of errors Solomon pointed out in his video, including basic spelling errors and typos, basic spelling errors everywhere. Mike miss spells the word vertical as vertical or vetrical, individual as individual, properties as proper tights, biomechanics as biomechanians, neural as neural, training as training a girl, science as sense as already noted, and exercise as excess size or exercercise. Forgetting that the spacebar exists, but perhaps the most common mechanical failure in the thesis is Mike's inability or refusal to press the spacebar. Missing spaces between words and after punctuation, a so frequent, it's as if the spacebar was rationed.

23:43There everywhere, by the time you encounter the 100th instance, you're no longer wondering how they slipped through. Your wondering if Mike's keyboard was partially submerged in cement. Reverting the order of a page citation, one reference alone, Kormietl 2010C manages to miss spell science as sense, lists a physically impossible page range, implying that the article ends before it begins, it omits necessary spacing after punctuation, and it inserts a comma before the final period for good measure. This exact citation appears uncorrected on pages 52, 78, and 109. And distorting or misrepresenting the works he cited to prove his point. On page 13, Mike makes two assertions to frame his study. First, that the research on technique and fitness characteristics variables is much less unified than research on psychological variables.

24:47And second, that there is very little information on the fitness characteristic differences between athletes of differing capability. For both claims, he cites two sources. Bumper and half 2010, and a book chapter by his supervisor Mike Stone, because an examination of these sources reveals that they don't support Mike's assertions. Starting with Bumper and half 2010, periodization, theory, and methodology of training, as the title would suggest, it's a book about the long-term cyclical structure of training. It doesn't contain any statement or analysis comparing the relative unity of research across the psychological, technical, and fitness characteristics of athletes. Siding it here is irrelevant at best, and misleading at worst. That said, the blame for this awful thesis can't fall entirely on Mike. It should have never made its past his supervisor let alone the examination committee at East Tennessee

25:50State. The fact that it did doesn't just make the university look bad, it's reflect poorly on the entire field of exercise science. As one commenter puts it, I have a PhD in exercise science, and now I am a professor, and I can tell you, this isn't a Mike Israel problem, it's a the entire field problem. I have seen far worse dissertations pass, even at big universities. However, regardless of who's to blame, for Mike it casts doubt on every claim his ever made about his understanding of exercise science. As a comment under Solomon's video eloquently puts it, Mike's entire thesis can be summarized as error 1 plus error 2 plus error 3 plus error n equals Mike's published thesis. That said, as disastrous as Mike's thesis was, it was his response to the situation that buried any chance of things ending well for him. It started with Mike restricting access to his PhD thesis to only alumni and students of East Tennessee State,

26:52effectively trying to hide the evidence, and then came the excuse, claiming that the PhD thesis Solomon reviewed was the first draft, not the final version. Maybe he was hoping this would make Solomon take down his video, but when that didn't work, he continued doubling down, and showed up on camera to make his point once again. However, he didn't post about it on his own channel like he should have, and instead addressed the matter on Dr. Milo Wolves channel, someone who's been a long time friend of Mike's. This was another red flag, suggesting that he might have been trying to keep the controversy out of sight from most of his audience. In a video titled Dr. Mike's response, the truth about his PhD. Dr. Milo took it upon himself to claim Mike's name. He repeated the point about Solomon reviewing an earlier draft and not the final thesis, and that Mike had actually sent Milo the final draft, which was free of all the errors that Solomon had critiqued. I need to make one thing very clear. The version of Mike's dissertation I reviewed is a much

27:56later draft. This is the document Mike himself saved, defended, and sent to me, and he corrects many of the typos and inconsistencies that Solomon highlighted in his video. Through no one's fault in particular, and that appears to be the version Solomon accessed. But one thing is certain, the document Solomon reacted to was not the latest version that was actually examined and passed. And that's the smoking gun. If there's one thing universities never get wrong, it's the name of their own department. In other words, Solomon wasn't even reviewing the defended archive dissertation. The video also included an interview with Mike where he took some responsibility for uploading the wrong draft to the university's database. We now know Solomon was looking at an accidentally uploaded incorrect rough draft. So I'll say this, I don't blame him for going hard on it because he is every reasonable idea to think this was the final draft. We have the final draft now in the link here. And so most of his critiques are just non-starters because the final

28:56just doesn't have most of those problems. Milo then ended the video by hinting at Solomon not being the best judge of Mike's thesis since he's been quite biased against Mike in many of his other videos. And when you look at the broader context, the pattern becomes clear. To date, Solomon has made more than 10 videos about Mike. That's over 13 hours of content targeting a single person. Topics range from two hour collaborations, critiquing Mike's bodybuilding performance, to hour long reactions to his surgery. To videos like this one, attacking his academic record. A quick look at his views on videos where he features Mike versus his non-Mike content shows an enormous discrepancy in his views. When one person becomes your channel's most reliable source of outrage, views and income, it raises the question of noted. Unfortunately for Milo and especially Mike, people did not buy any of it, with comment as stating, how exactly can that paper be in the official university database and only be the first draft? Makes no sense. No one puts drafts in official databases. The moment you said that,

29:58I knew it was just a lie's meant to cover your friend and nothing more. Trust me, bro, and earlier draft was published in multiple official locations, bro. Here is a Google drive link to the final version with the metadata stripped, bro. I totally wrote this version in 2013, bro. I would never feed my original into a large context AI window and frantically edited to try and fool you, bro. And as many people looked into it, it didn't take long for them to find proof debunking their entire defense. Like how the paper that Milo presented as the final version was dated March 2013, where a Solomon's version was dated August 2013. To add to that, a viewer was also able to catch an edit made by ETSU, most likely short for East Tennessee State University on the 3rd of October 2025, despite Milo claiming that Mike had never even watched Solomon's video. For context, Mike hasn't even watched Solomon's video. He doesn't respond to this kind of content as a matter of principle. But the real kicker was that the Google doc linked in the video's

31:02description as the final version wasn't owned by Milo or Mike. Instead, the owner was listed as Pippix Continator at gmail.com, which turned out to be a digital marketing agency. Along with this clear evidence of the documents being tempered with, there were plenty of other instances in the video that raised some eyebrows. Like both Mike and Milo downplaying the value of a PhD. And still the PhD isn't some kind of proof of your superiority. It is step one in an academic research career, which most people don't even know of taking. That's my PhD. It's a mediocre, step one to giving me a PhD and not much more than that. Never claimed that it was much more than that. Mike trying to deflect from the real issue. I just want to be really clear about something. There's a very, very important to people to him. I had many conversations with Stephen Hawking himself with him and I were in the waiting room at Epstein's Island. Now I know that sounds crazy, but he was really excited to be there. He just wanted to talk physics. And even trying to laugh at the situation. I guess technically I submitted the wrong to have to be graduate school.

32:06And so that's been being rectified now. But yeah, a PhD was one as a Jared father likes to say, 100% fine, which is a euphemism for it happened and it was okay. The backlash from these findings forced Mike to switch from defense to damage control, admitting that quote, the dissertation Solomon examined was indeed the correct document. But once again, downplayed his critiques by labeling them as clerical errors, which only included a misplaced negative sign on a few correlations, and a table-pasting misalignment repeated across three tables. Unsurprisingly, most of the comments on that post flat out refused to believe a word Mike was saying. But what is surprising is that at least for now, he seems to have come out of the controversy completely unscathed. Not only has his channel avoided losing subscribers, it's actually gained some. His strategy of not addressing the matter in his main channel seemed to have worked exactly as planned. Not to mention, the viewers who consider this whole thing to be

33:07nothing more than pointless internet drama. However, while Mike's numbers will likely remain intact for the time being, this controversy will leave a lasting mark on his reputation and legacy, especially after how he tried to discredit Solomon, and even threw his friend Milo under the bus. All he had to do was own up to the mistakes he made 12 years ago, but with how he reacted, these mistakes are now likely to follow him for the rest of his career, giving people ammunition to discredit him whenever they want. That said, this is still a developing situation and there could be updates in the future, so stay tuned if you want to know if Mike manages to fall any lower than he already has. In the meantime, check out our coverage of another fitness influencer who had a spectacular fall from Grace.