Fitness, Motivation, Mentorship, and Life's Calling ｜ @MorePlatesMoreDates ｜ EP 421 (dp3pCrgi_Vc)

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Hello everyone. I’m pleased to announce my new tour for 2024. Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I and an assortment of special guests are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I’ve been working on. My forthcoming book out November 2024, We Who Wrestle with God. I’m looking forward to this. I’m thrilled to be able to do it again and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye. It’s interesting because I hear entrepreneurs speak of this often how if you want to stand out, you know, be willing to work for free or show some value that you’re trying to make an offering. Yeah and while that is common advice, I actually see a shockingly few amount of people actually go out and implement it and even when they do, the way they go about it is often wrong in my opinion. If you want something from someone, you should put yourself in a position where the easiest thing for them to say is yes. Hello everybody. Today I have the opportunity to speak with Derek, social media influencer, Canadian social media influencer. There are a few of us. He runs a YouTube website, a famous one, More Plates, More Dates. He’s also a serial entrepreneur who runs three companies, Merrick Health, which is an organization that I use, Gorilla Mind and Intelligent Shop. And so what did we discuss? Well, we discussed how Derek transformed himself and made himself successful over a multi-year period but really starting intensely in 2016. How he became a blogger, how that transformed into a YouTube career, how that rearranged his relationships with women and with people in the social environment more generally, how that opened up the marketplace for him, how that helped him become financially successful to look for entrepreneurial activities and what that meant for him psychologically and interpersonally and financially. And on the way we talk about issues pertaining to men’s mental and physical health on all sorts of different fronts, most particularly because this is where Derek started with regard to the facilitation of performance and physical fitness but also with forays into the broader issues of motivation, enthusiasm and confidence. And so join us for that. Well, thanks very much for coming in today. Yeah, absolutely. You flew in from Vancouver. Yep. And that’s where you’re based? Yeah, born and raised. So why don’t you start by telling everybody who’s watching and listening what you’re up to and how you got to the place that you are. So we’ll start with that. Imagine that people don’t know anything about you. Let’s start with that. Okay, my name is Derek and I guess most people know me from my YouTube channel, MorePlatesMoreDates. It started back in 2016. I went to a university in British Columbia, did an undergrad in business administration and kind of irrelevant and useless for what I’m doing now. But that was my beginnings. And through that, I thought I was going to become an accountant or some typical business oriented position, downtown Vancouver or something of that nature. And I was actually bouncing downtown and I got injured. And while I was injured, I started writing blog articles online about my fitness journey, I suppose, because I was very into bodybuilding at a young age, and essentially enthralled in the science of human optimization and biology. And through that, I had accumulated a decent amount of knowledge at that point that I felt useful enough to impart to whoever was interested in reading. And at the time, WordPress blogs were actually a fairly reasonable way of getting information out there. So I started writing on a blog, MorePlatesMoreDates.com. And it was essentially named after, at the time, in my early 20s, something that was catchy, memorable, encompassed what I felt my content oriented around at the time, self improvement, fitness, etc. And as it went on, it sort of evolved into a pretty, uh, it was snowballing in popularity, especially the YouTube channel, as I started to accumulate more viewers. And when did the channel start? March 2016. 2016. And how long after the blog, how long after you began the blog was that? So technically, I started the blog in March, I believe, and I probably waited about a month or two to publish my first YouTube video, or it might have been a couple months before that. It’s actually, I don’t remember the exact date of my first article, but they’re pretty close together in time. Yeah, essentially, I had somebody who was at the time, you know, a big name in the like, Manosphere, Red Pill community, who’s like a self improvement guy, tell me you should be publishing everywhere, which was good advice, even at the time, too. Who was that? His name was Victor Pride. It was like a fake pseudonym. Yeah, Victor Pride. That’s pretty good. All right. So he was pretty popular at the time. And he said, you should be publishing everywhere. Why aren’t you? Why do you listen? Because he was successful and see. Yeah, but that doesn’t answer the question, because lots of people are successful, and they will tell people what to do or suggested or offer an example. But that doesn’t mean people listen. Yeah. Right. So, so, okay, you recognized his success. He was a trusted authority in the niche that I was publishing him. So for me, the path forward, it seemed most reasonable to replicate a blueprint set by those that have shown it to be whatever they did a successful path themselves. So why do you think? Okay, so fair enough. That’s a good answer. And efficiency, because writing is just infinitely more time consuming than YouTube. Yeah. Right, right, right. Okay, okay. So, so now you got good advice from someone who hypothetically knew what they were doing. But one of the things I’ve noticed that constitutes an impediment for people when they hope to progress is that they won’t swallow evidence of their own stupidity and move because to pay attention to something like that, you have to make allowance for the fact that you’ve actually run into someone who knows more than you do. And people will often offer lip service to that. But that doesn’t mean they’ll actually pay attention. So what do you think it was that made you sufficiently motivated to now you said, you know, there was an efficiency issue with YouTube, you’re obviously interested in this topic. But, but you, but you put everything into practice and relatively rapidly. So any internal obstacles to that? Or were you just enthusiastic and gung ho to go? And if you were, why were you? I suppose I had an inordinate amount of free time on my hands because of my injury at the time. So to me, it felt like I was doing myself a disservice by not publishing on every medium by which I could get the most eyeballs on it. And I had a sense of impending, like, traffic bottleneck when it comes to blogging. So as we’ve seen more recently, anyone who essentially stayed on just written articles only has more or less been phased out of relevancy and is not able to get the same eyeballs they once did on the internet. Yeah, well, the online communication environment is very dynamic. And not only do you have to be good at it, but you also have to stay on the cutting edge. And the search engines are so manipulated that it’s very difficult if you don’t want to play the game as to how you even stay ranked for certain things. Right, definitely. Yes, and that’s becoming more and more opaque. And that will continue to become more and more opaque, right, and invisible until the people who are doing it won’t even know what they’re doing. Yeah, it’s wild because Google, you would think with their super refined algorithms, would be able to at least identify with some semblance of accuracy what is the most credible sources of information. But you will, at least what I was noticing even at the time, and this is still the case today, blogs that had, for example, domain ratings that were seen as high authority because they had backlinks from certain places that were also seen as high authority, you could instantly rank for terms that you were not an expert in and you’re basically lying to your audience. You could say whatever you wanted, as long as you had a couple backlinks from a .gov, a Wikipedia, a whatever, these things would prop you up so much. Yeah, and then people would buy these sites too, totally flip the content and get ranked instantly for something they’re selling you that is unethical, high ticket, whatever. It’s very hard for people to stay ahead of the really malevolent psychopaths. Yeah, it’s an arms race always. Now, you said that you had taken a business administration degree and that you were aiming at being an accountant. Okay, this is quite different from being an accountant. Aiming because I didn’t really know, it’s not like I sought after it because it was my dream job. So why did you do it? It was just at the time what felt to be the most appropriate avenue given I was quite unsure of what my path forward would be. I just knew business was likely the degree that resonated with me the most. Okay, so you had some low resolution sense that you at least wanted to operate in a business environment. But there’s a big difference between accounting and managerial function like that and the more entrepreneurial function that you ended up adopting. Did you not know when you started down your education road that were you not able to distinguish between the entrepreneurial route and the managerial route? And I’m asking this partly because you made a point of pointing out that the education that you received has almost no bearing on what you’re doing now. And so is that actually true? Was university good for you? And how did you, you said the injury put a lot of free time on your hand. So how did you persist through your degree? How did you realize that wasn’t for you? And where did the interest that did eventually guide you bubble up from? I know it was associated with the injury and you’re working out. So when I was going to school, there are multiple different sub-disciplines of the business administration degree at the university and you could do marketing, you could do one of them is entrepreneurship. But at the time, I had entrepreneurial tendencies, but I certainly had no conception of how to go about starting a business. If it was viable and feasible, like it just seemed like businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors existed, but there was no real segue that I could even conceptualize in my mind as to how I go from A to B. It was just like these people must have been given the business by their parents or they had some inordinate amount of money that I would never attain in order to start it. So I just never really even thought about it with any level of depth. So to me, on a surface level, I thought, okay, I’m going to go work downtown for some big company and be their accountant or maybe specialize further and be a forensic accountant or something. So it was partly because there was a defined pathway. Yeah, I work very well with concrete goals. So for me, if there’s no clear path forward, it becomes very difficult to go step by step and actually check the boxes and get that reassurance and reinforcement that what I’m doing is correct. And this is sort of why I resonated with the guy who told me about publishing online and all the different platforms and also my current business partner or one of them, he was a popular influencer, I guess at the time, which back then proportionally, it’s actually not that long ago, but he had, I think 40,000 subscribers on YouTube and he was one of the go-to main sources of information for self-improvement and being able to speak articulately with women that you just met and all these things that were highly aspirational traits of somebody who’s a teenager who is relatively unsuccessful in all areas of life and I’m still getting into this and understanding what it takes to be a high performing or high value man, as they put it nowadays. So how did you stumble onto the realization that that’s actually what you wanted? I mean, the title of your blog and your YouTube channel points to that. I mean, obviously, more dates has something to do with it, but do you have any idea when you made the decision that it was a pathway of success that you wanted to walk down? I mean, you obviously went off to college, you went off to university to pursue that route. Do you remember, where did you grow up? Vancouver, British Columbia. Did most of your friends go off to university? Um, I would say about 50-50. Okay, okay. Were you an ambitious teenager? Yes. In what way? I think this is pretty typical, but a lot of people have this underlying feeling that they’re destined for more than what they are currently doing and there’s just something they’re missing that is the missing piece to solving that equation to set them on the right path and I always felt that piece was missing in my life to really guide me forward on what I actually should be doing. Maybe that’s not as common as I think, but I feel like a lot of people could. No, I think that’s the voice that calls people out of the safety of their photos tent into the world, right? If you pay attention to it, that’s the voice of adventure. That’s what people used to call a calling, right? Yes. It’s a very strange thing because a calling has an independent, it’s like an independent spirit because you have to act in cooperation with it. It’s like an agreement. It’s like a covenant. That’s how it used to be described. That’s how it’s described biblically. Something calls to you and you don’t exactly get to pick what that is. Like you can say no, you can avoid it, you can take a different path, but it isn’t obvious to me at all that what interests us is within our control and that’s a very strange thing, right? Because it indicates that there’s something like an autonomy that’s operating in what calls us. You can think the same way about conscience. Things you do that you might want to do will still bother you and you might think, well, if your conscience is you, then why can’t you just tell it what to tell you and end of problem? And well, part of the answer is it wouldn’t be much of a conscience if that was the case, but even more fundamentally that points to the operation of something that’s independent within your psychological landscape. So one of the things you see in traditional stories is the interplay of two things that guide people forward. There’s calling and so that’s the voice that you just described. So in the story of Abraham, for example, the biblical story of Abraham, Abraham’s about 75 when the story opens and he’s from a very wealthy and privileged background and he has no reason to do anything because everything that he could have is already at his hand and a voice comes to him and says you have to leave all this, you have to go out into the world and have your adventure, you have to get beyond your infantile security and dependence, even if it’s providing for you everything you might need out into the world and he follows that voice and it leads him into all sorts of catastrophe. Like it’s not a story without its ups and downs after that. It’s not an uphill trek towards ever increasing paradises, right? It’s it’s war and famine and starvation or war and famine and betrayal and the necessity of sacrifice, all the things that are terrible about life. So that voice that you said or that sense that you had when you were a kid, I think that’s in every kid that hasn’t had it thrashed out of them by through one means or another, tyrannical father or over intrusive mother, those are the most common crushing elements, let’s say. And then the other thing that you’ve pointed to, which is the desire to be attractive to women, that’s a major motivator for men and it’s partly because the biggest predictor of male success on the mating front is socioeconomic success. And the reason for that seems to be that women are attempting in some ways to level the economic playing field, right? Because pregnancy, childbirth, all of that, child care is very hard on them economically and so they’re looking for someone to split the load, let’s say, or share the opportunity. That’s another, that’s a much more positive way of thinking about it. So I think that voice is common, although I think we’re doing everything we can in our culture to squelch it, but it wasn’t squelched in you. And then you said you didn’t exactly know how to implement it, right? You went off to business school and that wasn’t exactly right. You had some sense that the right pathway forward, or the only pathway forward that you could see that was outlined was more conventional, right? So it’d be university education and then a job and a college. But then you got hurt and that’s interesting, right? Because that’s kind of a catastrophe. And yet, in that catastrophe was an opportunity. And the catastrophe produced for you a lot of excess free time. That’s a good deal if you can figure out how to use it. So how did you figure out what to do with that free time? And why did you turn to writing? Like, had you been a writer? Yeah, so fortunately, and this is partly why I think having a blueprint of sorts, at least for my, I don’t know, the way I orient my goal setting and whatnot was useful for me is one of my current business partners, he was at the time one of the forefront influencers of the manosphere, whatever niche. And I followed his content pretty closely while I was in university. And he had an online forum where young guys would log their self-improvement journeys and whatnot and keep themselves accountable. And over time, he had kind of taken note of my knowledge or and rigor in researching topics that I was very interested in, including but not limited to supplementation, human biology, performance enhancements, preventative medicine. And through that, I was afforded a business opportunity to actually work for him on the side as a blog writer slash customer service slash like all around, basically assistant for his current right. So you have a mentor there. Yeah, that’s a big deal. And I had been getting like pseudo mentored, I guess through his content for years. Right. Okay, so let’s talk about his content. You pointed to a few things you said it was associated with the manosphere. We can talk about what that means as well. And that you were perusing the online forums and also tracking people’s self-improvement journeys and you found something compelling in that. Yeah, and tracking my own as well. Okay, so you know, I just talked to Jaco Willink, I haven’t released that podcast yet. And I’ve talked to Jaco a couple of times. And you know, one of the things he discovered, which I thought was really fascinating, because Jaco is quite the bloody monster, you know, he knows perfectly well that with a couple of bad decisions, he could have been quite the quite the terrifying guy. I mean, he’s still a terrifying guy, but for good, you know, thank God for that. And he said that one of the things he discovered when he went into the military was that attracted as he was by the thought of mayhem and trouble, he found himself even more attracted by the fact that he had the opportunity to mentor other to mentor men who are younger than himself, and to guide them on a pathway of improvement. You know, then that that same pathway that you said called to you when you were a teenager, and that was really, in part what civilized him, right, because it he found something so compelling in that that that was more interesting than anything else he could manage, you know, and one of the things I really loved about being a clinical psychologist, and I still am a clinical psychologist for now, and also being a professor was that opportunity to, to guide my undergraduate students, my clients, my graduate students, there’s something I think what that is, it’s a it’s a generalized manifestation of the instinct for fatherhood, right? It’s something like that. And that’s a very profound instinct. The race, the species wouldn’t survive without that instinct. Obviously, the paternal instinct is just, it’s more subtle in some ways, and somewhat less targeted than the maternal instinct. But we wouldn’t have children with dependency periods of 18 years if that wasn’t a very powerful instinct. Okay, so you could imagine that call to adventure made it manifest in your life when you were a teenager, then, you know, you got a little older, and you could see that when you were in places where other people were pursuing that there was something about that that was that gripped you. Okay, now the writing bit that’s because writing is a difficult enterprise, like do you do you think you had a facility for it, writing per se, or do you think you were just so compelled by your interest in these things that we’ve been laying out that you were willing to learn to write to to manage that? I suppose a hybrid of both. In hindsight, my writing was not as great as I thought it was at the time. But similar to I think any content creator, if you look at your first piece of content versus current, the way you present yourself is significantly different. Well, hopefully, hopefully, you’ve learned anything. Yeah. So back then, though, my business partner, Chris, who had written multiple articles and published videos, his primary way of funding his entrepreneurial endeavors at the time was through his blog articles he was writing and essentially recommending products that he already used. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like leaving your keys in your car while you run into the gas station for a snack. On most occasions, you’re probably fine. But what if you come back to see someone driving off with your car? Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels or airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your personal data. 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Okay, so you’re writing, you’re starting to write and you’re starting, you’re being mentored at the same time and you’re writing about topics that interest you and you’re weaving into that the economic opportunity that’s associated with blogging. How is it that you, tell me how it is that you actually start writing? Like imagine that a lot of the people are listening who are looking for something like a step-by-step pathway. It’s difficult to discipline yourself to write. And so, and the educational pathway that you picked wasn’t necessarily writing intensive. So what psychological obstacles did you have to overcome to get yourself to sit down and write regularly? You know, I remember when I started to write, one of the things that happened on a pretty regular basis was when I sat down, I would think, well, I have other things to do. This isn’t a very good day for this. I don’t really have anything to say. No one’s going to pay any attention to this anyways. What the hell are you doing? That’s about, and then those things would plague me for a fair bit. But then I found over time, if I just sat through that, the amount of time those ideas plagued me shrunk, even though the intensity didn’t. And then eventually the intensity shrunk. And after a number of years of practicing, I could, unless I was tired, I could just sit down and get to it, right? Took a long time to organize myself to manage that. So those are typical impediments plucking. Plus not knowing anything is also an impediment. So when you first started to write, tell me how you learned to write. Well, the way you write in WordPress blogs for SEO was not the same as English in university, for example, it was a lot different. So a lot of the writing was essentially keyword written, just verbage that I would say to a friend in general about the same advice I’m imparting, but with keywords intertwined and sub categorization of them to be very reader friendly. So you were very conscious about the relationship between your writing and the probability that it would get distributed online. Yeah, the primary concerns for me at the time were similar to you. Is it a good use of time? Are people going to read it, et cetera? Fortunately, and this is where I think having good mentors comes into play. If it hadn’t been for Chris having essentially built a successful path for somebody starting from scratch on a WordPress blog, I wouldn’t have thought it would be a good use of time either that would actually lead anywhere significant. But I had seen the success he had with it, how many people he was able to reach, including myself and influence my life so significantly that it really inspired me to do it as well and figured, hey, I have as valuable of information and these certain disciplines of fitness, diet, nutrition, performance enhancement, preventative medicine that it’s useful and worthwhile to pursue. So I guess the main obstacles were technological savvy, starting a WordPress blog as easy as it is. Sites aren’t as visually friendly and user friendly for somebody to set up as they were as they are now. Back then, they were quite intensive where you’d just to move something around, you might need an actual developer to come in and code something just to put a specific header on your title page or something. It was brutal. So visually very unappealing, very primitive looking blogs, but the information was good. So, okay, so let’s concentrate on that. I mean, one of the things that’s permanently and intractably annoying online are content mills. So you could imagine that, and this is the case whenever you’re producing anything creative, there’s a balance between the quality of the production and the necessity of communicating it. And you can have a very high quality production and get nowhere. And you can have no content whatsoever and get somewhere. Those would be the two extremes. And just a content mill, you know, those sort of sites you go to where they break up the essay into paragraphs that are like three sentences long and put 50 ads between each. Yes, those goddamn places just drive me mad. They’re definitely run by like narcissistic psychopaths. And they pollute the informational environment, and that’s going to get way worse with AI. But you took, this is not a criticism, by the way, and I’ll explain why. You took some steps in that direction because you were very conscious of how the words you were using were likely to be picked up by the algorithms that communicated what you were writing. And then while you were talking, you redeemed yourself right away by saying, but the information was valuable. It’s like, okay, so for everyone watching and listening, if you’re artistically oriented, for example, a lot of artists stab themselves in the heart at the beginning of their career by adopting this pseudo moral framework of, well, I’m not going to sell out. It’s like, well, first of all, buddy, who’s asking you? You know, if you have an offer of a million dollars in hand and you decide that for artistic reasons, you’re going to reject it, and that’s not just a form of egotism, like more power to you, but you don’t get to brag about how you didn’t sell out before someone actually asks you to. And then the second thing is that’s a stupid attitude anyways, because it shows a certain contempt for your audience is that if you can’t communicate about what you’re doing in a manner that people find attractive and that’s accessible, you might as well be alone in the dark for the rest of your life, because no one’s going to know what you’re doing. And so there is a balance. I watched the Elvis movie recently, which I really, really liked, and I thought it toyed with this problem extremely interesting because you had Elvis who obviously had content. I mean, he was quite the charismatic genius and revolutionary in his ability to meld the sounds of black music in the US with, you know, the emerging white rock and roll market. And then you have his promoter and his promoters, you know, a bit of a shady character, but the balance they struck was unbelievably effective because Elvis had a stellar career, you know, and you could argue that his promoter took advantage of him. And I think at times likely did, but you can’t argue with the overwhelming and revolutionary success of the entire endeavor. And so you’ve got this tight balance to maintain and you want to have integrity of content, but you can’t sacrifice the willingness and the ability to communicate. That has to be integrated. And I would say for the artistic types, especially that are listening, and for those who might be otherwise stymied by their own integrity, you should take the problem of how to optimize your content production and to communicate it. Think about that as a creative problem in and of itself. Now you, you, I haven’t looked into search engine optimization and that sort of thing much. You don’t want it. Yeah. Well, that doesn’t mean that my staff hasn’t. Right. And so we’re very attuned to the necessity of staying on the cutting edge of the communication platforms. You can’t have contempt for your audience. And if your respect for your audience is also aligned with your desire to broaden your, your influence, and also to increase your financial opportunity, then that’s a nice alignment of motivation. Right. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If you get everything in its proper place. Okay. So you were writing, now you said you had valuable content and you started to realize that you could produce information that was as valuable as that, which was being offered by people who are already successful. Okay. How did you develop that ability and, and why, and how did you come to that realization? So I suppose one of my greatest assets is when I become interested in something, I become enthralled in it to where I want to learn as much as I can to be taught 0.01% in knowledge and that specific discipline. So in those exact topics I was talking about, I was just so hyper interested in them that I was currently researching them heavily, but I’d also been previously for over half a decade, perhaps seven, eight years at that point. So for me, it felt like I had some sort of life experience that was worth actually writing about and had been in the trenches and done certain things that were of value rather than just regurgitating. And they were genuine. Yeah. Right, right, right. Okay. So that’s very cool. All of that. So we did a study with this program called self-authoring, a part of it called future authoring. It helps, it has people develop a vision for their life. So to do that, you, you think five years down the road and you imagine like, honestly, if you were taking care of yourself, what could your life be like if it was the way you would like it to be? Right. And that’s a vague and complex question. And so we also break it down for people. What would your intimate relationship look like? Friendships, business, educational opportunities, how would you take care of yourself mentally and physically? How would you use your free time, so-called free time most productively? How might you serve other people? Right. So more differentiated. Okay. So now we had students do this program for 90 minutes, no coaching, nothing. No one ever looked at what they wrote before they went off to university. And also when they were in university, if they completed that rather than a writing exercise of equivalent length, they were 50% less likely to drop out in the first year, 50 bloody percent. Right. Now the biggest effect, this is where it’s really cool. The biggest effect was on in young men. It was, and the biggest effect was in young men who had a not so stellar academic career. Right. Right. So, and you might imagine that part of the reason they were underperforming, I mean, there’s intellectual reasons for underperformance and there’s reasons of discipline, but one of the reasons was they didn’t, they weren’t, they had no compelling reason to do anything. Right. Now I think it’s a truism for men that they won’t do a bloody thing until they find something that calls. Now women, like they’re propelled along their developmental path by biological necessity in a way that men aren’t. It’s like you better have your act together by 30 when you’re a woman, because otherwise you’re in trouble. You’re a man, you can monkey around till you’re Abraham’s age, like 75 and you’re still not scraped off the planet. You know, so, but, but you know, you said you, you hit a gold mine in some ways. And then what else you said that was cool was that, see, it was also dependent to some degree on your genuine knowledge, not just some abstract knowledge is you’d already disciplined yourself in a variety of manners that you could describe. If I’ve got this right, that was helpful. So let’s, let’s delve into that a little bit. So, okay. So now you’ve got, you’ve got business partners, you’ve got a plan to move forward. That’s it on the writing front. And then you start making YouTube videos, you’ve got some mentors. So these are good ways to start a business, right? Find someone who knows how to do it and, you know, see if you can latch yourself onto them in some manner that’s mutually productive and learn. Okay. And then you could dive into your own experience. Okay. So what did you know, how old were you when you started the blog? 23. Okay. So pretty young. So what did you know at that time that you felt was worth sharing that other people obviously appreciate it? And, and how did you manage to build up that body of knowledge? In general, it was my transformation from being what I deemed to be essentially, you wouldn’t even perceive that I exercise when I was probably 16, 15 years old. I was a rail like 138 pounds, had no muscles to speak of. One of the thinnest kids on my basketball team. How tall were you? Six, one. Oh yeah. That’s about exactly the size I was when I started weightlifting size and weight. Yeah. Yeah. So pretty sad. How much could you bench press when you started? Not even the bar. Oh, that’s worse than me. That’s really sad. I could manage 75 pounds, but it was a struggle. Yeah. So for me, I had gone from, you know, benching less than a girl to being able to do reasonable feats in the gym and be what would be considered to be a good physique to 99% of people, essentially, even in the fitness industry. And when did you start that? Probably around 17. Okay. And how did, okay, how did that come about? Primarily through my friends who were all in the gym and making progress. And I was the only one who was only playing basketball and not in the gym. Right. So, and you were also on a basketball team. So you had that in on the athletic side. Yeah. Yeah. See, I didn’t play sports much when I was a kid, partly because I skipped a grade. So I was younger than my peers. That put me at a disadvantage. So one of the things you see, for example, is NHL stars are way likely to be the oldest kids in their class. Like being older, that’s a, it’s a huge advantage on the athletic front to be even a year older and a huge disadvantage to be a year younger. Anyways, I didn’t have the impetus of team sports participation until I went off to graduate school. And that’s because I started playing team sports then. And that’s also when I started to work out. Okay. So you, you, you had, again, that’s good, good indication of the importance of your peer network and your mentoring group. You had people around you who were doing this and you could see success on their side. So you went off to the gym. What was it like to go to the gym when you first started to go? Like the first couple of weeks, you’re essentially a cripple because you’re so sore. But this is like, it’s when you have a virgin muscle because you work it out and it feels like you’ve been destroyed. But after a while you start to adapt and you start to see the scale climbing, especially as a good positive reinforcement that you visually see. Even if in the mirror, I’m not perceiving insane amounts of progress. I can see metrics of change on a numbers basis too, that are representing progress. And clearly the strength numbers are changing because on a long-term basis. Yeah. So that’s an advantage of weightlifting because it gives you those objective metrics very quickly. Because if you just go by the mirror, it’s very easy to get discouraged because it takes years to go from what appears to be untrained to somebody who, oh, that guy is jacked. So for me, a lot of it was like positive peer pressure, I suppose, in that my friends were all doing it and I felt kind of like left out if I didn’t. Weak and useless and isolated. Yeah. Plus unattractive. Yeah. That’s a bad combination. Just by association, I started to go and saw pretty fast results. And to me, that was enough to get, you know, bit by the iron bug is what they call it, where you’re so, you become addicted to the results and maybe addicted is too strong of a phrase, but like you really enjoy the process. It’s a habit anyways. Yeah. Yeah. It’s integrated into your life. Yeah. So I had a really positive experience. And for me, it just consumed such a large part of my life learning about it and educating myself to the extreme degree, even on the performance enhancement side, that it felt worthwhile to start writing about what I had learned to date. And perhaps at the time, like I think my knowledge now compared to then it was a semblance then of it is that it is now, but back then it felt still valuable enough and worthwhile. And I guess proportionally to the concentration of content online at that time was still like top, whatever percent. Well, the thing is too, you know, no matter where you are in your stage of development in relationship to a goal, there are people who are behind you, you know? And so even if you don’t know everything and you’re still somewhat even simple minded in your approach, that might be exactly what the people who are in even worse shape than you need to hear. Like I always knew it was often the case when I was lecturing as a professor that it was the easiest time for me to lecture was when I was just learning the material. Cause by the time you get to be an expert at something, you forget what people don’t know. Right. Right. And then that’s exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. So the reason I’m highlighting that is because, you know, people who are listening might think, well, I don’t know anything. I mean, in regard to themselves, maybe in regard to me too, but that doesn’t mean that the place you’re currently standing isn’t worth describing and sharing because it could be extremely useful for people for whom you’re in their zone of proximal development. So one of the things kids do that’s very interesting, when kids mature, they’ll often pick a friend that’s slightly older than them, someone they look up to, but they tend to pick a person like that who is doing things they could conceivably do. You know, so like a three-year-old isn’t going to hero worship at like a 14 year old, cause the gap is too great, but he might develop a tremendous admiration for the four-year-old down the street, you know, who’s got a little bit more physical skill. It’s in his zone of proximal development. And as a teacher, that’s the zone you should inhabit. And that’s a very wide zone, depending on the people that you’re interacting with. So, so it’s reasonable to have some confidence in your own knowledge, if you’ve actually come by it, you know, honestly, let’s say. That’s likely a big component of what motivated me to pursue the whole thing to begin with too, is because Chris, similar to I was kind of a, at the time, a bodybuilder meathead kind of guy who I deemed to be not outside the realm of my sphere of interest and had what was a higher level of education at the time and success, but it was within like the proximal range of achievement for what I could conceive I could get to. And what he had accomplished was very impressive and something I wanted to achieve myself. Once your business gets to a certain size, cracks start to emerge and things you used to do in a day are now taking over a week. If this is you, then you need to check out NetSuite. 37,000 businesses have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. NetSuite turns 25 this year. That’s 25 years of helping businesses do more with less. They can help you close your books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. Because your business is one of a kind, you get a customized solution for all of your key performance indicators in one efficient system with one source of truth. NetSuite will help you manage risks, get reliable forecasts, and improve margins. I cannot stress enough that you will have everything you need to grow all in one place with NetSuite. Right now, download NetSuite’s popular KPI checklist, designed to give you consistently excellent performance for absolutely free at netsuite.com slash jbp. That’s netsuite.com slash jbp to get your own key performance indicator checklist. Again, that’s netsuite.com slash jbp. So that’s interesting in relationship to choice of mentor, because you might want to think you want to work for the highest achieving guy in the world, but maybe you don’t. Maybe you want to write exactly. If it’s outside your atmosphere and you’re working for some celebrity, you’re never going to take takeaways that are significantly relevant to your current state and time. And perhaps that was a big component as well is I didn’t really log like vlogging necessarily on YouTube, but people can absolutely see my development in real time as I publish content. So perhaps following my education along, as I educated myself similar to what you mentioned was a big factor that. So what did you have? Okay, so I’m thinking of this Acton Academy. It’s a school that helps people develop their own self motivation, let’s say. And one of the exercises that the Acton Academy has, it’s very young people do, like 12 years old, is identify a domain of business that they might be interested in pursuing. And then writing a letter to someone in that business, attempting to describe to that person why entering a mentoring relationship with them would be useful, right? Would be interesting and useful. And so you can imagine that helps the kids learn to write a letter like that and to think that through. But also one of the things you want to do if you’re looking for a mentor and figuring out how to develop yourself is to find someone who can teach you. But you can’t just go begging for that. Yeah, there has to be a quid pro quo. So with the people that served as your mentors, what do you think it was that you had to offer to make the relationship work? Fortunately, I had enough existing content via their own platforms by posting my own self improvement journeys even before I was blogging. So prior to that. You’ve done your homework. Yeah, so I had already kind of shown evidence of some level of acumen and success in the niches that I’m speaking of. And that’s kind of what led Chris to even contact me to say at one point he had contacted me, hey, do you want to do a guest post on my website? And you write top 10, you know, like commonly overlooked something of bodybuilding. Yeah, so you had some proof of previous performance. Well, I just talked to a young guy who sent me three months ago, two months ago, he sent me a bunch of online, a number of online AI projects that he had built out of my material. He didn’t ask me if he could do that. And he wanted some of my time. But what he came armed with was these projects. And so I thought, well, I might as well take a look at them. And when I looked at them, I thought, oh, okay, might be worth, you know, half an hour talking to this kid. And so he had already positioned himself. So he was a credible communicator, right? Someone I might be interested in having a chat with. And so, you know, it’s very useful to understand how it is you can position yourself so that, yeah, because if you’re asking, if you want something from someone, you should put yourself in a position where the easiest thing for them to say is yes. Yeah, right. Yeah. And I often see it’s interesting because I hear entrepreneurs speak of this often, how if you want to stand out, you know, be willing to work for free or show some value that you’re trying to make an offering. Yeah, give something of value to the person that don’t just try and take or ask for time or anything like that. And while that is common advice, I actually see a shockingly few amount of people actually go out and implement it. And even when they do, the way they go about it is often wrong, in my opinion, like they are producing something that is what they think is valuable rather than finding insights from that person’s content or something that they can extrapolate out as that person deems it as value. So how can I go about accomplishing this? So they’re not making a bridge. Yeah. So sometimes I get reached out to a hundred times a month, hey, can I make thumbnails for you? Here’s examples of thumbnails that I’ve supposedly created. Like, how about you just send me one that might have looked good of you took raw footage yourself and made a great thumbnail and sent it to me in an email. Maybe it would have taken you how many minutes, but you would have stood out from 99% of other people in that moment or the AI thing. I’ve had some people reach out about AI stuff too, where, hey, what if you could consolidate all of your preventative medicine, health, optimization information, one AI robot? Here’s an example. Often I find as of now, those are relatively inaccurate, but it’s a good idea to show value that could be something the person you’re seeking would actually deem to be worth interacting with you. Well, so another thing that I really noticed with the undergraduates at the university, so there are a lot of students and not many professors. Like I think in the psych department at the U of T, there was like 300 students for one professor. So developing a relationship with a professor was a tricky business and it’s really necessary to develop such a relationship at some point in your life because you can’t get mentored properly and then you don’t have that pathway that you described. That’s a big problem. So a lot of what a university education is, if you’re fortunate, is a sequence of mentoring and apprenticeship experiences. But I’d have students show up to my office and say, can I work in your lab? And you have to be careful who you work with because you don’t have to bring very many people in who aren’t oriented properly for the whole bloody thing to turn into a nightmare. Like one in 30 is probably enough. One bad apple in 30 is enough to sink the ship. That’s a terrible mixed metaphor, but it’s true. I helped with a sequence of courses that were designed to produce entrepreneurs all around the world. I think the company that did this, it was the founder, the Funder Institute, founded in California. And they found that if they had one person in a class of 50 who was tilted in the dark tetrad direction, narcissistic, psychopathic, Machiavellian, that that was enough to sink the whole course. So anyways, these students would come and say, do you have any opportunities? And usually I have a lot of projects bouncing around in the air, a lot of them only potential and not manifest in any ways. And so I’d often say, well, here’s a problem I’m trying to solve. Why don’t you go do some research on that and come back and answer this question for me? And then the students would bifurcate. There’d be two responses to that. One would be one group of kids would come back like a week later, say they had a week deadline. They’d come back on time. They’d come back and over deliver, but not insanely, but you know, they went a little bit beyond the call of duty and they provided something that was actually useful. And I’d think, oh, that means I could give you something and you could do it. And it would be less trouble for me than doing it myself, which is sort of why you hire someone. But then there was another category of people who would come back and say, well, you know, I couldn’t get this finished. And then they’d have five reasons why not. And often they were plausible reasons, you know, but when I delved into the life circumstances of the people who did come back with it finished, they’d had just as many problems. They just didn’t let their problem stop them. Now, if there was a death in the family or something, you know, cataclysmic, well, fair enough, maybe, maybe, because you don’t get that many opportunities, you know, so you should capitalize on them. But so this goes along with the statistics show too, that if you’re, if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money. And you can imagine that just in a workplace, like imagine you’re running a restaurant and you’re going to hire, you hire some dishwashers and you want to figure out which ones to keep because most of them aren’t going to do the job and most of them will quit. And one of them comes 15 minutes early and leaves 15 minutes late, 15 minutes late. And you might think I’m not given that bloody capitalist one extra cent of my, one extra minute of my time. It’s like, yeah, well don’t think he won’t notice, you know, a little bit above and beyond pays incredible. It segregates you from your competition, right? And at work, if you are willing to go that extra mile and you’re smart enough also to to non-manipulatively make that known, you know, because people have to see what you’re doing too. That’s the marketing element. Then when your boss is sitting around and someone in a managerial position higher than yours has left suddenly and he’s flailing about trying to figure out who he can slot into that position tomorrow because he doesn’t have any time, your name might be the one that drifts up into his imagination. Yeah. Right. I think a lot of people would be shocked how like non-credential certain people in high positions actually are simply by the opportunities afforded to them through hard work and going above the call of duty of the average person. Sometimes it’ll be like, how did you become the, you know, producer for X person? It’s like, oh, I was just, they asked me to do something or I went out of my way to do it and it was extremely high quality. Yeah. And they gave me something else. Yeah. Yeah. You bet. Well, we know on the objective predictors of success front, the best predictor for success in a complex enterprise is intelligence. And you know, there’s not a lot you can do to crank up your raw intelligence, although there are things you can do to stop making yourself stupider. So while that’s something, you know, right, conscientiousness is diligence and dutifulness, orderliness, industriousness. It’s the second best predictor. And you can discipline yourself to become more conscientious and people do across time. As people get older, they get more conscientious. And so, you know, it’s lovely to be, to have as a gift from God an IQ of 145. But if you’re willing to work, you know, like actually work and not just look like you’re working, especially if you deliver when, if you strike when the iron is hot, that can move you an awful long ways. We have lots of people in my organization who, who rose through the ranks in exactly that manner, because they’re at hand. You ask them to do something extra and maybe just as a test, you know, this guy seems pretty good at what he’s doing. Can we give him something else? Yes. Oh, well, maybe he has potential that isn’t exhausted by his current role. Right. And so that’s fun to find out about yourself too. Okay. So you’re writing away and what do you start writing about and how often like, tell me about your writing routine to begin with and how you developed it. In general, I would, when I’m most mentally sharp and when was that for you, when I wake up, I try and stave off eating as long as I can to stay as mentally dialed. And I usually have about a seven to eight hour window where I can crank out whatever content creation on that day. And you found that was when you first woke up. Yeah. Yeah. I found the same thing, even though I didn’t like mornings, I was sharpest to write in the mornings. Yeah. So I would typically sit down and just put on headphones and try and stay as uninterrupted as possible, go on airplane mode and crank away and noise canceling headphones, like to be silent. Yeah. Okay. So you weren’t listening to music or anything else? Sometimes I listened to soft music that’s not totally distracting. Right. It just depends on my mood for that day. Right. But you know, I wouldn’t have anything on the background, like a show or hardcore music or anything. Yeah. Well, I found when I was, especially when I was writing seriously, it’s like, no, I love listening to music. It’s like, no, there’s, you can’t, if you’re serious about what you’re doing, you can’t allow for distraction. Now you said as well that you found that didn’t bother you as long as you were writing about something you’re interested in, because you were willing to get obsessive about it. I actually think that’s a very fundamental male trait, by the way, that unidimensional obsessiveness driven by interest, partly because that is the pathway to success. That’s the golden pathway to success for sure. That is the thing that’s, so I think that calling, that spontaneous interest is actually that manifestation of the instinct that leads to success. It’s deeply rooted in you biologically, way the hell down below your cognitive systems, way, way down. So if you tap into that, man, it’s a, it’s a powerful mode of force. Absolutely. Yeah. So for me at the time, I was obsessed primarily with body composition and looking good and performing well. And that led me into the performance enhancement side of things. But then further down the road to that, I learned about the detriments and dangers of it. And that led me down the preventative medicine pathway, where I became far more passionate about longevity, vitality. It led me to my primary business endeavors at this point, which is Marik Health, my preventative medicine platform. And through the knowledge on pharmacology and supplementation, I started a supplement company with my co-founder, Chris, and continued to make content thereafter that was more aligned with my current interest, which has transitioned over time less, because obviously as you get older and more mature, it’s not like even the name I’ve considered changing it because it’s not like 23 year old, more plates, more dates, Derek is the same as me now years later, where I’m far more interested in science based longevity tactics, blood work, analyzation, preventative medicine as a whole. And my content is less oriented to, you know, picking up tricks. Well, yeah, okay. So, okay. So let’s think about that too here, because, you know, one of the things you said was that when you went to university, you had a vague sense that business was your thing, right? It’s very low resolution representation, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong. It just meant that it wasn’t finally honed, right? It still pulled you in the right direction. Okay. So when you’re 23 and you’re writing about more plates, more dates, I mean, you have a compelling interest right at hand, which is you’re developing interest in women and being attracted to women. And so that would go along with looking good. And then that would, that would, you can see how that would segue into a deeper interest in something like performance, right? Because it’s like, well, what does it mean to look good? Well, that can be flashy and surface, but people will figure that out pretty damn quick if they have any sense, right? And so there has to be something deeper under that. And that could be something like, well, health and performance, because it really is the case that the truest form of looking good that’s sexually attractive is actually associated with optimized health. So for example, the markers that we find attractive in the opposite sex, say, and vice versa, are markers of biological health. So waist to hip ratio in women, 0.68 is optimized for fertility, right? And so symmetry is, which is a very important determinant of physical attractiveness, symmetry is an indication of untrammeled neurological and physiological development. So if you’re symmetrical, it indicates that you haven’t encountered pathogens or impediments in your developmental pathway that twisted and hurt you in some way that would be more than merely skin deep, right? Now I’m not saying that everybody who isn’t symmetrical, you know, has their underlying problems. I’m saying that if you’re looking for a quick and dirty marker of something like biological integrity, symmetry is a great one. Butterflies, this is so cool. You know how beautiful butterflies are. They’ve worked on that a long time, a long time. They can detect the deviation from symmetry in a potential mating partner of one part in a million. Right? And they’re butterflies. Like how they do that is just, it’s just a miracle that they can do that. I have no idea how that’s even possible, but the results are at hand, right? Because a lot of the beauty in butterflies is a consequence of sexual selection. I saw this really cool butterfly at one point, just a picture of it. When it closed its wings, it was a leaf and completely identical to a leaf. And when it opened it, it was beautiful like a butterfly is. And so the natural selection had tuned it to look like a leaf and the sexual selection had tuned it to be spectacularly beautiful. And natural selection or sexual selection, which is the selection of mates by at least somewhat conscious agents, it’s a major force that governs evolution. And our sense of beauty is a consequence of sexual selection. So now you can imagine that as a young man, the way that instinct to self-development, the self-development that best produces survival and reproductive fitness over the long run, makes itself manifest as the desire to be attracted to women. Right? And then the women become the judge of performance. And then you could imagine that if you pursued that diligently, like you did, that that would start to deepen. Yeah. Right. So now you’re, you started to become concerned with performance rather than looking good per se. And then that broadened out into a much deeper understanding of physical health primarily, or would you say how much physical health and how much mental health? I suppose at the time I didn’t really have a huge focus on mental health. It was more cognitive function as a whole. So how sharp, witty, charismatic, these were all things that stemmed from having multiple conversations with attractive and otherwise intimidating women that then bled into business interviews and presentations and things that I noticed. Oh wow, my conversational capacity was like significantly elevated just by exposing myself to these like otherwise fear inducing encounters with attractive women. Now unpack that. Okay. Okay. So first thing I would say to that is the best way to sustain and develop your cognitive function is through physical exercise, cardiovascular and weightlifting. It’s way better than doing cognitive exercises now, but you pointed to something else more specific, which was that part of the impetus you had to, to foster your ability to communicate came as a consequence of conversations that you had with challenging women. Okay. So tell me exactly, tell me how that developed. If you’re like most Americans, you’re struggling to make ends meet. 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And if you call today, you may not have to make next month’s mortgage payment. That’s 888-804-0303 or visit American financing.net. NMLS 182334 NMLS consumer access.org APR for rates in the five start at 6.406% for well qualified borrowers. Call 888-804-0303 for details about credit costs and terms. It wasn’t necessarily that I sought out as a goal to, if I talk to attractive women, it will then lead to business success. But it just, it was an indirect byproduct that I noticed was a fringe benefit. And for me, at least at the time, the most challenging and anxiety inducing activity was walking up to a woman who was very attractive that you didn’t know and being able to introduce yourself and have a fluent and articulate conversation. So after that had been accomplished. So, okay, so how did you, okay, so there’s a shift there, because maybe, because to begin with, if I understand it correctly, your primary focus was on something like physical appearance. Right. Yeah. And you had your reasons for that. I mean, you know, you were tall and thin and you needed to fix that up. But then this other idea comes in, you start to notice that the manner in which you’re being evaluated by women has something to do with the surface features that, surface features that we’ve been talking about, symmetry and muscle mass and physical confidence, all those things you can build up with weightlifting. But then there was a cognitive component. Like, I don’t think there is much more, that’s much more attractive to women than the capacity to be articulate. I mean, poets do just fine. Musicians do just fine. Right. And it’s no, it’s no, in no small part a reflection of their, of the charisma of their capacity to be articulate. Right. And this is, this is something that’s terribly badly taught to young men. If at all. Right. Well, it’s never taught to them. Like, it’s so appalling because if you took a group of 13 year old guys and you sat them down and said, you know, you’re, you’re kind of useless and hideous. And one of the things that you could do to be much more attractive to women is to become a hell of a lot smarter than you are and to learn how to show that and to explain why that is their motivation for attending, let’s say to English literature. This is something Willink again learned. I mean, he, when he was a commander in the, in the naval seals, one of the things he learned was, for example, that he couldn’t speak for his men properly unless he could make an articulate account of their battlefield performance. Right. And that his performance as a leader was dependent on his ability to be articulate. Then you see people like Russell Brand, for example, who are so articulate that it’s just beyond comprehension. And you can see exactly the charisma that rappers are exactly the same manifestation of exactly the same sort of thing. So I also think it’s pretty damn funny this week that Ben Shapiro is now the world’s number one rapper. Oh yeah. I haven’t watched that music. Oh my God. It’s so funny, especially cause Shapiro, I mean, he’s a rapid fire speaker, so it’s not that surprising, but he’s been like criticizing rap as not being music hip hop for years. So like this is so comical, but it’s a good, we can look at the underlying reason why that poetic gift is so attractive. It does indicate your capacity to be articulate. And that is a great indicator of your general competence. Okay. So you were learning that I noticed too speaking with you today, you don’t have any of the common errors that people often make when they’re speaking, no, um, no, ahs, no likes, you know, none of that, like, you know, none of that filler. And that you take your time to pause when you need to pause. And all of those bad habits of communication seem to have been completely taken out of you. Now you’ve been doing YouTube videos for a long time. So now you started to pay attention to more verbal articulation. Did that develop along with your interest in writing? Yeah, I think the writing was just a byproduct of the only medium I knew of to communicate my knowledge at the time. It was not necessarily that I had a huge passion for it. And I sought out to write elaborate and in-depth content because I loved writing. Right. This is the medium by which you reach people and, uh, give value. And then via that, I realized, oh, you know, you can build a far more intimate relationship with the viewer. They can associate with your journey as you develop, et cetera, over video and infinitely more time efficient as well. Oftentimes I would try and publish a coinciding article at the same time as the video and the proofreading process, even taking a transcript that was already written for me of what I said in a video and making it perfected for all the grammatical corrections that would be necessary for it to be actually publishable online. It was the time equivalent of filming five more videos. So I just eventually, and this is, I think my last article was years ago at this point, stopped writing and went full time to video. Okay. So what did the writing do to you or for you to facilitate that transition? Cause one of the important qualities of writing is the formalization of your thought, the formalization of the manner in which you express yourself, right? The, the ability to reflect on what you’re thinking because writing allows you to do that because it’s externalized. So I’ve turned to video to a large degree as well, although I still write. And the reason I write is because I don’t think there’s any deeper form of thinking than writing. And so what did the writing do for you that enabled you to make the transition into YouTube? I think just putting on paper, so to speak, even though it’s online, the thoughts I had that were recognized as valuable by people listening, subscribing to my mailing list. Yeah. That’s me gave me the reinforcement that pursuing content creation in general was worthwhile. Right. And you could identify what your market was interested in too, right? So you have a dialogue going with them. Yeah. Oftentimes when people make videos, they’re very scatterbrained, not guided in what they’re even trying to say. And at least with writing, it’s a very, very meticulous process by which you ensure your work is perfected before it goes out. Whereas with video, while you can edit it and chop it up at the end of the day, if you’re not an articulate speaker, it’s not going to come across the same way as articulate and focused. Yeah. You know, so one of the things I do before I go on stage is I have the questions I’m trying to address in mind. That’s the aim. It’s like, so the, the pro there’s a problem. The problem is manifest in the question. Here’s something I would like to know about that I don’t know about. And then I can aggregate stories around that to try to investigate that problem. And I can share that with the viewer now. And that gets me a fair ways because now I’m thinking through this problem and it, it’s really fun if this happens properly, because if the lecture goes spectacularly well, I can weave together all these disparate stories and it’ll come to a point that actually addresses the problem. And I can use that as a punchline. And if it’s good, I can do that near the end of the lecture, right? It lands, pull all these things together. It’s like telling a very complex joke that actually has a punchline, but it is akin to writing. So people out there who are listening, if you want to write or you want to speak, you need a problem in mind and your, your product, that essay or that lecture needs to circle around that, that issue at hand. And it should be an issue that your audience would also find compelling. Now you did market testing, so to speak with your writing, because you could tell what was landing and you were actually, see the other thing that people often don’t understand is when they’re producing a product, they have to find out if there’s a market for it. So it’s a dialogue between you and your customer base, right? And it’s very rare for someone to produce a product and then launch it into the world so that it will be successful without having gone through that dialogical process. So a lot of the serial entrepreneurs I know who’ve made many companies sequentially, when they have a new idea, they start, they’ll launch versions of it quite quickly to see how people are responding. And sometimes they find that the problem they’re solving, no one cares about, and they’ll, they’ll pivot to some other direction. But the thing about your audience is they’ll tell you what they want if you pay attention to them. And then you can figure out, you can feel your way forward. What do you think you did well? So let’s talk about your YouTube success now. So tell me how that started and tell me what you think you did right and tell us about how it grew. So in general, I think that transitioning from writing to video in general was the first catalyst to having hyper accelerated growth and exposure simply through efficiency of output. And then further to that, I started to realize that frequency was essentially my bottleneck by which I could, if I could get out more content, I could get more velocity of influence, I suppose, being gained over time. And for me, I went to one video a day, actually, at my height, I was doing two videos a day, which was how long were the videos, 20 minutes in general, right, right. So why’d you pick 20 minutes? I didn’t just whatever it landed at. That was the average. Okay, I see. I sometimes they’re relatively like not short form, not three minutes, but not an hour and a half. No podcast. It was mostly me addressing a specific topic and flashing it out to whatever amount of detail I felt worthwhile. And sometimes that would be an hour. Sometimes it’d be 15 minutes. I would say on average, it was 20, 25. Right. But you had a central topic in mind. Yeah, exactly. So what sort of topics did you start dealing with when you began and how has that developed across time? When it started, it was more your standard fitness questions, how to lose fat, how to get shredded, how to gain muscle, optimal diet for keeping fat off. Just any sort of topics that I wish I knew when I was 17 years old and had a quick answer to in a very easy to digest format from a content creator I had a high trust factor in and seemed educated about it and had some sort of experience in the trenches that I can. How did you identify? Okay, so did you try to put yourself in the, was that your target audience was like to begin with, was it like guys who are about 17? Did you try to put yourself in their head? How do you think it was that you set yourself up so the right questions to ask appeared for you? I think fortunately for me, often when I make content, it is based on a question I had relatively recently where I can appeal to a demographic that was me five plus years ago. So you’re noticing what you’re wondering about. Yeah, so by extension, and I think this is the best way to garner an audience that is actually aligned with what your interests are is what were you interested in yourself and what are you an expert at? Well that’s also genuine because that way you’re gathering around you the people who are your audience and not someone else’s, which is another reason you shouldn’t game it. Because if you do that right, this is one of the things I love about this podcast, is like I can just find people I’d like to talk to. That’s a good deal, and they’ll come and talk to me and then I can share that with everyone and because none of that is false, I’m never anything other than enthusiastic about what I’m doing because why would I not want to sit down and talk to someone? I’ve talked to my intellectual heroes on the podcast. And people who are great like yourself who are great at marketing and communicating and I can learn more all the time by doing that. So this speaks to this necessity, this is something for everybody to think about too, is you want to have your bloody motivations aligned, your interests aligned. This is the same when you’re working with people. Find out what you’re interested in right and pursue that. Make sure your head’s screwed on straight about that because your interests were aligned with trying to make things better. You know you came about that in the typical sort of young man way which is how can I get women to like me? Which is a perfectly good question you know because they’re very very harsh judges. Yes and they’re likely to reject and so that’s a good disciplinary strategy. And getting through that builds a lot of mental fortitude. Yeah more than anything else absolutely more than anything else. Yeah there’s a reason man you know you remember the movie Sleeping Beauty? Remember when the hero escapes from the castle? Yeah. Okay so it’s a feminine image he confronts that’s the evil queen right. She turns into the dragon that burns everything down before he gets to the princess. Right right well there’s a reason that story echoes it’s because if you want to awaken the sleeping princess you better let the dragon burn off everything stupid about you. Right and if that’ll be most of you. Yeah. Right so that’s very painful. Yeah you’re essentially a product on a market that will tell you in real time if you are worth being with or not and you will get the harsh reality. How annoying is that? Yeah especially in online dating which is essentially how most people meet nowadays you will get told very quickly if you are appealing or not. Right right well it’s pornography. You either deal with the realities of the situation or you swear off women become an incel whatever it is but. Yeah that’s not a good that’s not a good pathway. No. No there’s a lot of resentment and bitterness and murderous rage under that particular decision. Yeah. Right right right okay so now you’re making on average 20 minute videos and you’re concentrating on the things that you notice you were wondering about but also that might appeal to the younger people that you’re trying to pull along let’s say or encourage that’s a better way of thinking about it and so how does that broaden across time. Now you have Merrick Health and you have a supplement company tell me how the work that you were doing in YouTube where that led you in terms of the deepening of your interest and how that made itself manifest in the entrepreneurial business world. So complementary to self-improvement and optimization you will often typically you’ll end up down rabbit holes of what can I do to enhance cognitive performance what can I do to optimize my hormones what can I do to offset neurodegeneration prevent aging stay youthful vital strong build like all these things are intertwined. Yeah and all those are infinitely deep rabbit holes. Yeah so transitioning from just cosmetically how do I be as appealing as possible to also how do I perform well feel great actually be healthy etc. It all is uh it felt like a natural progression going from the more superficial to the more actual integrated focus so for me. I got a cool story about that. Do tell. All right so it’s one of the most famous stories in the world it’s Moses’ encounter with the burning bush okay so he’s just wandering around along his pathway he’s just a young guy he’s a shepherd at this point he’s got two wives he’s doing all right on that front he’s got a good relationship with his father-in-law there’s nothing special about him he’s left his home and he’s being a shepherd and in those days that was no joke because you were out on your own taking care of yourself guarding over these things that were pretty fragile and their reliance so like you’re a tough dude if you’re a shepherd low status but you know a contender all right so now he’s near Mount Sinai which is the place essentially where heaven and earth meet that’s the symbolic landscape and he sees something out of the corner of his eye it glimmers at him and gleams and attracts him and so he goes off the beaten path to investigate and it’s this burning bush and what a burning bush is it’s something that’s alive because a tree is a very good representation of life itself in its branching complexity right that’s why we have trees of say phylogenetic derivation evolutionary speaking and trees of relationship and a tree is something that branches and and it’s obviously also something that’s alive this is a burning it’s burning life well you could think about that as life at its most extreme because you are on fire i mean we’re metabolic agents right i mean we burn to live and so life is a form of a burning bush is a living flame that’s a good way of thinking about it and this is what attracts you is the essence of the living flame so moses goes to to look what is this and then he gets closer and closer to it right which is what you’re doing by the way when you go from you know the superficial attraction into the depths the rabbit holes let’s say he gets closer and closer to this source of this energy right and so at one point he notices he’s starting to tread on sacred ground that’s how close he is he’s way down in the depths he takes off his shoes that’s an indication of humility and he keeps pursuing and what happens is the voice of god itself speaks to him right the essence of being and transforms him that’s what turns him into a leader that the leader that can stand up against tyranny and slavery and so the message of that’s and that’s despite his inadequacies because moses objection right away says well i’m inarticulate i can’t speak well and god basically says well that’s your problem you should do something about that by whatever means necessary because this is what you’re called upon to do and so the idea there it’s such a cool idea which is why this is such a great story is that if you pay attention things will call to you you know some of them are generic like the male desire to be attractive to women if you take that seriously it does this right it leads you down into the depths that’s partly where you’ll encounter everything stupid about you that has to be burned away but it’s also where you discover the purpose that does make you part of the eternal process that stands up against tyranny and slavery right so that’s and there isn’t anything more entertaining than doing that so okay so now you’re pursuing your interest and you’re getting better and better at communicating and now you’re broadening your reach and deepening your understanding and so how does that make itself manifest actually in the realm of like proximal success you have merit health how does this unfold and why does it work um so for me over time as i developed my expertise in these very specific niche uh disciplines i felt like i had there was a lack of certain things in the marketplace that actually represented high value services and or products for the things i was seeking whether it be pre-workout supplementation for sports performance or cognitive enhancement with nootropics that weren’t pixie dusted with things that were on paper attractive looking ingredients but were actually at minuscule dosages that impart no actual benefit there was a lot of areas to be improved in the industries as a whole um and i could right so you could see as you delved further and further in and developed expertise you could see where the holes were essentially yeah and it was getting very frustrating to be able to be talking about what people should be looking for um even what i deemed to be high quality of certain product services whatever diagnostic metrics and it not being readily available or in a service that i felt was valuable enough that was uh something that had people that actually cared behind it yeah and were continuing to educate themselves on the forefront of the cutting edge right so something real yeah so for me being somebody who’s creating content about this every single day and communicating with elevating levels of expertise in these different fields and being associated by proximity to certain like expert minds in these industries um it was just a no-brainer for me to pursue what i felt hyper passionate about bringing the highest level of service to and also was frustrated with not having the access myself being a canadian for example with blood work essentially impossible to get anything if you’re not literally dying sometimes so i would and even then oh even then it’s like yeah it’s on it’s absolutely you’re imagining your erectile dysfunction or you know some yeah you know what’s they don’t even the concept of trt was something back then testosterone replacement therapy that was unfathomable for a primary care uh like a family doctor or somebody to be even discussing with you let alone let you get a blood test for or anything if you were under the age of i don’t know so what why did you become why did you become confident in your developing knowledge i mean you’re not an md you don’t have a biolo background in biology um you know you came at it from from the gym let’s say and from and from business administration you know and and and so why is it that you had faith in your progress and and does it does does your lack of formal qualification in that regard disturb you like how do you know that you’re not peddling snake oil how do you know that you’re not a charlatan say i mean it’s not like the health field isn’t full of charlottes so so you know you speak with enthusiasm and conviction about what you’re doing but how do you protect yourself against the potential for error so for me i have always valued transparency so in general when it came to supplements or diagnostics medical oversight it was always based on literature and i wasn’t the first certainly but i was one of the first to actually make content literally dissecting scientific papers on youtube to where i’m speaking about facts to my audience about the most cutting edge of information how long did it take you to learn to read a scientific paper that’s that’s actually very hard yeah years and also just again being enthralled in it at some point you go above and beyond the scope of what have your gym bros told you what have you read in online forums what have you and as you go up the the grapevine so to speak of quality of information you end up in actual scientific literature published by credential people and by extension and then you learn how to evaluate it which also takes years yeah and by extension i suppose a lot of my content because i had such a specific overlap with different areas of discipline like hair loss prevention performance enhancement hormone optimization diagnostic analysis these things are all different subcategories that aren’t one in the same and have unique overlap so i guess fortunate for me i had enough of a carved out unique channel that it caught the attention of certain people that even above the scope of the gym bro and the whatever i started to get associated with the likes of you know andrew huberman peter these are individuals that i consider friends and speak with regularly now so that kind of thing over time i suppose my imposter syndrome kind of faded away a little bit because i too didn’t think i’m just some gym bro why should i have any right to be talking about anything to do with blood work or anything and i would often be hesitant to make i don’t necessarily make medical recommendations ever but i will point to guided encouragement to seek out certain things that i deem to be worthwhile for myself or my family or what have you so it’s never about trying to play doctor it’s more about here’s the literature here’s how i’ve educated myself here’s the scope of influence that is created and assimilated my knowledge basis to where this is what i right and you can trust yourself to some degree because you’ve defined your pursuits carefully i mean one of the threads that weaves through everything we’ve talked about is the fact that you are actually interested in learning about how to be healthier and better multi-dimensionally and that’s genuine and then you’re also interested in helping other people do that and that’s genuine and so that actually sets the framework within which you can evaluate say scientific literature you know i mean if a scientist is evaluating his own data set and his goal is to advance his career everything every single statistic that he produces will be a lie yeah right because he’s bending his vision to serve his narcissism right and so you have to have your vision clear to begin with if you’re gonna if you’re gonna if you’re gonna pursue the truth in a manner that’s positive right and you can see i mean i can see by talking to you that there’s a real consistency in the way that you address all these themes and that consistency i mean we can boil it down to to some degree you can boil it down to self-interest right i mean which is okay i’m not complaining about that it’s that well you’re no one’s gonna quibble with your desire when you were a young man to be attractive to women it’s like yeah obviously and then the story of how that deepened that’s perfectly plausible and you do have skin in the game because if you go find out stupid things about how people can be healthy then you’re gonna like sink your own boat which seems like a stupid proposition so where are you at tell people about Merrick Health now and where you’re at with that and then also about the supplement company yeah yeah by the way i would i don’t know if this is something you’d be willing to speak to you but i’d love to hear your experience working with Merrick Health Michaela and you have used our services for a while now yeah um what’s your experience well i’m still my my experience has been fine and positive i’m still learning exactly how to use what you have to offer because it’s complicated right and and Michaela has gone farther down those rabbit holes that i have partly because of necessity and and and and desperation so i’m still working it out and trying to figure out where i could maximally benefit and i think that’ll probably take me a year or so to really get my feet under you know get my feet on the ground so i understand what i’m doing but i’m very interested in continuing to pursue it which is obviously partly why i’m talking to you today it’s tricky for me too because i i’m very careful now about any supplementation because my diet is so restricted yeah so so um i want more information about Merrick Health lay it out for people partly so i know more about it because i’m participating in it but also tell me what the value proposition so to speak is for the people you know who are watching and listening yeah so over time i just found it incredibly difficult to get medical oversight for myself and my family that reflected the most cutting-edge literature and was preventative oftentimes you will especially in canada my experience and many others is you go to a doctor even if you’re trying to be when i say preventative i mean trying to avoid the onset of disease rather than waiting for you to be in a stay healthy rather than be cured exactly and i understand there’s like you know political stuff associated with that and um the costs you know being free and all these things might yeah right free except for the dying part so in general even the access via your own autonomy to be able to pay for it was limited in canada to a point that it was so frustrating that i was finding myself driving over the border to go buy myself lab work from us-based companies and then even of those us because this doctors in canada would literally tell me no even when i asked to pay for blood work with cash which was wild to me wow wow so i would man so i would there’s the cost of free the cost of free is that no matter how much money you have you can’t buy the thing yeah right even your physical presence is such a burden on the system yeah yeah well that’s what i think the hospitals would work a hell of a lot better if there were a lot fewer patients in them so and that’s where all the incentives are aligned toward yeah right yeah so good so for me i would pay out of pocket to a diagnostic company in the states drive over the border pretend i was you know i had like a u.s billing address to be able to utilize their service and i would get diagnostics and then interpret them myself because as a canadian no doctor would at least of the ones i could find would look at it take it seriously and care because they would tell me oh you’re 24 years old why do you why are you even looking at this stuff this is a waste of time get out of my office and then even of the things i wanted to look at oftentimes it was things that they will not take seriously until it is a problem so for me right that isn’t the approach i want to take i don’t want to be having my parents in you know assisted living homes and whatnot when they’re older and me being there at an age that is just unjustifiable when they could otherwise avoid the onset of disease also for myself performing at a high level it’s all very important to me so finding out this information was of critical importance for not just health purposes but also performance and the overlap of avoiding the onset of any of these things to begin with yeah but even the services available in the u.s were shockingly sparse and then of the clinics in the states that would even offer services relevant in the sphere of hormone replacement were cookie cutter almost like not pill mills but very representative of that structure whereby it was clear their desire and incentive was not to oversee you with high quality care but more to get you on medications and keep you on them and just essentially make their money on prescriptions so they would tell you even if you had a transient blip in your testosterone levels as a late 20s you should be on trt and here’s seven medications to go with it that you also need to be on to handle the side effects of the testosterone replacement among myriads of peptides and other things that sometimes justifiable but oftentimes not and these cookie cutter approaches were so prevalent and unethical in my opinion that it motivated me to seek out like an entrepreneurial like for me that was a lot of my motivation to start this company to begin with is how long ago how long ago did you start marik health i think it is coming on three years now oh yeah yeah and so what scale of enterprise is it now um it’s without speaking to numbers yes uh it’s doing quite well and it is and when i say quite well it’s not just from a monetary it’s also very rewarding and this is why i actually spend so much time on it and i’m passionate about it is we are imparting a service that is of value that is of i think it’s unquantifiable value being able to prevent disease and optimize performance but also knowing that the medical providers that work for us are ones that have been vetted through our clinical acumen vetting process by which they actually reflect the level of education that we deem to be worthwhile to work with our clients to begin with so we have like a really rigorous process they’re committed to the process they’re committed to the idea of preventative medicine this is what to me was the most incentivizing component of it is being able to vet the medical providers and actually ensure we have individuals who are as passionate about further educating themselves so similar to me where i would read on updated literature stay up to date with anything to do with endocrinology hormone optimization performance vitality offsetting neuro that’s their fun now are these so is that now the fundamental focus of the medical professionals that you are what aligned with that you’ve hired like what is your relationship with the physicians some of them have specialties like we have an advisory board and some of them are cardiologist specialties some are this some are that some are more broad spectrum we have a foot doctor as well some of these individuals though many if they make it into our company to begin with are individuals who have shown the discipline to end actual enthusiasm to stay educated and continue past the point of becoming medically credentialed to actually work with patients what and what’s your finance like what’s what’s the financial arrangement with them how how are the medical professionals allied with your company so it’s structured in a way that essentially we are connecting the right clients with the right doctors so it’s right so you’re an intermediary essentially yeah so it’s not like i’m not playing doctor certainly not the case it’s we’re finding doctors that reflect what i believe to be and our team has vetted to be the highest level of applicant that is staying up to date actually what’s the diagnostic process like if someone wants to start using your your company what would that entail for them what what can they expect or look forward to so in general there’s going to be a somewhat lengthy depending on what you deem to be lengthy for medical assessment but uh intake questionnaire where we will ask for information on current lifestyle practices diet medication supplement try to get the full gamut of information family history that we can then use to have a more informed assessment of the diagnostics that we would be getting so further to that after we have some sort of baseline historical reference points and benchmarks we can use that as context to help guide our interpretations of the diagnostic analysis process so we have very comprehensive blood work and this is one of the areas i pride our company on is that we use markers that are the most validated and accurate to reflect the sought-after assessment of that organ’s function so for example when it comes to assessing atherosclerosis potential there is certain more advanced metrics like apolipoprotein b which reflect um essentially atherogenic potential as a whole in the body rather than just looking at ldlc or hdlc we’re far more um i think it’s not like this is an advanced metric it’s just not yet mainstream enough to be adopted by the masses so typically when you get a you know cardiovascular risk assessment you might get your blood pressure check once in the office and you might have you know white coat syndrome or they will not tell you to go check it again and get averages at home yeah right which is super important by the way one of the lowest hanging fruit things is blood pressure but above and beyond that having metrics that actually reflect cumulative risk or even genetic predispositions like lp little a is something that even if you have a normal looking lipid panel you could have a sky high lipoprotein little a which reflects a genetic predisposition that is not manipulatable through diet interventions so that is something that if this is underlying it’ll insidiously potentially enhance your cardiovascular disease risk significantly so and it is almost never tested for so these are things that again why we’re so passionate about what we do is we’re the ones trying to stay and it’s not like other people don’t do this but i feel it’s more rare than those who get the credentials and maybe cruise control on them so if someone’s concerned about their health they go to the merit health website they what do they have to do to to follow up to follow along with this procedure in general it will be getting a intake assessment by which you will get a regular physical blood pressure assessment family history people go to do that it depends where you live because you might have to go to a you know an in-person drop-in and get a physical done that meets the metrics of criteria we deem adequate to actually work with us and then above and beyond that we have an analysis of blood biomarkers and potentially saliva urine depending on what we deem necessary to get a comprehensive picture of your current health status and big cognizance of the fact that this is just a snapshot in time it’s not reflective of everything so that is where we get more data to pull from contextually with the existing questionnaire the physical etc to make a more informed assessment for path forward what can we do and why are you in the state you’re in right now do you have any issues what is the root of them do you have any symptoms right so rather than assuming health except when it deviates in illness and then going to the doctor because you’re ill you’re said i’m an organization where you can work in tandem with the doctor to not get sick to begin with but more than that not just to not get sick but to optimize your function it’s really a different model of what constitutes the medical especially now yeah one of our students the medical model one of our i suppose specialties of sorts and kind of what led me down the rabbit hole above and beyond the motivations of self uh diagnostic evaluation family etc it was also that bodybuilders are dropping dead left right and center at a very young age and often it is attributed to anabolic steroid use which is partially the case for sure but a lot of these individuals and those in high level sports will be exposing themselves to these drugs regardless of the fact that it’s detrimental to their lifespan and being able to oversee elite athletes with educated medical providers who themselves understand the context behind why they’re using what they’re using and aren’t going to judge them and shun them accordingly because a lot of some there’s a fine line between misusing substances to cheat and optimizing your nutrition and your your dietary intake in every possible way to maximize your performance and there’s going to be some vicious overlap there absolutely especially as the technologies transform yeah so while we do work with those who are seeking to optimize we also have the high-performing bodybuilder who inevitably will be shortening their lifespan with what they’re exposing themselves to but they need somebody who’s a non-judgmental and very educated about what they’re using in order to attenuate the damage as much as possible and that’s where some of our medical providers will provide a non-judgmental environment to actually oversee them to assess that they are doing the not encouraging use by any means yeah but also not shunning them from access so they’re serving as they’re serving counselors and consultants because at the end of the day a lot of these sports that are drug to the gills will exist regardless if they have a medical provider or not and getting them access to somebody who will try and attenuate the damage is of critical importance to avoid especially in the fitness industry and this is so what proportion of your clients do you suppose fall into the category of the typical person so to speak who’s looking at optimizing health and performance across time and in contrast to the more elite and competitive types who are looking to well to compete and to compete in a manner that allows them to win let’s say but also to sustain that across time yeah and and by the way to clarify we’re not condoning cheating this is in sports where it’s not tested so in general the majority of our clients are still those who are seeking to optimize and enhance quality of life vitality lifespan all metrics of health and performance and are the layman who is seeking just a high level medical provider who understands the cutting engine information stays on top of it the elite athlete is more of a minority okay well that makes sense because they’re rare okay so let me maybe we’ll close with this question so you’ve this has been seven years really since you’ve been diving into this that’s not very long right and so that’s a lot of transformation in a short period of time so now if you’re looking five years down the road let’s say um what fields of opportunity do you see opening up for yourself how would you like things to continue and what do you hope to offer the people well what do you hope to offer on the economic and and moral front let’s say as you continue moving forward um i suppose for me i guess fortunately i feel i have found my calling and as all i want to do is scale it as much as i can to be able to influence and educate as at high of a scale as possible because i feel as much as candidly some of these things are have a monetary incentive yeah and you need that’s not a bad thing yeah being candid about that i think is one of the things that distinguishes why bother selling to people who don’t want to buy yeah it’s not helpful but i’m very passionate about the products and services we bring yeah and also the education i’m imparting that is free at scale too and being able to maximize my efficiency and quality of output as long as i’m doing that and feel i haven’t left anything on the table that is where i want to be in five years i don’t know yeah so it’s it’s this still it’s the same pathway but further further differentiation and development yeah and just bringing awareness and education best place for people to follow you is is that youtube would you say i would say youtube more plates more dates any of the platforms and marrickhealth.com if you want to get high quality medical oversight diagnostics analysis etc all right sir well thank you very much for walking us through all that very useful on the career development and the on the on the on the what would you say and also with regards to providing people with information about how they can switch from a disease cure orientation to a health enhancement orientation which is something it would be lovely to see the entire medical establishment move in that direction and perhaps they will there’s some promising signs on that front i’m going to continue to talk with derek for another half an hour on the dailywire side as most of you watching and listening already know so if you’re inclined to join us there please do so throw some support the dailywire way they’re a good bastion in the in the fight for free speech which is ongoing and intensifying as we all sit here and watch so thank you very much sir it was very thank you for having thank you for coming in today all the way from vancouver that’s much appreciated it’s very nice to do these things in person and and everyone watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention and to the dailywire folks for facilitating these conversations and making them possible much appreciated thanks again sir thank you