Alex Feinberg: former professional athlete and techie turned trainer

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Alex Feinberg is anything but your typical trainer. An economics graduate from Vanderbilt, Feinberg willed himself to become a professional baseball player through focus and hard work and then talked his way into a sales and business development job at Google. In the late 2010’s Feinberg moved into the crypto space, but found that one precondition to success was having a large Twitter following. So he pivoted and focused on growing his Twitter following, and noticed that his lifestyle tweets, and images of him highlighting his fitness and dietary regime, were the ones that gained traction and got him followers.

Today Razib talks to Feinberg about how he helps people optimize their health, and how that might apply to other aspects of their life, like getting a raise at work through changing your presentation and delivery. Feinberg explains his methods rely on intuition and try to leverage your cognitive biases, as opposed to working against them. Razib probes whether these methods are appropriate for everyone; perhaps there are cognitive and physical parameters that help in terms of optimization. Feinberg admits his techniques are more effective for males than females. For example, it is much easier to gain muscle mass by simply changing nutrition and lifting if you have high testosterone. The Feinberg phenotype is not accessible to all.

Feinberg and Razib also talk about his experiences in the corporate world, in particular at Google. Feinberg claims that in 2011 Google was a much more libertarian company than it was by the time he left in 2018. In particular, Feinberg noticed that many executives and senior managers began to lie and willfully mislead employees in order to scale the corporate ladder. These experiences helped convince him that the corporate world was not for him, and over the last five years, his focus has been on developing independent revenue streams through his coaching, training and books.