Fitness, Motivation, Mentorship, and Life's Calling | @MorePlatesMoreDates | EP 421
Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information. I’m going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on for my forthcoming book, out November 2024, titled "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I’ll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!
It's interesting because I hear entrepreneurs speak of this often: how if you want to stand out, you know, be willing to work for free or show some value that you're trying to make an offering, man. While that is common advice, I actually see a shockingly few amount of people actually go out and implement it. Even when they do, the way they go about it is often wrong, in my opinion. If you want something from someone, you should put yourself in a position where the easiest thing for them to say is, "[Music] [Music] yes."
Hello everybody, today I have the opportunity to speak with Derek, a social media influencer, a Canadian social media influencer—there are a few of us! He runs a famous YouTube website called "More Plates More Dates." He's also a serial entrepreneur who runs three companies: Merck Health, which is an organization that I use; Guerilla Mind; and Intelligent Shop. So what did we discuss? We discussed how Derek transformed himself and made himself successful over a multi-year period, but really starting intensely in 2016. How he became a blogger, how that transformed into a YouTube career, how that rearranged his relationships with women and with people in the social environment more generally, how that opened up the marketplace for him, how that helped him become financially successful, and what that meant for him psychologically, interpersonally, and financially.
On the way, we talk about issues pertaining to men's mental and physical health on all sorts of different fronts, most particularly because this is where Derek started, with regard to the facilitation of performance and physical fitness, but also going into the broader issues of motivation, enthusiasm, and confidence. So join us for that!
Well, thanks very much for coming in today.
Yeah, absolutely! Flew in from Vancouver.
Yep, and that's where you're based?
Yeah, born and raised. So why don't you start by telling everybody who's watching and listening what you're up to and how you got to the place that you are? So we'll start with a—imagine that people don't know anything about you. Let's start with that.
Okay, my name is Derek, and I guess most people know me for my YouTube channel, More Plates More Dates. It started back in 2016. I went to a university in British Columbia, did an undergrad in business administration, which is kind of irrelevant and useless for what I'm doing now, but that was my beginnings. Through that, I thought I was going to become an accountant or some typical, you know, business-oriented position downtown Vancouver or something of that nature. I was actually bouncing downtown and I got injured. While I was injured, I started writing blog articles online about my fitness journey, I suppose, because I was very into bodybuilding at a young age and essentially enthralled in the science of human optimization and biology.
Through that, I had accumulated a decent amount of knowledge at that point that I felt useful enough to impart to whoever was interested in reading. At the time, WordPress blogs were actually a fairly reasonable way of getting information out there, so I started writing on a blog, MorePlates.com. It was essentially named after, at the time, in my early 20s, something that was catchy and memorable, encompassing what I felt my content was oriented around at the time, self-improvement, fitness, etc.
As it went on, it sort of evolved into something that was snowballing in popularity, especially the YouTube channel, as I started to accumulate more viewers.
When did the channel start?
March 2016.
And how long after the blog?
I started the blog in March, I believe, and I probably waited about a month or two to publish my first YouTube video, or it might have been a couple months before that. Actually, I don't remember the exact date of my first article, but they're pretty close together in time. I had somebody who was, at the time, a big name in the like manosphere, red pill community, who was like a self-improvement guy tell me, “You should be publishing everywhere,” which was good advice even at the time. I said, “Okay.”
Who was that?
His name was Victor Pride. It was like a fake pseudonym for what, Pride— that's pretty good!
All right, so he was pretty popular at the time and he said you should be publishing everywhere.
Why did you listen?
Because he was successful.
Yeah, but that doesn't answer the question because lots of people are successful and they will tell people what to do or suggest it or offer an example, but that doesn't mean people listen, right?
So, you recognized his success. He was a trusted authority in the niche that I was publishing in, so for me, the path forward seemed most reasonable to replicate a blueprint set by those who have shown it to be whatever they did—a successful path themselves.
Okay, so why do you think—okay, so fair enough that’s a good answer. If you want to evaluate efficiency because writing is just infinitely more time-consuming than YouTube.
Right.
So now, you got good advice from someone who hypothetically knew what they were doing, but one of the things I've noticed that constitutes an impediment for people when they hope to progress is that they won't swallow evidence of their own stupidity and move. To pay attention to something like that you have to make allowance for the fact that you've actually run into someone who knows more than you do. People will often offer lip service to that, but that doesn’t mean they'll actually pay attention.
So, what do you think it was that made you sufficiently motivated to—now, you said, you know, there was an efficiency issue with YouTube. You were obviously interested in this topic, but you put everything into practice relatively rapidly.
So, any internal obstacles to that or were you just enthusiastic and gung-ho to go, and if you were, why were you?
I suppose I had an inordinate amount of free time on my hands because of my injury at the time.
Yeah, so to me it felt like I was doing myself a disservice by not publishing on every medium by which I could get the most eyeballs on it, and I had a sense of impending traffic bottleneck when it comes to blogging. So, as we’ve seen more recently, anyone who essentially stayed on just written articles only has more or less been phased out of relevancy and has not been able to get the same eyeballs they once did.
Yeah, well, the online communication environment is very dynamic and not only do you have to be good at it, but you also have to stay on the cutting edge and the search engines are so manipulated that it's very difficult if you don't want to play the game as to how you even stay ranked for certain things, right?
Definitely.
Yes, and that's becoming more and more opaque and that will continue to become more and more opaque, right and invisible until the people who are doing it won't even know what they're doing.
Yeah, it's wild because Google, you would think with their super refined algorithms would be able to at least identify with some semblance of accuracy what are the most credible sources of information.
Right, but you will at least what I was noticing even at the time—and this is still the case today—blogs that had, for example, domain ratings that were seen as high authority because they had backlinks from certain places that were also seen as high authority, you could instantly rank for terms that you were not an expert in, and you're basically lying to your audience. You could say whatever you wanted as long as you had a couple backlinks from a Dogo, a Wikipedia, whatever. These things would prop you up so much.
Yeah, and then people would buy these sites too, totally flip the content and get ranked instantly for something they're selling you that is unethical, high-ticket, whatever.
It's very hard for people to stay ahead of the really malevolent psychopaths.
Yeah, it's an arms race always.
Now, you said that you had taken a business administration degree and that you were aiming at being an accountant.
Okay, this is quite different from being an accountant, aiming because I didn't really know—it's not like I sought after it because it was my dream job.
So why did you do it?
It was just at the time what felt to be the most appropriate avenue given I was quite unsure of what my path forward would be. I just knew business was likely the degree that resonated with me the most.
Okay, so you had some low-resolution sense that you at least wanted to operate in a business environment, but there's a big difference between accounting and a more managerial function like that and the more entrepreneurial function that you ended up adopting. Did you not know when you started down your education road that—did you not—were you not able to distinguish between the entrepreneurial route and the managerial route?
And I'm asking this partly because you made a point of pointing out that the education that you received has almost no bearing on what you're doing now, and so is that actually true? Was university good for you?
And how did you—you said the injury put a lot of free time on your hands, so how did you persist through your degree? How did you realize that wasn't for you, and where did the interest that did eventually guide you bubble up from?
I know it was associated with the injury and your—out. So when I was going to school, there are multiple different sub-disciplines of the business administration degree at the university. You could do marketing; you could do—one of them is entrepreneurship. But at the time, I had entrepreneurial tendencies, but I certainly had no conception of how to go about starting a business, if it was viable and feasible.
It just seemed like businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors existed, but there was no real segue that I could even conceptualize in my mind as to how I go from A to B. It was just like these people must have been given the business by their parents or they had some inordinate amount of money that I would never retain in order to start it. So I just never really even thought about it with any level of depth. To me, on a surface level, I thought, okay, I'm going to go work downtown for some big company and be their accountant or maybe specialize further and be a forensic accountant or—
Right, so it was partly because there was a defined pathway?
Yeah, I work very well with concrete goals, so for me if there's no clear path forward, it becomes very difficult to go step by step and actually check the boxes and get that, you know, reassurance and reinforcement that what I'm doing is correct.
This is sort of why I resonated with the guy who told me about publishing online and all the different platforms. Also, my current business partner—or one of them—he was a popular influencer, I guess, at the time which back then was proportionally not that long ago.
But he had, I think, 40,000 subscribers on YouTube, and he was one of the go-to main sources of information for self-improvement and being able to speak articulately with women that you just met and all these things that were highly aspirational traits of somebody who's a teenager who is relatively unsuccessful in all areas of life.
I'm still getting into this and understanding what it takes to be like a high-performing or like high-value man as they put it nowadays.
So how did you stumble onto the realization that that's actually what you wanted?
I mean, the title of your blog and your YouTube channel point to that. I mean, obviously, "More Dates" has something to do with it. But do you have any idea when you made the decision that it was a pathway to success that you wanted to walk down?
I mean, you obviously went off to college, you went off to university to pursue that route. Do you remember what—where did you grow up?
Vancouver, British Columbia.
Did most of your friends go off to university?
I would say about 50/50.
Okay. Were you an ambitious teenager?
Yes.
In what way?
I think this is pretty typical, but a lot of people have this underlying feeling that they're destined for more than what they are currently doing, and there's just something they're missing that is the missing piece to solving that equation to set them on the right path.
I always felt like that that piece was missing in my life to really guide me forward on what I actually should be doing. Maybe that's not as common as I think, but I feel like a lot of—
No, I think that's the voice that calls people out of the safety of their father's tent into the world, right? If you pay attention to it, that's the voice of adventure. That's what people used to call a calling, right?
And it's a very strange thing because a calling has an independent spirit, like an independent spirit, because you have to act in cooperation with it. It's like an agreement; it's like a covenant. That’s how it used to be described. That's how it's described biblically. Something calls to you, and you don’t exactly get to pick what that is.
Like you can say no, you can avoid it, you can take a different path, but it isn’t obvious to me at all that what interests us is within our control, and that’s a very strange thing.
Right, because it indicates that there’s something like an autonomy that's operating in what calls us. You can think the same way about conscience; you know, things you do that you might want to do will still bother you.
And you might think, well, if your conscience is you, then why can't you just tell it what to tell you and end the problem?
Well, part of the answer is it wouldn't be much of a conscience if that was the case. But even more fundamentally, that points to the operation of something that's independent within your psychological landscape.
So one of the things you see in traditional stories is the interplay of two things that guide people forward: there's calling. So that's the voice that you just described.
In the story of Abraham, for example, the biblical story of Abraham, he's about 75 when the story opens, and he's from a very wealthy and privileged background, and he has no reason to do anything because everything that he could have is already at his hand.
And a voice comes to him and says, “You have to leave all this. You have to go out into the world and have your adventure. You have to get beyond your infantile security and dependence, even if it's providing for you everything you might need.”
Out into the world, and he follows that voice, and it leads him into all sorts of catastrophe. It's not a story without its ups and downs after that. It's not an uphill trek towards ever-increasing paradises, right?
It's war and famine and starvation, war and famine and betrayal, and the necessity of sacrifice—all the things that are terrible about life.
So, that voice that you said—or that sense that you had when you were a kid, I think that’s in every kid that hasn’t had it thrashed out of them by, through one means or another, tyrannical father or over-intrusive mother. Those are the most common crushing elements, let's say.
And then the other thing that you pointed to, which is the desire to be attractive to women—that's a major motivator for men.
And it's partly because the biggest predictor of male success on the mating front is socioeconomic success. The reason for that seems to be that women are attempting, in some ways, to level the economic playing field because pregnancy, childbirth—all of that child care—is very hard on them economically, and so they're looking for someone to split the load, let’s say, or share the opportunity. That's another, that's a much more positive way of thinking about it.
So I think that voice is common, although I think we're doing everything we can in our culture to squelch it. But it wasn't squelched in you.
Then you said you didn’t exactly know how to implement it, right?
You went off to business school, and that wasn't exactly right. You had some sense that the right pathway forward, or the only pathway forward that you could see that was outlined, was more conventional—right?—be a university education and then job in a college, but then you got hurt.
And that’s interesting, right? Because that’s kind of a catastrophe, and yet in that catastrophe was an opportunity, and the catastrophe produced for you a lot of excess free time.
That's a good deal if you can figure out how to use it. So how did you figure out what to do with that free time, and why did you turn to writing?
Like, had you been a writer?
Yeah, so fortunately—and this is partly why I think having a blueprint of sorts, at least for my—I don’t know, the way I orient my goal setting and whatnot—was useful for me. My one of my current business partners, he was at the time one of the forefront influencers of the manosphere niche, and I followed his content pretty closely while I was in university.
He had an online forum where young guys would log their self-improvement journeys and whatnot and keep themselves accountable. Over time, he had kind of taken note of my knowledge and rigor in researching topics that I was interested in—oh yeah, including but not limited to supplementation, human biology, performance enhancements, and preventative medicine.
Through that, I was afforded a business opportunity to actually work for him on the side as a blog writer, customer service, all-around basically assistant for his current.
Right, so you had—yeah, that’s a big deal. I had been getting like pseudo-mentored, I guess, through his content for years prior.
Right, okay. So let's talk about his content. You pointed to a few things. You said it was associated with the manosphere; we can talk about what that means as well, and that you were perusing the online forums and also tracking people's self-improvement journeys, and you found something compelling in that.
Yeah, and tracking my own as well.
Okay, so you know I just talked to Jocko Willink. I haven't released that podcast yet. I've talked to Jocko a couple of times. One of the things he discovered, which I thought was really fascinating because Jocko is quite the bloody monster, you know, he knows perfectly well that with a couple of bad decisions he could have been quite the terrifying guy, still a terrifying guy, but for good—you know, thank God for that.
And he said that one of the things he discovered when he went into the military was that, as attracted as he was by the thought of mayhem and trouble, he found himself even more attracted by the fact that he had the opportunity to mentor men who were younger than himself and to guide them on a pathway of improvement.
You know, and that same pathway that you said called to you when you were a teenager, that was really in part what civilized him, right? Because he found something so compelling in that that that was more interesting than anything else he could manage, you know?
And one of the things I really loved about being a clinical psychologist, and I still am a clinical psychologist for now, and also being a professor was that opportunity to guide my undergraduate students, my clients, my graduate students.
There's something, I think, what that is—it’s a generalized manifestation of the instinct for fatherhood, right? It's something like that, and that's a very profound instinct; the race, the species wouldn't survive without that instinct. Obviously, the paternal instinct is just, it's more subtle in some ways and somewhat less targeted than the maternal instinct.
But we wouldn't have children with dependency periods of 18 years if that wasn't a very powerful instinct.
Okay, so you can imagine that call to adventure made it manifest in your life when you were a teenager. Then, you know, you got a little older, and you could see that when you were in places where other people were pursuing that, there was something about that that was gripping you.
Okay, now the writing bit—that’s because writing is a difficult enterprise. Like do you think you had a facility for it, writing per se, or do you think you were just so compelled by your interest in these things that we've been laying out that you were willing to learn to write to manage that?
I suppose a hybrid of both. In hindsight, my writing was not as great as I thought it was at the time, but similar to I think any content creator, if you look at your first piece of content versus your current, the way you present yourself is significantly different.
Well, hopefully!
Hopefully, if you've learned anything.
Yeah, so back then though, my business partner Chris, who had written multiple articles and published videos; his primary way of funding his entrepreneurial endeavors at the time was through his blog articles he was writing and essentially recommending products that he already used.
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Okay, so you're writing, you're starting to write, and you're being mentored at the same time, and you're writing about topics that interest you, and you're weaving into that the economic opportunity that's associated with blogging. How is it that you—tell me how it is that you actually start writing?
Like imagine that a lot of the people are listening who are looking for something like a step-by-step pathway. It's difficult to discipline yourself to write. And the educational pathway that you picked wasn't necessarily writing-intensive.
So what psychological obstacles did you have to overcome to get yourself to sit down and write regularly?
You know, I remember when I started to write, one of the things that happened on a pretty regular basis was when I sat down, I would think, "Well, I have other things to do. This isn't a very good day for this. I don't really have anything to say. No one's going to pay any attention to this anyways. What the hell are you doing?"
And that would plague me for a fair bit, but then I found over time if I just sat through that, the amount of time those ideas plagued me shrunk, even though the intensity didn't. And then eventually the intensity shrunk, and after a number of years of practicing, I could—unless I was tired, I could just sit down and get to it, right?
It took a long time to organize myself to manage that. Those are typical impediments. Plus, not knowing anything is also an impediment.
So when you first started to write, tell me how you learned to write.
Well, the way you write in WordPress blogs for SEO was not the same as English in university, for example. It was a lot different, so a lot of the writing was essentially keyword written—just verbiage that I would say to a friend in general about the same advice I'm imparting, but with keywords intertwined and subcategorization of them to be very—you were very conscious about the relationship between your writing and the probability that it would get distributed online?
Yeah, the primary concerns for me at the time were similar to you: Is it a good use of time? Are people going to read it? Etc. Fortunately—and this is where I think having good mentors comes into play—if it hadn't been for Chris having essentially built a successful path for somebody starting from scratch on a WordPress blog, I wouldn't have thought it would be a good use of time either that would actually lead anywhere significant.
I had seen the success he had with it, how many people he was able to reach, including myself, and influence my life so significantly that it really inspired me to do it as well. I figured, hey, I have as valuable of information in these certain disciplines of fitness, diet, nutrition, performance enhancement, and preventive medicine that it's useful and worthwhile to pursue.
So I guess the main obstacles were technological savvy. Starting a WordPress blog, as easy as it is, sites aren't as visually friendly and user-friendly for somebody to set up as they were, as they are now. Back then, they were quite intensive, where just to move something around, you might need an actual developer to come in and code something just to put a specific header on your title page or something. It was brutal—visually very appealing and primitive looking blogs, but the information was good.
Okay, okay. So let's concentrate on that. I mean, one of the things that's permanently and intractably annoying online are content mills. So you could imagine that—and this is the—this is the case whenever you're producing anything creative. There's a real balance between the quality of the production and the necessity of communicating it, right?
And you can have a very high-quality production and get nowhere, and you can have no content whatsoever and get somewhere. Like those would be the two extremes, and just a content mill—you know those sort of sites you go to where they break up the essay into paragraphs that are like three sentences long and put 50 ads between each?
Yes, those goddamn places just drive me mad.
They're definitely run by like narcissistic psychopaths, but now—and this is not a criticism by the way, and I'll explain why—you took some steps in that direction because you were very conscious of how the words you were using were likely to be picked up by the algorithms that communicated what you were writing.
And then while you were talking, you redeemed yourself right away by saying, "But the information was valuable." It's like, okay, so for everyone watching and listening, if you're artistically oriented, for example, a lot of artists stab themselves in the heart at the beginning of their career by adopting this pseudo moral framework of "Well, I'm not going to sell out."
It's like, well, first of all, buddy, who's asking you? If you have an offer of a million dollars in hand and you decide that for artistic reasons you're going to reject it, and that's not just a form of egotism—like more power to you.
But you don't get to brag about how you didn't sell out before someone actually asks you to. And then the second thing is that's a stupid attitude anyway because it shows a certain contempt for your audience. If you can't communicate about what you're doing in a manner that people find attractive and that's accessible, you might as well be alone in the dark for the rest of your life because no one's going to know what you're doing.
And so there is a balance. I watched the Elvis movie recently, which I really, really liked, and I thought it toyed with this problem extremely interestingly because you had Elvis, who obviously had—he was quite the charismatic genius. He was revolutionary in his ability to meld the sounds of black music in the US with, you know, the emerging white rock and roll market.
Then you have his promoter, and his promoter is, you know, a bit of a shady character, but the balance they struck was unbelievably effective because Elvis had a stellar career. You could argue that his promoter took advantage of him—and I think at times likely did—but you can't argue with the overwhelming and revolutionary success of the entire endeavor.
So you've got this tight balance to maintain. You want to have integrity of content, but you can't sacrifice the willingness and ability to communicate; that has to be integrated.
And I would say for the artistic types especially that are listening, and for those who might be otherwise stymied by their own integrity, you should take the problem of how to optimize your content production and to communicate it and think about that as a creative problem in and of itself.
Now you—I haven't looked into search engine optimization and that sort of thing much personally.
You don't want it?
Yeah, well that doesn't mean that my staff hasn't.
Okay, right, and so we're very attuned to the necessity of staying on the cutting edge of the communication platforms. You can't have contempt for your audience, and if your respect for your audience is also aligned with your desire to broaden your influence and also to increase your financial opportunity, then that's a nice alignment of motivation, right?
And there’s nothing wrong with that if you get everything in its proper place.
Okay, so you were writing. Now you said you had valuable content, and you started to realize that you could produce information that was as valuable as that which was being offered by people who were already successful.
Okay, how did you develop that ability, and why and how did you come to that realization?
So I suppose one of my greatest assets is when I become interested in something, I become enthralled in it to where I want to learn as much as I can to be top 0.1% in knowledge in that specific discipline. So right in those exact topics I was talking about, I was just so hyper-interested in them that I was currently researching them heavily, but I had also been previously for over half a decade, perhaps seven or eight years at that point.
So for me, it felt like I had some sort of life experience that was worth actually writing about, right? And had been in the trenches and done certain things that were of value rather than just regurgitating.
And they were genuine.
Yeah, right, right.
Okay, so that's very cool, all of that. So we did a study with this program called "Self-Authoring," a part of it called "Future Authoring." It helps—it has people develop a vision for their life.
So to do that, you think five years down the road and you imagine, like honestly, if you were taking care of yourself, what could your life be like if it was the way you would like it to be?
Right, that's a vague and complex question.
And so we also break it down for people: what would your intimate relationship look like? Friendships? Business? Educational opportunities? How would you take care of yourself mentally and physically? How would you use your free time? So-called free time most productively?
How might you serve other people? Right, so it's more differentiated.
Okay, so now we had students do this program for 90 minutes, no coaching, nothing. No one ever looked at what they wrote before they went off to university. And also when they were in university, if they completed that rather than a writing exercise of equivalent length, they were 50% less likely to drop out in the first year—50 bloody percent!
Now the biggest effect—this is where it's really cool—the biggest effect was on young men.
It was, and the biggest effect was on young men who had a not-so-stellar academic career.
Right, so, and you might imagine that part of the reason they were underperforming—I mean, there are intellectual reasons for underperformance and there are reasons of discipline. But one of the reasons was they weren’t—they didn't have a compelling reason to do anything.
Right, now I think it's a truism for men that they won't do a bloody thing until they find something that calls. Now, women, like, they're held along their developmental path by biological necessity in a way that men aren't.
It's like you better have your act together by 30 when you're a woman because otherwise you're in trouble. You're a man—you can monkey around till you're Abraham’s age—like 75—and you're still not scraped off the planet, you know?
But, you know, you said you hit a goldmine in some ways, and then what else you said that was cool was that see, it was also dependent to some degree on your genuine knowledge, not just some abstract knowledge, as you already disciplined yourself in a variety of manners that you could describe.
If I've got this right, that was helpful.
So let's delve into that a little bit. So, okay, so now you've got—you got business partners, you've got a plan to move forward that's on the writing front, and then you start making YouTube videos. You got some mentors, so these are good ways to start a business, right? Find someone who knows how to do it and see if you can latch yourself onto them in some manner that's mutually productive and learn.
Okay, and then you could dive into your own experience.
Okay, so what did you know? How old were you when you started the blog?
Um, 203.
Okay, so pretty young. So what did you know at that time that you felt was worth sharing that other people obviously appreciated? And how did you manage to build up that body of knowledge?
In general, it was my transformation from being what I deemed to be essentially—you wouldn't even believe that I exercised when I was probably 15 or 16 years old—I was a rail, like 138 lbs, had no muscle to speak of, one of the thinnest kids on my basketball team.
How tall were you?
6'1".
Oh, yeah, that's about exactly the size I was when I started weightlifting, size and weight.
Yeah, yeah, pretty sad.
How much could you bench press when you started?
Not even the bar.
Oh, that's worse than me; that's really sad, man! I could manage 75 pounds, but it was a struggle!
So for me, I had gone from, you know, benching less than a girl to being able to do reasonable feats in the gym and be what would be considered to be a good physique to 99% of people essentially, even in the fitness industry.
And when did you start that?
Probably around 17 years.
Okay, and how did that come about?
Primarily through my friends who were all in the gym and making progress, and I was the only one who was only playing basketball and not in the gym.
Right, so you had that in on the athletic side. Yeah, see, I didn't play sports much when I was a kid, partly because I skipped a grade, so I was younger than my peers.
Not putting me at a disadvantage. So one of the things you see, for example, is NHL stars are way likely to be the oldest kids in their class. Like being older—that's a huge advantage on the athletic front; to be even a year older—and a huge disadvantage to be a year younger.
Anyways, I didn't have the impetus of team sports participation till I went off to graduate school, and that's because I started playing team sports then, and that's also when I started to work out.
Okay, so you had—again, that's a good indication of the importance of your peer network and your mentoring group. You had people around you who were doing this, and you could see success on their side, so you went off to the gym.
What was it like to go to the gym when you first started to go?
Like the first couple of weeks, you're essentially a [__], because you're so sore—but this is like, it's when you have untrained muscles and you work it out, and it feels like you’ve been destroyed.
But after a while, you start to adapt, and you start to see the scale climbing, especially as a good positive reinforcement that you visually see—even if in the mirror I'm not perceiving insane amounts of progress. I can see metrics of change on a numbers basis too that are representing progress.
And clearly, the strength numbers are changing.
Yeah, right, right! On a long-term basis, yeah, so that's an advantage of weightlifting; it gives you those objective metrics very quickly because if you just go by the mirror, it's very easy to get discouraged because it takes years to go from what appears to be untrained to somebody who, oh, that guy's jacked!
So for me, a lot of it was like positive peer pressure, I suppose, in that my friends were all doing it, and I felt kind of like left out if I didn’t feel weak and useless and isolated.
Yeah, plus unattractive—yeah, that's a bad combination! Just by association, I started to go and saw pretty fast results, and to me that was enough to get, you know, bit by the iron bug is what they call it, where you become addicted to the results.
Maybe addicted is too strong of a phrase, but like you really enjoy the process, a habit anyways; yeah, it's integrated into your life.
Yeah, so I had a really positive experience, and for me, it just consumed such a large part of my life learning about it and educating myself to the extreme degree, even on the performance enhancement side, that it felt worthwhile to start writing about what I had learned to date.
And perhaps at the time, like I think my knowledge now compared to then was a semblance of it is that it is now, but back then it felt still valuable enough and worthwhile.
And I guess proportionally to the concentration of content online at that time was still like top whatever percent.
Well, the thing is too, you know, no matter where you are in your stage of development in relationship to a goal, there are people who are behind you—you know? And so even if you don't know everything and you're still somewhat even simple-minded in your approach, that might be exactly what the people who are in even worse shape than you need to hear.
Like I always knew it was often the case when I was lecturing as a professor that it was the—the easiest time for me to lecture was when I was just learning the material, because by the time you get to be an expert at something, you forget what people don't know, right?
And then that's exactly right!
Yeah, so the reason I'm highlighting that is because, you know, people who are listening might think, "Well, I don't know anything."
I mean, in regard to themselves, maybe in regard to me too. But that doesn't mean that the place you're currently standing isn't worth describing and sharing because it could be extremely useful for people for whom you're in their zone of proximal development.
So one of the things kids do that's very interesting, when kids mature, they'll often pick a friend that's slightly older than them, someone they look up to.
But they tend to pick a person like that who is doing things they could conceivably do. You know, so like a three-year-old isn't going to hero-worship a 14-year-old because the gap is too great, but he might develop a tremendous admiration for the four-year-old down the street, you know, who's got a little bit more physical skill—it's in his zone of proximal development.
And that, as a teacher, that's the zone you should inhabit. And that's a very wide zone depending on the people that you're interacting with.
So it's reasonable to have some confidence in your own knowledge if you've actually come by it, you know, honestly, let's say. That's likely a big component of what motivated me to pursue the whole thing to begin with too, is because Chris, similar to me, was kind of a—at the time a bodybuilder, meathead, kind of guy who I deemed to be not outside the realm of my sphere of interest and had what was, was a higher level of education at the time and success but was within the proximal range of achievement for what I could conceive I could get to.
And what he had accomplished was very impressive and something I wanted to achieve myself.
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Right, right. So that's interesting in relationship to choice of mentor, right?
Because you might want to think you want to work for the highest-achieving guy in the world, but maybe you don't.
Maybe you want to write, exactly your atmosphere, and you're working for some celebrity you're never going to take, you know, takeaways that are significantly relevant to your current state in time.
So perhaps that was a big component as well is I didn't really log like vlogging necessarily on YouTube, but people can absolutely see my development in real time as I publish content.
So perhaps following my education along, as I educated myself, similar to what you mentioned was a big factor that—
So what did you have?
Okay, so I'm thinking of this acting academy; it's a school that helps people develop their own self-motivation, let's say.
And one of the exercises that the acting academy has its very young people do—like 12 years old—is identify a domain of business that they might be interested in pursuing and then writing a letter to someone in that business attempting to describe to that person why entering a mentoring relationship with them would be useful.
Right?
You would imagine that helps the kids learn to write a letter like that and to think that through. But also, one of the things you want to do if you're looking for a mentor and figuring out how to develop yourself is to find someone who can teach you.
But you can’t just go begging for that; there has to be a quid pro quo.
So with the people that served as your mentors, what do you think it was that you had to offer to make the relationship work?
Fortunately, I had enough existing content via their own platforms by posting my own self-improvement journeys, even before I was blogging.
So prior to that, you had done your homework.
Yeah, so I had already kind of shown evidence of some level of acumen and success in the niches that I'm speaking of, and that's kind of what led Chris to even contact me to say at one point, he had contacted me, “Hey, do you want to do a guest post on my website?”
And you'd write “Top 10, you know, like—conly overlooked something of bodybuilding.”
Yeah, so you had some proof of previous performance.
Well, I just talked to a young guy who sent me three months ago, two months ago—he sent me a bunch of online, a number of online AI projects that he had built out of my material.
He didn't ask me if he could do that, and he wanted some of my time, but what he came armed with was these projects.
And so I thought, well, I might as well take a look at them, and when I looked at them, I thought, oh, okay, it might be worth, you know, half an hour talking to this kid.
So he had already positioned himself, so he was a credible communicator, right? Someone I might be interested in having a chat with.
And so, you know, it's very useful to understand how it is you can position yourself so that—
Yeah, because if you're asking—if you want something from someone, you should put yourself in a position where the easiest thing for them to say is yes!
Yeah, right?
And I often see it's interesting because I hear entrepreneurs speak of this often, how if you want to stand out, you know, be willing to work for free or show some value that you're trying to make an offering.
Give something of value to the person; don’t just try and take or ask for time or anything like that. And while that is common advice, I actually see a shockingly few amount of people actually go out and implement it.
And even when they do, the way they go about it is often wrong, in my opinion, like they are producing something that is what they think is valuable rather than finding insights from that person's content or something that they can extrapolate out as that person deems it as valuable.
So how can I go about accomplishing—how to build a bridge?
Yeah, so sometimes I get reached out to a hundred times a month, "Hey, can I make thumbnails for you? Here’s examples of thumbnails that I’ve supposedly created."
Like how about you just send me one that might have looked good if you took raw footage yourself and made a great thumbnail and sent it to me in an email? Maybe it would have taken you how many minutes?
But you would have stood out from 99% of other people in that moment. Or the AI thing—I’ve had some people reach out about AI stuff too where, “Hey, what if you could consult? Validate all of your preventative medicine, health optimization information—one AI robot!”
Here’s an example. Oftentimes, I find, as of now, those are relatively inaccurate, but it’s a good idea to show value that could be something the person you're seeking would actually deem to be worth interacting with you!
Well, so another thing that I really noticed with the undergraduates at university—so there are a lot of students and not many professors.
Like I think in the psych department at the UFT, there was like 300 students for one professor.
So developing a relationship with a professor was a tricky business, and it's really necessary to develop such a relationship at some point in your life because you can't get mentored properly.
And then you don't have that pathway that you described, you know, that's a big problem. So a lot of what a university education is, if you're fortunate, is a sequence of mentoring and apprenticeship experiences.
But I'd have, you know, students show up to my office and say, “You know, can I work in lab?”
And you have to be careful who you work with because you don't have to bring very many people in who aren't oriented properly for the whole bloody thing to turn into a nightmare.
Like one in 30 is probably enough—one bad apple in 30 is enough to sink the ship.
That’s a terrible mixed metaphor but it’s true!
I ran a—I helped with a sequence of courses that were designed to produce entrepreneurs all around the world.
I think the company that did this, it was founded, the founder of the Foner Institute, founded in California.
And they found that if they had one person in a class of 50 who was tilted in the dark tetrad direction, narcissistic, psychopathic, malevolent, that was enough to sink the whole course.
Like what?
So you gotta be careful.
So anyways, these students would come and say, “Do you have any opportunities?”
And usually, I have a lot of projects bouncing around in the air, a lot of them only potential and not manifest in anyways.
And so I'd often say, “Well, you know, here's a problem I'm trying to solve.”
Yeah, why don’t you go do some research on that and come back and answer this question for me?
Then the students would bifurcate—there'd be two responses to that.
One would be one group of kids would come back, like a week later, say they had a week deadline, they’d come back on time, they’d come back and over-deliver, but not insanely, but you know, they went a little bit beyond the call of duty and they provided something that was actually useful.
And I’d think, "Oh, that means I could give you something and you could do it, and it would be less trouble for me than doing it myself," which is sort of why you hire someone.
But then there was another category of people who would come back and say, “Well, you know, I couldn’t get this finished,” and then they’d have five reasons why not.
And often they were plausible reasons, you know? But when I delved into the life circumstances of the people who did come back with it finished, they’d had just as many problems—they just didn’t let their problems stop them.
Now, if there was a death in the family or something, you know, cataclysmic, well fair enough, maybe, maybe because you don’t get that many opportunities, you know, so you should capitalize on them.
But so this goes along with the statistics show too that if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money.
And you can imagine that just in a workplace, like imagine you're running a restaurant and you're going to hire you hire some dishwashers and you want to figure out which ones to keep, because most of them aren't going to do the job and most of them will quit.
And one of them comes 15 minutes early and leaves 15 minutes late, and you might think, “I’m not giving that bloody capitalist one extra scent of my—one extra minute of my time!"
It’s like, yeah, well, don’t think he won’t notice.
You know, a little bit above and beyond pays incredible! It segregates you from your competition, right?
And at work, if you are willing to go that extra mile and you're smart enough also to non-manipulatively make that known, you know, because people have to see what you're doing too—that's the marketing element—then when your boss is sitting around and someone in a managerial position higher than yours has left suddenly and he's flailing about trying to figure out who he can slot into that position tomorrow because he doesn't have any time, your name might be the one that drifts up into his imagination.
Yeah, I think a lot of people would be shocked how like non-credentialed certain people in high-up positions actually are simply by the opportunities afforded to them through hard work and going above the call of duty of the average person.
Sometimes it’ll be like, “How did you become the producer for X person?” It’s like, “Oh, I was just—they asked me to do something, or I went out of my way to do it, and it was extremely high quality.”
Yeah, and they gave me something else.
Yeah!
You bet! Well, we know on the objective predictors of success front, the best predictor for success in a complex enterprise is intelligence.
And you know there’s not a lot you can do to crank up your raw intelligence, although there are things you can do to stop making yourself stupider.
So, well that’s something—right?
Conscientiousness is diligence and dutifulness, orderliness, industriousness. It’s the second best predictor, and you can discipline yourself to become more conscientious.
People do across time, like as people get older, they get more conscientious.
So you know it’s lovely to be—to have as a gift from God an IQ of 145, but if you're willing to work, you know, like actually work and not just look like you're working, especially if you deliver when you strike when the iron's hot, that can move you an awful long ways.
We have people in my organization who rose through the ranks in exactly that manner because they’re at hand; you ask them to do something extra, and maybe just as a test, you know, this guy seems pretty good at what he's doing, can we give him something else?
Yeah, yes! Oh, well maybe he has potential that isn’t exhausted by his current role.
Yeah, right, and so that’s fun to find out about yourself too.
Okay, so you're writing away, and what do you start writing about, and how often?
Like tell me about your writing routine to begin with and how you developed it.
In general, I would—when I’m most mentally sharp and—
And when was that for you?
When I wake up! I try and stave off eating as long as I can to stay as mentally dialed.
I usually have about a seven to eight hour window where I can crank out whatever content creation on that day.
Okay, and you found that was when you first woke up?
Yeah, I found the same thing, even though I didn’t like mornings. I was sharpest to write in the mornings.
Yeah, so I would typically sit down and just put on headphones and try and stay as uninterrupted as possible, go on airplane mode, and crank away.
And noise-canceling headphones—you meant to—for it to be silent?
Yeah, okay, so you weren't listening to music or anything else.
Sometimes I listen to soft music that's not totally distracting; it just depends on my mood for that day. But, you know, I wouldn’t have anything on the background like a show or hardcore music or anything.
Well, especially when I was writing seriously, it’s like, yeah, no, I love listening to music. It's like, no, there’s—you can't—if you’re serious about what you’re doing, you can’t allow for distraction.
Now you said as well that you found that that didn't bother you as long as you were writing about something you’re interested in, because you were willing to get obsessive about it.
I actually think that's a very fundamental male trait, by the way—that unidimensional obsessiveness driven by interest—partly because that is the pathway to success that—that's the golden pathway to success for sure.
That is the thing that's so—I think that calling, yeah, that spontaneous interest is actually that manifestation of the instinct that leads to success.
It's deeply rooted in you biologically, way the hell down below your cognitive systems way, way down.
So if you tap into that, man, it's a powerful motive force.
No, absolutely. So for me at the time, I was obsessed primarily with body composition and looking good and performing well, and that led me into the performance enhancement side of things, but then further down the road to that, I learned about the detriment and dangers of it, and that led me down the preventative medicine pathway where I became far more passionate about longevity, vitality.
And it led me to my primary business endeavors at this point, which is Merck Health—my preventative medicine platform.
And through the knowledge on pharmacology and supplementation, I started a supplement company with my co-founder Chris and continued to make content thereafter that was more aligned with my current interest, which has transitioned over time.
Less because obviously as you get older and more mature, it’s not like—even the name I've considered changing it because it's not like 23-year-old More Plates More Dates is the same as me now years later, where I'm far more interested in and science-based longevity tactics, blood work analyzation, preventative medicine as a whole.
And my content is less oriented to, you know, picking up—
Well, yeah, okay, so—but okay, so let’s think about that too here because you know one of the things you said was that when you went to university you had a vague sense that business was your thing, right?
That’s a very low-resolution representation, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong; it just meant that it wasn’t finally honed, right?
It’s still in the right direction.
Okay, so when you're 23, and you're writing about “More Plates More Dates,” I mean, you have a compelling interest right at hand, which is you're developing interest in women and being attractive to women.
That would go along with looking good, and then you could see how that would segue into a deeper interest in something like performance, right?
Because it's like, well, what does it mean to look good? Well, that can be flashy and surface, but people figure that out pretty damn quick if they have any sense, right?
And so there has to be something deeper under that, and that could be something like health and performance, because it really is the case that the truest form of looking good that's sexually attractive is actually associated with optimized health.
So for example, the markers that we find attractive in the opposite sex, say, and vice versa, are markers of biological health.
So waist-to-hip ratio in women—0.68 is optimized for fertility, right?
And so symmetry, which is a very important determinant of physical attractiveness, is an indication of untrammeled neurological and physiological development.
So if you're symmetrical, it indicates that you haven't encountered pathogens or impediments in your developmental pathway that twisted and hurt you in some way.
That would be more than merely skin deep, right?
Now, I'm not saying that everybody who isn't symmetrical has underlying problems; I'm saying that if you're looking for a quick and dirty marker of something like biological integrity, symmetry is a great one.
Butterflies—this is so cool. You know how beautiful butterflies are? They worked on that a long time.
A long time! They can detect a deviation from symmetry in a potential mating partner of one part in a million!
Wow!
Right?
And you know how they do that? It's just a miracle that they can do that.
But the results are at hand, right? Because a lot of the beauty in butterflies is a consequence of sexual selection.
I saw this really cool butterfly at one point, just a picture of it—when it closed its wings, it was a leaf—completely identical to a leaf.
And when it opened it, it was beautiful—like a butterfly.
So the natural selection had tuned it to look like a leaf, and the sexual selection had tuned it to be spectacularly beautiful, and natural selection, or sexual selection, which is the selection of mates by at least somewhat conscious agents, it’s a major force that governs evolution, and our sense of beauty is a consequence of sexual selection.
So now you can imagine that as a young man, the way that instinct to self-development, the self-development that best produces survival and reproductive fitness over the long run makes itself manifest as the desire to be attractive to women.
Right?
And then the women become the judge of performance.
And then you could imagine that if you pursued that diligently, like you did, that that would start to deepen.
Yeah, right?
So now you started to become concerned with performance rather than looking good per se, and then that broadened out into a much deeper understanding of physical health primarily, or would you say how much physical health and how much mental health?
I suppose at the time, I didn't really have a huge focus on mental health; it was more cognitive function as a whole.
So how sharp, witty, charismatic—these were all things that stemmed from having multiple conversations with attractive and otherwise intimidating women that then bled into business interviews and presentations and things that I noticed.
“Oh wow, my conversational capacity was like significantly elevated just by exposing myself to these like otherwise fear-inducing encounters with attractive women.”
Now, unpack that.
Sure, okay.
So first thing I would say to that is the best way to sustain and develop your cognitive function is through physical exercise.
The cardiovascular and weightlifting, it's way better than doing cognitive exercises now, but you pointed to something else more specific, which was that part of the impetus you had to foster your ability to communicate came as a consequence of conversations that you had with challenging women.
Okay, so tell me exactly how that developed.
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It wasn’t necessarily that I sought out, as a goal, to talk to attractive women; it will then lead to business success, but it was just—it was an indirect byproduct that I noticed was a fringe benefit. And for me at least, at the time, the most challenging and anxiety-inducing activity was walking up to a woman who was very attractive that you didn't know and being able to introduce yourself and have a fluent and articulate conversation.
So after that had been accomplished and I could rapidly engage in those conversations, it certainly allowed me to not only overcome that fear, but I found it translated into my business interviews and into public speaking situations, where if I had the baseline ability to converse with someone where I felt major discomfort, it helped significantly through a regression analysis where I could find that public speaking became significantly less daunting.
So it sounds like you took that challenge and created a broader competence in yourself.
Yes, exactly!
And I suppose that’s such a profound need in our society, I mean, how many young men do you think would benefit from what you went through in terms of developing the ability to communicate that effectively?
Yeah, absolutely!
So we have to create avenues where they can practice that in low-stakes environments, socially and otherwise, where they have the capacity to do that because you’re going to be judged, and the expectation is still whether they know how to handle that feedback or not.
And some of that is related to going out in a structured manner, you know, or through social groups that are comfortable with those efforts and having mentors to guide along the way that genuinely understand that feeling of inadequacy.
Exactly.
It's interesting that we casually go out and converse with women.
So there are so many lessons that can be extracted from the experiences we’ve shared because they've come together from such a different starting point. So how do you perceive your own growth?
I think my own growth has been marked, and we can detail that through aspects of social discomfort. It was just heightened anxiety surrounding performance that catalyzed the progression.
Putting myself into position to be of high value through acquisition of knowledge, and that's what has helped me recognize I can be worth having around to those whom I interact with and improve upon.
Do you think that it has now led to some moral and ethical considerations in what you do?
Absolutely. I think that's where we reside right now.
Now, connecting to that journey, what do you think—if you could give advice to yourself five years ago or a young man starting down the same trajectory, what would that advice be?
Don’t be afraid to start and share your journey, along with what you’ve learned thus far, because that inexperience is perhaps your greatest asset in service of others.
The way you perceive yourself is wholly contingent upon the communities you cultivate around you.
Cultivating more meritocratic communities surrounding you will influence you for the better, creating opportunities where each other can elevate collectively across a societal timeline.
That's profound, that's really, really profound!
Okay, so I think we’ve reached a good place to wrap up.
So Derek, what do you feel like are your last takeaways you want everyone to think about and utilize from this conversation?
The pursuit of knowledge is your key to freedom; what we discuss here are tools you can enter into your skill set and leadership development for self-fulfillment.
Just remember that at the end of the day, what you're building is unquantifiable—a life of great virtue and value—while aligning your motivations!
All right, so thanks again!
Thank you for having me, Jordan!
And everyone out there, thank you very much for tuning in today.
Thanks for joining us!