Mark Bell's Power Project - Derek More Plates More Dates - Liver King & The Double-Edged Sword of D0ping || MBPP Ep. 849

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Derek More Plates More Dates, Zack Telander, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the video Derek and Zack recently published exposing Liver King and proving he is on PEDs.  Follow Derek: https://www.instagram.com/moreplatesmoredates/ Follow Zack: https://www.instagram.com/coach_zt/ New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Hey guys, I want to talk to you about Merrick Health, owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. Now, some of you guys are on a fat loss journey, some of you guys are trying to gain muscle, and some of you guys are just trying to optimize yourself and your hormones. That's why Merrick Health is so great, because you can get your blood work done. A lot of us don't know what's going on under the hood as far as our cholesterol, our testosterone, our hormones are concerned, and you need to get that checked multiple times a year. That's why we've partnered with Merrick and we have something called the Power Project Panel, which has 28 different labs.

And if you do get the Power Project Panel, they'll actually be able to partner you up with a patient care coordinator that will go through your labs with you and advise you on what you should do. So Andrew, how can they get it? Yeah, you guys got to head over to merrickhealth.com slash powerproject.

That's M-A-R-E-k health dot com slash power project uh you guys will see the power project panel and when you guys check out use promo code power project to save 101 off the entire panel links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes i don't feel kratom i don't know why you don't feel it maybe you should try this yeah try that one dude i've tried mass doses of kratom and and I highly doubt this will be different. Try this. Well, I mean, if you want to. We only go on peer pressure. Yeah.

Famous last words. We're going to peer pressure you. I have some bad stories with using too much Kratom in situations where I shouldn't have. Like when I first tried it, I think I had such a high dose that I just ended up puking for hours. Did you just blend up powder, like tons of powder? Yeah. So I just mixed up a few different strains. And this was like way back in the day, I was trying to find alternatives for alcohol that

wouldn't fuck up your gains, but would give you some sort of cognitive high, so to speak, or make you more socially fluent or whatever. How old were you at the time? I don't know, like 20 or something. Okay, okay. Maybe 19. Yeah. But yeah, I just definitely took too much.

And then since then, the taste and smell just makes me gay. Yeah. But it also just doesn't work for me that well. I think certain people have a disposition towards those kinds of compounds. I'm super curious. Let's see what happens. I think you should do it. Yeah, yeah. Put it down the old hatch. You know? position towards those kinds of compounds i'm super curious let's see what happens i think one of my friends took radon for the first time when he was going out on a date with a girl and then he had to pull over at a gas station and violently puke in front of her oh jesus so that's

like when you when you do a competition changing everything like uh here's I do for training, and then a week out from a competition, let me just change everything. I'm going on a date with a girl, very big pressure situation. Let me just try a drug for the first time. Dude, Zach, that pen is really strong. It hit me immediately. The pen you gave me. Oh, right.cha oh i also got

to mention one thing are we on yeah okay so uh zach we were planning on doing you know it was planning that derrick was going to come here in december but then we wanted to do like a mega cast because we had you a few weeks ago and we were like that's really good we've been talking to derrick forever yeah coming on the show long ass. So this was already going to happen, but then your video happened. So now it's just great timing. Yeah. How did you guys link up in the first place? So I had seen Zach's videos on kind of like documentary style videos that I thought were really impressive

and were totally different than the kind of off-the-cuff just jump cut editing videos that I thought were really impressive and were totally different than the kind of off-the-cuff, just jump-cut editing videos that I do. And it felt like this situation was just something that required a greater storytelling ability than I otherwise was, I don't know, like used to doing. And having that documentary style editing and having somebody who's good at storytelling and kind of breaking down situations in a, I don't know, professional and palatable way that is you can actually sit through an hour that's not just me mindlessly talking. It just felt like somebody to align with on that and just reached out and said, hey, dude, would you be interested in helping me make a high production value video that is sort of representative of some of the other stuff you've done? Yeah, and we had you on our podcast before, Zach, and you explained that you are a writer.

Basically, your dad was a writer. That's something that you saw and then you take pride in, I guess, not just maybe doing a selfie of you doing a particular lift or something, or just setting up a camera. You like to share a story, and you're actually in the middle of a movie right now, like a scripted movie, right? Right. Yeah, the production of Weightlifting's first narrative feature film. It's been an arduous task, for sure. Because weightlifting's so boring.

No. It depends who you're talking to some people enjoy it probably somebody out there storytelling all that stuff the back end of it comes from good writing that's something I've tried to do on my YouTube channel

what's difficult is trying to produce now more and more content I get a lot of feedback on YouTube. Like if you look at the creator studio, it says, oh, like all your numbers are up because you're posting so much. It'll literally say that. And so like in my mind, it's like, oh, well, I'll be rewarded for almost like less effort videos, which kind of sucks, right? So I have to like stop and take a break and like actually write something again i haven't done that in a while uh but those are i think those

are the things that um derek was talking about just like higher production value it takes writing and then uh and then like filming and then b-roll and all that stuff and that's exactly what we did that was the plan from from the jump like the moment he came to me i think within 24 hours i sent him back an outline right like almost immediately i was like cool let's do it i sent him an outline like every chapter um what it should look like and how how many minutes each section should be and then he's like yeah this looks great then i filmed my part and then there was a big break because he runs three businesses and also a youtube channel so we just kind of like sat around whatever and then uh he came back and he's like dude i've like wrote it all out i'm like no way he wrote it all out like he actually did yeah it was like a seriously long long script and

then he recorded it and then we had the initial timeline and that was like the most painstaking process was dealing with the initial timeline of everything laid out we had like a six hour zoom call basically trying to edit it down is it just me or do you guys find it distracting whatever smokey's eating over there smells delicious smells delicious and he should share it all. I'm just kidding, Smokey. I just totally embarrass him. But it does smell good, right? It smells great.

What is that? It smells great. It's chicken and rice. It actually is chicken and rice. So, Derek, what did it feel like to kind of hit the send button on this one? Because you've made a lot of videos over the years and I'm sure most of them you probably felt really good about. You're like, this is going to help a lot of people. This is going to share a lot of great information. But this one is different

because it could negatively impact somebody's life. There's a lot going on and a lot has happened since the release of the video uh was there like some conflict when you uh dropped the video was some conflict um even just in thinking like i don't really know what the fuck this is gonna do yeah a little bit hesitation for sure like it's a pretty high impact video and i knew it would i didn't know it would pick up this much traction but i knew it would be um pretty significantly covered or impactful on i don't just the overarching uh i don't know like the the prevalence of this uh the liver king character over the past year has just been in everyone's face and you know i knew people would

be uh paying attention to the video for sure and I didn't really know what to expect as far as like for me, it was just about communicating what I don't know. Like I've been on the sidelines watching this thing like on turn into this debacle of like bigger lie on a bigger line, a bigger lie. And I don't know. It just like felt sort of like it felt justified. But at the same time, it's such an impactful video. There's obvious hesitation on my end to put out something because, again, like I don't necessarily need the video really. Like for me, like I put out, you know, reaction videos here and there that will get, you know, a million views or whatever. Like I don't necessarily need this video.

So it's like, oh, I could just do nothing and nothing and you know not deal with potential heat on it or anything so that definitely crosses my mind for sure but I don't know it felt like something that kind of just needed to come to the surface and then him address it finally it's definitely different than some stuff that we've seen in the past like there used to be those like NutriFast or SlimFast type commercials or there was like stuff with like Dan Marino and these NFL players and people that used to be overweight or retired from their sport and they gained a lot of weight and then they said that they used this product to lose weight. And I think a lot of people probably knew that they didn't,

but there's also a lot of people that probably don't recognize that. However, in the case of the liver king, it was different because anytime the conversation got to be about performance enhancing drugs, he would not only deny it, a lot of times he would go out of his way to deny it. And in conversation with him, when I sat down at his dinner table, he was the one bringing it up

and he was the one bringing it up and he was the one, you know, commenting like that he's natural and he follows these ancestral tenets and stuff. So he kind of in a way, I guess, like what we saw with Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong like went after people. Yeah, the bullying. Yeah, he went after people for years saying, you know – suing people and all kinds of stuff. So I think in this case, he's adamantly lying and denying and stuff like that.

And so I think it was important to from that world from the jump that he wasn't aware of like that how that is perceived in the fitness industry because it almost seemed like something you would have seen 20 years ago but not now and i don't know it was just baffling to me that he would not only go out of his way to bring it up and like lean into it like you could i don't see how much i don't maybe there's a bit less impact from the jump. He just said, yeah, like by the way, I need this replacement therapy overseen by a doctor. But like these other lifestyle practices are still what overarchingly are like my foundation for being a healthy person. Like I don't think people would have not got on board with what he was preaching otherwise. And he kind of mentions that it doesn't impact his business much.

So if it doesn't make much difference one way or the other, why wouldn't you be forthcoming? And I've been forthcoming. I've been talking about steroids forever. And in my brother's movie, Bigger, Stronger, Faster, I mentioned I love steroids. I'll probably be on and off them the rest of my life. Probably I feel the exact same way today as I did 12 years ago. I fucking love them and I will probably party with them until the day I die. You need to chill,

dog. God damn. But you know, with this whole liver King thing, there's does seem to be a good and a bad to it because I'm not, it's not like I'm a big fan of the liver King, but when you look at kind of initially when you came onto the scene, he was talking about the tenants mainly. And then a little bit later on, the supplements ended up coming in as being like, I guess you see this sometimes now, but OG fitness, you'd see guys come on and they're fucking huge and they look a certain way, but it's because

they take this specific testosterone supplement. This helped me gain, you know, increase my testosterone. Like they literally said, this supplement helps me look this way. Now, again, I don't love the liver King or anything, but he never necessarily said that if you eat liver, you will look this way. You know what I mean? He never said that. And it's a tough thing because it's, I'm not saying it's right that he lied. We know that it's not good that he lied, but the message was never eat this to look like this. Even though for people who are uneducated and aren't in fitness or don't pay much attention to this, it's going to be perceived that way from a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that the explicit nature of everything is what we're ultimately

like after all the time. I mean, you could say that like every Coca-Cola commercial, every McDonald's commercial shows healthy people experiencing life in a beneficial way. And yet we could demonize them for portraying their product like that when in reality it causes serious health issues. They don't explicitly say you're going to be a healthy individual uh if you if you consume our products but it's still you know likely yeah it's insinuating and it's likely going to lead to a net negative down the line i think the there's two like real reasons and i remember this conversation with derek specifically is that it's, it's kind of like we didn't want to, I mean, he could have literally just press record and just read the emails and that

video would have banged and then it would have taken off. And, but I remember saying like, let's make this a little bit bigger than that. Like let's develop a story that is overarching to not just the fitness community, but sales and marketing in as a whole and um the holes in all of those things that people refuse to see or they do see it they just are kind of complicit in it so with liver king what you saw was a lot of people who are saying the same thing over and over again as if it's some sort of like new take if you believe that he was natural you're an idiot right and the thing is like nobody would be willing to admit not one human right now would say i thought he was natural i gave him the benefit of doubt though seriously

no that that's the thing when mark went over there and asked him and he said no i'm not yeah when he came back we talked about it i didn't say yeah i believe he's natural but to be perfectly honest i gave him the benefit of the doubt right because when well i think you would like to take people at their word with and for me i chose i chose to just keep my opinion to myself when i did come back and then we did talk about him because i'm like but that's it i'm not gonna sit here and call him liar. You guys are like outliers in the fact that you knew the guy or had experiences with him or you secondary knew him. We've been in the fitness industry a long time. The thing that I wanted to point to was like he's this kind of guy

who's like this lovable heel. Whether we know he's natty or not,'s kind of like ah that's just the liver king let him do his thing yeah i i always bring this example up when he appeared on ufc it was like they were showing actual celebrities and then they're showing oh look there's a liver king and there's a lot of people who are like yeah he's not natural but it's the liver king i want to get a picture with him and all these things like okay so just to be sure, like now that we've proven that he's not Natty, are you going to take a picture with him? Are you going to do the same thing with him? Maybe, maybe not.

But those are the same people that we were kind of trying to be like, hey, like it wasn't just the lie in that he was taking steroids. It was like his whole setup was a lie. I mean, when he called his shot was i think was the most crazy thing i want to look as good as possible so i need a coach to help me take my drugs to look as good as possible so i can promote my brand andrew you mind commenting on this a little bit our conversation and by all means mark cut me off if i say too much but uh no when when mark came back after hanging out with uh liver king at the liver king ranch we were on a walk and me and seymour just like like come on dude like like what do

you really think is going on here because like we wanted mark's opinion and he's just like i think he made a business decision to get in the best shape possible by all means and he was going he hired and keep in mind this is well before your guys's video he's like he hired a media team he's like i'm gonna have them live with me they're gonna record everything and i'm gonna get as much attention as possible and then fast forward i don't know i get four months or so when your guys video came out and in that email everything that he had said is what mark had said right after he met him but obviously he didn't tell him this directly this is just what mark had said right after he met him but obviously he didn't tell him this directly this is just what mark had like assumed had happened and it was spot on and it was just like one of the craziest

things where i'm like mark how'd you figure that out and just that's just mark being mark sometimes though when you uh read the email i was like holy fuck yeah i was like i kind of i kind of felt that when i was there because he's really smart i don't know if either one of you are. I think he downplays his intelligence. Interaction. Dude, I asked him business stuff and he just like he just went off just like anybody else that I've ever met. That's really proficient in business. What do you guys think of just the topic in general of an influencer? Is that because I think that that's what you guys exposed more so than anything.

Because I think that that's what you guys exposed more so than anything. Maybe we just shouldn't put so much stock into any influencer, whether it be me or you or any of us at this table or any other influencer. Maybe we should be a little bit more cautious about – because we don't know the actions of everybody. We don't know what happens behind closed doors. We don't know if somebody is drinking all the time. We don't know how somebody treats their spouse. The list of things goes on and on and on. And are you going to sit there and try to pick through everyone's moral closet? It would be very tedious thing to do. Do you think that that is maybe some of what the video was demonstrating as well? Yeah. Like I think anybody should be, I don't know,

questioned further as to, like, I don't think you should take anything at face value. You should always educate yourself with as many valuable resources as possible and come to like an informed decision on whatever you do with your body or your lifestyle or whatever it is that you're trying to learn about from a multitude of different credible resources and kind of come to your own informed conclusion as opposed to just blindly trusting one person who might otherwise represent the polar extreme of ancestral living

or somebody who says like one training style is the only one that works and it's the most superior thing to everything else. Like, I don't know, it's just kind of you have some onus of responsibility yourself to like further educate yourself as well to kind of be able to spot the charlatans or the, the people that are trying to represent the polar extreme of like fill in the blank is the only way to accomplish whatever it is that you're trying to do. Check out our shit.

Head to powerproject.live for the devil pussy mug, our merch and everything power project. Enjoy the episode. I think the too much stock in an influencer is, it depends on what level you're at in your knowledge of the thing. So like when I was just getting started on YouTube, I loved Gary Vee because he was talking about the side hustle and the main hustle and how you can manipulate what you do

to make your side hustle your dream job, whatever that is, and make it the real thing that you end up doing. Fast forward until I've actually done that. Now I kind of look back on my interest in Gary Vee with like a bit of nostalgia. I don't really listen to him or watch him anymore. Nothing against him, but that's it. I've kind of evolved past having such a important impact on my life you left him in the dust you left me in the dust too you told me that yeah well yeah you're like what's going on with this guy i just well because i didn't i don't know it's it's it's a weird thing but i think from the influencers perspective and again i don't really like that

term um and i don't think any of us do like to call ourselves influencers but like there's a point for artists where you're trying to continue this machine going and you just forget about the art that you created like that that made you who you were in the first place and so like what you see a lot of times are people who just want to keep putting out content, keep doing things and keep talking, just keep the fucking algorithm happy. And that is the scariest thing for someone in my position. But that's where we can run into this problem of influencers not actually being who they are. Right. And that's where like you can have people who might take poor advice from people or, you know, bad things can happen out of that. I think I wrote down here like punditry is like what you would say is put out these wild words, buddy.

I love it. So let's go. So like, well, you know what? I call him, you know, you know what a pundit is like a like like a political pundit. Well, you know what a pundit is? Like a political pundit. Yes, exactly. There are people who have really great ideas that are middle of the road. They make you think. They're good philosophies.

They get a ton of attention on them. Then they pick a team and they hop in and become somewhat of a pundit. They become the antithesis of the thing that got them where they were in the first place yes and that's a scary thing like i don't want to become that but at the same time i want to make a living and i want to feed the algorithm if that makes sense the punditry podcast yeah p-u-n-d-a-t-r-E-E. Rewind, rewind. Pundit. I mean, I'm sure you worry about this too. Although I asked you this and you said you had plenty of content ideas. You just don't have enough time.

Yeah, no, I've got pages, dude. Yeah, yeah. That's a great feeling. That's awesome. The thing is I get scared because I want to i want to expand to different things and i don't want people to be like hey why the fuck are you talking about philosophy well you will inevitably encounter if you've gone really deep down the rabbit hole of fill in the blank topic as you deviate from that whoever subscribed to you for that thing is where's the content on

this this is why i subscribed yeah i only see this once every two months now fuck you former power lifter like you know how many comments you've gotten of like why aren't we in the fucking strongest gym in the west anymore bring back the squat you know what i mean but you've how do you want me to get fat how do you experience with that because now you're a runner yeah i don't care you don't care i'm rich bitch i got other shit on that fuck yeah dude seriously your uh your youtube channel is not very old, right? Like I try to look back and sift through and I'm thinking like, man, Derek's been around for a little while.

And then I'm like, oh, he kind of has been in for a little while, but maybe it was more on Instagram and maybe it was more. Six years almost. Okay. But your YouTube channel is only like two or three years old maybe? Six years. Did you delete old videos or something? Huh?

Like you couldn't find videos from six years ago? No, I watched some of the older videos on this older videos you can't sort by old now on youtube it's boomer shit you just didn't do that where where did it first start with you um and what was uh like what was some of the reasons why you were putting out content on youtube or wherever else you were putting it um so for me i just had some time on my hands and started writing blog articles and for me when i started writing those it was based on a lot of the stuff i was interested in at the time like i was following some of the male self-improvement channels and blogs more so at the time because that was what was most prevalent for i don't know the people who were the most

influential at the time actually had like really big blogs, not YouTube channels, which is interesting. So back then I followed certain individuals. What year was the blog thing? Sorry if I missed that. 2012 maybe. I followed them from like 2012 to 2016. Yeah. I remember that time where like blogs were everything. Like Tim Ferriss and shit?

Yeah, yeah, sort of. Yeah. I didn't follow him specifically, but yeah, in that kind of like realm. He was more like, I don't know, I guess I don't follow him closely enough to say what he does. But my perception was more on like the biohacking side of things and like really, really fringe stuff potentially. Yeah. It was tough to find that information, hard, right? Yeah, and I wasn't really into entrepreneurial stuff at that time yet.

entrepreneurial stuff at that time yet. So it was more just like, how do I, you know, gain muscle, lose fat, dress better, get girls, speak more fluently in social interactions, etc. So stuff like that I was interested in. And I found myself going down rabbit holes and, you know, being, you know, on forums and stuff with other guys who kind of had similar aligned interests. And eventually I had what I felt to be enough experience to start writing about my trials and tribulations of doing the same thing. And then I started my blog and it was basically just as far as how it came to be.

I was just looking for, you know, names at the time that sort of represented what I was sort of interested in or what the brand overarchingly could be summarized as. So it was like lifting stuff, you know, lifting, getting jacked, you know, getting lean, lifestyle, you know, dating, self-improvement. So it's sort of just one of the URLs that was available was more plates, more dates.

And it sounded, you know, it rhymed. I thought it would be memorable. And it is. Yeah. And at the time, there was like a, I guess there might be now as well, but at the time, it like a, I guess there might be now as well, but at the time it was just the people I followed had these names that were, you know, rhyming or, I don't know, somewhat gimmicky or whatever.

Like I don't really know how to represent it, but stuff that was memorable and kind of just like cumulatively summed up what they do. Like one of the channels I followed was a good-looking loser, and then there was bold and determined, danger and play, like some of these things that were just like catchy, you know, brand names, I guess. So I just came up with that, ran with it. And then eventually, um, after writing some blog articles, one of those guys actually recommended I film videos with it. I was like, should I film on YouTube too? And they said, fuck yeah, of course you should. Similar to Gary Vee says publish everywhere million times a day yeah so so anyway

at the time i basically just repurposed my written articles and would read them essentially on youtube and then eventually i got to the point where i was better at talking than writing as far as a time efficiency standpoint and it also just didn't come across as organic reading off of your screen so i sort of transitioned away from writing, and then I turned more into this just mainly focusing on YouTube and the other video-based platforms, and then that's kind of how it came to be, and it sort of just took off from there. But it was slow.

It's not like it took off. It was like many years before it took off, took off. And I think some of the stuff you were talking about early on is stuff that was kind of hard for people to find. Without digging through a blog or a thread you had to kind of continually dig dig dig and then you found out oh this guy actually knows his shit it seems like he knows a ton especially when it came to uh like pharmaceuticals or something like that you would see that someone clearly knows uh occasionally you might see uh

somebody that was that really knew a lot about training, hypertrophy or strength training. You're like, holy shit. But you had to like really dig deep a couple of years back to try to find this information. And I remember some of your videos where you talked about male pattern baldness, erectile dysfunction, acne. Like you brought a lot of these things. It's not like no one was talking about them, but you brought a lot of these things to the forefront, which I think is awesome because you highlighted um you highlighted

an area where it's like there's a lot of men they're trying for self-improvement but for some reason especially if it comes to like looks we get weird about trying to like ask your bro ask your buddy like dude how can i like look a little bit better i get like you can't just say that to your friend for some reason i want to look a little bit better tomorrow i got a date like guys we get shamed for like hair loss stuff like oh you're just go bald like why do you care so much or no i would honest to god dude i it's so wild to me uh i definitely am like feeling like the hair recede back on me and like my comfort my comfort in talking with my friends and uh it feels heard right and just just other people like with talking about it has like skyrocketed and honest to god i think you changed that just like being like it you you never were

like uh shame and any of that never came into the conversation. You were just like, here's what works. You know, finasteride, derma rolling, minoxidil. Here's the shampoo I use. Here's what I use for this, this, and this. And like your comment section was everyone being like, I fucking love that we are just talking about this. Like balding is not a bad thing like you know what i mean it's just like how getting making fun of someone for balding is like honestly ridiculous because it's not their choice it's like it's not like it's not

like they have a bad same thing with snoring as well you know snoring people get it like really made fun of and teased a lot about snoring and and sometimes it has to do with body weight but sometimes this has to do with like you just train hard you lift a lot i mean they don't really know what the exact uh thing is for sleep apnea at least as far as i know they don't know exactly what causes it so there's a lot of these things that they're like medical and it's like man that's like uh you just like picking on me you're making fun of me and i don't have no control over this and and derek like just openly talking about it, I thought it was really cool. Another thing, too, like you told us a story.

It was like you told me and Chris at dinner the story about cologne and when you were a bouncer, and you were like testing colognes. Yeah. What was – So you were a bouncer, though? You have some nice cologne on today. Before – I was trying to work.

Oh, you think I have nice cologne? It's actually his. Oh, hey. That's his brand. Oh, there we go. Oh, you have a some nice cologne on before before oh you're trying to work oh you you think i have nice cologne it's actually his oh that's his brand oh there we go you have a brand of cologne yeah yeah it's really good what's it called it has some endocrine disruptors no lavender right oh it does okay good you gotta smell it all right good good yeah you gotta sniff this guy i'm always representing you so this is going to make my estrogen go through the roof? That's nice. I don't think so, bro. You're on TRT. You're good.

How do you know? You can touch as many receipts as you want. Mark, but you just came out as natural in our last episode. Yeah, you're netty. You said you were lying about the TRT the whole time. I lied to my brother. I lied on Bigger, Stronger, Faster. I've been natural the entire time.

Oh, shit. Yeah, yeah. Oh. Just another char, yeah. Oh. Damn. Just another charlatan. What was that story? Because that was, I thought that was amazing. Punder Tree?

Is that what it's called? God damn. Story. What was the story? We're so fucked. I can't stop thinking about that word. It's going to be in my head the whole time. Well, basically, so I guess this is just an example of where one of my

you know tangents of content came from is back in the day i was you know going down the self improvement rabbit hole you sort of look at anything you can do to maximize i don't know appeal to women or just you know social status or physique or whatever it is and expectedly you arrive at you know hygiene smelling good stuff like that was one of the tangents and for me um i guess i became somewhat of like a fragrance connoisseur so i would buy a lot of different ones and test them on dates and then my like ultimate field test was i would wear a different one every night when i was bouncing and then see how many compliments i would get compared to the other ones and kind of like compare performance and like compliments and um I don't know just like in general I would put them

like tit for tat against each other and just you know see what women thought and then I would create this kind of like consolidated list or ranking system of like which ones were the best for which scenarios and then that sort of tangented into content like some of my old videos you can find videos of me getting chicks to rate fragrances. I would just like walk around my school campus. Just be like, what do you think of this? Rate it out of 10. Compare it to this one.

That's what I mean. It's like when people, when people like you're, you now have a fragrance. Yeah. And I wear it. What's it called? What's the name? Because usually these things are like fierce and shit like that. Intelligent is the brand.

And then carbon is the name. Nice. And yeah. And what's like, people be like, what does a fucking YouTuber know about like scents and fragrances? And like, you know,

he doesn't know that world. Like motherfucker went out and beta tested them. You know what I mean? Like who the fuck else would I trust more than the guy who's like, yes, she said, I smell nice. Like,

let me get my notepad out. I didn't fucking write them down, but I think that's so amazing. That's so amazing. Like no one else does that shit, you know? So I, I don't know.

I, I, when you told us that story, I was like, I don't position myself as like a fragrance expert, by the way. I'm just like somewhat of a connoisseur slash fanatic, I guess.

Yeah. But yeah, obviously, you know, people would trust the recommendation of somebody who has done that sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. And like, I don't think anyone else has done that. But like, I used to watch channels where like there's this guy named Jeremy Fragrance and he's one of the ones. See like the white guy with the hair like that or something?

Probably. Yeah, what a great name. Jeremy Fragrance. Yeah, so he's like the premier uh fragrance influencer and um yeah like i used to watch his videos and he would talk to girls and get them to raise pull him up dude okay this guy is a legend okay so this guy more recently has gone on an interesting uh tangent of i don't know andrew there's a video he's like i masturbate but i don't come and oh man he's like and i'm really trying to figure out is he all about nofap no no no no his whole thing like he will be he'll be discussing a fragrance and then it'll divulge

into like some very like psychoanalytical problems that he's been having like lately he'll be like this one is like very good and I don't know man I'm in a weird place in my life what the hell and

I swear if you can find this it's like his most viral thing he's like my therapist that sounds awesome he's a good dude he's like I like masturbate

but I don't cum edgy man fucking edging's great keeping himself tense he would edge before videos and then tell you that he just did it it's like i did 1000 push-ups today uh i feel amazing i feel great the tiktok comments are all like like i think he did like 13 lines before this like it's the number of lines of cocaine that's like the like people think he's

on drugs now whereas he acts a lot different than he used to i hope he's good mentally i fucking do too he's a gem and he's like he honest to god like comes off as like a very good guy like very not like very caring and into fragrances but like recently he's kind of taken off on like more of like the meme side of things but yeah and he like leans into it because he knows at least on tiktok it's how you go viral if you become a meme and you do some of this like crazy shit yeah which is almost unfortunate because like i saw him as like the professional i didn't even know that yeah i didn't know he existed as like a actual dude his first videos were just like very structured, controlled.

Alpha M was also pretty good with the fragrances. Yeah. Remember him? Okay. R.I.P. Kevin Samuels. But I got a lot of fragrance stuff from Kevin Samuels before he kind of knocked out. You know, do you guys know who he is?

I know you know who he is. Yeah. He was an old red pill cat. Died recently. But yeah, he was all about that fragrance shit. Makes a difference. Did you look into the pheromones and that sort of thing too in fragrances? Is that legit?

Yeah. I don't know if that's legit. I'm skeptical. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. Okay. Real, just this is a stupid aside.

You heard of vabbing? Of what? Vabbing. No. You've never heard of vabbing. You, Zach? You need to do a video on this one too. It's apparently, and this would be actually great for you need to do a video on this one apparently and this

would be actually great for you you do some research this would be killer uh women take depends on what research women will go out and they will uh take their vaginal juices and put it on their neck and can i get an amen and like behind their ears because apparently um that scent will attract men it's like when they go around men and they have their vaginal juices around their, you know, So you're saying I should just like put my balls out? I'm not saying you should do that. I'm just saying maybe,

you know, I don't know, maybe ball smell would be, I don't know, who knows? But that is actually a thing. One of the great things about Sacramento is we have cum trees.

So if you're like, especially Davis, California, like you're walking down the street and like you're like is everyone whacking off on this corner like what the fuck's going on here is that's funny you say that because where i'm from there was this one bush i used to walk past and it smelled absurdly like cum and we always were like this is the cum bush and we'd like walk past it to go to school every day like those cum bush. I mean, if you think about it, like those pollen, like those days

where like there's a lot of pollen, it's just a bunch of tree cum, right? Yeah. It's essentially what pollen is. I think so. We need to, real quick,

why does everyone know what cum smells like here? That means, right? That means that, because you know, when you, that means each of us

has probably taken a sniff, right? Yeah. Right? Thank you. We've had sniff, right? Yeah. Right? Thank you. We've had this conversation, Smokey. Remember? Try and finagle your way out of explaining how you got a whiff of it.

Okay. All right. All right. Actual serious question, though. Let's say you're wiping your ass and you accidentally get a little bit of poop on your face. Oh, yeah. You got to quick wash your hands. It's really hard to get it off, too. Yeah. Just, oh, yeah. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. It's really hard

to get it off too. Yeah, just, oh God damn. It is. You know, why did you smell it if you knew it was

gonna smell like shit? Like, why did you do it? I don't know. It's male curiosity. It is male curiosity. It's so fucked, man.

Alright, but, I'm actually curious, Derek, when did you get into lifting? Like, you yourself

into actually lifting in the gym. When was that for you? Probably grade 11 maybe. Grade 11? Yeah. Okay, grade 11. So that's like, I don't know, 17 years old or something?

Okay. Fat or skinny? Oh, it was a twig. Such a Canadian answer, by the way. Grade 11. Now, I'm curious about this because we've been having this conversation where influencers nowadays, they'll lift for a little bit, but their favorite influencer lifts for a little bit, and then they're like, all right, guys, I'm going to get on TRT. And you shouldn't do it. You should lift for a while.

You shouldn't do it. But then young cats look at that and be like, well, if you're doing it, I'm going to do it. So for you, way before, because now you're 30-something, right? 30. You're 30. When did you start learning and using PEDs after you started lifting? Earlier than I should have. But that's part of the reason why my content exists too.

It's stuff that I wish I didn't do in hindsight that if this information existed i could have otherwise convinced myself to be natural until at least wait till your fucking brain is fully developed you know yeah that sort of thing so for me it's not like it was so absurd where it was like oh 17 years old get on gear but it was at least it was a few years and i would have waited way longer if i could go back in time for sure there's a lot to talk about here because um what are a couple things that maybe you did where you're like man that was not only was it foolish but it uh had repercussions too um well hopefully no repercussions and that's sort of why i like pulled way back before it got to a point where i would because at least i've become more cognizant of this is like a cumulative thing like you've

talked about many times how you could inject like a fucking 10 vials of test and you wouldn't die but like over time using you know high doses of gear will eventually catch up to you and you'll end up with you know cardiovascular disease or kidney damage or hepatotoxicity with your liver whatever it is or neurodegeneration these are things that are cumulative and like insidiously build up in the background. So for me, it was just being hyper aware of that and then reeling way back and becoming more okay with what is not representative of an enhanced, only could be sustained with gear look sort of thing or performance, etc. So I'm not saying that's bad necessarily if that's what somebody to, the ROI on the risk for that or their competitor or whatever. But yeah, it was just becoming aware of that. At least when I did, I'm fortunate enough that I wish I knew earlier, but hopefully no actual damage that is like significant. But just being aware of that stuff definitely changed my trajectory and like my mindset around it.

that stuff definitely changed my trajectory and like my mindset around it. Do you know if there's research behind people being on testosterone or people having using exogenous testosterone and doing so for many, many years, like decades? Like do we have, I know like we got like old bodybuilders and old powerlifters and stuff like that, but do we have information on people that have taken it for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and so on? We'll have case reports of people who show up who have, you know, end up dying or something brutal and they find out what they were doing and then they'll infer that it was because of this. But nothing really controlled where you have, you know, placebo group and 500 milligrams of tests for 20 years group and like this was the difference.

So, no, but what you can extrapolate out though is in the studies, they have studies upwards of a few months using like 600 milligrams of tests, I think is the most notable one. And you can see kind of what happens to the blood work and then extrapolate out what that might lead to down the line. And there are a lot of studies on, I don't know, just like the cumulative build build-up of these things and what could happen so we don't have a like a well-controlled test unfortunately but

um there is data that especially like again rodent models or rodent models but you can see kind of what happens to rodents who don't do anything and then they have these controlled settings where they do stuff like that and then show well this is the difference and you know it's not a human but you know we sort of see similar outcomes just in a far more drawn out time frame in bodybuilders who you know really abuse shit so you can kind of infer like okay this is probably what's building up on the back end that i'm unaware of right now or things to be cognizant of like blood pressure that is just left unchecked for years or checking your blood work very consistently, getting organ imaging, stuff like that

is often overlooked entirely. But I think a lot of the damage could be attenuated if people were more mindful of that stuff. And maybe the gist of some of it is like if someone starts to take performance enhancing drugs and they are just a recreational lifter or maybe even like a power lifter or something like that, most people will take some and they'll get some good results and they may get themselves into a point where they're like, hey, let me try a little bit more. Let me try a little bit more. And they may end up lifting a little bit more. They may end up being a little bit bigger. Mostly that's what you do see. But once you start

to really rev up the amount of testosterone that you take, your body starts to do all kinds of other things to counteract the amount of testosterone you have running through your veins. Can you explain some of that? And then maybe also explain how like sometimes there's a lot of like mitigation in that because that's what and Seema and I and Andrew we've talked about on the show before. Like once you start to throw in some of this farm pharmacology, like things start to get a little confusing. fusing. So you might want to really double, triple, quadruple think about this and really do your research before you get into this stuff because it's not necessarily always as simple as I'm just going to take a little bit of test. Yeah. And one thing I do want to circle back to the, is there studies on what it does long-term? One thing I can say is TRT, like sometimes we'll conflate steroids and TRT and vice versa, but like actual therapeutic TRT, there are studies to show that you would probably be healthier or better off than if you left your deficiency.

So that is notable. If you were deficient though, right? Yeah. And the determination of deficient is also subjective because it's a snapshot. Yes. because it's a snapshot. Yes. Yeah, a lot of people are just haphazardly getting on because they're interpreting a micro spec of time

of their entire life. And it's like, oh, my T was 292 on one morning of one day, like equals I need test. It's like, no. I'm going to blast it. Yeah, like maybe get a more comprehensive picture, make sure that you timed it right. Like, did you get your blood test at three in the afternoon

versus like right when you woke up? You know, get a more informed assessment of what's going on especially upstream too some people just look at the test in their blood and don't look at you know the signaling from their brain to their testes or what else is going on in their life that could have otherwise contributed to it um but yes sorry sort of diverting no that's great thank you yeah but yeah i just wanted to make sure i added that in because some people who are actually on therapeutic replacement might be like oh shit shit, like, you know, like what's, what's going to happen to me if I take this? It's definitely warranted from everything

I've seen, not a doctor here, of course, for somebody who literally has a deficiency using it at a therapeutic level relative to leaving themselves in that state. It's going to be, from what I understand, like similar to a woman going through menopause, like if they leave themselves deprived of hormones, Alzheimer's goes to the roof. Cardiovascular disease goes to the roof. Like there are so many things that are not going to be supported adequately with deficient hormones. So it's like absolutely going to be warranted in that scenario. And can you explain like what happens when people start to really rev their testosterone levels up? Yeah.

In general, we see in a dose-dependent manner neurodegeneration. You're not going to have – your brain function is just going to – it's not like you're guaranteed to become an idiot or something. But it's not healthy to sustain super physiological androgen levels perpetually. And it's kind of like, especially your sympathetic nervous system gets a little bit more redlined, the more free androgens are circulating around your body and it becomes more difficult to get high quality sleep, which indirectly has like a vicious circle effect on the back end with other things. And this is all, it's multifactorial because it's not just the gear. It's also what the gear does to the health things in your body, physiologic processes, which then on the back end will make the other stuff even worse.

And, you know, it's just like a vicious circle effect. Like it could cause, if you're revving yourself too hard, you weigh, you know, way more than you should, what your body would otherwise sustain. Without those, you know, you could have significant heart stress, which, you know, increases the size of your heart itself and it can no longer pump effectively. Or you have more demands to support the tissue you have that it can't keep up with. Or your kidneys start deteriorating. Red blood cell count goes up. Blood pressure goes up. Yeah, blood viscosity goes up.

And all of a sudden, you have like sludgy blood that's impossible to get. It's not impossible, but it's much more difficult to get around and actually get around to oxygenate tissues. Like there are a lot of things that um go unchecked and then some people even when they try to attenuate that by bloodletting to get their blood to where it should be they end up making themselves deficient and like uh like actually anemic borderline their ferritin levels drop too because they're just like you know therapeutically phlebotomizing so frequently they end up becoming deficient in something which on the back end fucks them up in something else like it's uh you need to understand this stuff and it's pretty fucking complicated,

but people will just start using it because they want the gains. And the odd thing about TRT and its prevalence now is that it's become like a supplement for some people. It's become a supplement to replace getting good sleep, getting good nutrition, sunlight, all these

things that if you spend time changing certain habits and you give it a good amount of time, your tea will probably come up. But I know some people who are like, I got to get four or five hours of sleep because I got work to do. So I'm just going to go this route because it's going to help me feel better. And it makes you wonder because I can understand the person who's like let's say they're driven they work super hard they can't get for like they can't get six to eight hours of quality sleep and their test is tanked because of that because of all the other things that

happen and then they're like let me just hop on trt i can understand it but from the health and fitness side it's hard to get behind that yeah i have like a little devil's advocate idea here that just kind of popped up in my mind it's like you could tell someone that goes out on the weekend and drinks a little bit you can access much more happiness without that you know um and you just have to teach yourself things and do new do different things in your life and you'll have that level of happiness all the time or whatever and that's absolutely valid you absolutely can but are we going to abs were we going to demonize the person that decides to drink a little bit on the weekend and have fun have fun it's it's definitely a balance i think

um something i really want to talk about is like we're at a time in the with with steroids uh in that it's very similar to dare uh if you if you think about dare that program to to to a lot of extent like failed yeah um and abstinence like talking about abstinence from sex that failed as well and then there was this kind of grace period where we were figuring out like the openness of all of those and like we're still kind of figuring out both drugs and sex and now we're beginning to try to start that figuring out of androgens and so what we have to determine is like is the abstinence route the good route or is when you say abstinence expand upon that within when it basically the everyone is everyone is clamoring for the rock to and and other guys to just be like i take steroids yeah right but the negative outcome of that is obvious

it's the the kids being like yeah he he even warned me like i shouldn't do it i shouldn't do any of this stuff but i'm gonna do it it's because it's the rock you know it's like you were saying like i go to bars and i drink and i do hook up with chicks, but you shouldn't do that. Every kid's going to be like, wait, wait, wait. What did you say? What's the key? Alcohol? Okay, cool.

Okay, cool. I'm going to go do that. But I think that it might be, and this is what I want to ask you aspect of it might be worse than saying, hey, I'm open about this. Don't do it. Even though maybe some kids start to do it or whatever. People who are not ready. I don't know. I don't know the answer.

It's the ethical dilemma. I brought it up with Derek on my show and like still something we have to figure out. And I think it's something we have to talk about. I would say I don't think it's anybody's business either. You make your own choice and what you do. But people are going to keep poking and prodding. That'll never stop. Right. I agree 100%. I think you would just

have to ignore it. I'm just saying like if you were to try to do something now and you were online and you just didn't share it, people are going to assume whatever but we don't have to address stuff. You don't have to address stuff but i think we don't you don't have to have an opinion on you don't have to say anything back to that person real quick mark i'm curious about this because for example i wish it was that way wait wait you

mentioned the rock right he's kind of in the health and fitness industry but he's an entertainer mark walberg i think i heard you talk about him with rogan he's uh in the entertainment industry he's not in the he's kind of in health and fitness, but he doesn't pay attention to stuff like he's not here consistently talking about this. But when you're in the fitness industry and you're a guy that's consistently in the gym and doing all these things, I think if you're in this, you're not an entertainer, you're not an actor, you're not fucking one of these people. If you're in this, it feels like you can't leave that out, even though it's going to affect the 19 year old that's just getting into this, that wants to get big fast. If you're in this, you can't avoid it. I was kind of disagree. I think I don't think you have to say anything you don't think so i don't think so i mean there are people that just yeah but but but no but you

do because the moment you go on a podcast you get asked that's okay and then no comment and then you lie no no you say no comment hey have you ever done them no comment i would i don't want to answer that question i want to address it you don't think that that answers the question good perfect yeah let the person come to their own conclusion, whatever way they want. Got it. So that would be the best route. Let them write the story for you. To circle back to the most recent thing, Liver King, that would have been a good answer for him?

I believe so. No comment? But real quick, think about an individual like Bradley Martin. Think about an individual like Bradley Martin. Right. He's never talked about that or he's never even talked about himself using anything right i don't think people have actually even really asked him in content and if he has he probably doesn't say anything he's kind of jokes about it i think just jokes about he is

literally someone who has taken the no comment route and look at him now i'm not saying it's a good thing but i'm saying that is somebody who was doing it in practice right now yeah right yeah no yeah that's a that's a good point both of those are good points i'm not like yeah That is somebody who is doing it in practice right now. Yeah. Right? Yeah. No, yeah. That's a good point. Both of those are good points. I'm not like – Yeah, I think a lot of people just have a hard time with the information and I think that's why the liver king may have felt like he needed to lie. I remember when I was a kid, there was the power team and my parents are Christian and I grew up growing up in a church and everything. And the power team would go around from one church to another.

And these big jacked guys and they would rip telephone books in half. And they would do all this stuff on stage. And they were jacked. Maybe there were a couple guys that were drug-free. Maybe. But I doubt that any of them were. And they would preach outwardly against it. So there would be another situation where it's like, eh, this is not great because they're outwardly preaching against it.

But for me personally, seeing that era of Hulk Hogan and the professional wrestlers and hearing about Lyle Alzado, who was a famous case where he said his growth hormone led to his brain tumor. And a lot of the stuff that was circling around, there they are in the power team. Crushed for Jesus. Yeah, they're like 300 pounds and yoked. This guy throws in some kicks too. It's fucking awesome. But for me, when I was, so I was already lifting at this age because I started lifting really young 12 13 years old or so obviously had an impact on me but I never thought in my head about I never

I never thought about taking steroids because of these individuals when I was young I always thought if I was ever going to do it it would be something i would do educated as an adult what the power team brother there's there's the it's the lord jesus supporting my strength how old is this like 80s 90s looks like 90s yeah but okay real quick though this this is an interesting thing because when it does come to people should be open people have been open for example i brought up brandon harding before brandon harding decided to take trt or whatever when he was like maybe 23 i think three years into lifting he decided to hop on um and he was open and he was honest about it and they're probably some of his younger viewers

who decided to get on um but also you have people on the other side of things like Russ Swole. Also, I want to apologize to Greg. On one of our podcasts, I mentioned that he made an ad here on Paul Sklar, but Greg actually said Paul was natural. But Russ Swole is an individual, pull him up please, who consistently gets drug tested. Russell Orhe. Russell Orhe. Consistently gets drug tested because he's an IPF pro.

He probably doesn't even want me to bring his name up in this conversation, but he looks crazy. He's been lifting for a long time. He's been an athlete for a long time. Greg made a natty or not on him. That initial natty or not, Greg said that there's absolutely no chance that Russ is natural because Greg didn't actually understand that Russ consistently gets drug tested. understand that russ consistently gets drug tested he made a video maybe a few weeks later because he found out wow this guy's always getting drug tested and he's always randomly drug tested and he's natural god look at that fucker he's five seven two hundred and two hundred pounds right i can see in your eyes you're like what the fuck no no i know about you know about okay you

know about it but this is the thing insanely strong insanely strong there are people out here who can look amazing who have been doing this for a long time and they're natural right but they everything gets lumped in in this industry i think that's part i i've seen some of your content and it seems that you've distanced yourself from the natty or not type content and my assumption is because it is purely speculative and you can't really know. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, no. A lot of it is just like even when I first got into it, it was just people asking for my opinion.

Like no different than if you're, you know, watching UFC with your bros or whatever. You watch like the rock movie. You're just like, oh, what do you think about this? And it's like at a point, you know, answering every every single person who's asking you might as well just make a video is what i thought it's like this is what i think and then people just really liked it so yeah you know so that's sort of how it stemmed but yeah some of it it's highly speculative and i like to be more i don't know conclusive in what i'm talking about so oftentimes i would rather talk about if i'm going to be talking about something,

something to do with, I don't know, there's like blood work to reinforce or something that's more like science-based rather than just speculation. So yeah, like I've, I don't know, I've like highly considered just, you know, going the full blown information dense route and not doing that stuff whatsoever.

So I don't know. I don't know what that looks like in the future, but yeah. Yeah. What do you guys think about somebody that is an entrepreneur that makes tremendous amounts of money? It's well known that they make a lot of money and they just never tell anybody how they make it. Awesome.

Like, can they keep that to themselves? Like, so in the case of a steroid, like, you know, let's say you're Lawrence Taylor and you play a lot of your career on crack no no no no can you keep that i know i know where you're going with this because like it is like the rock you're like we we're just continually beckoning him to to say that he he takes gear and it's like i i think pretty obvious that he does but you know there's like we'll never know like for sure no one will ever know but what if he just never talks about it ever

yeah i don't know it is it's it's a very strange thing i think he may have he may have talked about it he said he experimented as a teenager and then – He just kind of left it there. But then never did it again after. But it was just interesting because to make a specific statement, it's one thing to just brush it off and deflect. But then when you make specific statements like, why would you use tests for replacement therapy to double your test when you could just use the nine ancestral tenets? It's like, well, you don't do that. What is possible? Do we have any idea what's possible because i've been around a lot of people that have said naturally yeah that's have said they're

natural um john cena one is one of them somebody made been a longtime friend and john has in his gym he's got um all these tests not testosterone he's got all these tests uh on his wall where he was actually uh supposedly thirdparty tested, not by Vince McMahon in the locker room. So he was tested for performance-enhancing drugs and whatever different ways they do that. And he's got all these tests that show that he's never been on them or whatever. My impression of him was always deflecting because the only clip i've seen of him getting grilled was he said you're not i don't remember exactly what he said but it was

like you're not gonna hear me say i don't do it or but you'll but you'll never be able to i don't know exactly what i know what you're talking about yeah yeah yeah they had a hotel room clip and i think it was like edited a bunch of times yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. I could find it, but just basically the gist of it was what was aired was kind of what you were explaining, but they had to air the whole thing where it was not even close to what he said. It was just cut up very, very like... I covered the full interview at one point.

But yeah, they did ask him about gear, and he deflected, which was fine, I guess. You know, like you can say whatever he wants. But it was very much not yes or no from what I remember. Somebody made this really good point. I could be wrong, by the way. I'm just remembering it how I saw it. And it was very much like a half answer, which you can take from that what you will sort of thing.

Yeah. Basically, I mean, not so much anymore. He's a little older. He's out of wrestling. But he had like 20 not so much anymore. He's a little older. He's out of wrestling, but he had like 20-inch arms. He's got a small waist. He definitely is a mutant. His wrists are really big. His kneecaps are really big.

As far as I know, he's not calling people sub-primal if they're on TRT. He's not doing that. Power Project family, quality sleep can make everything with your health and fitness easier, which is why we've partnered with Hostage Tape. Now, we've been talking about mouth tape for years and nasal breathing for years. But one of the problems that we've had with tape is we all like to rock facial hair. And a lot of the mouth tapes we would use would fall off of our face at night.

Hostage Tape doesn't fall off your face if you have a beard or if you're not a man and you don't. I'm joking. I'm joking. You don't need a beard, right? But either way, hostage tape makes sense. It'll stick to your face when you're asleep. You'll have better quality sleep because you're breathing through your nose all night long. It is a no brainer. And if you head to hostage tape.com slash power project, you'll be able to get the power project annual deal, which is a year's supply of hostage shape for 55 cents a day. You'll be saving $150 on the typical yearly deal. You're going to get two free tins and a blindfold.

It's a no brainer. So head there right now and get yourself some hostage tape. Links in the description along with a podcast show notes. Shut your mouth when you sleep. Enjoy the show. You can go and crank that thing down because it keeps getting loose on you. Yeah. Just crank it down.

This way? Just tight. Lefty loosey, righty tighty. Yeah. It's getting worse. Enjoy the show. When I was getting into weightlifting, Reddit weightlifting was like my place for information. This was right around 2013, 2014. And someone was like, man, I really want to know what's possible naturally. Like what lifters could I look at? And somebody answers it and says, well, you're probably going to have to go back to around 1950 um to to absolutely know because um even then that people had already been like experimenting but the i think i think it was dianabol or there were some drugs that were like the first to kick off and it was just easy it's just like or certain pro hormones people didn't even think about it i don't think yeah

yeah so so you can you can gather that like if you want to see like the strongest people ever guarantee that they're natural you have to go back in time and and look at um potentially like uh paul anderson or something but even then like you don't know i would say yeah maybe not even body bodybuilders like strength athletes weightlifters, things like that. I think that's like the only way you can like guarantee. That's also really interesting because like the fatter athlete, you would never even really assume that they take steroids. Or your general population would never suspect some of the guys that are real big because they got tons of muscle and body fat. Right.

That kind of covers up the muscle. Yeah, and like what you look like we know like doesn't it doesn't determine uh what whether you do peds like lance armstrong didn't look like he did peds but he did and and that's never that was never the point was to like look like a bodybuilder but of course people kind of associate it with it but one thing i can say is like I'm from a sport where like I just on my podcast talked about this guy, Valentin Hristov, and his account of the drugs that he took on the Bulgarian team. And it's absolutely insane the amount of drugs. Max was just on the show saying, you want to know what they do in Russia? They found out whose parents were cool and they started giving kids right at puberty drugs that's right out of the mouth of a russian coach okay like this is

not just some sort of oh we don't know whether what they're doing or whether they're doing it is embedded within my sport so to to think like we're changing things and it's like we're too far gone. So we will never know what's like naturally possible unless we're literally having someone piss and take their blood every single day, at least twice a day for like two, three straight years. I know of some athletes who they were like pretty much using the same hole to like blood test them that's how

many times they were getting tested they're out in the uk like these guys were literally getting tested every single day in certain places in certain times because yukata wanted to fucking get them and the same yukata yeah uk oh yeah anti-doping agency and it's a kind of a similar situation in certain times with usada um you can obviously get around it everyone can get around it so like it sucks because you could say even with russell like i i i'm not gonna say he's on drugs i'm not gonna say like that's between him and god you know because like no matter how many tests you take, someone can always say there's a way to get around tests. That's the nature of this whole natty or not thing on the internet, though.

But I will say this, though. In weightlifting specifically, people have to understand that it is different situations from country to country. And it has been that way for a long time. And every time I bring this up, I'm sorry i'm going on a little rant here but every time i bring this up people are like you like sound like you're just like coping for the u.s and you think u.s is good and everyone else is bad it's like america dude we're the biggest abusers of steroids on the planet i'm not saying that but if you want to compare what usada does compared to what the bulgarians have done in the past or even like the current bulgarian team

or even the current colombian team or whatever like china it's not even close it's not even close and it's so obvious to me um i'm not excusing anything but we if we can't see that advantage there it's ridiculous you know um i'm sorry that was just a big roundabout way of of saying like we just will never know anything. I love your passion, dog. You know? Like the John Cena thing. Yeah.

Did he have a – like does he have a – what is it? A passport or what's the thing where it's – Biological passport. Biological passport. Biological passport. And then if there's something off, are we doing a carbon – something off, are we doing a carbon isotope test? Are we like doing all that? Like you could just push the goalposts every fucking time on him i have a question for both of you guys because this

is something that i've thought about before but within this fitness industry there's like a few people who are the um the the determiners and the gatekeepers of who's natural and who's not there's you there's greg there's maybe iillion, and then there's this other guy that wears glasses. I forgot his name. He's bald, he wears glasses. He has a pretty cool channel too. But when it does come to this whole thing within fitness, within other sports, you have like Giannis Antetokounmpo.

You know who he is from the Milwaukee Bucks? Who has an Achilles tendon that's double the size of a normal human, 13.5 inches. He can fucking run the length of the court in five strides. You have LeBron James who people think and say is on TRTB as he's a pro athlete. But you have some of these athletes in this realm who can do things that no matter what anybody does, even some guys who are 6'7 and 6'8 will not be able to jump like Giannis or jump like LeBron or like Jordan. You have other sports where people

are insanely fast. You have other sports where just there are physical anomalies in all these sports and the muscle side of things isn't necessarily always the thing. It's not always seen, right? But when it does come to this side of fitness, the bodybuilding side of things, for some reason there are, and you do see some differences like liver King, right? He had a GH gut. Mark mentioned he's like perpetually veiny. It's like his veins are always mad even when it's cold. But for some reason in this industry, we think that there is, and there is a limit to the amount of muscle somebody can gain. Look at an IFBB pro bodybuilder. Ain't nobody doing that shit naturally. But if you look at natural bodybuilding where things are tested and it's

not as exciting, so it doesn't get as much, people don't look at it as much. There's fucking 20 different federations and it's unorganized. But when you look at top natural bodybuilders who are getting randomly tested in the off season, and they're also getting tested during shows, some of these guys look freaky. Some of these people look insane. And most people, like if Greg ever paid any attention to these guys, or if most people looked at them, they'd say, that person's on drugs. So why is it that there are anomalies within other sports, but when it comes to muscle, we don't think that there can be people

who have a propensity for that? I think that we do i mean i think like growing up i knew a kid uh his name was ziggy it'd be crazy if he actually saw this but he moved to my school in eighth grade and we started working out uh for football and he bench pressed 315 right in front of me wait how old was he 13 13 years old yeah okay he's like pure uh armenian descent you know yeah and he was fucking jacked at 13 that wasn't i was like i didn't even know that that was human like i didn't even i maybe was doing 135 pounds like maybe probably not even at that point yet uh and that dude was just jacked from like the jump and if he like really really just lifted all day every day and like went really

hard like everyone would think he's on gear of course um but yeah i mean i don't know i think i just think people care too much of course course. Yeah. Um, and it, when people want to sell things, it's like, well, Hey, fuck you. If you want to sell things,

people care too much. You made a whole video about it. Well, well, no, you obviously care about it. Well, yeah,

I care in, in the sense, like my part, uh, doesn't really have much to do with being natty or not. It has to do with the, the speech that you use to sell things and the speech that i try to stray from at every corner absolutisms um sacred

knowledge convoluted uh language that makes people confused more um and and just absolutely no room between the in-group and the out-group and once you've created that then you sell yes that's something that i try to stay away from if you're not doing that and you're on steroids and you're not telling people i honest to god like don't really have a fucking issue with that at all um what i think the reason why i was so attracted to this liver king thing was because he was the charlatan first and foremost. And then the like, Hey,

let's break this seal open so people can kind of see behind, see beyond that. Yeah. Yeah. No. Circling back to your question about like, why is fitness so heavily focused on for like the, what was the overarching question like

yeah because like in a bunch of other sports there are freaks you know i mean i mean at the top levels of sports you look at and i mean everyone's gonna say that everyone the nfl's on drugs but guys at the top level they're like if they did come to fitness they'd blow motherfuckers out of the water aaron donald everyone people think he's on a lot of drugs too you know what i mean but these are also athletes at the top level and i think it's it's different because a pro bodybuilder isn't necessarily the top of the top of genetic athleticism yeah they're the top of the top of genetic propensity for muscle gain, but that doesn't mean that they can sprint a 4-2, 4-3, or 4-4.

You know what I mean? And I'd imagine that the athletes, like for example, I'm going to use Russ Swole again. Sorry, Russ. But Russ was a former football player that got injured. He had goals of playing professional football. The only reason the guy chose to do powerlifting is because he got injured. Phil Heath was a college basketball player.

He was a college basketball player. You know what I mean? So it's different. Yeah, so I think that the athletes are always going to do the best. The best athletes are going to always do the best. And what happens is, though, like what gets really weird is when the athletes start to mess around with drugs and they do too good. And that's when people are like, all right, there's something going on here. What do you mean?

So who was that Yankees pitcher who in his final years on the Yankees was pitching better than he ever has before at like 40-something? Was it... Wasn't... Was it... Oh, God.

Rob... Roger Clemens. Yes. Yes. Roger Clemens. Okay. Yes. Roger Clemens. Okay. That was really suspect. You're talking straight up.

This guy's an absolute monster of a pitcher. At his old-ass age, was starting to pitch some of the best baseball of his entire life. Yeah. That's when things get weird. He's known as a power guy, too. Yeah. Yes. And it's like, shit, like the drugs are working too well.

Like we got to scale it back at that level. That would be my speculation. And so you see guys like, holy shit, Barry Bonds, unbelievable athlete, unbelievable baseball player. Shit, he's getting way too good at this. Like way, way, way too good. You know, I mean, I think, and most people think like he's going to Hall of Fame before the steroids, I think 100%. Yeah. Right? I don't want to like continually speculate athletes that haven't been caught or been caught.

But I think there's something to be said about like these incredible athletes in the late stages of their careers. said about like these incredible athletes in the late stages of their careers you know dabbling with some peptides dabbling with some gh maybe uh low dose testosterone and absolutely crushing you know an interesting thing is sometimes some people will take it just to just to catch up to the genetic anomaly so that's interesting right that's when it's like – Because Barry Bonds is like multiple generation baseball player. Oh, yeah. And he was unbelievable. And it appears that he took stuff probably later in his career. It looked like he was already on his way to the Hall of Fame.

But imagine me or anybody else just trying to take something just to try to catch up to some of that. And that's, I think, the biggest issue that people have is like you're actually not naturally as good as the other guy. I wonder what makes us admire that. Like why would you admire somebody? It would be like admiring just like, oh, I was born in New York. I have zero control over being born in New York.

Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people just assume that if somebody does look amazing or is performing in some way that they probably did something to get there and they don't want to believe that it could just be a genetic superiority to themselves they on like the people who end up abusing the shit the worst are the people who are trying to catch up and compensate in general like i've seen some people that are competing at like local just like their first show and they're using as much shit as a guy who's like a top pro if not more sometimes to try and because they just think oh i don't have the secret and they're using as much shit as a guy who's like a top pro, if not more sometimes, to try and – because they just think, oh, I don't have the secret and they must just be doing more than me.

And in reality, they just weren't meant to do that activity. You know, the interesting thing about bodybuilding and this fitness space is that when it comes to trying to aspire to be like someone in this space or someone that you idealize in this space for most people well not for most people but like to try to become a really good basketball player you got to get on the court and fucking train that you can't take testosterone and fucking growth hormone and shit to get there but this specific thing right if someone wants to try to catch up to that genetic elite well i can train a lot and maybe i

can use a bunch of shit to do that there's no other sport that really has that you can take as much shit as you want but you'll never be a barry bonds you'll never be a fucking aaron donald you got to be an athlete for that but for this you can have that you could potentially in your mind have that look if you hop on a bunch of shit and that's what's so weird about this well look if you think about um basketball as if like if we were just to collect every basketball move that a player makes in a day that has a recovery toll um so somebody who's not as genetically gifted if they're able to have more basketball moves per day, they can give themselves a leg up. And that would be where something like literally any androgen could help them with that.

And so instead of thinking about it in like I'm going to beat the guy that is better than me, I'm going to be able to outwork him because I'm literally not going to feel the guy that is better than me. I'm going to be able to outwork him because I'm literally not going to feel the fatigue that I would normally feel. I think that is where you could see the stark, stark difference across all sports. Actually, you can just do more, just do more and,

and not have the recovery costs of doing more and that's where you can catch up but i don't think you think you could catch up though yeah you think you could but it's worth it for them it's worth a shot right it's like why not this is my life this is what i want to do and the the answer to why not is like it's against the rules first and foremost, but that doesn't really matter if you can't get caught to a lot of people. Derek, have you noticed differences or disadvantages rather of people using performance enhancing drugs? Like someone's body getting very tight? Like we saw some pictures and some stuff of Liver King. And when you see him try to do something more athletic, he looks a lot like me.

Like he's got the mobility of a trash can, I would say. And I've noticed that to be a trait of a lot of guys that take stuff. However, a lot of guys that take stuff start to become well-muscled. But our boy Encima here is well-muscled and he's very fluid. And his muscle, his body has a different look than uh some of the people that we see like yeah here you can just tell how tight the hips are and how tight that shoulder must be just to try to uh to throw that so have you observed potential disadvantages are you aware of anything that any steroid could do to muscles that would perhaps hinder some stuff in any way?

I think in general, a lot of people who are using this stuff are doing it not for actual real performance reasons. It's more vanity driven. The image they're trying to portray, some cosmetic perception of what is the representation of peak masculinity and what they think to be the ideal physique to either attract women or feel superior to other men or whatever it is. And in general, oftentimes people will neglect functional training or flexibility or mobility or whatever. Striving for that because they don't deem it to be a good use of time. So I don't know. Even me, when I used to teach swimming lessons, I used to be a lifeguard when i was younger oh shit yeah when i was uh like at peak size i would be

trying to teach back crawl and my fucking dealt with like snapping my face so i like i couldn't even teach the the movements he's like drowning and trying to teach at the same time and i'm sure you can attest to when you're like super muscled, you don't float very well. So careful with your next words. I know where you're going with this. Why can't I float? Well, is it because I'm muscled? Oh, yeah. Calm down.

Bone density. So I got a lot of density, too. If you think about like, look, if your training is geared towards gaining muscle, then you're going to be too muscled. But if your training is geared towards your specific sport, you're going to be geared towards your specific sport. So you take testosterone and you get on your bike, you're going to be better at biking, but you're not necessarily going to be too muscled. So I guess. Yeah, I don't think taking gear will inherently like wipe out your mobility necessarily. But it could negatively impact.

I mean just – if you took stuff and maybe just kind of didn't know what you're doing. We saw it with Vitor Belfort when he was young. He came in the UFC and he absolutely just dominated. He's high-level jujitsu but he just punched the shit out of everybody because he was so strong and just he came in and just smashed everybody but he over juiced himself to the point where he got himself too big and too jacked he was kind of puffy and he actually didn't perform very well yeah like over shooting what would otherwise be conducive to your sport could otherwise be super counterproductive it's like dose dependent as well well it's just like whatever you get out of the drugs that you're using so like hypothetically if you were a terrible responder and you only gain one pound out of whatever it is you're using

you know how much is that going to impede whatever it is that you're trying to do it depends on the sport depends what you're trying to do out of it but it'll like if you become a 260 pound shredded bodybuilder like obviously there's no getting around the fact that it's gonna make it more difficult to do basic shit even like walk upstairs you're gonna look like an idiot oftentimes yeah and something like uh you know if you're playing something like tennis and you're taking like testosterone and anadrol or something that would yeah could be something that would bloat your body up so much that it might be a negative yeah yeah so i think in general it's more more like a consequence of whatever it is that you're getting out of the drugs, more so than the drugs aren't going to all of a sudden make it so you can't touch your back anymore,

can't wash your back in the shower anymore. It's going to be a consequence of how much physical mass there is preventing you from getting there, as well as you're neglecting the activities that would otherwise be conducive to you know maintaining peak flexibility or mobility or whatever it is derek you downsized yeah how much did you used to weigh like how much more than now peak was like 255 maybe but it was not like bring up the pictures it was not it was not that lean so now i'm actually curious about this uh first off why did you choose to downsize i don't know if he's got better he's busier or whatever but

mentally did you feel any type of struggle with i used to look like this and now you don't look bad by any means that's all i'm saying but what i noticed is like for example pete rubish right we gotta get on your pete you know pete yeah yeah like he came full off yeah and you see like pete used and pete looks good now but pete used to look like fucking superman and i i am curious what does it what is it like mentally to have seen yourself at this point and now you're not there. Are you just fine with that? Or does it hit you at all? Well, it's definitely a perception in the fitness industry that it becomes very difficult if you tie your, I don't know, brand around it too significantly.

And then you end up, I don't know, like for guys, for me, I didn't really think it was that. It kind of just happened naturally too. Not actually naturally. think it was that it kind of just happened naturally to not not actually as i started focusing on like entrepreneurial endeavors and just did my my uh i don't know interest shifted that alignment of interest very much just naturally took away from my ability to you know focus as much and you know allocate you know mental resources to training um you know like six days a week i drop down to like three to four just to maintain. I'm doing like the minimum volume to get in and out. Maybe that's not the most conducive to, you know, sustaining size. And then also the,

the drugs, like what's the point of taking more, all these drugs when I'm not even training to make use of them properly. I'm just stressing my body out for no reason. So I don't know, like for me, I had kind of come to terms with i was never going to like compete on a stage um for me i don't have the genetics to like push it and build like a crazy physique that i felt was even sustainable because it was the amount of eating and the training and stuff was very much eating into the the productivity that i otherwise deemed to be more valuable so you know like for me it just kind of uh i don valuable. So, you know, like for me, it just kind of, uh, I don't know, my interests, you know, shifted as I got older. When you're younger, you, uh, think a lot

of things are super important that might not be as important to you years, years later. Yeah. Switching gears. Um, how did you end up, uh, running multiple businesses? Because you just mentioned something that I'm fascinated with, which is people's interest level. Because I often will hear people talk about the grind and how hard things are. And I'm always like, well, you either did it or you didn't do it. And if you did it, that shows me that that's where your interest level is. And I hear Joe Rogan talk about it often about following your interest and how he just kept following his own interest. He follows his curiosity. It seems like you have had a similar path.

How did you get into it? You got a fragrance now. That's uncommon for someone to have their own cologne. And you're also involved in a TRT clinic as well, right? Yeah. So for me, it was very much as I progressed online, there was a lot of stuff that I used that I was recommending to people because it was stuff I felt useful enough to spend my money on was either benefiting my life in some

capacity or had some utility or was something I'd been using for years already, like before, you know, I had ever even made a piece of content and that kind of stuff. It's the most natural segue into what are you going to, how are you going to monetize? Well, the stuff that I believe in and use already. And if I can somehow improve on that, or I don't know, offer something that I feel there's a hole in the market for, you know, by all means lean into that. So for me, any vertical I've gone down has very much been aligned with stuff that is highly interesting to me. And I otherwise, I don't know, resonate with and know can be scalable because I'm actually interested in it and continuously further educate myself on or am passionate enough about it that I feel it's imparting value on the audience when they use it themselves. Have you gotten yourself into any businesses where you weren't that interested

or have you thought about a bunch of different ideas and then you're like, I don't think that's good because I probably just won't give a fuck about that in three or four years. I guess like fortunately most the stuff I do has been pretty aligned with exactly. That's why I try to be a bit more dialed on the amount of stuff I start. Like, I don't want to start something and half-ass the shit out of it. So I have only a couple of things and I try to pour most of my mental resources into that. So for me, dietary supplements has been, you know, I'm continuously further educating myself and trying to like mainly on the cognitive enhancement space. We started with the nootropic formula before we ever got into the workout stuff

with the pre-workouts and the protein and whatnot, all stuff I used and bought anyways. But I was very, very interested in the nootropic side of things, cognitive enhancement, increasing memory formation, information retention, mental clarity, sharpness, et cetera. So like that's where that kind of scaled out. And then on the preventative medicine side of things, that is where Merrick Health kind of was like very aligned with what i was doing is it's hot you know i'd seen so many bodybuilders fuck themselves up or even me wishing i knew more about this stuff going into it and had high quality medical oversight wasn't getting shunned by doctors or judged that's you know a big thing people deal with in this industry

too is judgmental doctors who will shun you for just wanting to be proactive about your health to avoid having a heart attack or whatever and just my frustrations too with my own family trying to get help and even if my mom's like 60 years old trying to get like a basic assessment or like uh i don't know just see where her cardiovascular health is even though she hasn't had a heart attack yet you know i would very much like to see you know is there anything that is building up insidiously on the back end that we could get in front of and she needs to change her diet or her lifestyle or something accordingly. Or, but, you know, if you don't literally have a heart attack happening right in front of their face, oftentimes they won't let you.

Yeah. So I've become very passionate about the preventative medicine side of things and being proactive about avoiding getting to that disease state and optimizing your quality of life, health, vitality, et cetera. Does that seem to be getting a little bit better here in the United States, do you feel, and in Canada? Fortunately, you can pay for a lot of stuff out of pocket here, which I do like. They don't, you know, like in Canada, oftentimes even when you try to pay for something they'll tell you no which is wild because it's like yeah so I guess it's such a burden to the system in some places that

not only is it not going to be covered by the free health care but even if you want to pay for it yourself they'll be like no you can't sorry you don't need it because I know better than you I think you can get out of my office like it needs to be stated that Merrick is not just a fucking steroidsid to say that

yeah when we call it a trt clinic like i almost cringe a little bit because i know what people's perception of trt clinics are i'll tell you from from my experience like i have thyroid issues and i don't know if that is genetic like it runs in a does it run good it could be autoimmune so like yeah i mean i have autoimmune issues in my family and um like i did bloods like a long time ago and the doctor the the general doctor was like well you know um this looks a little concerning but we can do something about it or not and you know as i'm getting older like i just i don't know i want to do something just get more in touch with what's going on um my sleep sucks a lot of things are i'm having issues with so i did uh the merrick blood test and it was like a seriously full scale. I know that you guys have them as a sponsor.

I don't know. I've got my blood work done. Yeah, 14 vials basically determining like full scale, like thyroid, even like DHT and like so many things that would never be considered. Also on top of that, the onboarding process, basically with, i had a woman who i talked to she like explained to me like how much more in-depth this is than like any blood

test you've ever had before and then derek also said it's like over half um of your clients don't even yeah we have a big chunk of our patients that aren't on trt like oftentimes people just assume like you go in you're going to be put on trt it's not the case whatsoever like the doctors are going to be like they're gonna they're gonna avoid it if they can right or yeah like you would be evaluating natural interventions first that are good if it's warranted to go down the like you might just have you know perpetually high cortisol levels from having fucked up sleep or whatever it is and it's warranted to go down the – like you might just have perpetually high cortisol levels from having fucked up sleep or whatever it is and it's on the back end screwing up your gonadotropin output, which leads to low tests. But you think because you have a 300 test, like, oh, I need TRT and I feel like shit. It's like, well, what about being like you walk in and they just want to sling some pill at you because they can get a decent paycheck from whatever company they're working with.

Circling back quick, sorry to interrupt, but I just don't want to forget. Like one of the motivations too was doctors, they can only learn so much in multiple areas. Yeah. So going down like the hyper niche of hormone replacement or I don't know, like comprehensive thyroid analysis, it's more so finding doctors that align with our niche of what we focus on and we vetted them that they stay up to date on the current literature and don't just rely on their you know their md from fucking 20 years ago or whatever and they're very very passionate about continuing to educate themselves themselves on the specific area too so like we don't touch a lot of stuff that a family doctor would obviously but the stuff that we are passionate about and we make sure we have that in-depth knowledge like that's our bread and butter and that's why we exist and

why i'm so passionate about it is because some of that stuff like i very much have experienced like even my first girlfriend ever she had hashimoto's thyroiditis and i remember going to multiple doctors with her and they kept telling her she was fine, even though she was cold all the time, hair was falling out, had all these brutal issues that were... I was like, on the surface, this looks like your hypothyroid. And I just couldn't wrap my head around what was going on because I would see her TSH levels. And in Canada, if your TSH levels fall within a certain range, they don't look at anything

else. You need to have a fucked up TSH and then a fucked up t4 to even look at your t3 and then they won't even look at your thyroid thyroid globulin antibodies your tpo thyroid peroxide peroxidase uh i think it's tpo antibodies they won't look at some of these more in-depth markers because it's just they they don't even go that far as to either warrant it from the free health care perspective or they otherwise don't think it's warranted because of the preliminary markers aren't representative of what is like so blatantly fucked up to even justify the other things. I forget which marker it was. I was sky high, but I think her TPO antibodies were like through the roof once we actually got the full scale testing done. But she had gone like a year of getting told she was fine because her tsh levels on paper looked okay and like that was frustrating because i saw her suffering for a

year straight with an autoimmune issue that she didn't know it was like inside her body it was like her immune system was attacking her thyroid gland essentially the entire time and i was like damn you know like that would have been ideal if we had somebody who listened and really pushed for that more elaborate testing. And I don't know if that's a detriment of the free health care where they try to be as limited as possible of where they allocate the available budget. And for a young woman who otherwise seems like they should be healthy, maybe we're not going to test anything. But even if she wanted to pay, they wouldn't let her pay. Yeah, but we also didn't even know about that stuff right to look

further yeah because it's like why would you even be looking for antibodies when you have a normal tsh like that kind of thing is not well known um oh go ahead go ahead no it's just like some of the autoimmune stuff is like new i don't know new generation education i guess and for sure it's not very well understood why it's happening what what's going on, why is your body attacking itself. Like it's not common. Got to go on a carnivore diet. Maybe. I don't know.

I guess it depends. But anyway, like if Merrick Health existed back then, I could have got her like a full-scale thyroid panel and seen like a major red flag immediately. Or you could otherwise see the representation of slowly deteriorating biomarkers that aren't reflective of somebody who has the same thyroid health month to month. And you can see it like slowly like petering away in function. And if you had like somebody who was actually really, really focused on digging into that, they might have been able to flesh out and interpret the blood work and say like, oh, you know, maybe this is why your body temperature is like chronically low. say like, oh, you know, maybe this is why your body temperature is like chronically low. And have you guys adjusted the actual reference ranges? Because like when you go to a hospital, reference ranges are at a certain level for where most of the population is. Do you guys have adjusted reference ranges for like testosterone and other things where it should be ideally? Yeah. So we go by the reference ranges of the LabCorp or the Quest, but we will often have our

own unique interpretation of what we deem to be reflective of, in general, what we'd like to see in an optimized state for that specific individual, and then kind of use that context to relate targeted recommendations. But it's still somewhat vague until you actually get to talk to a provider and get like a more informed assessment. It's kind of just creating a picture that you can then kind of extrapolate out certain informed, educated assessments about things, but to actually dial in on a specific recommendation,

you need that. I don't know, like targeted oversight that kind of understands exactly what's going on at all levels. Cause you could have a low test or even a normal test, but your free test is low because your SHBG is high because your liver is stressed out because you're doing this and that. There's like a bunch of different stuff that goes into it. I love it. I think it's great. And I, something I've shared for quite some time is I think people should treat themselves like athletes,

you know, treat yourself like a professional athlete. So there might be a cost associated with getting some of these tests done, but it makes you feel incredible because you have a whole team of people that are like combing through your blood work and they're saying, hey, you might need these vitamins and you might need more sleep or, you know, what's your day like? It looks like you're maybe a little more stressed than you might think. And there's a lot of stuff that you can just go through, exercise, diet, we know how powerful all of these things are. And maybe just with some intervention from people that know what they're doing and that know how to read your blood work and check the hormones, uh, shit. I mean, again, there might be a cost associated with it, but like, what if it changes your life? Yeah. What if you drop 20 pounds and

feel better and now you've, you know, feel like you're 25 when you're 45? Yeah. And even assessing like why, even from the TRT side of things, why, if you actually need it, finding out why you need it. Like is it that you have inadequate signaling from your brain to your testes or is it your testes are literally like functionally damaged and are unresponsive? Because there's a difference between are you a candidate because you no matter how much your brain is signaling to them they're just not going to respond and at that point you could never you could probably never recover where even if you're trying to optimize the natural things if you have like primary hypogonadism and your testicles are just like like sub optimally

functioning or lack thereof entirely you know there's some of that stuff. It will very, very much impact what a actual informed, assessed, you know, recommendation might be because maybe you might not need TRT. Maybe you just need to dial in certain things or even kick things back in with certain drugs that might otherwise not be lifelong reliance on exogenous testosterone. Like it would be very worthwhile to understand like why it's low, what factors could have led to it. And if it's something you can fix naturally through lifestyle changes, dietary manipulation, sleep hygiene improvements, et cetera, versus just haphazardly jumping on shit. Yeah. You know, Zach and I were talking

about something the other day and actually I listened to when I think you, I don't know if you were talking with him or you were talking to Chris, but you're talking about how like when it comes to the hypertrophy aspect of things or looking bigger, you know, when you get leaner, people are like, do you even lift? And you almost feel a pressure, right? To try to look a certain way. We had Nathan French on the podcast recently and I, Nathan's mentioned that he's on TRT. He is quite young. And he did mention that like there did seem to be a, you know, he performs at a high level before he had ever gone on anything before he got on TRT. He was doing triathlons. He was doing marathon running. He did a bodybuilding show. This was pre TRT.

Like a seven minute mile or something in a marathon. Like just ridiculous. Yeah. He was working himself down. Right. So he ended up getting on TRT, but he did say that there did feel that there was a bit of a pressure, right? Yeah. There's an extreme amount. There's an extreme amount of pressure because not only is he doing this because he enjoys it, but there's also the side of social media. And we've been kind of thinking about this where the looks side of things, right? Like, for example, the Kardashians, lip filler, they probably got some shit in their ass, right? But then you start seeing a lot of women trying to become Kardashian clothes where they get lip filler and they get BBLs because instead of – not everyone has genetics for ass, right? So if you can get a BBL and get that ass right now but also get that tummy tuck because they take fat from here and they put it over here, the best of both worlds.

I don't even have to go to the gym. I don't have to do the work. I'm not saying – That surgery was hard for me to recover from but thank you for recommending it to me. You're welcome. I appreciate it. You thick, you thick, you thick. It was worth it.

But the interesting thing is that it does seem to be like we see that affecting women. We see that affecting their body image and the way they feel about themselves where they think, if I can just plump my lips up and change this, I'll be good. And now, I mean, you kind of do see it like it's always been on the male side of things. You want to be big and muscular, right? But it does seem that with the prevalence of younger guys getting on trt when they don't need it for any type of testosterone replacement they're just trying to get big and jacked it seems like trt is the new bbl for guys so i and it's not technically replacement oftentimes it's not replacement yeah i want to stack it on top i want to talk about like my journey through like actually the how you look thing um when i started no one gave a shit about how they looked or anything.

It was like, that was the cool thing about CrossFit. It was like, what's your time? Like, can you do this thing? What you look like doesn't matter. It's can you do this thing. You look like a firefighter is what I told you. I'm working on it. It's the hat.

The hat's got the red in it. It does. I thought like a fire marshal was coming you i'm working on it it's the hat the hat's got the like the red in it i thought like a fire marshal was coming i'm working on it so um and then it went into weightlifting again what do you do it has nothing to do with what you look like like nobody cares about what anyone looks like in the sports what's your total matters that's your performance your performance matters and then when i started to post things online, immediately comments came in. Like, wow, this is amazing for such a skinny, long guy to be doing. And I found that kind of endearing. It was fun.

It was like my thing. It was like that's my difficulty that I have to deal with maybe. It's like me being a taller, lankier athlete trying to do a sport that's notoriously for shorter people, people who've always been strong in the gym. And I leaned into that and I loved it, you know, but as I moved away from weightlifting, then my identity now is like, okay, well, I want to just like do general fitness stuff. Okay. Well now like what I look like kind of matters. And that sucks because now I'm paying much more attention to it um i've been putting on a lot of weight lately to try and fit this role of a of a weightlifter and in doing so

i've put in a movie in a movie right okay in a movie and i'm really excited about that but in doing so i've put on a lot of fat and it's like it's not really comfortable to be at this body weight right now um mainly because like this is the game, bro. Yeah, I know. And so what do I do if I like I said, if I go and try and lean out like people are. I think the common thing is like if you do cardio, you're not going to lose your gains. And that's absolutely true. Like if I started to lose body fat, like I wouldn't lose that much strength, if

any at all, if I just maintained a lot of other things and, and trained well. But I think that losing that body fat, people would then begin to say, oh, do you even lift again? It's like almost like the, the fat like allows me to have this perception of looking bigger, you know? And if I, if I slim down again to, to try and be sub 10% body fat, like, you know, it's, it's a catch 22. And I realized that. And what I'm excited for hopefully, you know, is when I finish, you know this bulk if you want to call it that uh and just do what i want to do and look

how it ends up looking and just live that way i i cannot wait to do to be in that that space you know um and i'm just gonna continually have to ignore the people talking about how I look. And it's, that is, you know, it sounds like I'm a whiny little piss ant for being like, guys, stop talking about how I look because I'm the one putting myself out there online. Yeah. Like this is the game. We, we cannot change the masses for being like, okay, here's someone on screen. This is what they look like. Comment.

You look like this right that's never i repeat never ever ever going to change for women for men if you put yourself online yes the first thing anyone is going to say is how do you look it sucks but that's the world we live in yeah right the keyboard adds that you know that ability for people to just be like, oh, I've got no filter anymore. You look like this. You look like that. So when that can no longer have an effect, I'm excited to be in that place. Someone who's a great example of this is James Smith.

Do you know James Smith? Which one? He's a British guy. He lives in Australia now. I'm good good friend. I'm good friends with James Smith. He was on steroids for a little bit, wanted to get jacked, be a personal trainer who was jacked. And now he's off steroids.

He's been off steroids for a long time. I think he just did like a few cycles and he – you could say like he doesn't look like he lifts, but he's an athletic looking dude. He looks fine, whatever. He likes doing jujitsu and he talks about fitness. And I find that to be very endearing. Yeah. You know, if someone is going to come along, some juice monkey bodybuilder, and he's like, this guy is giving people fitness advice and he doesn't look like he lifts like,

well, that's bullshit. And like, I'm hoping that I'll be able to parse through those things as they come at me in the future. I like James, but the funny thing about him is that James is the opposite of the juice monkey bodybuilder in that he will say that most of these guys are on juice.

Like he's that guy who's like, I used to take juice and most of these guys are on juice and look at like, he's kind of playing the opposite game of it. And I kind of see that. And it's James has amazing information. Don't get me wrong, but he's playing the opposite where he's like, all these people are on juice. Cause I know because I used to be on it and look at me now. Like I've, that's a theme I've noticed within his content did not taken away from the quality of his content, which is high quality, high knowledge. And when put into practice will work.

Okay. But it's, it's kind of odd. I will say that. I will say this. I've never had this level of body dysmorphia in my life. How do we get what I currently have? Why? Oh, because of the way you're having to look for the movie role.

You could tell, right? Like when we were working out, I currently have. Why? Because of the way you're having to look for the movie role? You could tell, right? Like when we were working out, I kept talking. It's just like it's on my mind a lot. And it never was before. And it was kind of like my superpower. You ever see how fat I got? No. I mean.

You got to lean into it, man. I know. And I think at some point, like I'm not too worried about it. Like I know I'm just, I can sense it. I'm excited to move past it and I know I was thinking you're a crazy person right now you look great you look like an athlete you dwarf everyone yeah as your audience said you mugged us the last time you came on yeah yeah true yeah are you gonna change your training habits by

any chance like on your way coming down cuz I'm sure if I'm wrong but like Olympic lifting might not be the best for like developing no like i was actually talking to mark about this before like when i hit the end and in sema when i hit that deadlift like something changed where i was like i don't want to really want to do this you did a 661 deadlift recently yes or 660 yeah 660 there you go and i just like i really don't want to do this anymore like i don't have it in me maybe i will in the future but knowing how hard i trained for that deadlift like to train harder than that and to be older and to try to do that naturally why on earth would i want to do that to myself like it's nowhere near as fun as like waking up uh like going to do some like light cardio, coming back, getting a nice pump and like sitting down and doing work for the day.

That sounds so great for me. Yeah. You know, like going to the gym and being like, I want to fucking kill myself with deadlifts today. Like, yeah. So you mentioned having some like body dysmorphia. How do you guys think? You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of people right now that have a lot of anxiety. We see a lot of depression. Maybe it's also just getting talked about more. Maybe

it's kind of been around for a long time and we just haven't, maybe a lot of men have like just stuffed it down and just didn't talk about their feelings. But what do you guys think is maybe some things that are responsible to leading to some of this and what are some ways out of it? Because I do think like hormone optimization, getting your blood work done, just really being concerned with your health, never mind taking testosterone or anything like that. But just taking control of your health I think can be something that's really valuable, going on walks, running, getting some sunlight and so forth. going on walks, running, getting some sunlight and so forth. Yeah. I don't think I have like an expert opinion on like how to manage the mental side of this industry because it's pretty fucked up, dude.

Like when you're looking at TikToks and, you know, Instagram and it's just like the hyper extreme outliers of people that clearly are, you know, picking up the most traction, getting success. Like it's hard to not get mind warped by it. Yeah. And especially. Do you feel that personally sometimes? Like the stress and uh well fortunately for me i don't feel like a pressure to maintain something

as much as i might have if i was somebody who didn't sit in front of a camera and do like informative style content but yeah like even like when i started shit it like came from a place of insecurity when i was younger too like it's not like i was trying to become a mr olympia competitor or something and i think a lot of people, you know, that's ultimately what drives them to do it as much as they wouldn't want to say they're, you know, doing it because they're competing or whatever. Like I think even a lot of the competitors

would probably still be pushing it even if they weren't, you know, stepping on stage because they just enjoy the process of continuing to improve upon themselves or, you know, look larger in life or whatever it is. Like it's very much all derives down to this, you know, body dysmorphia that I think is hyper accelerated and at scale more than ever. And it's really hard to get out of it. Like I don't really have good advice on that other than, I don't know, just be like mindful of what you're consuming and that what you see is not representative of what like the layman necessarily thinks is good.

Like if you have visible abs or you're in reasonable shape, like you're probably like a top 1% person as is like. But then you see some guy you follow on social media and it's hard to not get mind warped into thinking this is the pinnacle and this is what i need to get to to be good and oftentimes people will take that and then it blurs the line so much on what is good that then they see somebody else who's objectively not like super impressive and they're like oh you do even lift or whatever yeah yeah and i think you know it's a it's a totally valid question like how do we defeat this thing and what we haven't brought up yet is just straight up focusing on just the mind like and like yeah we talk about the fact that so many things that we can practice are therapeutic therapeutic but nothing is more therapeutic than therapy or uh like mindfulness um or

having some sort of sense of value like men specifically like vasopressin is our is our drug you know it's like we we want to feel like we are valued and if you can give that if you can give that – if you can give a man some sort of purpose, some sort of value, they won't feel the pressures of somebody saying they don't look like they lift. And when that scale tips towards, okay, I feel what society is saying about me or whatever, that's when the negative part of it happens and i think the more that a male can kind of and and i'm only saying this because i am a male um can kind of mitigate that with practices outside of the gym what do you do well what is your suggestion um he cries about it no no i have that's all the time we got for the day no no what do i do uh i make sure to have you know my drug of choice which is talking to other people who want to have deep discussion um i not sure if i brought it up in the last podcast i was here but i went on this bachelor party and it was actually really awesome we

all of us like sat around in a circle it was like 20 20 guys and um you could drink if you wanted to i didn't even drink the whole weekend on this bachelor party which was pretty awesome um and we sat around a circle and they're like okay we want you to go around and say what's one thing that's ascending in the world like what's something that's going up trending whatever this is at a bachelor party yeah wow yeah these are the people that i try to hang around nice yeah and then another thing was what was a coming of age thing for you and my story of the coming of age thing was when i i have three older sisters and all like i didn't really fit in with them my older sisters would be doing whatever. And my mom would be doing whatever.

And I would go in and talk with my dad, even when I was like 11 years old, but we would talk like man to man. Yeah. And we would talk about very deep things like anything, philosophy, religion, politics, whatever. I realized very early on in my life that that is what I need to function. Like I absolutely need that. And that's something that I lean into.

And then you partied after this. Oh, what? The bachelor party thing. Yeah. I'm just trying to imagine I'm showing up to a bachelor party. I sit in a circle. It's like,

tell me your darkest secrets. I'd be like, fuck. He told me about it. It was like him and Chris. And they're just like me, Chris. And like a bunch of deep conversations,

having deep conversations. And then we, after it, after it, you and like a bunch of deep conversations, having deep conversations. And then we, after it, after it, you could like, like once it was, Oh, it was cool.

It was like for this guy, you know, like this is what he wanted. Like, this is all he wanted. He wanted his, his best friends to talk openly and honestly with each other. And like for a group of grown men to do something like that,

it's pretty fucking amazing. Um, and then after that drink, have fun, do whatever you want but what ended up happening was everyone split off into smaller groups and just kept talking until you know it's time to go to sleep and then we all went to sleep and woke up and there was more events for us to do for the rest of the weekend and that's kind of beside the point i just think like that's what i do to to answer your question um you know, I've tried like actual therapy

and personally... What do you mean by tried? Do you feel like it didn't work? I think that it's very therapeutic for people to just be heard and to have deeper discussions. There are a lot of people who don't have that. So if a therapist can provide that for you, to just make you think

deeper and talk deeper, then that can actually really change who you are and and your perspective on life i'm lucky that i get that every day i'm literally with a guy whose podcast is called modern wisdom it's all about being wiser and smarter and talking better so i get to talk to that guy all the time i don't need that what i want is like some serious hand holding what's got you fucked up and let's bust through that thing whatever that is and like i didn't get that with you know my first couple experiences with therapists so that's something that i'm interested in and and i'm knowingly wanting to go after yeah um and i think like know, a lot of people say like the gym is my therapy and

movement is my therapy. Well, that's true, but therapy could also be your therapy, you know? You know, you're totally right about that on the mental side of things. But I do think that on the physical side of things, the odd thing about when we think specifically about bodybuilding is bodybuilding is judging your physique on the way it looks. The reason why I haven't competed since 2015 is because I kind of found jujitsu. Uh, I was a soccer player since I was six. So when I played in college and I got injured, I needed another physical outlet. That's when I got into bodybuilding and powerlifting. Um, but bodybuilding was fucking annoying because you're always in

like you you go on stage and then this person says bring up your triceps bring up your shoulders and then you're now hyper focused every single day of i need to make my shoulders bigger i need to make this bigger oh i need to fucking mess with this symmetry and this shit and that is not good it's not that isn't actually healthy, even though, because within fitness, people look at certain individuals and their physique is somewhat a physical representation of their health. Even though we know that people can be on a shit ton of gear and their blood work could be shit and they're not actually healthy, but that's what the immediately thing that's what's seen. But I think if like you did, you have weightlifting and you have jujitsu, these are two performance based

physical practices where it's like yeah you do pay attention to the way you look but it's more so about the way you perform and that's why like when i found jujitsu it was so fucking good like i don't it's not that i don't care about the way i look but my physical practices my training is not focused on the way i look it's focused on what i can do not not, and that's been so helpful for me. So I don't plan on competing in bodybuilding anymore because it's just too hyper-focused on your physique. And then you get hyper-focused on your physique. You know what I mean? What if you really like it though? Well, I mean, if you like it, I can't tell people what's

problematic for them. Everybody like Alberto Nunez, Jeff Alberts, these guys from 3DMJ, Eric, like Sam okunola and sam doesn't compete anymore in bodybuilding but these are some natural bodybuilders and they look great but they've been able to do it for decades in a healthy way jeff is almost 50 years old and he has kids he looks great he's managed to do it in a healthy way but he's not hyper focused on it it doesn't seem that he has body dysmorphia, but I do know bikini competitors and bodybuilding competitors who's just like, they're just incessantly trying to change certain things and they're incessantly focused on the physique. And, and this is Jeff right here. He's,

um, I think he's 50. This guy, I fucking love this man. Um, but if you can find something that can allow you to perform and get you not so focused on your physique all the time, that could be a physical practice that could help this body dysmorphia idea. I think both of those things, jujitsu and weightlifting, in a way like they just give you a mirror and they try to almost like break down your ego. I know jujitsu for sure. break down your ego and i know i know jujitsu for sure um have you guys heard the saying it's like you spend your 20s worrying what everyone thinks about you you spend your 30s not worrying what anyone thinks about you and then you spend your 40s realizing no one thought anything about you at all i never heard that but that's dope so uh in essence and there's a you know a famous book, Crime and Punishment. Too long.

Super famous. Yeah. Well, the main character, Raskolnikov, is constantly worrying what everyone thinks about him. And he's constantly putting himself down. He's like, I'm just a slimy piece of shit. And what I loved about that book was realizing that that outlook is the most selfish, self-driven outlook that you could possibly have. Making fun of yourself and how you're perceived and worrying about that is as selfish as it gets, even though you're putting yourself down. You think by putting yourself down, you're making yourself lower. But by constantly focusing on yourself, you have a much higher ego than you would ever perceive

and i think if there's any way that we can kind of reverse that and maybe give someone confidence and that they don't have to to put themselves down or look at what other people think then it's fine i think like you can be a bodybuilder and be confident and not have body dysmorphia and just love it and feel good. Like at least that's what Arnold put out there into the world. At least that's how he portrayed himself, but you never know with anyone. But yeah,

I think, I think it's something, something worth thinking about is, is destroying someone's ego in, in a way and trying to build up some level of confidence. Power Project family, I hope you're having a good day. Now, we've partnered with Eight Sleep Mattresses because it's made a big difference for our recovery and everything that we do. Me personally, I sleep really hot, so I used to wake up in a puddle of sweat.

But now, since the mattress changes its temperature through the night, I sleep like a baby. Andrew, how can they learn more? Yes, you guys got to head over to 8sleep.com slash power project. And when you guys go there, you'll automatically receive $150 off of your order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Still on two hours sleep. Doug, you know that was a joke, right? Yeah.

Was it? Fuck you. All right. So that two hours of sleep thing, we legit did a bit we laughed after it it was a joke but people really actually thought i slept two hours two hours what did you say it was like a gram of caffeine yeah i said i was asleep yeah i decided to do a gram of caffeine i think i said i'd eat like 400 grams of protein and get two hours of sleep it was just like the most ridiculous shit that people would do you take a do. Now might be a good time to mention the app that you have. If you take a picture of somebody, it will tell you whether they're natty or not, right?

You want to take a picture of Encima and take it out? I'm just kidding. Why did you bring that shit up? I've seen it come up and people do believe that you were serious. Doug, we've been talking so much about sleep on this podcast for years about how to get optimal sleep how many hours temperature all this shit and we like a joke a joke like that is taken seriously i don't know we can even preface the

joke and be like hey guys the next couple seconds we're totally lying and this is a joke say the joke finish the joke and be like hey guys that was a complete joke that wasn't real but inevitably like the first two comments are like bullshit he's not getting two hours of sleep and natty fuck that guy or he's on drugs getting two hours of sleep yeah yeah that's the only way have you ever heard of pose law it's like an internet law like that or it's yeah if you could look it up uh it's it's basically like if if you do not disclaim it directly nobody will know that it's satire and I guess in this case even if you do people don't know that

it's satire. Have you seen that clip that we're talking about? Uh uh. Do you want to find it? I can try to find it. I think it was just a classic. But Poe's Law is very interesting because we talked about how he eats and stuff how he doesn't eat like he doesn't really eat just drink water i think yeah two hours sleep that was not too long after we had chef rush on so you were talking about like the 2000 push-ups before he like yeah yeah

did you guys have chef rush on yeah on the show in person yeah yeah he has very big biceps very big i think you Very big biceps. I think you were here, right? He broke our picep. Yeah, his routine's insane, dude. How much of it was possible and true? We don't know. And he does a lot of push-ups.

He does a lot of push-ups. He has the capacity to do a lot of push-ups. He did a lot of push-ups when he came here. Just bumped out like 150. I think he made a mistake in his rebuttal where he called i don't remember what exactly what he said but he implied greg ducey was racist or something yeah and it was like why wouldn't like you could just have a rebuttal that's just straight up a rebuttal like why is that why do you have to throw in something and then greg fucking tweaked his neck was gonna explode and that yeah it sucked that he did that because that's unfortunate greg's not racist yeah how does what do you got over there i was gonna explode and that yeah it sucked that he did that because that's unfortunate

greg's not racist yeah how does what do you got over there i was gonna ask derry like how does it feel to kind of be like the final boss for like the natty or not like like because like they'll tag greg and let's have it but then i think michael hearn's the final boss bro well well he's on the opposite side that's your opposition oh i'm the final yeah yeah no you're the final guy because it's like even within SEMA, we're like, dude, what can we do? And they're like, oh, we'll wait for Derek to test him or some shit like that. Oh, yeah.

It just seems like you're the last guy. That was kind of the weird thing is because I did see that clip. That's how I found your guy's stuff to begin with. That's how you found our shit? With that clip? Yeah. Fucking hell. So this is where you can imagine why some people have come to that conclusion to that conclusion like even me i was like there's no way he's serious but

there was a lot of people that were thought you were and people were asking and like reddit threads and stuff is this guy natural like there's no fucking way and then i found out you were working with merrick before i even knew and your blood work was there so i was like okay this is kind of it was kind of complicated at that point to do like a legitimate unbiased analysis so i was like okay i might just it might just not happen do you know like fuck offhand what the effective dose of caffeine is like in general uh like i don't know if you would call it like medical or whatever like effective dose for what for uh performance like if you're an athlete or if you're trying like strength athlete um i think off the top of my head it was like there is a study that actually assesses forced production

outcomes or what could attenuate like sleep deprived induced performance loss and i forget what it was exactly but it was like 400 or something 300 to 400 maybe i forgot off the top of my head was it like um two kilograms like three to one uh milligram to kilogram type of thing if i don't remember the hundred hundreds there's no way i'm gonna remember a kilogram ratio so i have no idea okay so my head because i feel like because you said a gram of caffeine i said it was like i said a lot it was like a thousand i don't know it was just a lot of caffeine so like just like what's the most absurd thing i could say without sounding like

i'm maybe like totally bullshitting even though you probably thought it still was it sounded like no man that like that video we were literally laughing we were laughing you had such a straight face for like 10 minutes yeah like well okay i think you guys have mastered you guys are good i think you guys have mastered trolling but so then did you get in sema's lab work though like did you get a chance he provided it to me too but then i also knew that we were working with him behind the scenes and i had no idea at the time so it was uh but yeah and he's been drug tested concurrently as well so so what was your analysis of his blood work though i'd have to bring it up to remember exactly what it said in the moment though was it like from what i saw everything checked out so got it i just because he's the final boss and we get this in the fucking comments

all the time it's like well let's see what derek has to say it's like well there you guys heard it except from what i saw from what he saw at the time right at the time of that exact test i have a question he was cycled off that he was that's what'll happen um but when it comes to you put out number one you put out a lot of content you have three businesses you're extremely productive even when we were doing a little bit of a pump workout in the gym beforehand you're like i i typically just like to go and do things because immediately that my brain is working the best at that time. So you think a lot about your productivity when it comes to certain things. What I'm curious is about that is when it comes to your workflow and stuff,

I know you're big into a certain type of supplementation, but if someone is trying to peek the fuck out of their focus, what are some immediate things, whether it's supplementation habits that they can add into their routine so that they can get the most cognitive benefit out of what they're doing? It really depends on the person

because you could give general vague recommendations that could potentially be counterproductive for one person. Because I know some people who, I don't know about you guys, but I try to maintain like a fasting window when I wake up because I'm more sharp before I've if I eat carbs for example brain function gone 20 down at least for me um but some people they literally can't function without a heavy breakfast which to me is the total antithesis of you know helpful so for me I try to

stave off hunger as long as I can, because I know once I have that first meal, you know, I'm, uh, you know, my sharpness drops by, you know, a significant amount. So quick question about that specifically, do you know, cause like we've been utilizing fasting for a while too, and we've noticed the cognitive benefits of not eating and just working. Right. Yeah. But you, it took you a while to get used to that, right? Yeah, yeah, I would say so, yeah. I had very much become acclimated to eating when I wake up, so it's definitely a new habit that you have to form

and become used to doing because sometimes you're just, your brain becomes tied to a certain activity and then it associates functioning with eating right when you wake up and then you think, if I don't eat the breakfast, can I even go work at all? Yep. Yeah. So a lot of it is just foundational principles, as boring as it is. Some people might think, what's the sickest biohack for mental clarity?

But it's very much high-quality sleep, getting in a good micronutrient-dense diet. A lot of people focus just on the protein intake, but then overlook the actual quality of the food. And they end up eating stuff that's just like not even food. It's just like a protein replacement supplement or like whatever. And actually hitting all of your like base foundational principles, I think, is like the meat and potatoes of what you need to focus on than anything else is icing on the cake. And if you have certain deficiencies that would warrant addressing, like some nootropics

that are seen as cognitive enhancing, they're really just kind of like supplements for inadequate choline intake or this or that. And some people might benefit from that. Some people, they might not. So it kind of depends on the person, but yeah, I wouldn't overarchingly be like, oh yeah, you know, nicotine or caffeine or this or that. Like they could be useful for certain people, but I wouldn't just say like broad spectrum overarchingly everyone should be doing this or everyone should be doing that like some people take choline supplements and they feel worse because they either get enough through their diet already or they're not deficient and they can't process it in a way that is otherwise effective for them yeah so it kind of depends yeah i mean the answer for

every question it's a boring answer unfortunately it depends it always depends but there's always a bunch of things that like you can like you know for example the choline thing or maybe going to trying to trying out utropic route or trying out the habit of fasting there's a bunch of things you could plug in that can have a big effect like for me personally the biggest effect has been you like learning about intermittent fasting a few years ago because i didn't i learned about and i started doing that because i heard all these high performance people talk about the mental cognitive effects. The biggest hack I could probably suggest that would probably benefit a lot of people if they don't have like blood sugar regulation issues and otherwise need a breakfast to function or whatever is finding ways to stave off the appetite or craving for food in the morning as much as possible so whatever habits you do that support that yeah i feel like the longer you can drag out that that window of that mental clarity from the lack of intake of calories

ideally entirely the better you'll probably be like i would find a being just normally functioning in a fasting window relative to being um having a giant dinner and then taking like the most intense stimulant of all time like i would function better fasting with no drugs than with a shit ton of food in my system and the most hectic of drugs personally. I think it's important to note that like when we're talking about fasting, you're also mentioning that like maybe you had a big dinner. So, you know, people tend to think, you know, what about post-workout nutrition and what about pre-workout nutrition? To me, What about post-workout nutrition and what about pre-workout nutrition? To me, pre-workout is anything that you've eaten before you worked out, regardless of how long it is.

And then post-workout nutrition would be the same thing. It's kind of regardless. I know there's like a sweet spot so you can kind of ride out that hormonal cascade and stuff. But I think in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it matters a lot. What matters the most, in my opinion, is just how can you be consistent? How can you follow through with a program or a protocol? Because if you fast and you crash every time and you fast and then you binge and you fast and it's just not – it's clearly not working. Like you weren't able to sustain it. Then you need to probably try it maybe a little longer or you probably

need to like dismiss it and just realize i don't think that's the way the way for me yeah and i think uh like you guys are a good example of you know trying out stuff that might otherwise spit in the face of like ideal bodybuilding stuff like you do one meal a day sometimes now right sometimes yeah yeah and it's like for you has your physique like significantly deteriorated no like if anything you're fucking still as jacked as ever seemingly so i get enough calories in that meal that's the thing yeah so it's it all kind of depends but like for you you've done a lot of things that would otherwise be seen as suboptimal but they've still been more you know more conducive for whatever it is that you're trying to achieve and you know it's not always that you need to follow the six meals a day or get get the anabolic window in or whatever so yeah uh craig made a video uh saying like you don't

need to do the squat bench and deadlift and uh i agree with that you don't need to do it um but one of the things that oh quick caveat because i know that could get clipped i think if you are bodybuilding you know several meals a day could probably be the most conducive thing to getting you to where you need to go i don't think shoving it all into one window is the ideal way if you're trying to grow but i think for you you're very much re-evaluating what's important in life to you based on what maybe 10 years ago was most important and re-allocating things accordingly to be kind of like broad spectrum hitting all the vectors you want in like the maximum way you can, but perhaps it's not the

best way, but it's still adequate for what you deem to be satisfactory. Yes. And Zach, don't forget what you're going to say, but I want to say two things about that. First off, there are days I do one meal a day and then there are days because my activity ranges from a day to day where I'm like, okay, today I should eat breakfast because I can feel like, oh, wow, I did a lot yesterday and even that dinner didn't fix it. I'm going to eat two or three meals today. So it ranges. It's not like this one meal a day, every fucking day type of thing. But also when you were mentioning like sometimes you'll fast and you'll binge.

Remember when we started fasting? As we were getting the hang of it, there would be days where it's just like, fuck i ate too much last night like you get used to this new this new habit you're not sure how much you can handle in terms of food after you haven't eaten all day long and then you eat way too much you're like oh fuck right there's an adjustment period to any of these habits and you cannot expect it to be an immediate thing it took us a few months to get used to fasting right but when we've gotten used to it, it's an amazing tool that we have in the toolbox. So just think about that. And remember, it's not an immediate thing. And we have run into people that also struggled with getting in enough food too. So just, you got to try it out for a while and give it a shot and see how

it works for you. I think an important thing with this is not checking off the box that, oh, that's not for me until you really have done it. And that's kind of where I was going with this. Like Greg Doucette made that video saying you don't have to bench squat or deadlift. And that absolutely may be true in definitely certain instances and depending on what your goals are. But I think what I've seen a lot with – and I'll use the squat as an example is people tend to go in put weight on the bar and just kind of start squat because it squatting because it is kind of like an intuitive type of movement or at least it it should be and um then they'll get on a hack squat where they'll get on

a leg press or they get on a leg extension and they'll say, wow, that feels a lot better. Like that, I feel a pump now in my legs. Whereas when I was back squatting, it just felt weird. Like I just couldn't manage all my joints and everything. That is kind of like this, this like false positive type of thing that you've, that you've now given yourself. And you and you basically say well the squat isn't for me i tried it it doesn't work as well it doesn't feel as good what you didn't do was like develop any level of mobility that could potentially make the squat feel good and that's something that i've been trying to do for people for years like hey guys there are i have i have like a bunch of technique videos that can help develop this thing that you're not so good at and maybe do all of that then try the thing that you're not so good

at you might have a totally new understanding of this thing and you might like it and i think that a lot of people say hey if it's not for you don't do do it. You don't have to. But people cannot determine whether it is for them or not until they go through that process. So it's like that's something that I'm always advocating for. Like don't give up on something because right now it doesn't feel good. You have to try it enough times and you have to break through different things. So like fasting or whatever, you could be like, man, every time I fast, when I eat my meal, I end up eating 3,000, 4,000 calories, which by the way, I could do fucking easily. I know everyone at this table could easily do that.

Fast all day and then have an entire pizza to yourself. Boom. You didn't finish your steak the other day though, bro. Call you out. Look at that. Do you know how much protein we ate when I was there? Oh yeah, it was awesome. That was the best meal I've had in a long time.

Mark just got oysters, tuna tartare, and then steaks, and then maybe a few potatoes. I went to a restaurant with him and Chris, and I was shocked at how little they ate. You were just disappointed. Oh, shut up, dude. Shut up. Get out of here. By the way, I went back, and I finished that steak and everyone else's lobster mac and cheese. Did you?

I took the meal home. Lobster mac and cheese and the mashed potatoes, too, that you guys didn't eat. I want to go back a little bit to Focus and things like that. There are things like modafinil. Tell me about this, dude. Yeah, yeah. Some Mind Bullet. Yeah, some Kratom.

Well, my brother made a movie about it called Leaf of Faith. Excellent, by the way. And it's something I, you know, my brother kept recommending it to me and I was like, I don't think I need that. Because he was mentioning for like pain management. And I was like, I don't feel like I'm in a lot of pain. I feel pretty good. And then I think just something was bothering me, maybe my back or something. And I was like, well, I'll give it a try. And I just, for myself, I noticed just a boost in my mood. I just like felt really good. I felt really happy. I felt like we always say,

I feel like I'm like giving people hugs or people are hugging me or something like that. So I was like, shit, whatever that is, that feels pretty good. So I started utilizing it before some workouts. Now I take it before bed, first thing in the morning. I take it before I shit. I take it when I go to the bath. No, I'm just kidding. I will utilize it often before a run, sometimes before a podcast, kind of depending on what it is. But, yeah, I love Kratom. I love MindBullet. It's been a great product for us.

How many grams of Kratom is like the equivalency of one dose for these? That sucker right there, the potion that you're holding is about eight grams. So that is a pretty hefty dose. And I usually sip on it. I usually go like quarter or half or something like that. I'll do a third. Yeah. I'll usually do like one of these might last me three days.

Damn. Yeah. I did a full one on the podcast the last time I was here. You guys gave me a full dose. Yeah. Sometimes it's nice, right? Yeah. I tried to caution you.

I think it's really an awesome pre-workout personally. Yeah. But what are things like modafinil? Like what do these things do? And it's my understanding. I've never tried some of these other things, but I've heard more recently there's like injectables and stuff that people are getting into. I don't know how well they work and stuff like that. Yeah.

that yeah so i think people conflate smart drugs a lot with stimulants which is they're not really they can make you more productive or more you know offset poor sleep like modafinil is a wakefulness drug and it's uh prescribed for people with um sleep and sleep apnea actually too um how does it help with sleep apnea because if you have poor quality sleep and you're very prone to just falling asleep at random times throughout the day so like for example when i first found out i had sleep apnea when i was i don't know like 10 years ago or something i was falling asleep and this it got progressively worse the bigger i got because it was definitely like a physical impediment thing by neck size for me so when i was in classes in university i literally couldn't sit there for more than five minutes

without passing out. And everyone just thought I was a teacher, thought I was a shitty student, but I just literally couldn't stay awake. So you get prescribed modafinil, which is a wakefulness agent, which would keep you awake to kind of make up for. And again, this is sort of where it would be more ideal to have an understanding of what goes into certain disease states or whatever, because then you can otherwise identify, you know, maybe I wouldn't need the modafinil if I actually took care of my sleep apnea rather than just band-aiding the issue. But anyways, modafinil is prescribed for essentially just staying awake. It's not something that's like very euphoric. It's not something that really, like some people might otherwise get a little bit of a boost from that because it's a dopamine re-update inhibitor. So you have more dopamine

circulating that does not get essentially like used up. Like it's freely dopamine reuptake inhibitor so you have more dopamine circulating that does not get uh um essentially like used up like it it's freely circulating for longer than it would have otherwise been but it is not as potent as something like an adderall for or uh some of these other adhd drugs like it's a different category entirely so a slightly different mechanism of action but these things are not really smart they're more so just like creating a pseudo state of like hyper dopaminergic activity to then make up for i don't know like if you actually have a deficiency in some area like yeah maybe it could help you focus more but um it is uh like a different kind of category i would say category i would say the nootropics because those are more designed around things that actually support brain health, cognitive enhancement, neuroprotection, things of that nature, as opposed to like hyperaggressive stimulants that just create like a self-induced pseudo state of, you know, hyper sympathetic drive, dopaminergic activity that is otherwise unsustainable as a natural. And then you become reliant on that new baseline very quickly.

And before you know it, you're taking, you know, 20, 30 milligrams of a combo of amphetamines just to function as you would have normally naturally. What was the Sam Bankman-free drug? Selegiline. So what did that do? That was a monoamine oxidase B inhibitor. That was a monoamine oxidase B inhibitor. So basically phenethylamine as well as dopamine neurotransmitters in the brain that otherwise get deaminated and broken down by something called monoamine oxidase.

And if you inhibit that enzymatic process, you basically keep it around longer. Yeah. So you can have like a heightened level of like central nervous system stimulation and dopaminergic activity. And it kind of creates this new baseline state that's perpetual because this drug that he used, it was like a transdermal patch. Have you ever tried that shit? I haven't tried that drug. Okay. But it's not as intense as actual amphetamines. But he was very much using something that sustains itself around the clock.

Those kind of drugs kind of freak me out too because they're like, it's called a suicidal inhibitor. So once it attaches to this enzyme and binds to it, you have to then wait until you create the enzyme entirely again from scratch before you can then get the same level of metabolism of certain compounds essentially. So for that, even though the half-life is a certain duration you still have to wait for your body to onboard new enzymes to actually so like its effect could last for weeks even after discontinuation so so anyway he had this patch and it was like bleeding out this hormone over not hormone but this compound over um i think it was like nine milligrams every 24 hours or something yeah and um yeah it essentially creates like a new baseline of like low-grade enhanced dopaminergic signaling perpetually because it doesn't work its way out of is kind of what you're getting at with these amphetamines is that they don't actually enhance cognitive performance. They just like help release dopamine.

It depends. And this drug also metabolizes into amphetamine itself. I forget exactly which amphetamine it was. It might be like an analog or something. But it was – its effects are kind of like speculative as to what the main driver of its of its uh mechanism is but it seems to be the monoamine oxidase inhibiting properties but yeah like the uh the like stimulation of release of you know dopamine that otherwise wouldn't have been there it's not necessarily conducive to cognitive health at all. So like this is where there's a very interesting thing.

It's like people who take Adderall, it's not that they're more effective. It's just that they like what they're doing more or it's more fun or like they get a better response from it. So like you take Adderall and you clean the house and you're like, wow, I'm so much more productive. It's just because you don't hate cleaning the house. Some people use it to tie like reward signaling to activities that they

otherwise found tedious and boring to like, if you're trying to study and you take amphetamines, you might otherwise be trying to train your brain to enjoy the activity that otherwise was like the most dull and you know, a task you would have not been able to focus on all of a sudden becomes this thing that you don't mind doing because you just feel good. So it's kind of a hack in some instances.

Like I'm not saying it has no utility by any means. It's just the way people go about using it I think is often misguided and they think that it's like a brain enhancing thing. Exactly, yes. Whereas you could otherwise be taking away from your brain function of tomorrow to get like squeeze more out of today sort of thing. I remember how hyped up I used to get like before finals, like in college, like I would just be like, all right, we're going to the library.

My buddy's got some Adderall for me. Like I used to pride myself on how much information I could shove in my brain in a matter of 24 hours. And I knew immediately after the test. Oh, it's gone. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you walk out of the room. You're like, I don't remember shit. I just wrote the test two seconds ago. Yeah, college like honest to God made like the process

of like learning and it gamed it in such a way that I actually think I became stupider. Yeah, like it was like in in no way do I care about your final, but you told me how i can get an a and you bet your ass i'm going to put my best foot forward and try to get an a and that is to show up on the final and memorize everything that you possibly can in weird ways with copious amounts

of adderall and copious amounts of cramming in this in the last minute and i'm going to game the system and i'm going to write the system and i'm going to write this test and i'm not going to remember a single fucking thing after this yeah and and like because i don't care about it you know and that like it's such a flawed way of going through like the process of education it's it's utterly pathetic but i played that game and so many other people played that game something i've been considering i thought would be interesting is going back to my university and sitting in a marketing class just to see because i don't exactly remember what they tried to teach me back then i just remember it was very not applicable now but they have people that are positioning

themselves as like this is how you have a successful business or whatever like one of the funniest degrees is the entrepreneurship degree oh yeah i'm like is that new is that like no that was like in the there were entrepreneurship in the business faculty there was different subsections of undergrads you could get and one of them was entrepreneurship and i'm just like like what i've spent i don't know 100 grand plus or however much it costs i don't even even remember, but it was prohibitively expensive. But to get this degree after four years, and then I'm still at ground zero in debt. How is this conducive to entrepreneurship whatsoever? And I don't know.

It's just some of the stuff made no sense to me, and I would love to – I don't even know if it would be legal, but I would love to go sit in a classroom and just get my reaction to whatever material they're putting out now. The university collegiate game is just so funny to me, man. It's so funny, especially because I was working at Texas A&M and seeing the amount of money that they make off these kids. 60,000 undergrad. How special can a degree be if 60,000 people within one mile of each other are

getting that same degree? Like, you know, and the amount of money that they get off of football games and just, it's a racket, bro. I think there's a total racket. I think there are certain jobs cause I'm very pessimistic about the university

system, but I always try to preface it with like, there are certain jobs that, you know, you're kind of forced to do it if you want to do that gig. Like my girlfriend's a physicist and you can't just become a physicist. Of course, yeah. But for marketing or entrepreneurship, I don't know, man.

Business. I feel like I wasted a bit of time and money. No, our parents, our educators, they just said you can't get a job that you're going to want or make enough money unless you get an education. It wasn't like if you want to be an engineer you got to go to engineering school because that's an unknown thing yeah you want to be a lawyer you got to go to it was like no if you want a good job everyone wants a good job yeah so i'm gonna go to school i gotta go to school and then when i go there it's like you give me your syllabus this is exactly what i'm gonna do okay fuck it like what was the job you guys were doing before you got into social media stuff like the most

around the yeah you go first okay uh so the first job out of college i was an assistant for what you would call like a rep he uh for an advertisement agencies he was like the middleman between production companies and advertisement agencies so he was there was a lot of schmoozing and stuff and i was just his assistant he paid me 500 bucks a week it was awesome um and then like the money the fact that it was 500 cash a week was like the coolest thing ever for me um and then i just slowly but surely became obsessed with uh training and and it was CrossFit at the time and then weightlifting. And then I just like transferred into that space. That was my first like, that was my actual job that I had.

Out of college? Yes. I also was bouncing for a little bit too. Oh, nice. Yep. Okay. You three were bouncers at a certain point. Bouncing a little bit.

And then that's pretty much it. And then, you know, personal much it. And then personal training. Gold's Gym personal training. Strength and conditioning coach. It's been so long since I've had a job. I did train people for a while. I was a bouncer as well. And that's about it for me.

Seema? African mom. She was an engineer. So I was initially going to school because i wanted to be a doctor like being african it's like the doctor lawyer engineer it's like that's if you're not then you are a failure to your family um but then i realized because i was volunteering in a hospital that like i didn't want to spend my days in a hospital so i didn't realize what i didn't know what i wanted to do in school anymore because i realized that i didn't want to go that route so i dropped out

and started like training people i was like a personal trainer for a while um and then I started just like continuing to work with people until I yeah found myself doing that then I came here and yeah how'd you guys meet and connect because you're like the co-host of this thing now and like it's I don't know it's just like an interesting scenario yeah I'm actually very curious about it you want like maybe you guys have talked about this a lot apologies if this is like redundant but like i don't talk about it that much not that much and andrew as well i think you guys have a nice little trio here thank you for real yeah i think all of it kind of happened because the gym is free right well i was actually scared of coming in here initially did you come to the

thing with omar yeah the seminar with mike and omar that's where i first saw you right yeah and i didn't come back after that that was in 2014 i came with some including smoky too i mean all of this is is because the gym is free and these guys are fucking cheap basically that's how a lot of this stuff happened so we had a omar isaf come in and do a seminar and we did like a live podcast recording seminar type thing and uh and sema came to that and then i saw him at la i think at la fit expo and i was like i think i met you at the gym or my gym or something and yeah i saw him at barbell brigade and then i was like you i think you told you live in Sacramento. Like, why aren't you training in my gym? And so then he started coming in and then, uh, Andrew, uh, came into the gym. Again, we had a seminar. Most of the

seminars that we do are free. Um, and, uh, he took some photos that day. I think maybe emailed me ahead of time asking if it was okay, or maybe asked me there on the spot if it was okay to take pictures. And then we talked a little bit afterwards. I was like, actually, I could really use a photographer. And he was like, and he like gave me a card or something or told me an email or a website to go to where he does his photography. I was like, this is perfect time. Like I was literally just thinking like I need a photographer.

And he just fucking dropped out of the sky. Yeah, that was wild. It was right after Chris Bell was on Joe Rogan. So that was like my opening statement was like, dude, Chris on Joe Rogan was fucking cool and da-da-da. Yeah, but that's how we all met here because of the gym. What number episode is this? It's going to be like eight something something.

Eight something? Yeah, but I did about 600 of them before that probably. Oh, okay. So did you? Wait, wait. Eight something what? Which episode are we talking about? Chill out, bro. figure out i'm confused uh 800 something it'll be 840 oh this episode this episode's 849 wow yeah so do you think in sema was like extraordinarily

articulate or how did you determine to be a good co-host well i was just like this guy's on tons of shit like we're just gonna talk about steroids the whole time i guess i asked him and like then he was like i think he said yes but he like walked away like fuck wait what are you talking about right now i think i asked you to be on the show and then you walked away and you're like god damn i don't know if i got anything to talk about oh yeah i said yeah real quick it was uh i think you brought we did an episode together an episode like 70 something of the podcast you invited me on as a guest that was years ago and then like i think 100 episodes later you're like hey you want to try

co-hosting and yeah i immediately said yeah but i didn't think i had anything to talk about for any period of time the shit was scary he like drove home that day and he was like i don't know what i'm gonna do being on this show it's gonna be crazy yeah it's a random call yeah andrew huberman's calling hey i feel like i probably shouldn't answer it he's like yo i'm in jail help me out like what the hell of all the people you're the only number i could remember i'm sorry uh you're on speaker bro. I'm in a lot of trouble and I need your help. And I need you to say yes. Don't ask me what it is.

With Encima, just asking him to come on the show. I always like to surround myself with people that I think are like-minded people. People that want to be better. They want to do better. And they're working on it continuously. And that's something I saw with him. And I was like, he's in better shape than me. He's a little taller than me.

He's a little tanner than me. I'm like, to me, I think that's perfect. Like I, I actually like that. I like to have, you know, somebody next to me that I get to chase after, you know, I don't know if I'll ever catch up to him, but I'll work on it. No, there's definitely something to be said about surrounding yourself. Everyone always says... He's young, too, and that's huge. Yeah. I try to associate

with people who are hyper-ambitious, entrepreneurial, and stuff like that because it's a whole different world than if I just stay in my little bubble in Canada and just talk to the same people over and over again. It's hard of break out and keep yourself motivated and have that drive perpetually. That was the biggest change for me in my life was becoming really good friends with Chris and then moving in with Chris. And it's like every metric of my YouTube, everything has gone up because I see someone who works so hard and is so driven and is that far ahead of me.

How long after you met that you moved in? That's pretty quick. It sounds like it happened pretty quick. We're just two young lovers. That's what I was thinking of the listeners. I was thinking of the listeners like, wow, okay. Oh, we just found out something that we didn't really know starting out the show but okay i'll keep listening hey it's two separate houses so uh-huh moved in together in two separate houses well his stuff is in the back house but we sleep together

you leave your toothbrush in his home sometimes don't you oh i gotta brush my teeth yeah we know what's going on over there no but it does help to have people like to have friends that you admire in not just like who they are as a person but what they can show you that they do i think it humbles the shit out of you too when you think you're you know hot shit and then you're around people that are far more successful or on your level or whatever like it keeps you grounded and like like you know like be grateful for what you have but you're not the shit like relax yeah yeah i loved working out with the different people that have come in here over the years uh whether it's like jay cutler or stan efforting or eric spoto actually i remember eric

spoto saying like you're the only guy that ever benched with me. And I was like, I didn't really bench with you. You just killed me. Uh, this guy benched a six 35, uh, for a double that day. And I, I think I did pretty well, but I benched probably a hundred pounds less at least. And he was like, no, no, no. I just mean like, once I start going up in weight, people just leave. And I was like, I'm the only guy that ever stick around. I'm like, okay, that sounds cool. Like I, I kind of, I kind of like that. It gives me a motive, a lot of motivation. What do you think is something kind of, we'll end the podcast here, but what do you think is something that someone can do and or take that can help with motivation? Cause it does seem like testosterone can sometimes help. And again, that might be if someone's in a place where their testosterone is low to begin with.

What are some kind of things that you've noticed over the years that could help, I guess, just get someone started? Because I see a lot of people are kind of hurting, depressed, anxious. And in my opinion, I would love to see them just move. But like, how do we get them in motion? Yeah. Yeah. As far as testosterone, like Huberman has a good quote, it's testosterone makes effort feel good.

I think that's definitely a relevant and, um, applicable, um, statement for that. If you were deficient, you know, it's worthwhile to address it for sure. And see if there's any clinical deficiency. I don't want to go too down the rabbit hole. Like ultimately the foundational backbones of, you know, good sleep, diet, et cetera. Like everyone already knows that that's going to be the meat and potatoes of everything as far as like motivating yourself with drugs or not. Like I think ultimately if there's a, if there's a deficiency, it could absolutely be, you

know, detrimental to your drive to even want to go to the gym you know it becomes impossible not only to build sufficient muscle or make any progress but also your motivation and mental state to actually even be conducive to getting off your ass could be very very um hindered if you have suboptimal testosterone for example so i think that's a worthwhile example but it's definitely the answer to that is not just go inject yourself it's very much to find out like is this the reason why you feel this way and the reason why your mental state is in the place it is and do you have all your other bases covered but for me like motivation wise we just talked about surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals people who you strive to either emulate what they're doing or, you know, keep up

in some way because you like competition. I think motivation is grounded in competition to some extent. Like even among friends, I like to be competitive and kind of, you know, be up to snuff with what they're doing. You very much feel compelled to push yourself harder when you're around people that also push themselves. So for me, the biggest motivating factor and what underpins a lot of what I do is seeing other people in my space killing it and me wanting to be in that, I don't know, feel like I'm actually doing myself justice and kind of meeting my potential. Let me quickly add to that because I remember what you said there. We were talking about surrounding yourself with people, right? And when Mark invited me to the gym, right? At the gym I

was training at before, I was like the one of the strong or the strongest guy in that gym. It wasn't like a community-based gym either. I was at a 24 and then this other gym, Olympus Sports Coliseum, where there were a few other powerlifters, but I was the strongest guy there. And I wasn't really getting that much stronger that much, like that much faster. But when I came to super training in 15, 2015, I wasn't the strongest guy in the gym. I was actually like, I wasn't that great. And within, because I had guys like this guy that was used to be here, Marcus, I had Mike, Mike Farr here. Other guys were like helping me and helping me with my technique, helping me pick things out. Mark was also. Within a few months, my deadlift regressed a little bit because they changed up my form.

And then I was able to put like 80 good pounds on my deadlift within a five or six month period. This is a gain that I didn't have before because I didn't have people around me that were helping me improve. I wasn't seeing people around me that were lifting some crazy weight, but within a short amount of time by getting around people that were much stronger than me, that had way more knowledgeable than me in that, right? I got stronger so much faster. And I know this isn't a motivation thing or a testosterone thing or whatever, but by getting around better people, I immediately became better just by a byproduct of having them around me. And there probably, I mean, probably shit happened to my hormones to some extent, but the basis of trying to improve your surroundings of the people around you

is actually a very, very big deal to any type of progress. Yeah, for sure. And I think also just doing what you love is the most important thing too, because you're not going to be motivated to continue pushing. And once you start to burn out or something presents itself, that's, you know, an obstacle. If you're not going to be motivated to continue pushing once you start to burn out or something presents itself that's you know an obstacle if you're doing something you fucking hate like you you almost have to push yourself just to do the thing like almost in a mediocre way like if you're doing a i'm not necessarily saying everyone you know go quit your job if you don't like it or anything but like like doing activities that you're passionate about i think everyone can resonate with the fact that it's easiest to excel and lean into that and become better or improve in some capacity when you actually care about what you're doing.

So, yeah, like even from the content side or, you know, the business side, like whatever it is that or if you're, you know, hyper passionate about training, all that stuff, surrounding yourself with the right people, but also making sure you love what you're doing i think is absolutely i don't know at the uh the pinnacle of success yeah then give yourself some slack too if there is something that you really do like and enjoy and if you have uh moments where you don't necessarily feel like doing it i suppose you can like force yourself to do it but uh it's been my experience it's been nice just to let it pass like it was a let it go like with lifting i don't mind like letting lifting go for a little bit because i know that there's going to be some like i'm i've always lifted i love it it will always be there and if i have a couple days or a week or something where i just don't really feel like doing much of it i'm totally cool with it Andrew, take us on out of here. Sure thing. Make sure you guys

stick around for Smelly's big old tip before we get out of here. And let us know what you guys think about today's conversation. Drop all those comments down below. Hit that like button and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already. For everything podcast related, head over to powerproject.live. You'll find a bunch of cool shit there, including

links to Merrick.com. That's what we talked about today. Links to them down in the description below as well uh follow the podcast at mb power project on instagram tiktok and twitter my instagram tiktok and twitter is at i am andrew z and sema where you at some free mouth tape for you guys oh there you go breathe through your nose at night hostage tape shut your fucking mouth at and see me ending on instagram youtube and sema yin yang on tiktok and twitter discords below powerproject.live for all this cool shit derrick and zach where can people find you guys i'm at uh at more plates more dates on all social media essentially and yeah you can find me there coach underscore zt at uh on instagram and then zach tellender on YouTube. And then, yeah, check out the WeFunder for the first feature film called The Weight.

Awesome. You can check that out. Just go to WeFunder.com and then search The Weight feature film. Derek, we've had some people on the show that are on so much shit, they just sit here and go. They snore when they're awake. Like Darth Vader's on the show. Like, oh oh my God.

Smelly's tip of the day is the quote from Louis Simmons that I think goes along with a lot of what we talked about today. If you walk with the lame, you will develop a limp. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.