Derek from More Plates More Dates joins Sam and Shaan to break down how he built a portfolio of supplement and telemedicine businesses worth over $100M starting from zero — entirely bootstrapped off the back of his YouTube channel. He covers the origin of Gorilla Mind and Merrick Health, his philosophy of building businesses around products he already believes in, the pickup-to-entrepreneurship pipeline, managing money as a Canadian entrepreneur, and his views on TRT, GLP-1s, Brian Johnson, and food quality.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road), Derek (guest, More Plates More Dates, founder of Gorilla Mind, Merrick Health, Intelligent)
Cold Open / Revenue Teaser [00:00:00]
Shaan: I don’t know what you’re doing per month, but I would not be shocked if this was doing between six and eight million a month in revenue. Blink twice if I’m right.
Derek: Yeah, you guys are pretty on point with your ballpark.
Introduction: The Subreddit Mistake [00:00:15]
Sam: All right, what’s up — we got Derek from More Plates More Dates here. I think I made a fatal mistake before this podcast. I don’t know if you know this, but I was doing research last night. I was like, okay, I’ve got to be prepped, I’ve got to be ready to go. I’ve been following you for a while, but I said let me just make sure I button up here — and I go to your subreddit, r/moreplatesmoredates.
To be clear, this is not like my subreddit. I didn’t start it, but I didn’t realize that at the time. So I’m on this subreddit thinking it’s your subreddit, thinking these are just polite, civil, faithful fans. In fact, it says there are 163,000 “faithfuls” — that’s how they call the members. It is a top one percent subreddit, so you’re doing really well.
And I say, hey, I’m interviewing Derek — he’s coming on a pod, we’re gonna hang out. What should we talk about? Give me some ideas. I posted this at like 1am and went to sleep. I wake up and I say, oh, let me just check that real quick — maybe somebody had some really thoughtful questions.
Here’s the breakdown: 98% of them want to know how big your penis is. That’s the number one comment by far. Everybody said the same exact thing. I don’t know if that’s an inside joke or you just have some really eager fans. And then the second comment was like, bro, you needed to know — this is a trolling subreddit. This is not the serious subreddit for people trying to have a real conversation. You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into. And sure enough, I did not. The third comment was “bring a ruler.”
Derek: They’re very creative. I can imagine what kind of stuff they had in store for you. There’s a decent amount of trolling and just weird posting that goes on there, but there is some insightful stuff. I’m a moderator on it — I didn’t start it — but I do check in from time to time. I’ve been pretty shocked at how much it’s ramped up.
Sam: Yeah, so Derek — I’ve been watching you for years. I remember watching you when you were doing, I think, a cottage cheese or some type of protein intake video and you looked horrible, because I believe you were an amateur or maybe more serious than amateur bodybuilder and you were cutting. You looked just miserable when you were really lean.
But you have all these amazing videos where originally it started as like, is this celebrity taking steroids? But then it expanded to really cool breakdowns about the science behind different fitness stuff, and also life advice. And now you have, I think, four different companies — Gorilla Mind, Merrick, and a few others. We’re interested in some fitness stuff, but also the fact that you’re running three or four pretty successful businesses. What do you have now — 1.5 million subscribers?
Derek: 1.89, yeah.
Sam: So you built what appears to be a monster business, and you’ve done it with some really high integrity. It feels like your video setup is almost janky, although I feel like that’s part of the shtick. It’s all just really high-quality, well-researched content.
Derek: It’s quite unintentional, the jankiness. I just don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to videography and whatnot. Every time I try to spruce it up I fail miserably, so I just leave it the same.
The Background Mystery: Same Wall, Three Houses [00:02:30]
Sam: I’ve heard a rumor — and you’ve clearly gotten quite successful, I imagine your businesses are doing tens of millions in revenue — I heard a rumor that you’ve moved to a really nice house. And between your first apartment when you started, your second better apartment, and your third nice house, you purposely make the background look exactly the same — to the point where you’ve even taken a wall from your first apartment into the third place. Is that true?
We’ve been spreading this rumor, by the way, whether it’s true or not.
Derek: First — who told you that? One of your friends?
Sam: I won’t say.
Derek: It is not a green screen, I’ll tell you that. A lot of people wonder if it is — it’s not. Some people use it in their Zoom calls now apparently, which is crazy. But yeah, it’s been the same background for a while. It may or may not be a sauna — that’s the other prevalent rumor. But I think it’s a secret that’s gonna live and die with the channel.
Sam: You’ve also done a good job of somewhat hiding your identity. I mean, you have to go pretty deep to find your full name. You’ve done a good job of staying under the radar while also being incredibly popular.
Derek: Yeah, I don’t know how I even managed to have the foresight to think of that at the time, but it just seemed like a reasonable idea — if you were ever going to become popular, to avoid weirdos and that kind of stuff. With that said, there’s also the question of whether you’re going to be able to leave as much of a legacy without your last name out there. But I don’t know how much I believe in that anyway. It seems like it’s worked out.
Origin: Good Looking Loser and the Early Days [00:04:00]
Sam: You and your business partner both have funny names for your content channels. Yours is More Plates More Dates, which is hilarious — and then his is GoodLookingLoser.com.
Derek: Yeah, he was an OG YouTuber. He started making content in 2009, and that’s actually how I found his stuff — through his YouTube channel where he talked about how to talk to women. He had videos of himself going up to girls cold approaching, and I was baffled at the time. I was just a teenager in university watching his stuff. I was one of the first ten or fifteen people who joined his online forum and tracked and logged my trials and tribulations with fitness and women and all that in university. Eventually we ended up actually working together, which is really cool. He hasn’t posted regularly in five-plus years, but he is the OG.
The Pickup-to-Entrepreneurship Pipeline [00:05:30]
Sam: We’re going to talk about your business side, because I believe you’ve built a nine-figure business — over $100M — off your channel. But I want to start with the pickup thing, because I just had Mark Manson on the podcast. He’s one of the most popular self-help authors ever, wrote a book with Will Smith, super legit now — but he started off in the pickup world. His blog name was Entropy.
I’ve noticed a few backgrounds that seem to lead to interesting people. Elite gamers tend to become really successful in business if they so choose. Debate lends itself well to people who end up being leaders. And now another one I’m noticing is pickup. Is there anything to that, or am I just reading into it?
Derek: It’s weird — I actually had lunch with Andrew Wilkinson a few weeks ago and he said the same thing about pickup. I don’t know if it’s just a feeling of inadequacy that drove you to the pickup stuff to begin with, which also translates to your weird drive in an entrepreneurial aspect. Most people simply won’t feel it’s something worth striving for.
But there’s definite overlap where people are trying to optimize all areas of their life — whether it is social dynamics or whatever — and that obviously translates into business. For me, job interviews became infinitely easier after I learned how to walk up to attractive women. If you can walk up to a ten out of ten and not get nervous, going into a job interview is just butter. Whereas before I used to be super nervous in the waiting room, overthinking the entire situation.
Business presentations became so much easier. I became more confident in rooms, meeting new people — whether talking to guys or women, didn’t matter. I think there is a huge overlap. Not to say being a dirtbag equates to being an entrepreneur — I wouldn’t suggest that — but there are certain social skills and EQ you can gain from pickup stuff that translates.
Shaan: I did study that stuff. I read all the books, I bought some of the courses, went to an event. I was really into it because it was rooted in a sense of inadequacy — I wanted to meet women and be liked. But it totally carries over to sales. There’s like a three-second rule — as soon as you see a woman you’re attracted to, you have three seconds to go talk to her. I used all of it. I loved it. I wouldn’t call myself a pickup artist though.
Sam: It’s like Subway Sandwich Artist.
Shaan: Half of those guys ended up with horrible lives as they got older — still doing this at fifty and it’s like, dude, that’s not cool. It’s cool to be settled down. The pickup artist community does a really good job of teaching young men how to be confident and meet women, but then half of them do a really bad job of saying, all right, now here’s how you become a good partner. They get you to the first date but they suck after that.
Derek: I think one of the best takeaways from the pickup world is being able to review those guys’ lives — from pre-success being essentially losers, to peak success having an incredible dating life — and then what happens to them thereafter. The younger guys have the luxury of watching the entire timeline and seeing: did they end up somewhere I’d aspire to be, and why or why not?
When I was coming up, even getting on a date was an achievement in itself — being able to meet people cold was like the floodgates opening. But you don’t realize there’s a whole other element: how do you actually become happy and have successful relationships? Nobody taught you that. Being able to see the before and after — the Neil Strauss’s of the world and what happened to them — I think is pretty insightful.
The Business Portfolio: Gorilla Mind, Merrick Health, Intelligent [00:10:00]
Sam: I want to ask about your businesses. So there’s Gorilla Mind — looks like pre-workout and creatine. You’ve got to tell me what you’d name it, because I know you hate the name, right?
Shaan: We had another one we were talking about — deer antler spray?
Sam: My thing with you, Derek, is I trust you a lot. I totally agree — the name reminds me of when we were younger, like C4 Explode and that stuff. I remember taking that and I was like, this is awesome, and also, this might be illegal. It felt like Adderall. I got two hearts right now.
But when I think of your brand, my values align with your values. For some reason the name — I mean, objectively this is working, right? Looking at the traffic, it’s over a million visitors a month for an ecom store doing supplements — super high margin, high review purchase rate. I don’t know what you’re doing per month but I would not be shocked if this was doing six to eight million a month in revenue.
Derek: I’ll say this: as far as the niche goes, traffic numbers are oftentimes quite misleading, so I don’t know how much I’d read into those statistics. We’re starting to get into retail too, and I don’t know if Amazon is equal to our Shopify.
As far as the branding — I do agree that in the health niche, when it comes to trusted dietary supplements for a multivitamin or a B complex or a lipid support product, I’m totally on the same page that even I wouldn’t have the highest trust factor in a company called Gorilla Mind or Bucked Up. But when it comes to things that are meant to get you cognitively dialed in and hardcore pre-workouts that vasodilate the hell out of you — that’s where the more edgy branding works. You probably wouldn’t trust a Gorilla Mind B complex and you’d go with Thorne, but you’d probably go with Gorilla Mode pre-workout over Thorne’s pre-workout.
Sam: I’m a thirty-something yuppie who wants to look good naked and live a long time, and there’s a balance of like — am I putting bro stuff in my body? But your other one, Merrick Health — I’m on that website. The branding of Merrick is beautiful. Merrick Health does hormone optimization and hormone replacement therapy, thyroid stuff. That branding is phenomenal, and I would guess that company will be more valuable than Gorilla Mind because it’s a subscription model — probably $300 a month per customer.
Derek: The telemedicine space, especially high-level preventative medicine and diagnostics — it’s a lot more premium and the margins are superior, but it’s also contingent on the level of service, and that’s where we differentiate ourselves. There are a lot of telemedicine pop-up clinics now, and we steer away from that moniker. We’re broad-spectrum preventative medicine where you can trust you’re not going to just get thrown on a cookie-cutter script of testosterone and anastrozole and kicked out the door. We pride ourselves on the service, the doctor oversight, and the quality of providers — they’re highly educated and vetted by me and my team specifically.
And yeah, more than $300 a month in general. It is definitely the way of the future and what I’m most passionate about. You’re probably right that it’s, at least objectively right now, more valuable than Gorilla Mind.
Running Multiple Companies: The Org Chart [00:15:00]
Sam: How big is your team now? Who do you have helping you run each of these companies?
Derek: I live in Canada — the companies are based in the U.S. So being on site is essentially impossible for me. I have my business partner Chris — Good Looking Loser — who’s in Idaho where the Gorilla Mind HQ was stationed. He’s the one who built out the team in person for warehouse fulfillment. We’ll both vet high-level C-suite guys, but a lot of the hands-on tasks are fulfilled through teams there that I have minimal oversight or interaction with day to day.
I’m more on the marketing and C-suite level — and retail, increasingly. There’s something like fifty to a hundred people in each company, though I don’t actually know exactly. The way it delineates: Chris in Boise handles everything hands-on — fulfillment, warehouse, distribution, legal, accounting, retail — and I oversee all things marketing, content, product formulation, manufacturing, supply chain.
On the Merrick Health side, my business partner doesn’t have an online presence, but I met him through the industry years ago. He’s exceptionally well-versed in how to operate a team, build out infrastructure, get the licensing, and stay on top of all the compliance — because in telemedicine there’s quite a bit that goes into doing it the right way.
There are a lot of clinics that get spun up and are essentially just illegally prescribing steroids. And a lot of compounding pharmacies, despite being legitimate, are not above board — they’ll prescribe underground-lab-level drugs that aren’t even pharmaceutical grade. It’s wild. So my partner oversees essentially everything when it comes to the team. I help vet providers and high-level talent, and I’m heavily involved in marketing. Without my partners, none of this would be possible.
Sam: Is Intelligent the third one?
Derek: Yeah, I would say those two are definitely bigger than Intelligent, but Intelligent probably has the best profit margin of the three. That’s me and Chris as well.
Compounding Pharmacy: Should Derek Control the Supply Chain? [00:19:00]
Sam: What’s crazy is you’re taking on progressively harder problems. A supplement company is like a two or three out of ten. Merrick Health would be a six or seven — there’s real regulation involved. And you mentioned looking at doing a compounding pharmacy, which sounds like the hardest. Does that basically mean you’re getting the active compounds, handling them safely, combining them, and shipping out to clinics like Merrick Health?
Derek: Yeah. When you get prescribed testosterone from a clinic like Merrick, they fill the prescription through a compounding pharmacy — like an Empower Pharmacy or similar — which has its own markup on medication. They’re receiving the active drugs and creating a finished product for you. Logically, anytime you can get more of the supply chain to control the margin, that’s beneficial.
Whether the bandwidth allocated to doing that is a worthwhile use of time is to be determined. There’s different levels of quality control required — you have to be GMP certified, have a certain level of oversight in your facility. And is that taking away from what your bread and butter is on the private labeling or marketing side? It depends. Some companies kill it just being manufacturers without even having their own brand.
Sam: How big do you think Empower is?
Derek: Probably $100M plus.
Sam: What multiple would that business sell for? Is that just a manufacturing business?
Derek: It’s tough because they have a trust factor that other pharmacies don’t. Even for me personally — if I was getting a compounded testosterone from Empower versus some rinky-dink compounding pharmacy, I would 100% trust Empower more, even though they supposedly have the same quality control rigor. There is actually pretty significant variability sometimes in the compounding world — plus or minus on certain drugs, even as shocking as that sounds. What you see on the label in the pharmaceutical world is not always what you’re getting.
Sam: That seems like such an intimidating business to go down.
Derek: Fortunately, it’s actually wild — Gorilla Mind is probably the thing that has the highest level of difficulty for me, because I’m intimately involved in product formulation. On the telemedicine side, I don’t sit there making medication formulations. There’s a preset concentration for testosterone or fill-in-the-blank drug. I don’t control that or need any creativity into what goes into it, because it’s tightly regulated.
Whereas in the supplement world, people just look at our label and rip us off. I’m the guy who has to be creative and come up with innovative ideas. I don’t want somebody to come out with my name on a product that I don’t have significant personal time investment into the formula. So Gorilla Mind formulation and product rollout is the most time-consuming. I’d say Gorilla Mind is like a six or seven out of ten for me, and Merrick is like a two.
Sam: Oh, interestingly. We had Doug DeMuro on — the car YouTuber, four or five million subscribers — and he launched Cars and Bids, which could be a multi-hundred million dollar business. But comparing you to him — that would be like if Doug started making car parts. I’m like, dude, Doug, why don’t you just crush the marketplace? When I think about you launching a pharmacy, I’m like, man, that seems like you’re leveraging yourself pretty high when you could just keep crushing the other two.
Derek: I’m not dead set on it. I imagine during discovery and fleshing out all the details, I’ll probably uncover that leaning into our bread and butter is more worthwhile. It’s on my radar, but probably not worth our time or money right now.
Sam: There’s one reason I could see doing it: it’s pretty dope. Like, there’s still that component of — this would be sick if you could actually pull it off. That factor does matter.
Derek: Yeah, and just being able to control everything — you’re not putting yourself in a position where you can get squeezed. Companies like Roman have their own pharmacies, and there’s a reason for that. At scale, there seems like an inevitable obstacle if you try to just market the hell out of your business without controlling that aspect. But to be determined.
Business Goals: Billion-Dollar Companies Without an Exit [00:24:00]
Shaan: What’s your business goal? You shifted your focus — bodybuilding and dating became number one priority for a while, then entrepreneurship became the main focus. What’s the goal?
We’ve met a bunch of people who take the “oh shucks, I’m just trying to help people” attitude, which I rarely believe. And then there are others — like Rob Dyrdek came on, and he said he was a skateboard kid who ended up on TV and still wasn’t making real money, and finally in this last five-year period he figured out: I need to go from rookie to black belt, I want to make a billion dollars, so I need to own the production company instead of just being the talent. Very articulate about it.
How would you describe your goals?
Derek: I should probably revisit my goals because I don’t have a firm concrete objective. But I do know from a value standpoint — I think Gorilla Mind and Merrick Health are billion-dollar companies in the future. I very much intend for them to get there and strongly believe they will.
Sam: That sounds like a good goal.
Derek: Those are two concrete ones I can put on paper as financial metrics, but I don’t necessarily want to sell them either. It’s kind of a vanity metric you’re chasing, almost like a million subscribers on YouTube — once you get there, it’s the same old the next day. Nothing changes other than your objective success and how people perceive you.
And maybe you have more flexibility in what you can do. From the Merrick side, it’s a company I’m so passionate about preventative medicine — if something is working, that’s me being able to at scale educate people and add real value. It’s hard to see me deviating from that. Maybe I’ll change my mindset as I get a bit older and have kids. But right now, not really.
Bootstrapped: No Fundraising, Pure Content Leverage [00:27:00]
Sam: Have you raised financing or funding for any of these businesses?
Derek: No, never.
Sam: Dude, that’s crazy. Because you’ve got 1.8, 1.9 million subscribers — that’s a lot, but that’s not a lot-a-lot. I mean, if someone grinds for ten years you could get there. What’s crazy is you’ve built two businesses that could plausibly be worth $100M off the back of 1.9 million subscribers. That’s a significant amount.
Derek: You have to keep in mind our influencer marketing is pretty dialed, especially on the Gorilla Mind side. We have a lot of people who believe in what I’m doing and trust me, so they trust that I’m going to put them in the best spot to accrue the most value from whatever company they’re partnering with. Our combined following, counting the influencers we work with, is probably in the tens of millions if not a hundred million plus.
Sam: Have you become more popular, or have they grown beyond you at this point?
Derek: I think they’re big enough they can be their own thing. Fortunately that’s allowed me the flexibility to pull back on content frequency a bit, because the trust factor is very high and the success of the company has its own resume of credibility. Being one of the top-selling pre-workouts on Amazon against companies I bought from when I was seventeen years old — that’s wild to me. And those kinds of things help us get into retail and expand globally in ways that aren’t contingent on me.
It definitely helps that I’m the face of the brand, but if you work with us as an influencer and you’re going to have a collaborative pre-workout, knowing that I’m indirectly endorsing it and making it for you is a huge plus — whereas most brand owners aren’t even faces of the brand and nobody knows who they are. That latitude gives us flexibility to grow outside of an influencer treadmill where we’re constantly having to acquire new people to get exposure.
There’s absolutely a diminishing returns point. For us right now it’s very much global expansion and going heavier into retail on some of the products like energy drinks. But it’s all a bit of an experiment, to be honest.
The Origin Story: Affiliate Marketing to Brand Builder [00:31:30]
Shaan: I went and read your blog to prep, and you said something — when you were eighteen, what were your priorities? You said: make more money, date hordes of gorgeous women, have a killer physique, and do well in school. And then you realized: I should go all in on one of these goals right now at the expense of the others. Why that philosophy — go all in on one versus balance?
Derek: I wouldn’t necessarily claim it’s the correct way to live your life, but I think a lot of people — especially in the entrepreneurial world — live in stages. Almost like seasons of your life. Certain seasons allow you to complete prerequisites for others.
When it comes to women — when you’re young, you don’t need exorbitant amounts of funds. You can have a piece of crap car, live with your parents, and still do great with attractive women your age. Being able to kind of get that season of your life out of the way, and develop those social skills — at the time when I was broke, that felt worth getting out of the way before going down the road of entrepreneurship, which I knew would consume the majority of my free time.
Dating large numbers of women when you’re trying to get your anxiety out of your system — it’s not something you can juggle simultaneously with building a business. Dating as a single person can be as consuming as a full-time job in itself.
I was also more hardcore about bodybuilding at the time — dedicating blocks of time to cutting and bulking phases, getting to striking distance of stage-ready condition, which is super mentally taxing. Trying to do everything at the same time, you’ll just fail or do everything half-assed and never get anything done with exceptional quality. I’d still probably agree with that logic, even though that blog is super outdated.
Shaan: I think people should be segregating things into seasons, personally.
Sam: What’s that quote — lions graze, lions rest, and then pounce? In business it’s sometimes a little easier to be like the lion instead of a constant forty hours a week. Sprints might be easier.
I was watching some of your videos — you got back from Europe and it sounded like you’re with a girlfriend or wife. Has building these companies been a lot easier once you have more stability?
Derek: Night and day. If I was single right now, I’d probably get half as much work done.
Sam: When I was building my first company, probably twice a week I would lay on the floor like, this isn’t gonna work, I feel miserable, I’m just gonna quit. Having a spouse to say “no, you got this” — that was just the greatest thing ever. That’s when I knew, dude, having a wife is so much better.
Derek: I totally agree with that for sure.
Building Through Affiliate Marketing to Owning the Product [00:36:30]
Sam: What was the origin story for the business? What triggered the thought of — all right, I need to start this? Because I think you were in an internet marketing affiliate game before. When did you transition to wanting to own your own businesses?
Derek: Prior to influencer integrations, when I first started affiliate marketing it was still very SEO-driven and blog-heavy. There wasn’t as much flat-rate-per-integration type stuff happening — or at least I wasn’t that aware of it.
Sam: What were you selling?
Derek: An array of things — whatever I personally used, with Amazon affiliate links and so on. Five percent commissions on shampoo I used for hair loss prevention, things like that.
Sam: Was that beer money or was it like — wow, I’m making stupid money?
Derek: At the time I felt extremely successful, though in proportional terms perhaps not now. But back then, that was the stuff that funds your ability to actually start your own businesses.
The thing that helped me the most, and what I typically recommend to people, is organically integrating things you already use and truly believe in. If you just plug whatever comes your way — integrations for products you don’t believe in — you just become a robot mindlessly reading scripts, your credibility goes out the window, and people stop listening to your product recommendations.
For me it was always: how do I monetize stuff I use anyway and would tell people about for free? And that would include supplements, hair loss prevention products, various diet-related things. Basically, what has an affiliate program, is a product I already use, and I can get a commission for telling people something I’d tell them anyway?
That’s how I built up my initial funds to then start businesses that replaced the affiliate recommendations I would have been making anyway. It stemmed from: what am I most passionate about personally — promote those, because I would anyway — and then eventually replace them with things that I feel are higher quality and reflect exactly what I’d want as a consumer in that niche.
I’ve always been a formulator. I’ve always dug heavily into the chemistry and pharmacology side of things. Once I became financially viable, getting into supplements was an eventual inevitability. Then hair loss prevention products led me to Intelligent. Then telemedicine — I was making content for years about preventative medicine, blood work interpretation, hormone optimization — that was such a no-brainer to get into too.
Sam: We had our buddy Syed on — he had a high-traffic blog helping people with WordPress. He’d see what people clicked on most, figure out that’s the product they needed, then go buy that company or the number two player, improve it, and make it his recommendation. He went systematically. It’s almost like you did that for the body. High traffic content, start with affiliates, see what people click on — and then maybe be the supplier instead of the affiliate.
Derek: It’s crazy how much has evolved just in the past six or seven years in terms of where people get their recommendations. SEO is so irrelevant now to where I shop, and where most of our customers shop. Back in the day it was all about being top-ranked on Google for “buy fill-in-the-blank.” Now it’s so heavily social media. For e-commerce especially, no one cares about Google ranking anymore the way they did then.
The Guru Economy and Trust as a Business Moat [00:42:00]
Sam: The New York Times had this article about how audiences attach to a certain health and wellness person — there’s you, there’s Huberman, there’s Mark Sisson who started Primal Kitchen, there’s Carnivore MD. They often say different things. But the article was saying — and this is true — you just get behind someone and do whatever they say.
If you talk to Andrew Huberman, the most common question he gets, I’m sure you get this too, is just: tell me exactly what you do and I’ll do the exact same thing.
On one hand that’s maybe dangerous because it doesn’t always apply to each person, but on the other hand it makes a great business — because it’s just, whatever Derek says, I buy.
Derek: Trust factor is everything nowadays, especially in the health niche, because it is so hard to know who to trust. Charlatans get platformed too because they say outrageous things — you’ll even see them on big podcasts sometimes, just because they’ll say something that seems so contradictory to accepted science to get a good hook. Not necessarily because they’re the foremost expert, just because it’s a good clip. And it’s super confusing for the layman who’s just trying to learn something.
What I do, and what I think a lot of people should do when self-educating, is find a handful of people who through all evidence provided have the highest trust factor and knowledge simultaneously — because those two coupled are what lead to recommendations that are actually practical and valuable.
Sam: How did you become an expert? Huberman is a professor at Stanford’s lab. When I first found your channel I was clicking on things like “what is Conor McGregor taking” or “Jon Jones” — and you’re talking about the pulsing effects of picograms of whatever Jon Jones got popped for. I was like, how does this random YouTuber know this stuff when it doesn’t even seem like USADA understands what’s going on?
Derek: Largely through years of self-education, and educating myself through experts. I’m very good at extrapolating out and determining what is valuable information, then assimilating it into my own consolidated framework. That’s one of my strong suits. I’ve been researching like a maniac since I was around ten — ten-plus years at this point. I don’t necessarily claim to be an expert, though people label me as such. I’m just a nerd who learns a lot.
But a lot of this stuff is publicly available — it’s just hard to translate into layman’s terms. Somebody in a lab determining if an assay will be implementable for USADA in the future to catch people micro-dosing is not going to go out and elaborate publicly on why you could still get away with it — nor is it beneficial for them to assert that publicly. A lot of this stuff is just swept under the rug because they either don’t understand it or it’s not readily circulated. It’s all publicly available, it’s just a matter of being able to dissect it.
Tech Bros Getting Jacked: Bezos, Zuck, Brian Johnson [00:47:00]
Sam: What do you think of the testosterone movement going on in tech? You’ve got Bezos retiring and getting jacked, Zuck becoming an MMA fighter, Brian Johnson logging everything — semi-glutide, super lean, meticulous. Who’s doing it right, who’s doing it wrong?
Derek: I think it’s good that guys are prioritizing muscle mass and quality of life rather than just existing. Overall, it’s a good thing to be pursuing — I don’t know exactly what word to use — a more masculine path, I guess.
I don’t necessarily know who’s doing it wrong or right because they’re not very outspoken about their protocols. What about Brian Johnson? He’s meticulous about publishing what he’s doing.
Sam: What’s your take?
Derek: That guy — it’s tough. I do see the value in some of what he’s doing, but I think a lot of it is totally contradictory. For example: he calorie-deprives himself to the point of hormone suppression, but then supplements with testosterone. Make up your mind — which one is going to be conducive to longevity? Because you’re just correcting what you screwed yourself up for to begin with. Why is your body fighting back against you just for you to manually administer something to correct a self-induced deficiency from literal nutrient deprivation? There’s clearly some contradictory action there.
Overall I think it’s interesting, and I’m curious to see where some of those products and services he’s rolling out go. As it goes heavier into selling, I really hope he’s very candid about his desire to monetize and not make it seem entirely like a noble endeavor. Like the private-label olive oil — other people could have gotten it. You could have just recommended a good company. You didn’t have to do it yourself. There’s a monetary incentive there, which is fine, but be upfront about it.
A lot of what he does is also way overkill, and it’s hard to track anything with certainty when there are a billion variables. I also think he puts way too much credence into certain trackers — the age clocks. Those are essentially a gimmick.
Sam: Why are the age clocks a gimmick?
Derek: A lot of it is based on what’s going on in your body in this current snapshot of time. You could just as easily screw up your blood work and make it look like you’re way older than you are in a matter of days. Your chronological biological age didn’t shift that much in a matter of days, but based on your current health status — your blood work — you can make it look like you’re plus or minus twenty years.
So to take that and say, “I’m this biologically young now” — no. Your current snapshot reflects something that looks like that, but it’s not indicative of your overall health status. Most credible people I trust think it’s not particularly reliable.
Sam: I’ve tested all of them — Inside Tracker, True Diagnostics, all of them. It’s messed up because I know in my head that this is theory and probably a gimmick, but it’s so fun.
Shaan: Did they come out the same?
Sam: Those two came out the same, basically: my blood work is great. And they give you an actual number — “you’re thirty-four chronologically, biologically you’re twenty-three.” And I’m like, oh, sick. I know Derek just said it’s a gimmick, but I kind of feel amazing.
Derek: I see that reaction and I’m like — it gives you a false sense. You’re like, oh I’m doing everything great. But I know it’s a gimmick.
Sam’s Self-Experiments: TRT, Semaglutide, Coming Off [00:52:30]
Sam: I’ve done my own experimenting. I’ve tested semaglutide, I’ve tested TRT, I don’t do any of that now. I tried anastrozole — in my opinion, worst thing ever, made me feel miserable. Tried Clomid. Now I don’t do anything. But I’ve gone through it all because I like experimenting and then doing blood work. It’s addicting, like someone obsessed with gadgets.
Shaan: Why did you come off TRT?
Sam: I got really strong. I wanted to do it because I was running really low for years — like 130 — so I said let’s figure out what’s going on. I did it, got low body fat, got strong, hitting record squat and bench numbers. Then I was like, let’s just try without it, let’s see what happens.
And I still felt great. So I was like, well, if I don’t have to take it and I still feel wonderful — let’s just try not doing it for a while.
Derek: How long ago?
Sam: Last summer, about a year. My testosterone dropped — it was 800 on TRT, went to 400, 420 off it. And you said it was 130 before.
Sam: Yeah, 130 — and I was twenty-six percent body fat, miserable, running my company, stressed. For a year I tried eating healthy and lifting and just didn’t get it right. Then I sold my company, got financial security, got pretty lean and strong, got married, relationship was amazing, ate well — ate all natural foods — and just felt dialed in. Then I went off, testosterone dropped, but I didn’t feel horrible.
Derek: Interesting. Well, if you don’t need it, you’re probably better off waiting. How old are you?
Sam: Thirty.
Derek: Yeah. For me it’s more so because when I was younger I did a lot of hardcore bodybuilding stuff and shut down my system. With what I know now I could probably restore natural function similarly to what you did, but it would be a more aggressive and arduous recovery phase. Putting myself through that right now isn’t top of mind. So it’s kind of: stay on it, optimize everything around it.
Peptides, BPC-157, and Recovery [00:56:00]
Sam: There are a few things I’m really fascinated by — like BPC-157 and some of these peptides. As I get older my injuries aren’t healing as fast. My shoulder’s been hurting for a month. What do you think about those?
Derek: I think they can be useful, as long as they’re used context-specifically and not overused. BPC increases something called VEGF expression and is pro-angiogenic — meaning it can literally create blood flow that wasn’t there. But that also means a potentially pro-carcinogenic proliferative effect if you have existing cancer cells that could be exacerbated. Some athletes use it preventatively a bit too much. But in the context where you actually have an injury with low blood flow to it, there’s a real use case. I think it’s high utility in the right context.
GLP-1s, Ozempic, and Children’s Dosing [00:57:30]
Sam: From my very amateur point of view, semaglutide and Metformin and some of these GLP-1 agonists — like the things that limit blood sugar spikes — seem really fascinating. They can apparently even help people get off alcohol. There are weird uses for these drugs beyond what they’re intended to do. You were on semaglutide — are you still?
Derek: I’ve tested most of the GLP-1 agonists for appetite suppression. They’re probably the best overall appetite suppressant in the pharmaceutical world — the mechanism is solid. Previous alternatives were people just abusing Adderall and Phentermine and crazy stimulants to shut down appetite, which screws up their heart and brain.
I wouldn’t say semaglutide is risk-free, though. There are question marks around long-term use, especially in children who are still developing.
Sam: There’s an Ozempic Juniors or something, right?
Derek: Yeah, I think so. Look, the want for the answer to just be “eat less” is there. But the question is: will those children ever become metabolically optimal without it? And if not, is the ROI of using it worth the risk? You could easily assert that a kid who would have remained fat without it is better off on it.
Sam: Yeah, generally for anyone who’s overweight — of course, there are ways to educate and help people get on the right path without drugs. I’ve seen plenty of people who were very fat end up with amazing lifestyles through habit. But some kids might just need it.
European Food Quality and Groceries [00:59:30]
Sam: You did this thing in a Europe video where you said you weren’t training that hard, you indulged in bread and food, lived like a tourist, ate a lot — but felt great. Because you were walking a ton, and I think the food just seemed higher quality. Whether that’s regulation, what chemicals are or aren’t allowed, whatever.
You said you spend a lot on groceries and get high quality stuff. Are you buying from popular grocery stores, niche online providers, what?
Derek: I go to a butcher for bison liver and certain meats, but a lot of the other stuff is local grocery. In Canada there’s not a lot of flexibility on quality or availability of some foods you might otherwise find at higher-end places in the States. So as much as I’d love to have the highest level of everything, sourcing is a huge issue in Canada — as absurd as that sounds for basic foods.
When I can, I get the best available. Bison I think is the leanest, most nutrient-dense red meat you can get, and I’ll buy a ton of that even though it’s three times more expensive than extra lean ground beef at the grocery store.
Sam: That story about that beef company — did Huberman help get it going?
Derek: I was at a place a couple weeks ago and had the venison sticks they sell. Pretty damn good. I trust his recommendation, so I’d imagine it’s all top-tier.
Sam: Man, I’ve been watching some of your videos and it’s making me nervous about the quality of my food. Whole Foods was the gold standard for the longest time, and now I’m like — nah, that might still not be good enough. It’s to the point where I want to start raising my own animals.
Derek: It’s tough, because a lot of people swear off supplements and say just eat whole foods — but then other people say the soil is so depleted that you need to supplement. And it’s like, trying to know what you’re doing can be quite overwhelming, even when you have the financial means to figure it out. Even determining what to spend your money on can be overwhelming.
Closing: The Empire That’s Not Fully Revealed Yet [01:02:00]
Sam: Well, we appreciate you coming on. I’ve been a big fan for years, and I know Shaan has too. What I think is going to happen — in the next four or five years, there’s going to be some type of article or reveal that shows how big your empire really is, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised. The fact that you’ve built multiple nine-figure companies, or potentially billion-plus businesses, off the back of this audience — I think it’s going to be really cool when that story finally comes out.
Derek: We’ll see where it goes. I appreciate you guys having me on and being so patient as I get back into content. Kieran’s been trying to get me on for a while, so I’m glad we were able to make it happen.
Sam: Shout out to Kieran. Thanks. All right, that’s the pod.