This is an auto-generated transcript of Never Enough Podcast Episode 9. It may contain minor errors.
Andrew: How's your day going, what have you been doing today?
Derek: Basically woke up and came here, so haven't done a whole lot yet.
Andrew: And you're a night owl still?
Derek: Yeah, brutal one. You go to bed at like what time—it depends, but typically on an average day 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m.
Andrew: That's where I used to be and then I had kids. And when it's PST and you have businesses to operate in EST—brutal.
Andrew: What do you do at night, like what do you do with all that time?
Derek: All the stuff that is difficult to focus on in the day when your phone is exploding. You can pretty much spur work out of thin air just by responding to one thing—it equals an answer. So even though you've responded to things, you're actually just spurring further threads of the same problem. And often times the day gets burnt up just by nature of answering all that stuff in business hours. At night time everyone's asleep—you can actually focus on new stuff with no interruption. It's like the real airplane mode.
Andrew: You've built this huge audience, you have a few million followers, and unlike most influencers you've actually built your own businesses. Can you talk about what those businesses are?
Derek: My primary three businesses are Gorilla Mind, which is a dietary supplements company and energy drinks. Then there's Marek Health, which is a telemedicine company focused on concierge-level preventative medicine—getting access to high-quality medical providers to interpret really elaborate, insightful diagnostics. And then the third business is called Intelligent—it started with men's hair loss prevention products and then segregated also into fragrances and skin care, so it's more like a men's self-care line.
Andrew: And you also make money from advertising on the YouTube channel. How big is this whole empire?
Derek: I think cumulatively I'm pretty comfortable saying it's nine figures plus cumulatively gross.
Andrew: And how many years in are you now?
Derek: Eight.
Andrew: Crazy. And so where were you eight years ago?
Just bouncing downtown Vancouver and finished my undergrad in marketing—which is totally useless by the way—trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I had entrepreneurial tendencies but I didn't have a blueprint to follow. And when I was bouncing downtown, sometimes you get in fights with patrons and I ended up getting injured one time. Basically I fell down and my leg developed like an internal bleeding and I was basically unable to return to work. While I was immobile I basically started writing blog articles about men's fitness. So basically getting punched in the face launched a hundred million dollar empire.
Andrew: What was your first piece of content?
Derek: The first article I wrote was "How to Bulk Without Getting Fat Part One" specifically.
Andrew: What year was this? 2016—that was already tons of websites that say this. You're not doing anything new, and yet you still managed to build this huge following.
Derek: I think the perception that it was saturated was probably not as real as it is now. And I also knew things outside of just the basics—like pharmacology. I was getting very into human biology, blood work interpretation—all the stuff that people follow my channel for now was different than what was available online.
Andrew: I became aware of you because I'm one of these guys who's an ectomorph and I can't put on muscle. So I went on YouTube and started searching and I started watching you. And then I saw you on Rogan. How did you go from some bouncer randomly writing articles to being on Joe Rogan?
Derek: I think the big pivot was when I started talking about transparency around hormone use and celebrity actors. This was something that was swept under the rug brutally, where every actor would come out and say "oh I gained 30 lbs of muscle in 8 weeks because I just trained twice a day" and no one was calling out the fact that they're often lying. And at the time it was sort of a revolutionary concept to be calling the stuff out.
Andrew: Why do you think it's a shameful thing for so many actors to admit they take anabolics?
Derek: Sometimes it's actually a net negative to be influencing young people to be taking hormones when they're still in adolescence. And often times there's monetary incentive to lie about it—like Chris Hemsworth has that fitness app but really he's probably taking other stuff as well.
Andrew: So you went from bouncer writing blog posts to calling out celebrities on hormone use. How's the channel evolved over the last three or four years?
Derek: There's far less basic content. It has transitioned more towards preventive medicine, longevity, interpreting diagnostics—more so than the science of performance enhancement.
Andrew: How have your own priorities changed when it comes to health—10 years ago versus today?
10 years ago I would have been trying to get as jacked as humanly possible with very little regard for the risks. And literally 10 years ago you would hear this was a common phrase—"where are the bodies?"—and people would talk about how there's no evidence that steroids are killing people, when the reality is it's insidiously shortening your life dramatically.
Derek: I'm on a physiologic replacement amount, which can be a bit of a copout for optimization for some people, because TRT is the new fake natty essentially. But the baseline state you've imposed is exogenous and not representative of what you could sustain with natural function.
Andrew: If you could go back 10 years, would you tell yourself not to take anabolics?
Derek: No, I would have done everything I did because it led me to where I am now.
Andrew: Let's say you had a son who's 22 and wants to get ripped. What would you tell him?
Maximize what you can naturally, and then learn as much as you can about how your hormones work. And only once you're thoroughly educated and understand how the drugs are affecting you should you touch it.
Andrew: If someone sees like Brad Pitt or Chris Hemsworth and they want to go natural, is that achievable?
Derek: Brad Pitt wasn't that big in Fight Club so I think it's reasonable a lot of people could get there naturally. The way it looks though, once you actually get that body composition, is not going to necessarily look the same in the mirror because you might see 160-pound Brad Pitt shredded and be like "he's way bigger than me" but it's actually just body composition and lighting. A lot of celebrities will attest to the fact that when they were on camera it was an aesthetically produced situation that they water-depleted for, had perfect lighting—it's not a sustainable thing they could themselves maintain long-term.
Transcript truncated. Listen to the full episode for the complete conversation.
Listen to the full episode: Episode Page
Subscribe: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify
