Derek Fitness and Joe Rogan break down doping loopholes, like USADA’s carbon isotope test evasion via animal-derived testosterone synthesis, while dissecting John Jones’s suppressed testosterone case—performance-enhancing drugs may still work despite low natural levels. They contrast extreme body modifications (e.g., Eugenia Cooney’s anorexia, Rich Piana’s PMMA injections) with functional fitness, citing Alex Pereira’s knockout power and Glover Teixeira’s late-career UFC success. Rogan’s organic success in podcasting clashes with Derek’s structured health business approach, exposing how wealth and power dynamics skew relationships, from Bezos’ ex-wife to Musk’s billionaire rivalries. Ultimately, the episode reveals how obsession—whether with performance, appearance, or dominance—drives both innovation and exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
For me, I've always sort of just been like a nerd about pharmacology and biology, endocrinology, stuff like that.
And I've always just researched online about random stuff.
And eventually, I was encouraged by a few people to start posting online.
And I was, I just started writing out blog articles on a WordPress site, maybe like five and a half years ago or something at this point.
And Eventually, it got to the point where, I guess YouTube was already big, but it wasn't that what it is now.
And I was just asking people in the, I don't know, male self-improvement niche that I was friends with, do you think I should be posting videos too instead of just writing these articles?
And they said, yeah, it's a no-brainer.
You should be.
Yeah.
I just started basically reiterating my articles in video format, too.
And then, eventually, the YouTube sort of outpaced the WordPress site.
And that's why it's always, you know, Derek from MorePlatesMondays.com, that website, was where I originally wrote my articles.
And that eventually got to the point where it wasn't very time-efficient to write, unfortunately.
So, I kind of, like...
Move disproportionately towards video format because I can just fire off a video in, I don't know, 15 minutes.
Otherwise, that in written format would take five plus hours to write out, if not longer.
Yeah, it's not like they make it obvious where their shortcomings are and where the loopholes are, because they would obviously prefer people to not know what they're doing current research on to tighten up.
But yeah, there's definitely leeway still, or else they would not still be in the lab trying to figure out ways to bulletproof it, essentially.
Well, there's one gym that I know of that at one point in time, I don't know how they do it now, but at one point in time, they had literally full-time scientists that were working with the athletes.
I think a lot of athletes have maybe not like a full team, but there's usually some sort of chemistry slash pharmacology guy in the back end who they're deferring to, or even just their bro who's experienced enough.
Yeah, I think usually there's some sort of, I don't know, deferral to figure out, like even people who, anybody at a top level is trying to figure out what kind of edge they can get, regardless if it's through straight edge supplementation, dietary practice, manipulations, lifestyle interventions, etc., and Right.
Or is there a way to get around?
Or what are the other people in my sport doing that I don't know about?
And if other people are doing something, you're going to, you know, not as dramatic as the Lance Armstrong case where everyone's doing it.
And even that guy, though, he might have just got it out of his system in time because they're still trying to figure out how to detect EPO use, blood transfusions, autologous.
You can't detect right now at all except for aberrations in your hematology that can kind of like...
Infer based on longitudinal data that something's off, and they can assert that you're doping and putting blood back into yourself, but they still can't even tell.
So if you're hypothetically an athlete who understands how this process works going into it, it's not very hard to go to LabCorp, get my own hematology panel, assess my reticulocyte, hemoglobin, red blood cell count over time, develop my own longitudinal biological passport before I go into a tested sport, and see, do I fall within the threshold cutoffs where I would not get caught for my degree of autologous blood transfusions?
So hypothetically, I could just...
I could go in quite confidently if I had done the preliminary research prior.
Well, I would bet the figure skaters were still doing stuff that might just not be on the banned list yet.
Or might be now.
Who knows?
Because even like 2000...
I think it was 2000...
When were the Summer Olympics?
It was like 2008...
2004, 2008, and 2012 or something like that.
They've retested...
Since they've developed some of these long-term metabolite assays, they've been able to go back and retroactively catch, I think it was like, 150 athletes that otherwise...
caught at the time, and this was over six years later, and then of those 150, that's just a ballpark number, it's not accurate, but it was like 79, I think, were medalists.
Yeah, and in professional sports, obviously, the contracts are so ridiculous.
Like, there was one NBA player who just popped for draw standalone and testosterone like a week and a half ago or something.
And when you actually look at it, the guy has only played, I think in totality, like seven minutes on the court or something, but his contract is like almost $8 million.
So even guys at the highest level of professional sports, it's so lucrative, the amount of money that's on the table, that if you think, even if you're, you know, like a low tier, like you're still a top tier athlete, obviously, if you're in the NBA, for example, but if you're at the bottom of the totem pole and you think you have leeway with,
you're not going to get tested as much or whatever, you're The choices of drugs he used, too, were like, one of them was absurd and made no sense, but I assume he was just hedging against the chance that he would get randomly tested to, you know, if it helps you get this lucrative contract, even if you're, like, just a seven-minute court player, like, it's a big fucking deal.
Yeah, I've heard in arm wrestling, it's like a more obscure sport, obviously, but some of them are drug tested.
The scrutiny is very low, but some of them don't even, they just take whatever they want and go sauce to the tits and just hope they won't get tested.
Like, that's their strategy.
Yeah.
So, like, they take whatever the fuck they want and just hedge against the probability that they won't get tested, and then if they get lucky, which a lot of the times they do because it's very low-scrutiny testing, they just go in, like, full board.
It's an amazing documentary because it was like Icarus in the sense that the way...
If you haven't seen Icarus, folks, Brian Fogle, the guy who's the director of it, is also the star of it.
And what happened was Brian, who is an athlete and he does bike races...
He decided as a cyclist it would be interesting if he did a race natural and then did the same race the next year, juiced to the tits.
And so he did the race natural, documented it all, and then hired this guy, Gregory Rychenkov.
And Gregory was the head of the Russian anti-doping agency, which is not real.
Yeah.
The Russian Anti-Doping Agency is the Russian We Dope Everybody Agency.
And so Gregory talked Brian through the protocol, told him what to take, how to take it.
I don't know if he supplied him with it.
I don't really remember that.
But along the way, the Russians get busted in the Sochi Olympics.
Gregory has to flee the country and then rats out the entire Russian Olympic team.
And now he's got a hit out on him.
So he's hiding in America and still is.
He's under witness protection.
He's got 24-hour armed guards around him all the time.
And, you know, someone from Russia apparently is looking to kill him.
So this poor guy's wandering around.
Well, the smashing machine is like that in that what they were doing was they were studying Mark Coleman, or excuse me, Mark Kerr, when he was at the peak of his popularity in Pride.
And Mark Kerr was a fucking gorilla.
Look at him there.
My God, just an enormous wrestler, super powerful guy, just fucking smashes shit out of people.
But when they start filming this documentary...
He is falling apart.
They catch him falling apart.
He's addicted to pain medication, so he's shooting up, and he's doing it right in front of the documentary crew.
He's just out of his mind.
He's doing steroids.
He's doing painkillers.
He's just completely addicted.
And you see everything collapse.
They caught it right at the right time, right when the cameras got to him, was right when it was all falling apart.
And it's a fascinating documentary.
And that was in the Japan days of Pride, where not only were there no testing, but...
Yeah, he's usually the poster boy for USADA. Yeah, he was the guy that was probably responsible for them getting rid of the TRT program.
The TRT program is very controversial because the whole idea behind it was some of these guys need testosterone just like anything else, like thyroid medication.
We're just going to give it to them.
But the problem is why do they need testosterone?
Why does a 26-year-old man have low testosterone?
Well, the reality is a lot of them were on juice.
And so their natural endocrine system shuts down and then they get tested during that time period.
They go, oh my god, this poor guy, he needs medicine.
And so you give them testosterone and Vitor, like whatever the natural level was, Vitor was at hyperhuman levels to the point where they were worried he was going to die.
Something a lot of people don't consider about TRT2 that goes overlooked when it comes to these TUEs is even if you're within the natural reference range, like he was pushing it to super physiologic levels.
That's why, you know, he was getting more scrutiny too.
But even if he kept his levels at like 700 nanograms per deciliter and that's like a normal level...
bleed of hormone you're getting all day.
That's not going to dip based on diurnal rhythm.
It's not going to dip based on shitty sleep, based on excessive training, based on weight cutting, lack of substrate for actually producing the hormones and nutrition while you're weight cutting aggressively.
Fucking anything.
It just stays chronically at 700 the entire time.
Whereas a natural who has 700 would be like 700 in the morning, goes down to 500, 600, blah, blah, blah.
And obviously when you're weight cutting aggressively, if you're a guy who loses 30, 40, 50 pounds in a matter of a few months to make weight for an event, obviously your test levels are going to go in the gutter too.
But then you maintain that that entire time.
Your performance metrics obviously stay far better.
And also, You get a disproportionate drop in SHBG, which spikes your free test to a level that otherwise would never be achievable.
So it's like a binding protein that regulates how much hormone is freely in circulation to get to target tissues.
So if you have a higher SHBG, you have less free testosterone that actually is...
Mm.
So if you have this drop in SHBG from exogenous administration of testosterone, you get a disproportionate rise in your free test because there's less of this binding protein to hold on to it.
And when you get that disproportionate rise in free T, you get more psychoactive activity, aggression, muscle building.
There's a reason why guys on TRT, I guarantee you hold more muscle than they would have otherwise at the same level on paper of a total T with natural levels.
Yeah, it's kind of ironic how testosterone commercial grade is derived from soy, which is like the complete fucking opposite of what- Yams or soy?
It comes from like yams, stigmasterol, I forgot all the, like it's basically like soy derived ultimately at the end of the day.
Yeah, it's like Mexican yams and it's like all these, the way they react it down, it comes from, I think the current way to do it is soy, which is just interesting because that's like the last thing you would think makes testosterone.
Commercial-grade testosterone, like the stuff you get from a pharmacy for your TRT, is all derived from the soy derived.
So the carbon isotope of it, the ratio of it, is indicative of plant-derived testosterone.
Right.
When you do a carbon isotope ratio test and you combust it down and you see what kind of carbon content is in it when you're checking the urine, you see it disproportionately...
The carbon-13 to carbon-12 ratio is disproportionately in favor of plant-derived testosterone to a point where there's no way a human could produce this through endogenous steroidogenesis from cholesterol.
So if you hypothetically wanted to skirt around this test...
If you had animal-derived cholesterol and you reacted it down, you could hypothetically get a human-looking derived testosterone that's completely immune to detection through the carbon isotope ratio test.
It's not like you would ever be able to get that from a commercial company that's going to provide it to you, but hypothetically, if you got, I don't know, from like a medical supply company, you've got animal-grade testosterone, or I mean cholesterol, and then you had a chemist who you hired because you're, you know, an athlete who has access to the resources available to pay somebody to do this.
And you had the lab equipment.
You could hypothetically manually take that cholesterol and react it down, all the way down to testosterone, just like your body would endogenously.
And then once you have that, you have testosterone that's been derived from animal-based cholesterol that has a carbon isotope ratio equivalent to that of what looks to be animal-derived rather than plant.
I think athletes in all sports, I don't think it's prevalent.
Like, especially in the UFC, some of the people who get caught, even at, like, high-level fighters, TJ Dillashaw, he is recombinant EPO, which is highly detectable if you're looking for it.
So even the highest level of fighters I don't necessarily think have access to the resources to hire these chemists necessarily or even think to do this kind of stuff.
But ultimately, I do think at a very high level, there are individuals doing this.
If you can literally take a fucking yam and turn it to test, I cannot imagine it's impossible to take actual human-identical cholesterol, which is literally what your body uses to make tests, And react at them.
To me, it makes more sense how you get tested out of that than out of a random plant.
And you got to think, out of all the stuff that China does, one of the things they do is these concentration camps.
They have these prisoner camps.
And, you know, the people that did wrong speak or whatever and they shuffle them off there.
I would imagine, I mean, the dark rumor was always like that's where you're getting some organ transplants that some people would go over there to get organ transplants.
You gotta think they're making testosterone that way too.
Just using people as like a fucking sponge to drain out.
Personally, I think that if you go back historically to the beginning, like obviously the guy is pretty loose on what he's willing to do in terms of, you know...
So with him, if you go back to his first positive test results, I believe he tested positive for clomiphene and letrozole way back in like 2016 or something.
So if you look at those two drugs, one of them is an aromatase inhibitor that you would use to prevent gyno formation usually.
And then Clomid is like a fertility drug you would use to restore testosterone production, or in women use it to aid in fertility.
So using those two drugs back then, to me, seemed like something you would be doing to either, you know, prevent the gyno from what you were using at a time when it was less scrutinous, perhaps.
And then the Clomid, you know, to recover or something was tainted is what his claim was.
But we already have, you know, history of him doing this or getting popped for something pretty stupid to get popped for way back in, you know, 2015-2016 era, approximately.
After that, he tests positive for Torinobol.
And then thereafter, the pulsing.
But the thing that's interesting about that is when Nowitzki talks about this pulsing M3 metabolite, he refers to...
Well, it's not him.
He's just reiterating the research.
And it's ultimately they use this reference point of Clomid pulsing as a...
Kind of a proxy to exemplify, look, here's a drug that stores itself in fat tissue and pulses over time.
So they use Clomid as an example, because they can't just give a human a shit ton of Terenabol and try and figure out if this is going to work or not.
So they give them this fertility drug, or they've looked in the data and found, parsed out this information about Clomid pulsing.
And they use that as a reference point for like, look, there's a drug that can pulse over time.
But the interesting thing is, Jon Jones literally popped for Clomid before.
But he's never had that pulse.
So he has this pterinibol that keeps pulsing, but the Clomid they use as the reference point of a drug that can pulse never pulsed for him.
Like the idea would be that metabolites of these hormones, like first of all with pterinibol, After Icarus came out, and shortly around that, Rod Chankov is the one who came up with the M3 metabolite test and extended the detection window of Torinobol.
And that's actually, when I mentioned the Summer Olympics and how many people retroactively got their medals stripped or they got popped for the Summer Olympics for...
Like, 12 years in totality.
A lot of those positive test results were forward-to-rendible after they used Rod Chankov's data to retroactively test the urine samples and see.
They thought, at the time, it was undetectable because they got it out of their system based on the current detection windows.
But then when Rod Chankov came out with his data, and when they went back and tested it using his assay, you could figure out, oh, past that date, they actually detected for that, you know, the longer-term metabolites.
So, the idea behind the pulsing is these metabolites that linger, they can store themselves in fat tissue, essentially, and they can liberate themselves over time sporadically.
Like, I think personally, like, the amount of tyrinobol he had was so small.
A lot of times, like, for certain compounds like tyrinobol, the only way you're going to get it is, like, underground.
Like, you're going to get it.
It's not a pharmaceutical product that's designed for, like, a clinical application.
So, you're going to get it designed by an underground lab who sells steroids to, you know, random bodybuilders or a chemist in, you know, China or something.
And you're kind of just banking on the fact that it's not going to be tainted.
They're going to use, like, clean equipment.
It's going to be whatever drug you're hoping to get.
And there are a lot of different scenarios that might, you know, explain it.
And there's different theories, like, I could have that could hypothetically.
Either one could be true, potentially.
But I think one of the options is a drug he thought he was getting that was potentially undetectable was tainted with serenable.
or he thought he could get around the detection window by taking it, unaware of Rodchenkov's long-term data that came out, or there's like a variety of different things that could be happening, but ultimately for him, he got it in his system, and on paper,
when you look at his testosterone levels when you look at his testosterone levels and his ratios of testosterone to epitestosterone, like when he fought DC, they were so out of whack that it would not be explainable, in my opinion, by anything other than some sort of suppression of your system via the usage of something.
Yeah, so normally the levels would be over 10 times what he had in general.
I'd have to pull it up to remember exactly, but he was like in the single digits for urinary testosterone, which otherwise should be like 60 plus or something.
He was like 4 or something.
And it was multiple data points of his testosterone being single digits to a point that would indicate significant suppression, in my opinion.
Because if you have a drug that's suppressing your system, the drug you're taking, presumably, is what is driving your performance vectors that you deem useful enough to use in competition.
So hypothetically, if I was using Terenabol...
Like, all those athletes in Russia or whatever using Terenabol, you're going to have some suppression of your testosterone levels, which, you know, on paper could inhibit performance, but you're using the drug to drive performance.
So even though your endogenous levels are lower, you're relying on this compound you're using that you deem useful enough to dope with, potentially.
If they're using a test that's sophisticated enough to detect that he has these very low testosterone levels and he has this pulsing of terinobol, like where is the room for this compound that's going to significantly increase his performance?
Yeah, so let's just say, hypothetically, Terenabol or any random oral steroid is not, like, presumably, this isn't 100% factual, this is just speculating based on the levels and whatnot, but if he has a certain, even if he has crushed tests...
The room, if they're not looking for a certain drug that's not on their list, and you're using it, full board, whatever dose you want, because they can't detect it because they don't even know it exists, then that's going to be significantly performance enhancing.
So, see, the thing is, like, when they catch someone with something like what Victor Conte had come clean with that they use for Barry Bonds and all these different athletes, undetectable, you rub it on your skin, and no one knew what it was.
We think, oh, well, they caught that guy.
They're more sophisticated now.
You can't get away with that now.
Do you think it's possible there could be some new designer steroids or some new compound that's not on the list of things to be tested for because we don't even know it exists, but yet it is significantly enhancing performance?
If you don't have an assay developed for it, detecting it is...
You can't prove anything exists in the body if you don't have an assay to detect it.
So even though you have this elaborate list of steroids that are known about, if you have a novel drug and you don't know how to detect it, even if you have other markers that look fucked up, like it's testosterone levels in the gutter, there's no threshold amount where you pop because your test is in the gutter.
They look for high test.
They don't look for low.
So if you're really low randomly, they might be like, huh, that's weird, and keep an eye on it.
maybe test you further for other stuff, but it doesn't mean you couldn't be using something gung-ho the entire time.
So I do think designer drugs exist.
I don't necessarily know that they're being leveraged highly in the designer steroid family because you could hypothetically probably be able to determine this compound derived from testosterone was manipulated and, you know, see something iffy and, you know, dig into it and get you know, see something iffy and, you know, dig into it and get a perhaps find out pretty clear pretty soon what it is and retroactively, you know,
But I do think there are novel agents being developed from the growth hormone side of things, EPO side of things, the testosterone, obviously, there's the carbon isotope ratio proof cholesterol derived testosterone, which you could also potentially argue the guy was Using basic TRT and came off and crashed his system at the time of the test or something.
There's a million different reasons, but ultimately seeing that level in his urine, testing for a random compound, having in the past tested positive for a fertility drug and an aromatase inhibitor you would only use in the context of drug use essentially, intentionally in most cases.
It's just like highly improbable.
I don't think that he's at least tried to do some shit to get around the system.
So, explain how someone would create something that would mimic the effects of hyperhuman levels of testosterone, but be a novel steroid, like a new compound.
Well, I think the main loopholes in testing at this point are through bioidentical compounds, so things that your body naturally produces.
So if you're trying to mimic the benefits of a high dose of testosterone, I think the main go-to, to be honest, is literal testosterone.
So I wouldn't even, I don't think people are often deferring to these, you know, oral agents that would shut you down and trying to design like a THG, the clear kind of thing.
I think they're using literal micro doses of actual testosterone, actual EPO, actual GH, things of that nature.
Yeah, so for right now, the detection of these things, if they're identical to what you naturally produce, it's kind of difficult to prove one way or the other.
Like at least with a synthetic drug, if you develop a test for it, you can prove retroactively you use something that should never be in your body.
But with testosterone, EPO, GH, etc., it's a lot more finicky because it's supposed to be there.
So, I think that, again, even with randomized testing 24 hours, you have to give a one-hour whereabouts of where you're going to be every single day.
Hypothetically, after that one-hour window, if you microdose, test, GH, EPO, all these bioidentical compounds, the likelihood that you're going to get detected is like...
It depends on the individual, and you would do this preliminary data going into your longitudinal testing beforehand, ideally.
I'm not saying how to do it or anything, I'm just, you know, hypothetically saying.
And you would kind of know beforehand what it looks like when you take this microdose of a compound and what it does to your, you know, detection parameters.
Yeah, so like hypothetically, like there are studies that literally show people microdosing EPO and GH and getting away with it and almost nobody getting caught.
And then there are certain genetic polymorphisms that cause it to be nearly impossible to tell if somebody's using even megadoses of testosterone.
So there's some individuals that have a genetic...
It's like they're literally missing the gene that encodes for the enzyme that excretes testosterone that they test in your urine.
So they test in your urine for testosterone, like glucuronidated testosterone.
They add glucuronic acid to the testosterone in your body.
That's a process that happens to allow you to, like...
piss it out essentially and some individuals lack the gene that encodes for this enzyme so it makes it so you literally piss out barely any of this you know marker that they test for so you there's people who use upwards of like half a gram of testosterone 500 milligrams which is like a fucking actual bodybuilder cycle essentially and getting no detection that's crazy yeah Yeah.
That's why you have the biological passport, because you could assess over time what does your testosterone look like, and then they develop their own little, like, a much narrower and smaller threshold for red-flagging you.
So, a lot of my research has been developed around, like, my research has been developed around trying to not die and live a long, healthy life while using things like testosterone, having a higher body weight than otherwise, you know, maybe optimal for longevity.
We were talking before the podcast about athletes and actors and people who are carrying massive amounts of weight and what kind of a toll that takes on your body if you're a 300 pound, 8% body fat guy who's 50. Yeah.
Yeah, especially if you're, I don't know, I guess at the end of the day, even if you claim it's, oh, I'm just on medical prescribed testosterone, People ultimately know that it's not TRT limit levels, you know, if you're walking around at fucking the rock sides, essentially.
I think a lot of the time, people don't want people to downplay their hard work, so they don't want to admit it.
Even bodybuilders who couldn't argue out of taking stuff because it's so obvious, they often will do this thing where they say the doses they use are lower because then it doesn't take away from the fact that they still train hard, they eat perfect, they're so meticulous about their sleep, etc.
Which I sort of understand, but it's all fucking lying at all levels.
Especially when it comes to testosterone replacement therapy, because for me, I'm a person where if I find something that's beneficial, I want to tell everybody.
If I find something that works great for me, I just tell everybody.
So when I talk about it, first of all I talk about it because everything that I find beneficial I feel like I have an obligation to tell people.
And the thing about the testosterone thing, it's like, I think it comes back from the Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, those guys getting caught doing steroids and everybody was so disappointed.
In baseball in particular, that was such a big deal.
If you got caught using steroids or in the Olympics or anything else, like, my God, you're a cheater.
It's not like there's some sort of a sanctioned competition where you have an unfair advantage over other people because you're taking testosterone replacement therapy and the normal 50-year-old guy is not.
But I think some of it is natural because of science, the understanding of nutrition and supplementation, hyperbaric chambers, all the things that are legal that people do implement.
There's a lot of legal things that you can do that can change your hormone profile.
Sauna's a big one.
There's a lot of different things that people do that do have a measurable effect on your ability to recover, your endocrine system to function correctly.
Sleep.
People know how valuable sleep is now.
It's literally like a performance-enhancing drug.
People that sleep four hours a day versus people that sleep eight hours a day, the markers are fucking astonishing.
Yeah, and back in the day, too, especially from the entrepreneurial side of things, people would always advocate this whole, like, sleep when you're dead, you know?
If you go to bed and sleep for six hours, you get an extra two hours of work that you wouldn't have otherwise.
I mean, I'll tell you right now, I got five hours sleep last night, and I just did a workout with John Wolf over at Onnit.
Me and Bert Kreischer just worked out.
I'm wrecked.
My brain is like firing on six cylinders.
It's like...
But if I get a good eight-hour sleep and I come in, if I needed to do something where I had to be at my fucking very best, like some super complicated podcast with a shady character, and I had to have all my resources and all my research at my fingertips so I could just pull it out at any moment, I would make sure that I got a lot of sleep and didn't work out that day.
Yeah, so having alpha-GPC, I find the most bioavailable form of choline that actually crosses the blood-brain barrier, and then acetylcholinesterase inhibitors that inhibit the breakdown of acetylcholine, so you could use, like, hupergine A is a good one.
And the CPAP is a game changer for me because otherwise, you know, I was getting, I don't know, like...
I forgot how many episodes of apneas I was having per hour, but it was exorbitant to the point that I probably would be dead by now if I didn't get a CPAP otherwise.
Well, when you first start, yeah, because you're not used to something blowing air into your airway and strapped to your head, so I'd often wake up and just be fucking chucked across the room or whatever.
But some people, they don't get used to it.
They don't try to get used to it.
They just do it a couple nights, and they say, this thing sucks.
Who wants this?
Some single guys have this idea that girls are going to think it's weird and shit when you show up and you have the CPAP machine.
Like, I wore a pulse oximeter, and that's how you assess if you have sleep apnea or not.
And if you are...
Even like a healthy guy otherwise, and you're lean, even if you're fucking shredded, if you're a big guy, highly recommend a sleep study to anyone, because it's something that, even sometimes significant others, they may just think you're a horrible snorer, and they just go in another room maybe to get away from you, and they just think that's how you sleep, and you're just annoying and loud.
But you might literally be dying in your sleep, gasping for air.
Like, I used to wake up.
Sit up and gasp for air because I was literally at the point of about to pass out and my body wakes me up and makes me breathe.
I remember I was on a plane once and there was a guy behind me, it was a long flight, I think it was an international flight, there was a guy behind me, he was a big guy, very overweight, and he was holding his breath, choking for like 15-20 seconds at a time.
So he's like laying back like, And then he gets up.
You could use the full face mask, which is pretty much impossible to knock off, but that makes a bunch of lines on your face and it encourages mouth breathing, which otherwise is...
There's research that's come out that implies that's bad for performance and just longevity and whatnot.
No, the quality is the same because it's manually putting the amount of pressure I need to oxygenate me, but it encourages that subconscious mouth breathing that otherwise carries into your day.
It's just like a big long tube that connects to the machine that's on the ground and then it has this just like a strap that goes on your head up here.
It's a pretty thin strap here and here.
It has these little nasal pillows that you just like put into your nose and it's maybe like this big.
And it does look ridiculous, so I can see why some guys don't want to do it, especially around women, but ultimately, they'll understand if they like you enough.
Yeah, so that, apparently, if it's too dramatic, it gets to a point where you can't even feel the inside of your nose or something, and it feels like it's empty because all the stuff in there is just gone.
I can't imagine what it's like because it's never happened to me, but people say it's...
The worst thing ever and it makes them suicidal from how it feels.
Yeah.
There's some like real weird YouTube videos about guys talking about how they got their deviated septum fixed and the turbinate reduction and their lives have been ruined.
Sometimes I wonder when it comes to nature versus nurture of being a parent, like how much it's just you're predetermined to be your brain chemistry a certain way versus how you're raised.
Like how do I avoid having my kid do this, you know?
Yeah, and what's wild is if you go on her YouTube and you sort by oldest to newest, you can actually see she was still obviously underweight in the first video, but it gets...
Yeah, with bodybuilders it's wild too because it's almost like the opposite extreme where you actually are aware you're killing yourself very quickly while you're doing it.
Yeah, like you still want to walk around at like 260 plus, even though you know how stressful it is on all your organ systems, your heart.
Because it's one thing to realize something is unhealthy and fix it, but when your entire...
Persona is built around this physique and you're like superhuman, to watch it literally disintegrate and be mentally okay with it, that takes a very strong willpower in my opinion.
And you can't get away from the comments of people saying you're smaller, too.
Like, even for me in my comment section, if it's, you know, the difference between me at peak versus now, it's, oh, Derek, you stopped caring about muscle.
Oh, what happened?
And it's like, it's not like I was a bodybuilder level competing at, you know, a pro level or anything like that.
And he was literally the pinnacle of the sport, 260, 70, fucking shredded.
That's the brutal thing too when you get to that size is progressive overload, you get to a point where you're forced to use weights that are so exorbitant to overload because you're way too strong that it's impossible to not literally fucking dismantle your entire infrastructure while you're supporting those loads because you're squatting hundreds and hundreds of pounds, benching hundreds and hundreds, doing this and this, and your bones can't just adapt and be totally fine.
Or maybe just type in, what is PMMA? But that, Jamie, if you just back up to where you just were, it said Rich Piana's girlfriend shows pictures before PMMA oil.
Sinfall is one thing where you do inject just sterile oil in such a bolus amount that it eventually stretches the fascia of the muscle, and you can, you know, manipulate the shape of body parts, and a lot of pro bodybuilders do it, but PMMA is literally like a filler, apparently.
I could imagine, because some of them just want a fat ass, and to get that amount of size, you might otherwise need to make the rest of your body a size you don't want it to be to get to that point.
So I understand why they might want the injections, but...
No, the lips one is, I agree, makes, I don't, it's weird because a lot of the time when you hear girls say what they would love to have done, you can transparently tell them no guy wants to see that or cares, but they still want it.
Yeah, I could see if some chick had like a brutally deviated septum where their nose is like off-center or like their lips are so thin that it looks weird where it's not balanced, but the ones with normal features that then go to the hyper-extreme, I could never wrap my head around that shit.
Yeah, granted, we would still probably say breast implants are fine, even though that's like, not to some severe degree, but just like better than what their natural is.
And for some reason, our heads can wrap around that looking good, but then other stuff looks not good.
It's like, that's a ballsy move to put that out to the whole world where you can see you without your teeth, like scroll down, see her without her teeth, and then see her dolled up with the teeth.
You actually get microfractures all over the shin because, you know, you're constantly whacking it and inspiring.
Even if you're wearing shin pads, like there's some guys that will practice, like Kevin Ross made a bag for me that's in my LA studio that I've got to bring over to here that's a sandbag.
It's made out of all sand, and I would kick it.
And it fucking hurts like hell, man.
It's just sand.
So you just thunk, thunk.
It's just so hard.
But when you do that, it really conditions your shins.
And it actually makes your bones stronger, too.
You've seen guys, I'm sure, break baseball bats with their shins.
Have you seen that?
After a while, they can just smash right through a baseball bat.
But the parts of your shin that are exposed, like bone, you can harden.
But the shit you can never harden is your calves.
That is why that has become such a weapon in MMA, the calf kick.
Because the nerves and the tissue is all exposed.
And there's so little of it.
Like if somebody punches you in the forearm, my god, it hurts so much more than punching you in the ass.
But your forearms, like if someone kicks your forearms, that's one thing about MMA that people don't take into consideration.
When you see guys block a kick, that fucking hurts so much.
When someone's kicking you and you block it like this and you take it on the forearm, that shin just slamming into your arms, a lot of times guys are losing like 50% of the strength in their arms.
But it looks normal because they're still moving around and they're still throwing punches, but everything is numb.
Everything hurts.
It's just like the whole arm is just like, ugh!
And you're still throwing punches, but it's throbbing.
Shins always beat forearms.
I've trained with guys where they're holding pads for me and their fucking arms go numb from holding pads.
They have a big ass pad and just slamming kicks into the pads and they can't move their arms afterwards.
Now imagine it's just meat.
Just meat and the bones slamming right into the meat of your arm.
Yeah, I have a bag set up in my house and I have a gym where I have weight lifting equipment on one side and the other side is matted up for jujitsu and heavy bags and yeah.
You want to talk about a brutal cardio workout, 20-second sprint, 10-second rest.
20-second sprint, 10-second rest.
And you do it for eight repetitions, so eight 20s, right?
So it's like...
And then 10 seconds, you're like, nine, seven, seven, and then you do it again.
And it's incredible for your cardio.
So I'll do those.
I'll do like a set of those, get warmed up, and then mostly I'll stretch and then work on kicks.
So I'll start off with like kicks in the air.
I get my stretching in, Make everything nice and loose.
And then once I feel like everything's loose, then I'll do rounds where I'll just like shadow boxing and throwing kicks in the air.
And then once I get loose enough to the fact that I feel like I can, like everything's completely stretched out, all my tissues warm, then I will do like repetitions, like a hundred kicks with this leg, a hundred kicks with that leg.
And then I'll work on my form and stretching.
Then once I've done that, then I set the timer and do rounds in the bag.
Yeah, that's probably good at this point for longevity, I would imagine.
There's definitely a huge disparity between the guys like Coleman, who trained mental, full board, low reps too with high weight, and then the guys like Jay Cutler, who went higher rep, higher volume to achieve the same level of breakdown of the muscle, but took them...
It's like more sets in the gym and more time intensive, but now they can still train perfectly in their 40s.
Like even though I don't lift heavy weights, like one time we did a podcast, we got really drunk.
And the guys went out to the gym.
It was in the LA studio.
I had a studio that was set up in one part of this warehouse and then connected to it.
It was this full gym, like all rogue equipment.
It was awesome.
And these dorks, like Bert Kreischer and Tom Segura and Ari, they all got under the bench and they tried to put up 225. They were all benching 225. And I don't bench.
But he also, like in the things, like occasionally, he'll do stuff with traditional weightlifting stuff.
And he said, it's interesting that like when he goes, I'm paraphrasing, but when he goes and does traditional weightlifting stuff, he hasn't lost any of his strength.
He's like super fucking strong.
But most of the time when you see him, like maybe he'll have like a 70 pound kettlebell.
Look at that.
That's just deadlifting stuff.
The dude's like, jacked.
But if you see some of the other ones, Jamie, where he's shirtless and he's doing most of what he does, see what he's doing there?
That's probably like a 45-pound kettlebell.
If you see some of his stuff, like here it is.
This is mostly the kind of routines that he does.
But I mean, look at the amount of muscle that guy's carrying around.
Yeah, and I guess if you're trying to even take a balanced approach to things, like, are you even going to be censored to the point where you can't even be a news outlet to begin with?
So he was probably like too proud to tell people, this is really 100 pounds.
I'm just fucking around.
Yeah, but like thought like I'll play it off and people think and I bought it Hmm, but then you see like a real bodybuilder using a hundred pound dumbbell.
Oh, yeah, that's different Yeah, no, I think most some layman would see the you know Cuomo video and be like damn this guy's a fucking house like look at him toss this hundred pound double around There are some people that are stupid strong and they don't even look that big and Yeah, yeah, definitely.
There's one thing that's weird, is wrestler strength.
Some of the strongest fucking human beings that I've ever met were wrestlers.
There's this dude, Eric, I forget his last name, but we used to do drills together and he wasn't much bigger than me, man.
He was, you know, I'm 200 pounds now.
Back then I was probably 190 and maybe he was 200, 205 at the most.
So maybe he's 15 pounds heavier than me.
And we used to do these drills, this knee-on-belly drill.
The knee-on-belly drill is you're on your back, the guy has his knee across your belly, and generally like hands on one shoulder and maybe an overhook on one of your arms.
And the idea is he's trying to hold you in place and you're trying to explode out of there, you know, put pressure on the knee, hip escape, get out of the position.
When he was on top of me, I wasn't going anywhere.
This fucking dude would pin me down.
It was crazy how strong he was.
But then when we reversed it and I was on top of him, I would just go flying.
He was so fucking strong that he would get his hands on you and he'd fuck!
And you would just literally be lifted into the sky.
I couldn't hold him down.
And it was this wrestler strength that is just, he wasn't that much bigger.
Because there would be other guys that were that big and he would train with them and it was proportionate.
It made sense.
Like we'd roll with them and they were strong, but it wasn't freakish.
And then wrestler strength is like a different kind of strength.
They're so used to manipulating bodies and they're so used to just being able to push things.
They're always just pushing and pulling and pushing and pulling and they just have this fucking preposterous tendon strength.
Where they can deadlift a fucking ridiculous amount, but then bench, they suck at, and then transferring to actual athletics, it might not even make a difference at all, and they get tossed around by some dude who can't even bench a fucking plate or something.
Well, I mean, not just maintain it, but he was also preparing for the UFC. So preparing...
The grappling aspect of it is a big deal.
And it's also like, his rise...
His rise as a kickboxer coincides with Glover Teixeira's rejuvenation as an MMA fighter because they train together.
It's really interesting because Glover just won the light heavyweight title and he's 42, which I think is like the second oldest guy to ever win a title.
And also in a very competitive weight class against this guy Jan Blachowicz, who's a fucking murderer, right?
And Glover just dominated him, took him down, beat him up, strangled him, dropped him, hurt him bad standing, then got him to the ground, strangled him.
But Glover has been training with Alex Pereira.
And so they've been enhancing each other's skill set.
Glover's a fantastic grappler, great wrestler, black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and also a very good striker.
But Alex Pereira is literally the scariest striker on earth.
So the two of them together, it's really greatly enhanced Glover's abilities and also greatly enhanced Alex.
So the two of them together, now competing in the UFC, it's a big deal.
And then Alex is the same size as him too.
Because even though he fights at 185, he also held the Glory 205-pound title and was knocking people out at light heavyweight as well.
Whitaker's looked fucking amazing ever since Stylebender knocked him out, you know, and maybe with a different approach it could be a different fight, but Adesanya is just so smart, man.
He's so clever.
Like when you watch him fight, for a person like me who loves like intricate, high-level striking setups and traps, he's the master.
Yeah, usually maybe like, I don't know, like half an hour beforehand and I make sure while I'm getting ready for bed, I piss before I start brushing my teeth and then I piss again after I'm done, right before, just to make sure I get the last little bit out.
This is a product that we sell usually for hyperhydrating a muscle for endurance work or for getting just like a impractically ridiculous pump in the gym as a bodybuilder.
But you could hypothetically retain more water before you go to bed so you don't piss.
There's that feeling you get, it's funny because it's the most dramatic, before you go to bed, you're like, huh, I'm super parched now and it just feels so dry, like I wouldn't even be able to sleep knowing that my throat is this parched.
I can hold my piss like a motherfucker during a podcast, but at 4 o'clock in the morning, it's almost always like, God damn it, I wake up from a nightmare or something like that, and I'm like, fuck, I gotta pee.
Oh, where I am on the West Coast, it's basically everywhere you go into, you have to wear a mask.
You have to show proof of vaccination to get into pretty much everything except grocery stores.
What else?
Like fast food restaurants.
Gyms, you do need to show it, which is problematic, obviously, because it's kind of like paradoxical to, oh, you want to be healthy, but we're not going to let you be healthy unless you get this thing, you know what I mean?
But pretty much everywhere you need it, other than grocery stores and a couple random things that are less relevant.
It's literally like a third world country about to implode.
I used to go there years ago, and it was gorgeous.
You'd see a few homeless people every now and then, but it was all tech money and everything.
Now, every time you turn on the news, after they fucking took over that six block, the Antifa people took over that six block area in downtown Seattle, and the mayor called it the Summer of Love, and everybody was like, what is this bitch saying?
What are you talking about?
You got fucking Antifa took over your town.
You've got literal militants controlling the streets like warlords.
They were beating people up that took photographs and videos.
They had their own...
Police.
They were using their own authoritarian control system.
Somebody got shot there, and then eventually the whole thing imploded, and the police recaptured it.
Like chaos post-COVID. There's been some protests and stuff downtown, but I think it's...
I don't know, there's very strict gun laws in Canada, so I think it's...
I don't really know how much less or more problematic that is because of that, but there's not that much violence in Vancouver, but there is protests against the vaccine and stuff like that, and...
I don't know.
Like, I kind of stay out of the downtown area nowadays.
It's kind of going to shit a bit.
Like, a lot of people have moved from down...
It used to be the place to be, downtown Vancouver.
And then a lot of people have moved to the suburbs away from it to get away from the bullshit.
And the prices did not go...
They're still exorbitantly high and ridiculous.
So, it's kind of like...
I don't know.
Like, of all the places to live, the most overpriced, I think it's like...
Vancouver, Toronto, California, New York kind of places are all absurd.
It's kind of unfortunate too because it's not like I have a lot of flexibility if I ever want to move because like where else do I go in Canada and then getting citizenship in the States is quite difficult to do.
Like, if you want to sneak over from Haiti, like all those people coming from Haiti, and then, like, you know, you see this lady comes over from Haiti and immediately gets married to some American guy, like, hey, how'd you meet?
Yeah, I guess it's kind of like an ethical, weird thing where you're like an official government guy and you have to criticize a relationship's validity.
Yeah, one of the, I did a video a long time ago on Jason Momoa, I think, and his role in Aquaman, and the way I say aqua, apparently, is like, instead of aqua.
And just like certain things like that, people would clue into and be like, what the fuck?
He's still athletic and has a good frame beforehand, but that's the reason why he also ends up the way he does when he takes gear, because a lot of people who take gear, they still look like shit, to be honest, but it's still pretty obvious he packed on just exorbitant amounts of tissue very quick.
Because it's very difficult, especially when you're growing up and you get influenced by these comic books and you see them and they look like Mr. Olympia competitors in the comic books.
And I just find it hilarious how many women complain about body, like obviously they have their own issues with unrealistic body image, you know, things that are portrayed to be the ideal for women.
But those physiques are achievable through like some like nutrient deprivation, excessive cardio or whatever.
Whereas for us, the physique we're told is like the ideal is achieved through grams and copious amounts of exogenous steroids that are going to kill you in like 15 years.
And then, yeah, and it's like that is what's portrayed on us as like ultimate, you know, pinnacle of masculinity, some ridiculous, unrealistic ideal that you'll never get to.
Even if you had prime genetics and sauce your face off and ate food all day and trained every fucking day perfectly, you'll still never get there in most cases.
The problem, I don't see anything wrong with, of course, if you just want to be a certain way, or you have.
Like, some people, through epigenetics, when they're born, their parents, the way their lifestyle is, will literally influence their kid's baseline as to how, you know, they're...
signaling, satiation, like feedback systems and whatnot work.
And they end up having a harder time, you know, keeping weight off than the next person.
Like there's obviously some genetic predisposition elements.
And if you want to be, if you're overweight, like whatever, but don't put out there like viral TikTok videos that are like, be okay with being like a fat fuck and like, you know, actually promoting it as if it's like cool almost, or it's completely fine in a way that's not going to harm you in some capacity. or it's completely fine in a way that's not going Well, not only that, I mean, especially during the pandemic, and especially during when we talked about this yesterday, they pulled up the study where it was showing how COVID affects overweight people so much differently because their body literally doesn't produce the antibodies correctly. they pulled up the study where it was showing how
Yeah, pretty much everything in your body, physiologic process-wise, functions better when you're, you know, a lean slash athletic body composition, have some muscle, have good glycemic control.
But one of the things that Peter, who's a, he's an oncologist, and now he does mostly life extension medicine, but he said, or he's an oncologist, A surgeon?
Is an oncologist someone who does cancer surgeries?
Whatever he is.
Genius guy.
He said that having high cardio, having a high cardiovascular fitness level, reduces your all-cause mortality by five-fold.
One thing I thought that was really interesting is he mentioned the use of flavoxamine in attenuating the COVID-19.
Yeah, that's definitely a super promising intervention now.
And it has so many multifaceted applications.
And I don't know why more people aren't looking at it for a concurrent adjunct to be used alongside the main thing that everyone thinks is the only thing you can use right now.
No, it's crazy how much Fat Shroud's facial features, too, where it's like somebody who they thought they were ugly and then they just got in shape and it's like, oh, wow, you're fucking hot.
Yeah, some of it is gear-related, too, though, because there's an idea that there's more androgen receptors in your delts and traps, so you sort of see this.
This is almost one of the ways you can identify guys who use shit, too.
Like, you know, when you saw Vitor, you're like, his traps are up to his...
Yeah, there's more androgen receptors in there that steroids bind to.
So you can sort of identify a guy who has disproportionate development, like, oh, he's probably using hormones.
Uh, so that's, like, growth hormone releasing hormone.
It's, like, a peptide.
And, like, personally, I see, uh...
There's something called CJC1295 that the same compounding pharmacy you probably get the Samorlin from probably makes.
That seems to be more efficacious, and I've used that over Samorlin, and I use a GHRP with it, like an ipamorelin concurrently with it, and it definitely works to some extent.
But for me, I don't know.
I like the fact that it works with your body's internal system, whereas GH is just an unregulated amount of hormone getting introduced into your system.
You have no control over how much output there is.
Right.
And CJC1295, it's like your pituitary, there's a bottleneck where you're not going to go over what you otherwise should need.
Because with GH, you could end up in a situation where you do have disproportionate insulin resistance developing, progressing cancer potentially, whereas you have this...
That would never happen with one unit, but within your own body's pituitary limits, the samoralin seems to be more favorable from a risk standpoint, at least.
Well, it kind of depends on how frequently you want the benefits, because if you're using this stuff, you're going to get acute lipolysis when you're using it.
What's that mean?
Liberation of free fatty acids into circulation to then burn.
For GH or anything GH-related, they basically do...
Insulin is like a storage hormone, and GH is like a liberating...
fatty acids for then burning and exercise ideally so ideally you would be doing some sort of activity after its use or you'd be using it at a time when you otherwise are trying to induce the most recovery like pre-sleep is like what i would time it as so that's as important like doing it is like when you do it is very important I think so.
Because if you were just using GH just haphazardly all the time, hypothetically, if you have no...
Injuries to heal.
You have nothing really going on.
You're not exercising.
You're freeing up fatty acids, becoming insulin resistant, and then not burning them.
And they kind of just get redeposited, and you're making yourself acutely insulin resistant for no reason, essentially.
I have heard that, that people do develop insulin resistance from GH use.
I have heard of that.
I think that was from, there was a book that I had read like back in the day when I had first heard about people doing hormonal replacement, doing hormone replacement with growth hormone.
But we had a guy named Bigfoot Silva that fought in the UFC that had a pituitary gland tumor.
And it was causing him to have gigantism.
And then they operated on the pituitary gland and then his body wasn't producing any hormones and so then he was fighting with no hormones and the problem was he just could not take a punch anymore where he was like indestructible before and Yeah.
And then all of a sudden he'd take a punch and he'd just go out.
And I mean, it's hard to say because part of that could have been, there's a thing that happens to a fighter when they've had X amount of pro fights, X amount of gym wars, X amount of sparring sessions.
Crack him on the jaw, he would just fucking fire back, and you couldn't believe the shots he could eat.
And then one day he'd get hit, and bink, just like his legs would go, and he just would not be able to take a shot anymore.
And he actually explained it to me.
He said, it's like your body is trying to protect you from your toughness.
It's like your brain realizes, like, oh, this motherfucker's gonna stand and trade bombs with this guy again, and we're just gonna take the damage, fuck that, we're just gonna shut down the system.
Yeah, I think that's almost sort of how, even as you get older, some of these processes down-regulate to, I think, conserve you as you become less capable of handling stressful events.
A lot of people, they want to replace every hormone that gets shut down.
But, like, there's a theory that maybe these things are downregulating on purpose to avoid things like cancer and whatnot.
One of the things that I've done recently that helped me a lot is hyperbaric chamber use.
I followed that Israeli, there's an Israeli university that did a protocol which was for 90 days you do 60 sessions of 90 minutes per day, 60 of those 90 minute sessions, and you found at the end of the 90 days they had an increase of the telomeres which corresponded to a 20 year decrease in biological age.
Because it's like there's no way the overall mass of the food is producing this much of a difference where it's like I sat down with a flat stomach and now it's like touching the fucking table.
When I look at something that's literally not even, has no nutrient substance whatsoever, and yet I want it like an idiot, and I disproportionately eat so much of it that I know it's going to make me feel sick, too.
And it's like, you know, gonna be like pro fucking cancer, pro get fat, pro everything that I don't want, but it tastes, makes me feel very dumb.
I've done keto a couple times, but it was super long ago, and I was never doing anything entrepreneurial at the time, so it was irrelevant, me assessing the brain fog back then, so I don't even remember what it was like.
But now, from a cognitive aspect, I notice a dramatic...
Anytime I have a super carb-dense meal...
The brain fog is just like another 20% added every like carb dense meal until the end of the day you're just like in a fucking haze trying to work and it's just not even like nothing productive is happening and I know guys who do carnivore or keto diets you stay mentally sharp.
Perpetually, because your blood sugar is just stable, you're not spiking your insulin through the roof.
So, I've been very, very tempted to try it, personally, just for the cognitive elements, but the dramatic decrease, and you lose, like, instantly, like, 10 pounds of water, like, out of the muscle, specifically, from the lack of glycogen, and the performance hit you take in the gym.
It's very hard to build muscle when you're in keto, or it's harder.
That's sort of like, eh, I've been like weighing it out in my head if I should try it or not.
I wonder if you could do carnivore as your base diet, and then just around the workout sessions that you're trying to get that acute glycogen saturation, burn it up, and get back into carnivore quick.
If you could do something like a cyclic dextrin peri-workout, get the glycogen you need, burn it, get back into keto immediately after or close to it so you can retain the mental clarity around the workout perimeter.
Yeah, it seems like that's possible, and I know some guys have done that with apples, and for whatever reason, that combination seems to be pretty common.
I don't know exactly what those comprise of, but the gastric emptying of this stuff is very, very fast intestinal transit to the point that it's in and out of your system.
So you have low GI stress in and out of your system quick, so you could hypothetically fuel up for the workout, burn it, and then be back into keto relatively quick, ideally, I would think.
You'd have to experiment, I guess, because ultimately, I'm sure you can tell a dramatic difference when you, the keto adaptation period is pretty rough from what I remember, like transitioning.
So I think you'd tell if it was making the transition in and out difficult from like a time duration standpoint pretty quick.
If you don't have one, not a bidet bidet like you're a Frenchman.
But one of them toilet seat things.
I forget what the name of the one that I have, but for my house here in Texas, I got one where you even come near it, it opens up, and light goes off and everything, and you sit down, and you can press a button, and the button shoots hot water up your butt.
Because sometimes you sit there and you've got that one random one that's like, what, do I need a whole roll of toilet paper to get rid of this last bit?
It was wild when it was like a fucking shift in the universe when like those tight pants came out and like Lululemon was founded in Vancouver in Canada.
And girls starting to wear the Lululemon tight pants that show off their ass.
Some of the preferences for women are just like...
I guess it's good universally, though, because it means there's more chances for guys, whereas for chicks, it's like there's like...
You can kind of tell universally what's attractive on a woman from like a body composition aspect and features, but then for guys, it's like so many fucking options and so many preferences that more guys are going to have a chance than otherwise would with like a...
5-10% of guys get like 90% of the girls or something, because it's just like all of these, like especially from an online dating aspect, it's just like disproportionately ridiculous in how successful a very small subsect of guys is on the device, on the...
Apps versus women, they, from like, I don't know, 5 out of 10s all the way to 10 out of 10, a lot of them are pretty much inundated with options still.
Whereas guys, it's like only the top upper echelon have all the options and the rest get like fucking none.
Yeah, I can't even imagine the, like, awareness of knowing how disproportionate my value is based on physical appearance and almost nothing else.
Because, like, if I'm a guy seeking a high-quality woman, like, I don't really give a shit if she's, like, rich and successful.
At all.
No, like, I would prefer you are, you know, like, a good cook and, like, can take care of shit and, like, help me achieve success in my endeavors and are, like, supportive.
Rather than, like, I don't give a fuck if you're a breadwinner or not.
Like, if some chick is, like, has super high aspirations and wants to be, like, entrepreneurial and, like, start a business and do that, I'm almost like, oh, like, how much time is this going to take?
Women are worried about the idea that if you're not into strong women and that you want the woman to be subservient and you want the woman to be like for you to be priority, your life to be a priority and your success be a priority and her to be almost like, you know, she's an accessory.
It's not that I wouldn't want them to have their own aspirations and goals and stuff.
I would just think...
If I have my path, I'm going to go down and do certain things that I know are going to support me and a family down the line.
I don't necessarily...
I would rather see you allocating time towards something that's, I don't know, like, aligns with my vision of where I'm going.
Because it's like if we have two different paths entrepreneurially, she's, like, I can't imagine you wouldn't drift apart in some capacity if you're, like, she's full board on work, you're full board on work.
Yeah, because if you're dating, first of all, and you meet a good one, she's going to want to spend a lot of time with you, right?
She's like, he really likes me.
We're going to go out again tonight.
And like, oh my God, you're going out every night.
And then you're going out four nights a week, and you're going out to dinners, and you leave the house at 7. You don't come home till 11. Then you're tired when you go to the gym in the morning.
But you're really into it because you really like her, but it takes a lot of time.
Whereas if you're married, you live in the same house.
So you come home, it saves a lot of time.
Also, when you're working really hard, she doesn't think that you are ignoring her.
She thinks you're working for the both of you if you have your funds together tied in together.
It's complicated shit, though.
Because, again, if you're a woman and you You assume that's sort of a traditional male-female marriage-wife role, and you take care of the house while the guy's working, and then the guy goes, eh, I'm done with this.
And you're like, bitch, I just invested 15 fucking years in your stupid life.
I never thought, oh, I want to have the number one podcast in the world.
I'm going to fucking work hard.
I'm going to have the number one podcast.
Never thought that once.
Never advertised this podcast.
Never went on other podcasts with a specific goal of promoting it.
Never took out video ads anywhere or anything.
Just did it.
So that's the same with almost everything I've ever done.
My goal as a comedian was just be a professional.
It wasn't like, I want to sell out arenas.
When it came to arenas, I was like, really?
I could do an arena?
Okay, let's try it.
Shit, this is crazy.
So it's just my goal was always just to do my best, like do my best as a comic, do my best as a podcaster, and that has worked for me.
I'm not saying it should work for everybody, because I think some people need, like there's some people that are very goal-oriented, like they want to have a vision board, they want to write all this shit down.
And they want to say, you know, by the time I'm 30, I want to have X amount of dollars in the bank and I want to have my own house.
And by the time I'm 40, I want to be the fucking CEO of this and be doing that.
Yeah, I think there's a misconception about how, like, disorganized or just like, I don't know, people don't realize they're successful until they're just like, they are, and it was just a result of their hard work cumulatively over time, and it's like, eventually you're in this amazing position, but it's not like you planned it necessarily step by step.
I do cage fighting commentary, I do stand-up comedy, and I do podcasting.
Three things where there's no blueprint.
Cage fighting commentary, first of all, when I started doing it, there was literally maybe four guys that had done it before me.
So there was no blueprint.
There's no one to tell me what to do.
I just did it.
I would just explain what was happening, why it was happening, and I felt like I had an obligation to try to explain to people, like, especially the ground game when it comes to jiu-jitsu positions, which is very technical.
And so I'm trying to explain and walk my way through these very intricate positions where I see a guy setting up for a very specific move.
And then when it comes to stand-up comedy, like...
No one can tell you how to do it.
You just gotta do it.
Your way is gonna be different from that guy's way.
Mitch Hedberg is very different from Sam Kinison, who's very different from Chris Rock.
Everybody's different.
You just have to figure out what makes your perspective funny.
No one can teach you how to do it.
No one can show you how to be funny.
A guy can teach you how to play guitar.
No one can teach you how to do stand-up.
You just gotta do it, and hopefully it works.
And then with podcasting, I mean, there was radio before, so it was like Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony, but that was like really how I got into it.
And then once I started doing podcasting in 2009, there was Adam Carolla.
He already had one and Marc Maron had one.
There's a few guys who had one before me, but it was just like...
It was bullshit.
No one got any money from it.
I mean, Corolla was the only guy that I think was making some money at the time.
But for me, it was like, there's no money in this.
It's just silly.
Just doing it for fun.
It was 100% doing it for fun.
And it went on like that for years, where I didn't make any money.
Like, whenever I look at, like, we were just on Spotify 2021, number one podcast of the year, all this, they sent me some stuff, showed me what the numbers are.
I'm like, okay.
Can't think about it.
I mean, it's great.
Wild.
It's crazy that it's the number one podcast in the world, but it's still, it's the same thing.
I just come in and I do it.
So I don't have, like, goals that way.
So I didn't, like, find a woman who, like, aligned with my goal.
She's just cool.
So we just get along great.
So it works.
And I just do my shit.
And she doesn't get in the way.
She doesn't fuck with me and she's very supportive.
So it's a great relationship in that way.
But again, I couldn't teach anybody how to meet somebody like my wife.
I couldn't teach anybody how to meet somebody who understands how crazy I am.
And it just works with me.
Because other people won't work with me.
Relationships are just like business partnerships or even friendships.
Like some guy who would be great friends with another guy, you would think that guy's annoying as fuck, and you'd never want to hang out with him.
Whereas other people would be like, dude, fucking let's party!
You're excited to see him.
There's people for everybody in business, in relationships, in friendships.
It's like you got to know what you like.
Know what you like and know who you are, and hopefully you get lucky and find someone that fits with that.
Because that way, if they like you, they actually like you.
If you're working so hard to convince someone that you're awesome, but you're really kind of bullshitting, eventually you're going to get exhausted and you're going to give that up.
And that's what a lot of women say guys do.
Like, they're in a relationship with a guy, and then they know him for, like, a couple of months, and all of a sudden that guy reveals who he really is.
Well, the mom was multiple bad relationships, divorced over and over again, right?
And he thinks it's just like, she grew up with this predatory idea of what a marriage is.
Like, you can find a guy who's successful, and then you treat him real nice, and then you work your way in, and then once you get pregnant, and then tell this motherfucker what's up.
And so once she was married, and when she was pregnant, it was just like, She just decided, you know, no sense in dragging this out.
Let's just close this up right now and take that check.
You know, I think once a man has children, and once you've been through all that, and your father, it's like, what am I going to date some 20-year-old?
And someone who's like the same age as your kids, it seems kind of creepy.
If you're a smoke show, if you're a hot lady, and you meet some Rupert Murdoch-looking guy, and he's worth billions of dollars, you're like, I think I can fuck this guy.
And you really can.
If you're a hot lady, you can kind of fuck any guy.
If he's single, all you have to do is be alone with him.
And if he's straight, you know, you can eventually, you know, charm your way to the point where this guy wants to fuck you, and he can't believe he can.
So for me, I started to develop more, I don't know, uh...
I don't know, kind of like higher tier goals from a daily, like micro standpoint as things went on and became proportionally, you know, more, I don't know, the stakes are higher.
So I would, for example, when I wanted to grow faster and I just saw the opportunity of what my channel was doing, I went from posting once a week or something to once a day.
And then after that, I went to twice a day.
And adhering to that schedule, I could tell the growth was disproportionately better And the performance of things was getting better, and I was also getting better at speaking, becoming more fluent, being able to articulate myself, and things were just proportionally escalating, almost in a dose-dependent manner of the input relative to the output of what result I was getting.
So I started to change my daily goals accordingly, just knowing that the output was going to be this superior...
Thing that otherwise I wouldn't have got to in nearly the same time frame or the, I don't know, the level at which it's become.
So my goals did.
I do have goals, but it was, I don't know.
Like at this point, I do have pretty tangible goals, but they're more based around my companies rather than Anything to do with the channel itself.
We just kind of started it in the beginning and then it just got...
The same thing with me.
I was doing it once a week.
We're doing the podcast.
We were doing it on Ustream at the time, and me and my friend Brian, and we were watching this little chat thing, and we would answer questions on Twitter and shit.
It was just fucking around.
It was all fucking around.
And then when the numbers started rolling in, and then I got better at it, too.
That was the other thing.
It's like I realized somewhere along the line, a couple years in, this is something you can actually get better at.
You get better at conversations.
You get better at not being annoying.
Get better at not talking over people.
You get better at listening.
You get better at like the art of flowing the conversation and keeping it together and keeping it engaging and interesting.
Yeah.
And then I realized that if I do it more days, more than once a week, then you'll have more people pay attention.
That's what I'd said to a lot of my comedian friends at the time.
They were like, "Why do you do so many fucking podcasts?" I go, dude, you should do more, too.
The more you do, the more people will watch it.
They become addicted to it.
It becomes a part of their life, and you give them content, and in return, they come see you do stand-up, you have a successful show, you get advertising revenue.
I had this idea of it that a lot of other comics didn't seem to grasp, because comedians, a lot of us are lazy.
We're impulsive, kind of wild, crazy people.
And not the type of people that you would think are going to sit down and formulate some sort of a business plan.
Especially based on something that was never supposed to be a business in the first place.
And then as time went on, I really started saying, okay, now I need a real legit professional studio.
Now I need a legit this.
And then the big thing was moving here.
Moving to Texas.
Because it was...
Kind of risky.
But I was like, I think I can do it.
I'm like, I think I'm at a place where people will come to me.
Because they were already coming to me in L.A. And I'm like, in L.A. is kind of fucked.
And I thought it was fucked like in May of 2020. I was like, I don't see this turning around.
When I saw lines outside the gun stores, I was like...
But yeah, the goal thing is it's interesting when someone just concentrates on doing a good thing and that thing is something that they're genuinely interested in.
That's what comes through when I watch your show is that these subjects that you're talking about, you obviously have a genuine interest and a deep knowledge of.
Yeah, I think there's a huge disparity between individuals who just post for the sake of having high viewership, though, too, and people who feel like they're impactful in some, like, actual way that's improving lives.
Because eventually those people who are just entertainers on YouTube that post vlogs and just like, you know, girlfriend, boyfriend channels that are just like, you know, dumb, like today we're going to go like fill up a fucking pit of balls and jump in them and like see how many, I don't know, let's do some random challenge that's just like try and do something as extravagant and let's do some random challenge that's just like try and do something as extravagant and ridiculous as possible for max Eventually you burn out and start to question like, yeah, all those people eventually have some sort of tangent into something else or just burn out.
But for me, a lot of my stuff is based on interpreting blood work, getting preventative medicine, doing stuff that's actually impactful either from a performance enhancement context or a prevention of deterioration of health aspect.
That kind of stuff I'm highly passionate about, highly interested in, and those are literally the foundations of my businesses, too, because I have a preventative medicine practice with a bunch of doctors in it who we literally diagnose and help people with pituitary adenomas with low testosterone or individuals with autoimmune issues or this or that.
And for me, when I put out content and I see somebody that found an undiagnosed Issue that they went years without realizing was ruining their life and then we're able to find it and fix it for them or something like that kind of stuff is like very rewarding from not just a Monetary aspect,
but like it feels like you're doing something useful Rather than just like producing content for the sake of content that you think will get high views kind of thing Yeah, so when I put out information that's I don't know extrapolating or like parsing out information from Newest literature that's come out on endocrinology that could be relatable for hormone replacement or how to attenuate the cardiovascular implications of testosterone use and things of this nature.
It's very, very practical in that I'm actually potentially imparting information on somebody that's going to save years off their life, improve their quality of life, do a bunch of different things that are above and beyond me talking about, oh, is this guy naughty or not?
Yeah, so More Plates, More Dates on YouTube, and then my two companies are GorillaMind.com for my nootropic and pre-workout formulas and supplements, and then Merrick Health, if you want high-quality preventative medicine.
High-quality preventative medicine hormone replacement.
It's basically a platform where I get you connected with doctors that represent the most cutting-edge literature and the most recent ways to optimize your health, performance, vitality, etc.