Derek Munro of More Plates More Dates on Joe Rogan Podcast #2421 (Transcript)

And it also operates through a seemingly different mechanism. Even though it’s often stacked up against SSRIs for its comparisons and outperforms them or matches it with a relative lack of side effects.

It is something that operates through seemingly antioxidant activity, some dopaminergic, some serotonergic, and just a little bit more of a benign way to achieve what is a similar outcome, but with a seemingly lower if not negligible to non-existent side effect profile. I’m not saying that’s what our drink does, I’m just saying that’s what the literature on Saffron does. And anyone can go look that up and reference it.

And then huperzine A, probably the most impactful acetylcholinesterase inhibitor that you can include alongside choline precursors. So it inhibits the breakdown of acetylcholine as opposed to being the fuel, the precursor. Choline, acetyl, alpha GPC, CDP choline, these are things that provide the substrate to actually produce the acetylcholine.

So preventing the breakdown of it too could otherwise get a one-two punch where you get the heightened fuel substrate, but then also an inhibition of its breakdown. So you have just a heightened level of cognitive capacity through both the one-two punch.

The Science of Dosing and Formulation

JOE ROGAN: How did you determine these doses and what you were going to include and not include?

DEREK MUNRO: So a lot of it derived from the original capsule based formula. So back in 2021 I had already been using this thing for daily use essentially and it was something that was determined based upon years of experience, personal anecdotes.

But digging through hordes of clinical literature, ultimately there’s a lot of these compounds that have clinical studies on them for different applications. You can kind of sift through what are the efficacious dosages, where are they impactful or as a sustainable level you could actually take this long term without it being negatively impactful on, because sometimes if you overdo it in one area over time it might be problematic.

So trying to find the fine balance of where is a dose that moves the needle but isn’t going to kind of push you in too far of a negative direction that it’s unsustainable. Because sometimes this stuff, it’s a hammer solution. You might see an energy drink that’s 300, 350 caffeine and it’s, okay, you’ve essentially singled out a lot of the customers who might otherwise benefit from it. Even if there was other good stuff in the drink. It’s only stiff junkies can use it now.

So this is kind of the fine balance of what I thought to be the most sustainable version of balancing dopamine input, serotonergic activity, getting some of that anti-anxiety support and also getting a reasonable hit of caffeine.

JOE ROGAN: And did you, so in pill form, did you start out by using each individual supplement and then trying to use them in combination to see if there’s a synergistic effect? How did you do it over time?

DEREK MUNRO: I guess maybe that’s a bit more interesting than digging through literature, but when I was a university student, just being a nerd, mixing stuff in my kitchen, like a chemist essentially and just measuring raw powders back in the day.

What we would do or at least biohackers and what have you, we’d buy just off of different websites, raw bulk ingredients. And then you’d measure out with little micro spoons in these laboratory increments to try and get, okay, the microgram equivalent of this. And you’d make some disgusting shake with a concoction of different unflavored powder and create what is your ultimate kind of combination through trial and error, ultimately.

JOE ROGAN: And were you doing a diary like today? I feel great.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s just keeping a log almost, you know, working out, how did you respond to fill in the blank.

JOE ROGAN: Or take into account sleep, all these different factors, diet, as many variables.

Early Days of Nootropic Experimentation

DEREK MUNRO: At the time, obviously a bit more rudimentary and crude when you’re 21 years old and you’re just trying to get cognitively locked in to study for finals. But back then it was just what is the most impactful things that I’ve heard work?

And then also digging further into literature, looking on the limited forums that existed back then online, because it’s a lot more of a niche community back then. It’s not like this was years discussed. 2009, 2008.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, early days. Yeah, that’s when I first started f*ing around with them.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh yeah, Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I first found out about Neuro1. That was the first one I found out about. Did you ever try that?

DEREK MUNRO: That one, Neuro One?

JOE ROGAN: It’s Bill Romanowski’s company, the Football Player. So he developed it because he was having cognitive problems after years and years of playing football. And so he came up with this formulation.

And I was doing this radio show, Alice and No Name, in San Francisco, and No Name’s a dude. I forget his name, unfortunately. So long ago. But he was working out with Romanowski. Romanowski was trying to get him in shape, and he gave him this stuff. He said, “Hey, try it.”

And it was, you know, I do morning radio when you’re promoting. I was doing Cobbs Comedy Club. Whenever you’re doing a comedy club, you’d show. This is back in the day when radio meant something. You’d show up in the morning and you do the morning drive. And they would go, “Oh, Joe Rogan’s appearing at the comedy club this weekend. Come see him.” And you’d be funny on the radio and have a good time with the people.

And he gave it to me, and I was like, “Hey, man, this stuff feels like something’s going on. This is legit.” And that’s what really got me. And that’s how we developed Alpha Brain. We developed Alpha Brain after me trying out Neuro1, saying, “Can we optimize this? Is there another way to do this? Is there other forms that we’re missing?”

But your formulation seems very comprehensive and also f*ing delicious.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s one of the difficult things, too, is making it taste good while still being able to suspend the active ingredients because they could just fall out of suspension or myriad of different issues, carbonation problems. Even exploding cans in transit that you’re not predicting are going to react a certain way. Even the black lids, dude. It’s stuff you don’t even think of. But absorbing heat, it’s, “Oh, it’s going to be more prone to blowing up now because…”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, because of a black lid.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Did you want a black lid just for aesthetics?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. At the time, it was, “This looks cool.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And so what are you sweetening this stuff with?

Sweeteners and Side Effects

DEREK MUNRO: Primarily sucralose, which obviously, you know, some people have their opinions on it, and that’s totally fine and good. But in general, based on clinical literature, seems to be well tolerated.

JOE ROGAN: And what is the issue with it that people have?

DEREK MUNRO: I think some people think it depends on the person and the kind of content they make. Typically. And typically they have a bit of a bias. But in general, it’s, you know, going to irritate your gut. Or it could cause GI distress. And for some people with extremely sensitive gastrointestinal issues, it can for sure.

But in general, at the dosages used and just having it even conservatively, which most people are going to be, it’s pretty benign, at least from the literature I’ve seen.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things that we had noticed when we first came out with Alpha Brain was for some people, it’s a small amount, but for some people, they would get headaches and they felt terrible after taking it. I don’t know what their dose. I don’t know if they were taking the recommended dose or if they were saying, “Well, two’s good, I’ll take five.” There’s a lot of folks like that out there.

Velvet Bean Extract and Dopamine Overdose

DEREK MUNRO: But yeah, some of these, if you’re not careful, it could be pushing you into… We vetted this out beforehand, but one of the first formulations or prototypes of Gorilla Mind in the capsule form, we had something called velvet bean extract, which standardizes to L-Dopa. So like Levodopa is used for Parkinson’s patients because it’s a direct precursor to dopamine without a rate limiting step that kind of regulates the conversion.

So rather than using tyrosine, we thought, and we didn’t end up releasing it because of this, we could just go, okay, let’s get a straight precursor and see how impactful this thing is, because we really want it to hit. And oh my God, I had like dopamine overdose myself. Had my girlfriend at the time also f herself up and my parents fed themselves up. And somehow it didn’t occur until like three incidents later. I’m like, okay, this thing is unsustainable.

And I guess my business partners didn’t really even think worth mentioning, which was kind of crazy at the time because they just trusted me to do the formulations and whatnot. But they had the same experience and didn’t bring it up. And I’m like, guys, we can’t release this sh. It was just way too intense.

JOE ROGAN: What did it do to you?

DEREK MUNRO: Just makes you extremely nauseous. You feel like you have to keel over on a couch and just lie there until you feel like you can actually regain composure and start moving around again.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Dopamine, a lot of people think more is better. More motivation, more drive, more, you know, the more the better is what a lot of people think. But similar to, probably even worse than stimulants because at least stimulants, you have kind of a direct biofeedback through your heart rate’s going through the roof, and you’re getting the anxiety with dopamine.

If you overdo it with something that you can’t rate limit either, you just get sick and you just end up having to lie down for hours.

Dosing Flexibility: Drinks vs Pills

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. One thing I like about a drink versus a pill form is that you can just take a little.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, you can meter your dose.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because you take a pill, you’re taking a pill.

DEREK MUNRO: That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t, unless you want to cut pills in half or pour some of the capsule out. No one’s doing that. But this is nice because you could just kind of sip a little bit of it. How many of these can you drink in a day?

DEREK MUNRO: I could drink a lot, personally. You don’t even want to know, dude.

JOE ROGAN: How many do you drink a day?

DEREK MUNRO: On a typical day, probably two to three, but I was recommended… Oh, check the warning label, bro.

JOE ROGAN: What does the warning label say, bro?

DEREK MUNRO: It must say no more than two a day, but I would say on a podcast, not more than one is what I would recommend.

JOE ROGAN: Well, especially with all that caffeine as well.

Caffeine Dosing and Performance Enhancement

DEREK MUNRO: You never know in general. 400 milligrams is even like the FDA stated, you know, everyone’s going to be okay, probably dose. But in reality, it’s kind of crazy. A lot of people don’t realize the studies done for caffeine induced performance enhancement are all looking at like three to six milligrams a kilogram, which is, unless you’re a tiny woman, 400, 500, 600 milligrams are the doses that actually really move the needle when it comes to acute performance enhancement.

JOE ROGAN: Chael Sonnen used to take it in pill form.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because he was saying that there’s a level where they’ll test you. Well, you’ll pop. Where they’ll say, okay, you’re in a stimulant level. Like, you took a stimulant before you fought.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. They had threshold concentrations that they would deem inappropriately high, perhaps for safety, perhaps because they thought it was an unfair advantage. It’s kind of…

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s what they were looking at it.

DEREK MUNRO: It kind of depends, though, because I think it was removed. And I don’t think that threshold exists anymore, except in the NCAA. I’d have to revisit it, but I’m pretty sure caffeine is essentially, you could go full bore at this point.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. So five, 600 milligrams was what the efficacious dose was.

DEREK MUNRO: So you can get performance enhancement as low as I think some people was like a milligram per kilogram. It depends on the person and tolerance of course, but in general the most tried and true studies when it comes to repeatable high impact with a proportional relative lack of side effects, but not none, was like three to six milligrams a kilogram. And some of the studies go even higher than that.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. And what are the benefits? Like what did they get?

DEREK MUNRO: Like acute strength enhancements, offsetting any sleep induced deprivation performance outcomes. Mentally you can pretty much offset like a sh*y night of sleep and all the kind of detriment to your performance via a pretty solid dose of caffeine.

Yeah, most of the stuff is kind of energy acutely offsetting performance decrement related. But also in a context of strength, high intensity activity, you can absolutely get a benefit from it. And there’s a reason why, you know, sprinters will take Modafinil or high dose caffeine or power lifters will take massive doses of pre-workout before lift or whatnot. It’s all impactful for your cycle state to get really locked in in a hyper vigilant state to really max out on what you’re trying to do, whatever it may be.

Creatine Dosing and Sleep Deprivation

JOE ROGAN: I had a podcast the other day with Chris Masterjohn. Do you know who he is?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, he’s great.

JOE ROGAN: Great. And we were talking about the impact of creatine and they’re trying to figure out what is the correct dose. And a lot of people are going 20, 30. They’re getting pretty high because recommended was like five milligrams, I think. And now everyone’s saying actually the real benefits are at 20 and at least 10.

But you’re getting a lot of what happens when people have sleep deprivation. And I’ll butcher the science so I won’t try to repeat it. And I recommend anybody listen to the episode. But what he was essentially saying was it bypasses all the problems that occur and you could at least have a bridge to your performance would not be impeded by a lack of sleep, at least for a temporary, for a day or whatever.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, definitely want to touch on that. But one thing to mention on the caffeine too is I think a lot of people, when they hear the stuff like, you know, I heard you can go up to 20 grams of creatine or the highest impact dose in caffeine literature is three to six milligrams a kilogram, it’s not like I, or I imagine Chris is blindly recommending anybody start there.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

DEREK MUNRO: And it could easily get misconstrued that way in a clippable format. If people will just hear the headline and then run with it. You should start as low as you can with caffeine and you could get an ergogenic effect as low as, I think the lowest dose was like 50 to 100 milligrams, probably, if you equate it to body weight.

But it’s all tolerance dependent. It’s just when you look at the studies, these are the repeatable high impact outcomes are typically in, and especially in trained athletes where you’re trying to see how hard you can push them. It’s kind of like, you know, for max stress resilience, max acute force production, these are the kind of dosages that are just used in the studies.

So anyway, with that caveat and same with the creatine, you know, you might sh yourself if you go to 20 right away. You don’t want to start there.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people do, apparently.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, and I mean Rhonda Patrick, amazing content and she tolerates 20 grams well, which is kind of surprising, because I know a lot of women who don’t. I think she probably micro doses it throughout the day and is really regimented about making sure she’s diligently spreading it out. But some people who they bomb 20 at a time, even guys who think they have iron stomachs…

JOE ROGAN: And it’s so much powder, too. Just the fact that you’re consuming all this powder.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Speaking of which, are you still doing the million gummies a day?

JOE ROGAN: Of what?

DEREK MUNRO: Of creatine. You said you were going to crank that sh up to get that 20 grams.

Creatine Gummies vs Powder

JOE ROGAN: I stopped with the gummies and I went to powdered form.

DEREK MUNRO: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Because I felt like I’m tired of eating these f*ing things.

DEREK MUNRO: You got up to like, what, like 10 plus a day? Oh, more.

JOE ROGAN: I was eating like 15 a day. 15 gummies a day. But the issue is, what else is in the gummies? You know, what are the other things?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, they’re not gelatin and calories either. It’s kind of just like if I’m going to eat candy, you know, kind of want it to be good candy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I don’t even know what it’s sweetened with. They taste good. But the point was, is I didn’t like eating them. I was eating, I’m forcing myself to chew these things down. Like, what am I doing? I can just mix creatine in a glass of water, stir it up real quick, and just chug it in five seconds and we’re done. I don’t have to chew and swallow all these stupid f*ing gummies.

I know, but I do keep them. I keep them around because I think it’s a great thing. If I hadn’t had enough lately, I’ll just pop a few.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s like the best gateway drug, if you can even call it. It’s not like a drug, but to get people who otherwise would never try it to actually see the benefits of it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

DEREK MUNRO: So I know so many women who literally refuse to take the powder because…

JOE ROGAN: Right.

DEREK MUNRO: Even though it’s kind of tasteless, it’s still a nuisance. Can be a little bit messy, depending on the scooper shape of it and everything. And how you’re going to try to convince a chick like, trust me, it’s really good for your health. If you fing swig this thing dry and then chase it with water every day, it’s not the easiest sell. Every time they’re like, f you, I don’t care.

So the gummies are good for that in my opinion. And yeah, I mean we’re going back to the 20 grams and the offsetting of performance deteriorations. I do think it’s basically offsetting kind of the deficiencies in ATP production, especially locally in the brain, and also kind of offsetting the pulling of resources away from methylation support and whatnot in order to produce the endogenous creatine as well.

These things can all be impactful to kind of get you back to almost baseline. So if you’re in a deteriorated state, being able to offset the performance decrements from an otherwise sleep deprived state or you’re traveling or what have you, it can absolutely be super impactful and the literature has shown that time and time again.

Creatine’s Evolution from “Cheating” to Mainstream

JOE ROGAN: What’s interesting is that creatine in the 1990s was thought of like steroids.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean it was really frowned upon. Like, oh my God, someone’s taking creatine, they’re cheating. It was really, that’s how it was first introduced to the market.

DEREK MUNRO: You have to hide it from your parents when you’re a teenager.

JOE ROGAN: Really.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Well, at least when I was a teenager it was kind of like it had a taboo still. It was like, you know, kind of like steroids, light version.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s because it works.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And parents, but they hear the stigma and the taboo associated like I heard creatine, they’re selling it at the GNCs.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: You know, better watch out for that one.

JOE ROGAN: Meanwhile they had real steroids at GNC.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh yeah, the irony too. Yeah, I mean they’re like fing M1Ts over the counter from you know, like some 19 year old kid who’s just like manning the counter and doesn’t care and like f your endocrine system up.

JOE ROGAN: To sell it to you 100%. I took some stuff called Mag 10. Do you remember that?

DEREK MUNRO: If I saw the ingredient deck, I’m sure it’s just like some f*ing run in the mill 1T product or something.

JOE ROGAN: Gained like 10 solid pounds of muscle in a month.

DEREK MUNRO: And I bet your liver markers, not that you did blood work back then, were destroyed. Yeah, like worse than if you took like injectable tren even.

JOE ROGAN: Right? Right.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, 100%, it killed my dick afterwards too. When I got off of it, I was like, what’s going on? And I was like, oh, this is a real steroid.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And that’s like, you’re not giving the PCT from the guy at the counter.

JOE ROGAN: I felt like a f*ing gorilla when I was taking it. I felt so strong when I was taking it. I literally gained. I think it was like I was on it for five or six weeks, and I gained 10 solid pounds of muscle.

DEREK MUNRO: The amount of people that have inadvertently gotten gynecomastia from those days when they were sold some irresponsible pro hormone over the counter without, like, any knowledge of what they were taking, and then had to just recover naturally with no support. It’s a shame.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, there was so much of that stuff, like werewolf blast.

DEREK MUNRO: There was dragon’s dick.

JOE ROGAN: You could buy them. And they were just pills. They were just regular pills.

The Wild West of Stimulants and Supplements

DEREK MUNRO: The stimulants are crazy, too. Like, ephedrine was over the counter and, like, so weird. But in Canada, for relatively recently, even, it was still available over the counter. Even though Canada is, like, super tight on regulation when it comes to the most weird stuff.

Like, when it comes to caffeine, you can’t even have a can with 200 milligrams. It has to be, like, 180 or lower. Why exactly? I don’t know, but that is a thing. As well as limitations on basic amino acids. It’s like tyrosine if it’s more than, like, 10 milligrams or something.

JOE ROGAN: Amino acids, yeah. That’s hilarious.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s very.

JOE ROGAN: Based on what?

DEREK MUNRO: Nonsense.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God. But nanny state.

DEREK MUNRO: But anyway, so ephedrine, for whatever reason, was still over the counter available in GNCs up until like, a handful of years ago. And it was, you know, the best seller in GNCs and a lot of supplement stores. Not just because it worked as, you know, like a bronco dilator, but also because people were buying it in bulk to make meth.

JOE ROGAN: I believe it. I took Rip fuel once for Jiu Jitsu, right before Jiu Jitsu, and I had to stop in the middle of class. I was like, I got to sit down. I pulled over to the side of my guys, My fing heart is beating out of my chest. And I was explaining. I don’t remember how many I took, but I took some Rip fuel. I was like, well, it’s good to lift with. I’ll try it for Jiu Jitsu. It’s fing. For something that, like, really taxes your cardiovascular system. It was horrendous.

DEREK MUNRO: Wrestling horrid. Like, 120.

JOE ROGAN: Right away, I was tired. Like, right away. Like, right away, like, we start rolling. I was like, God, I’m f*ing exhausted. My heart’s beating out of my chest.

DEREK MUNRO: But in your brain, you’re like, this feels good.

JOE ROGAN: I knew I f*ed up. I knew I did it once and I never did it again.

DEREK MUNRO: If you’re doing that, sport. But for a guy who’s going to the gym and is told like, this is the s*, bro.

JOE ROGAN: If you’re just lifting. Yeah. If you’re just going for, like, max bench, that kind of s*, anybody watching will know you know the original. Have you heard of Jack 3D?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I took that too.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. She was nuts. And what’s crazy, too, is back then it was proprietary blends on a lot of the products, and it was still the norm with no education available, no YouTube to really tell you what to look for.

JOE ROGAN: So no oversight.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So these companies would basically sell you for, you know, 50 bucks a tub of, like, a powder flavored tub of just, like, the stimulant. And then it was like, like, all the other ingredients for vasodilation, they’re like, f* you. You’re just getting DMAA, bro. Nothing. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You were just getting, like, straight meth.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. There was so much. Those were the wild west days of, like, GNCs and, like, local vitamin shops.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because you could get stuff that really worked. Like, worked like something that’s highly illegal and you could buy with a credit card.

DEREK MUNRO: And the sales tactics were just, like, so ruthless, but you couldn’t really prove them otherwise.

JOE ROGAN: It was always like a pit bull with, like, giant muscles on the cover of it with, like, lightning bolts.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s funny too, because some of these companies, it’s like, now we’re in the mix, competing with them on shelves or whatever. But I remember being, like, convinced back when I was a teenager by them, oh, you need, you know, GAKIC, LEUKIC, and Cre Kick and this combo that cost 250 bucks.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: And it’s like, you know, literally pressed tablets of, like, glutamine or something at a dose that doesn’t even help. And they’re telling me, like, this is what Jay Cutler used to f*ing prep for the Olympia.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. He’s like, look at the before and after of Lee Priest. He lost, like, 50 pounds of pure fat and kept all his muscle from Celtech.

The Deception of Bodybuilding’s Golden Era

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s the dirty thing about those bodybuilders. Back in the days, they couldn’t admit they were on gear. So they were all just telling you they were taking this stuff and then they would be spokespeople for it. And it’s. God, it was so deceptive. It was so creepy.

And you’d have to know someone at the gym who would, you know, I would just want to be like Lee Haney. Like, no, that’s not how he got that way. Yeah, you got to take the real stuff. He’s, this is what he’s actually taking. And so many people didn’t think that those bodybuilders were on like hardcore steroids.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, a lot of. Yeah, it’s a deception at a mass scale for sure.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know the whole sport. Yeah, the whole sport was just a complete like three card Monty game.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s crazy because now it’s almost full circle because, you know, I was back then, you know, convinced, at least at the time when I didn’t know any better. Oh, you know, I guess this guy must be natural because he told me so or whatever. And it’s like I’m skeptical but like, and you know, you, in hindsight it’s absolutely ridiculous.

But now a lot of bodybuilders are pretty forthcoming because it’s more normal to be transparent and also not mislead people and, you know, unethically sell things and just reality check people on the what it’s going to take to be at that level and the risk you want to, you know, subject yourself to.

Because back in the day too, it was like you didn’t know if you had good genetics or not when it came to certain dosage responses. So you would like always think the next guy’s just taking more than you. It would result in guys unspokenly thinking this guy must just be taking 5x the amount of s* I’m on. So I need to go to like 5 to 10 grams of total gear per week now. And you would just like, that’s what led to so many early deaths in bodybuilding too.

JOE ROGAN: So I think there’s another thing, another factor is that the consequences of lying and getting caught now are huge. Because if you lose all credibility and people know that you’re just a bulls* artist and then they’ll never trust you again. Like, you have one chance to tell the truth forever.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the moment you violate that, you’re always a liar. And that’s, that’s a giant fing issue with, with whether it’s actors or anybody. You know, like all these guys who prep for roles and they’re talking about it now like, oh, I took Anavar, I took this like Mickey Rourke did when he was talking about that movie the Wrestler, you know, I remember they were asking him on whatever talk show he was on, he’s like I fing took everything. What are you talking about? I took.

DEREK MUNRO: That guy was a pioneer of interviews for that kind of stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s a wild dude. He’ll tell the truth. Yeah. But you have one chance to tell the truth forever.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You violate that and you’re always going to be a bulls* artist. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: A guy who’s pretty good about that now is Frank Grillo.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: He was doing some like men’s health thing and I have never seen men’s health talk about steroids forthcomingly.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So they had him on in a sit down interview and they were like, so, you know, what’s it take to be just recent? Yeah. So last year, within the last year.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

DEREK MUNRO: If not months ago.

JOE ROGAN: Is this when he was talking about Anavar?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, he talked about his TRT protocol and kind of like the realities of how impactful it actually is and improving his performance and how it makes him feel. And he was just like pretty non sugar coated about it.

Hollywood Gets Real About Performance Enhancement

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s a good example because he was clean for a long time.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like he had like very low testosterone because he was just going on willpower. He was really just, just working out on willpower. Action star lifts the lid on fitness recovery and the reality behind the scenes physiques. Frank Grillo 60 gets real about Hollywood steroid use. They all do it well. That is a fact.

But he was not on anything for a long time, like deep into his 50s. And he got his testosterone. He’s good friends of Brian Callan and you know, he got his testosterone taken. It was f*ing nothing. He had like zero. But he was just very disciplined and working out hard.

But he didn’t look like he was on gear. He just looked like he was ripped. He was like shredded. He was like in really good shape because he trained every f*ing day. And he was doing a lot of boxing, so a lot of like heavy caloric expenditure. A lot of like long rounds, hitting the bag, hitting mitts, doing sparring. You know, you’re going to burn off so much calories and also you’re going to like your, your metabolism is going to be like completely jacked.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So then for him to talk about, okay, now I got on this and then I got on that and this is the improvements. My sleep, my mood, everything got better. Because you know, he’s talked about as like his testosterone. When he got a test, it was super low.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s probably one of the few examples actually still to this day though of somebody being like really transparent. I actually saw the Rock talking about Peptide use recently, which is kind of like a.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. Dipping his toes in the water.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: He’s lost a ton of weight, man.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, dude. Yeah. Kind of crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Hollywood Transformations and Health Risks

DEREK MUNRO: And there’s a lot of speculation about if it’s like a health thing or what. But that’s tough to know because he just had the role where he gained the most eyes he ever has, too.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right. But that had to be terrible for him.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, for sure. But it’s like, would you have subjected yourself to that if you knew? I don’t know if he would have known. But you would think proactively he would know how close he is to kind of like an issue, being probably pretty close.

JOE ROGAN: 50 years old and getting up to 300 pounds. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: I just mean, I think he probably had more preventative screening before that role to know he could even subject himself to it without dying, because it’s like a pretty risky endeavor to go become the biggest you’ve ever been at that age.

So to then downsize after, the theory is that he was literally about to die, essentially, so that’s why he lost so much weight now. And I’m thinking, I think maybe he’s just trying to take like a health phase and kind of come down and wait for a bit, and he’ll probably crank it back up.

JOE ROGAN: Honestly, I think just—this is pure speculation. I haven’t talked to him about this. I think based on what he tried to do with the Smashing Machine, I think he’s trying to win an Oscar. He’s trying to be a real actor because he was really good in that movie. Did you see it?

DEREK MUNRO: Not yet. Planning on it, though.

The Smashing Machine: A Breakthrough Performance

JOE ROGAN: It’s the best mixed martial arts movie ever. That’s not saying a lot because they all suck, but it is the most accurate in terms of historical matches. They had all the matches with Igor Vovchanchyn, all these different people that he fought, that Mark Kerr actually fought. And it’s just a good movie. It’s a really good movie.

Emily Blunt plays his crazy girlfriend, and she’s out of her fing mind. And to the point where they’re arguing right before he fights and you’re getting anxiety watching, like, “Oh, gee, Christ.” It’s just such a crazy, toxic relationship. It is Emily Blunt, right? I didn’t f that up, did I? There it is. She’s f*ing great in it, too.

It’s just a really good movie that I think would have gotten a lot more credit if it wasn’t a mixed martial arts movie. Because I think, you know, mixed martial arts movies like, “Oh, it’s some f*ing meathead, like rah, rah, rah bullshit.”

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Movie. But it’s a very good movie. And he is Mark Kerr.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, he’s so accurate.

JOE ROGAN: So good. Yeah, he just—and not just the fighting stuff, man, the fighting stuff was great. But the acting stuff, he played that guy and I know Mark. I was like, “F*, that’s Mark. That’s nuts.” It was so good. It was a really good movie. So what I think he’s doing is the same thing Bautista’s doing.

DEREK MUNRO: Dave Bautista, quite inverse.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Dave Bautista lost a lot of weight too.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, but I guess, I mean typically when actors are trying to get taken more seriously for more impactful, like artsy creative roles, it’s almost like the jacked meathead guy downsizes to do something more, you know, artsy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: But this is getting as yoked as possible in order to be the artist.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right.

DEREK MUNRO: Whereas Bautista is fully downsized, I think now.

The Reality of Performance Enhancement

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but I think what I’m saying is now, I think he’s probably trying to get different kinds of roles. Roles where, I mean, if you’ve ever met him—no, he looks like a superhero. He looks like a superhero. We worked out together. He came to the gym and I brought a bunch of comedians. We worked out and hung out. Tony Hinchcliffe was in his glory because you know, he loves pro wrestling. We’re all in the sauna together hanging out.

DEREK MUNRO: It was the first time he probably still doesn’t know that he uses gear.

JOE ROGAN: What’s that?

DEREK MUNRO: He probably still doesn’t know that he uses gear.

JOE ROGAN: What do you mean?

DEREK MUNRO: Hinchcliffe is just like, oh, Hinchcliffe doesn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he knows he uses gear.

DEREK MUNRO: I still remember the episode where he was dumbfounded that you and Schaub thought that he was doing anything.

JOE ROGAN: He is locked into being a 12-year-old pro wrestling fan for the rest of his life. It’s like a religious thing for him. It’s like, you know, Mary was a virgin, she gave birth to Jesus. I’m not kidding. He f*ing loves pro wrestling so much that he is completely locked in.

DEREK MUNRO: He’s a good example though of a reasonably in-the-know guy who has friends in the space too. You and Schaub know about this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: Even he was surprised that you guys thought that at the time.

JOE ROGAN: It’s funny yeah, it is funny when you think about it.

DEREK MUNRO: So imagine just the average person, they probably, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And also he’s, you know, been very coy about it and saying—actually not really coy, probably deceptive.

DEREK MUNRO: Right. Just strategically perfect in his tactics when it comes to avoiding it.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, that’s the best way to describe it. Instead of saying, “I’ve never taken steroids,” he’s kind of like, “Look over there.” But everybody who knows knows, you know, it’s one of those things. It’s like you look at them, you’re like, “There’s no way. There’s no way. There’s just no way.”

DEREK MUNRO: I think I can’t imagine talking about peptides and putting the feelers out there would not eventually transition to, you know, “It was recommended to me by my doctor to be on hormone support or whatever.”

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I mean, you’re kind of in that realm talking about it at this point.

JOE ROGAN: You know, just come out and say it. I’ve always just come out and said it. I don’t see any problem with it, but I don’t have that kind of a reputation. The problem with the pro wrestling thing is you’re a role model for the youth and you know, you have to, especially a guy like that, he’s a giant movie star. You don’t want to be telling everybody you’re on gear.

DEREK MUNRO: He probably wasn’t for a big chunk of his early career.

JOE ROGAN: In his early career, right? Yeah, his early career. I don’t think he was.

DEREK MUNRO: But I guess the problem is when you’re like, “When I really became successful is when I just sauced my a off.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the thing. When he became a superhero. I mean, the first time I met him, he had cowboy boots on, so he’s even taller and he just looked like a brick. I’m like, “This isn’t even a real person. This is not a real person. This is a superhero.”

Downsizing and Sustainability

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy, dude, but I think he’s still jacked. It’s just proportionally, relative to what he was, you know, it’s kind of like anybody who used to be a bodybuilder or had significant amounts of size, even me. People in my videos are like, “Where’d you go? You’ve lost everything.” It’s like, okay, I’m not non-existent anymore. I’m just not a bodybuilder anymore. You know what I mean?

So with him, it’s like, he’s still yoked. He’s 230, 240 or whatever.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The thing is, super gear heads will always criticize. “Oh, you look f*ing chick now.” They get crazy. They said that about Bautista, too, but he’s 240.

DEREK MUNRO: I think he’s just going to stop wearing the weird tapered Gucci suits. It just makes him look a little bit more slender than—it’s not complementary to his physique. He’s still jacked.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but it is complementary if you didn’t know what he used to look like. Yeah, that’s what’s crazy. You look at him, the guy looks f*ing great.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, objectively, if you look at it with no baseline, pull up a—

JOE ROGAN: Photo of Dave Bautista now.

DEREK MUNRO: And he’s also just getting older. There’s got to be some level where you get acceptance of, “Okay, you’re allowed to downsize so you don’t die.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you could die. That’s the thing. If you’re pushing gear at that age. So there’s—yeah. Look at Bautista on the right. You wouldn’t say that’s a small guy. You know, that’s not a small guy. He’s a big f*ing dude, but he’s just slimmer now. He looks like, if you saw an MMA fighter like Alex Pereira, you don’t think Alex Pereira’s small.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but you know, he’s 240 pounds. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: If he was bodybuilding for a while and then decided to convert to, you know, MMA, that’s the thing.

JOE ROGAN: But he also got—that’s what he looks like now. That’s not a small guy.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, he’s—I don’t know how old, but—

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that’s 2025. He’s got to be 50. 56. 56. So that’s—he’s fing shredded. He looks fing gigantic. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I think he actually did a role recently where he bulked up. Yeah. I think about it, he went to fat weight, too, which is crazy.

Extreme Transformations for Roles

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that was Glass Onion. Is that what it was called? There was some movie that he did. Was a really good movie. It was a movie where some billionaire had everybody come to his island for some crazy party and there was a murder. What was that called? That was Glass Onion.

DEREK MUNRO: Right.

JOE ROGAN: He was huge for Glass Onion. He got gigantic. He got big for something else, too. But I think he was playing—I don’t remember what his role was—but playing some former athlete or something along those lines.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, he was housey. Dude.

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird when you get really big for a movie that sucks. You know what I mean? Or kill yourself for a movie that sucks.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I hope it did well. Jesus.

JOE ROGAN: Christian Bale did that for the Machinist. He almost died.

DEREK MUNRO: 75 pounds he gained for Knock at the Cabin.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s what it is. What was that movie? Show me what that looked like. Oh, yeah, Knock at the Cabin. What was that movie? A horror movie? I did not watch it.

DEREK MUNRO: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: A horror movie, huh?

DEREK MUNRO: Do you watch horror movies?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. I love a good horror movie. He was 315. Yeah. Jesus. So now he’s 240. Yeah. It’s much, much more sustainable. Yeah, but that’s a weird weight. What the f did he eat to get that big? And again, he probably did that at 52, which is fing dangerous. Yeah, you probably got sleep apnea. You’re all f*ed up.

Yeah, Charlize Theron did that too, recently. She did it for Monster.

DEREK MUNRO: I know. No, again.

JOE ROGAN: She did it again. Don’t do that, Charlize. Oh, God. That’s real. Yeah. What is it for?

DEREK MUNRO: I forget the movie. I just saw this photo the other day.

JOE ROGAN: I think some women, they’re probably—a lady like her, they’re probably—Tully. I don’t know what that is.

DEREK MUNRO: Might not be new. I just saw.

JOE ROGAN: It’s such a flex when you’re a hot lady. They get fat and gross. And when she did Monster, she shaved her eyebrows off.

DEREK MUNRO: Did you see the Sydney Sweeney boxing?

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t see that.

DEREK MUNRO: Not that she got fat and gross, but she gained some weight.

JOE ROGAN: Did she? Yeah, that movie got zero attention. The Christy Martin movie.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because it was three decades past when anybody gave a sh*t. You know what I mean?

Hollywood Transformations and Body Transformations

DEREK MUNRO: I at least got the impression. I haven’t watched it, so I could be way off base, that it was kind of like one of those artistic kind of like, probably looked at my versatility in roles kind of thing.

JOE ROGAN: In that movie, did she gain weight? They might have put her in a fight.

DEREK MUNRO: Well, they said she gained like 30 pounds of muscle or something, which is like the typical headline nonsense.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Horseshit.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, but she definitely took it seriously and gained the weight that she needed to look whatever the role was, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: That’s such a weird thing, the acting world. You have to change your… Like, Robert De Niro was the first guy to do it for Raging Bull.

DEREK MUNRO: You remember Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, but that was a fat suit.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah, yeah.

The Last Great Comedy Before Woke Culture

JOE ROGAN: I mean, because they made his forearms fat, they shaved his head. He was fing great in that movie. Oh, f, what a movie. That was the last bang before woke. That was the last movie that you could ever do like that before woke kicked in and essentially ruined great comedies because you couldn’t go too far. You can’t do that anymore. You just get in trouble.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s like back then, if you were to ask, okay, have a hit list of just ready to laugh your ass off movies that are just low effort. You don’t have to think too much. You can just sit down and enjoy. There’s a bunch of bangers from back then. It’s like nowadays, I don’t even know what to go to.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t happen anymore. Like the Farrelly brothers movies, like Kingpin. F*ing great movie. There’s Something About Mary. There’s so many of those outrageous, outrageous, hysterical movies that it was funny.

I asked Robert Downey Jr., I go, you couldn’t do blackface in a movie today. He goes, “Oh, you could do it, but what would happen afterwards is the big deal.” He got it in like… It’s like the scene in a movie where the elevator door closes right before the monster gets to you. Yeah, he got there just in time and it was perfect timing where he didn’t suffer from it.

DEREK MUNRO: No. Yeah, it’s crazy to see the Delta and just I don’t even know what to watch when I go on Netflix now.

JOE ROGAN: Well, with comedies it’s really f*ing hard. It’s really hard. The only thing that’s really wild and free is stand up comedy. Like, to do a comedy movie and just go full Tropic Thunder is almost impossible today.

But if somebody did it, if somebody just self financed it, oh my God, it would f*ing kill. Who’d make so much money and then open up the floodgates because people still want that. They still love… It’s not that you agree with everything these people are saying and doing. It’s comedy.

Like, I don’t agree with John Wick killing everybody. But he’s not really killing everybody. Like, it’s a f*ing movie. And it used to be that you knew that when you went into these movies before, everybody was looking for everything to potentially be offended by. Yeah, it’s just ruined everything.

What’s Worth Watching Now

DEREK MUNRO: What do you watch now?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t watch comedies anymore.

DEREK MUNRO: But just in general. Do you have any kind of just low barrier? Just I sit down and turn my brain off.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, there’s a lot of great stuff. You know what I watched last night? Jamie, you recommended Pluribus. Is that what it’s called?

DEREK MUNRO: Only watch the first episode. What a weird show, right?

JOE ROGAN: Holy shit, is it good? Holy shit, is it good? It’s a new Apple show and I don’t want to give away too much, but it has something to do with aliens. And aliens send a transmission to Earth and there’s this insane impact on society, but it’s total left field movie. You don’t see it coming. It’s crazy or not. Movies, television show.

And again, like Jamie, I’ve only seen the first episode, but it’s great. It’s like, holy shit, he’s giving you anxiety. It’s so good.

DEREK MUNRO: Did you guys watch… What was that other Apple show? That was really good. It was in an office setting. I can’t believe I’m forgetting. Severance. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Severance is great. Especially the first episode or the first season. First season was great. After a while, they get a little weird because you’re running this very strange game that you’re doing. These people remember and don’t remember, and then you’re f*ing with the guy’s head so he can remember, and then he…

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, what about Stranger Things and It. Those are two that my girlfriend has me watching right now.

JOE ROGAN: I watched the first episode of Stranger Things last night as well. Or yesterday as well. That was great.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s… Dude, it’s kind of crazy how much time is between these seasons now. It’s like, you finish. I almost can’t… Don’t want to commit to something because it’s like, well, if I like it, yeah, f* you to me two years from now, three years.

JOE ROGAN: Game of Thrones, it’s a great example of that.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, dude. House of Dragon. Good luck seeing the next season, bro.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, unfortunately with House of Dragons, it’s got to follow Game of Thrones, which is one of the best series of all time. And the characters just aren’t as compelling for whatever reason. And so I don’t know who the f* anybody is. So the new season starts. I’m like, who’s that?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, and maybe I just have monkey brain, but I’m watching. I’m like, I didn’t see a dragon the whole f*ing episode. I feel ripped off.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I need a dragon. I need that dragon to f*ing kill somebody, you need to burn somebody alive. Yeah, it’s… There’s a lot of great shows now, but again, it’s very hard to make a great comedy.

You can make a great mindless entertainment, fun show. Slow Horses. That’s a great show. That’s… Is that an Apple show? I believe it is, yeah. That’s another Apple show with Gary Oldman. It’s a spy. MI5 or MI… What is it? MI5. What do they call themselves? MI5.

DEREK MUNRO: The number is the person.

The Golden Age of Streaming Content

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s whatever. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s a spy show. British spy show. That’s a really good show. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of great shows to watch. There’s… I think it’s probably the best time ever for content. If you just want to sit and be entertained. It’s probably the best time ever because the streaming.

Because streaming instead of one episode, you’re watching a show and it takes place over an hour, and then the next episode is totally different. Totally different subject line, different story. No, it’s like the thing you get locked into these characters like Sopranos, I think was the first one to really do that excellently and drag it out over many, many seasons where you have this running storyline.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah, I’m kind of just tuned out of TV at this point. I just watch what my girlfriend wants to watch and Stranger Things and It is the thing right now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I watched the new It show. Yeah, I watched the first episode of that, too. That looks great.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s oddly overlapping with the Stranger Things. I feel like I’m kind of watching the same show. Obviously, totally different overall stories, but you have kids and these kind of evil things and… Yeah, I don’t want to wreck an episode, but they mentioned it. Not specifically It, but a story about an extraterrestrial evil being. Called It in a Stranger Things episode. I’m like, this is a weird f*ing reference for these being at the same time right now.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, they probably didn’t plan that out, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I don’t know, man.

JOE ROGAN: What is it called? Welcome to Derry. So what it’s called? Yeah, the new one. But it’s good. That’s good, too.

DEREK MUNRO: The release date scheduling makes absolutely no sense for Stranger Things too. It’s in batches. And the next batch is coming out on Christmas, and then the final one is New Year’s.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the exact times you probably can bang out all the episodes. Or you’re going to have to force your family to sit there with you.

DEREK MUNRO: What’s that?

JOE ROGAN: High school kids can.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, high school kids can. Vacations.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think Stranger Things is so big. They could f*ing watch at 3 o’clock in the morning and it would still get 30 million views.

DEREK MUNRO: But just such a weird choice. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just weird that it takes so long to make one of those damn things that you have to wait three years in between seasons. And then you have these kids that are playing 15 year olds now. They’re f*ing 30. Yeah. It’s kind of weird.

DEREK MUNRO: You can tell some of them. It’s like, how do we make you look as young as possible?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you give them goofy haircuts and… And then there’s also, spoiler alert, there’s some computer generated imaging so that they’re using some sort of an AI program to make scenes with the kids when they were young. And you kind of can tell, but you kind of can’t tell. It’s really good.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah. Nowadays it’s like you feel like you just AI generate the whole thing, but yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s getting close. It’s getting to the point where there’s no excuse for waiting three years because you could have AI generate scripts and do it in an hour.

F1 Racing Drama

DEREK MUNRO: What about F1? You guys following it at all right now? The show or the actual racing?

JOE ROGAN: I went to the F1 that was in Austin. It was amazing.

DEREK MUNRO: This year?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: It’s awesome.

DEREK MUNRO: I think right now it’s the first time in the last 15 years they’ve had three drivers coming down to the final race to win the championship between them. And the final race is this weekend.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really? Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s like, where is it? I think it’s in… Is it in Abu Dhabi? I don’t know. That might have been the race that just happened, but it was nuts, dude. It’s because right now you had McLaren who was a shoe in to have their main driver, or at least the guy who is in the lead, take it.

But they’re refusing to favor one over the other, which is a typical strategy for whoever’s in the lead. You’ll have the other one kind of block people for them to make sure they win the driver’s championship.

JOE ROGAN: They’re refusing to do that?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. They’re making sure they can have equal opportunities to win. But the net result might now be none of them win and a guy from Red Bull takes the thing.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s crazy. Is it because the drivers aren’t willing to do that? I guess.

DEREK MUNRO: But also just lack of enforcement from the pit boss, team guy who’s supposed to be enforcing team principles and whatnot.

JOE ROGAN: It is kind of funky that that’s how you win. You have someone, it’s a team game.

DEREK MUNRO: I mean there’s team generated points between the two drivers which can result in the team championship. But the thing that most people actually care about is who’s the best driver in the world.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

DEREK MUNRO: And that will be coming down to one person. Even if it’s a guy from a team that won the thing, they’re still competing against each other. And sometimes they can get pretty reckless where one is not willing to compromise and he’ll blow the whole thing up to make sure that he has the best opportunity.

Understandably. But it’s also like, you guys are getting paid tens of millions of dollars. Maybe you should listen to your f*ing guy who’s telling you what to do.

Formula 1 Strategy and Technology

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I get it. But then again if you’re on another team, you’re like, well, this is kind of bullshit, because this guy didn’t really win the race. He won the race because his friends blocked everybody.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, fair enough. But I mean, part of it is kind of like that. It’s part of the strategy.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I get it. I get it. But maybe we should abandon that strategy because if it is a race.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I guess it’s just problematic because it’s so bandwidth intensive, too, to manage the two drivers that if they’re equally trying to win and only one is more likely to. What may very well happen on this weekend is they both don’t win.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So I got a tour of the McLaren pit last year, and they showed me all the different technology that’s involved, and they gave me a rundown of how much engineering is involved in these things and explained everything. It’s crazy. They’re all just trying to shave tenths of seconds out of turns, and then it all accumulates over the course of the race.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s pretty psychotic. When you look at what the differential is and what really separates these guys, it’s often just minuscule amounts and just the littlest mistake, you know?

JOE ROGAN: What are those guys on? That’s what I want to know. Do they test them?

DEREK MUNRO: They are tested, but not to the rigor of an Olympic.

JOE ROGAN: Do they test them for Gorilla Mind?

DEREK MUNRO: I’m sure they’re probably using it.

JOE ROGAN: This is probably a good thing for them to take.

DEREK MUNRO: Probably for something that’s not banned. Yeah, but is any of this stuff banned, do you think, in Formula 1?

JOE ROGAN: No, none of it. This is all very straight edge, really tried and true nootropics that work through endogenous pathways or things otherwise backfill neurotransmitters. Similar to the creatine deficiency that we talked about. If you backfill it and you can otherwise have a readily available source of phosphocreatine to offset ATP deficits. L-tyrosine, stuff like that. Similar just in regards to dopamine, for example.

The Gorilla Mind Effect

JOE ROGAN: An hour in and I feel it. It’s legit. Yeah, it’s very legit. And again, it’s very delicious. So congratulations on that.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Those guys lose a ton of weight, too, during those races.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, dude, so much water loss. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because you’re f*ing hot as shit in those suits. So you don’t burn alive if you crash.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So new different strategies, like hyper hydration using things like liquid glycerol could be impactful to retain more water.

JOE ROGAN: Do they wear a diaper?

DEREK MUNRO: I don’t know. But how long is the race? It could be. It depends, but it’s upwards of an hour, an hour and a half. So.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, just piss yourself. Yeah, yeah. Just sit in your own pee for an hour and a half. Yeah. You would have to, I would imagine, with that kind of money on the line. Just f*ing let it go, baby.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I don’t even know if you’d have to, though. If you’re just perspiring like a motherf*er, you might come out drenched, right? Yeah. And they’ve lost like.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good point. But sometimes in the sauna I have to pee.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Sometimes I’m 15 minutes into a sauna session and I’m like, goddamn it. I can’t hold it. So I got to open the door and go out and piss outside, then climb back in again.

Glycerol and Hydration Strategies

DEREK MUNRO: Have you ever tried glycerol for hyperhydration?

JOE ROGAN: No. What is that?

DEREK MUNRO: It’s just straight up glycerol. It’s a sugar, but it also has a hyper hydrating effect that you can hold upwards of an extra pound of body water if you have it as a supplement. So some endurance athletes will use it before events in order to retain more water in a way that is not. It enhances thermoregulation, your ability to tolerate stress. You don’t lose as much, you don’t dehydrate as fast. There’s a lot of upsides for its unique application. Maybe even avoiding pissing at nighttime could be really, potentially. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that would help because I always have to piss. Yeah. One thing that helps me is sauna before bed, though. Sauna before bed. I can generally sleep through the night.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So I’ll do a session about an hour before I go to sleep and no water after that. Oh, yeah, that usually does it, doctor.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. If you do a water cutoff that’s pretty regimented, it’s probably the best overall strategy.

JOE ROGAN: As long as you make sure you hydrate in the morning. So I’m pretty diligent about that first step in the morning. Amino acids with water, I do that 99% of the time. First thing before coffee, before anything.

DEREK MUNRO: And do you put electrolytes in it?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, I take Gary Brecka’s stuff. It’s called Perfect Aminos. Aminos and electrolytes. I get that in first thing in the morning. Just, you know, get it out of the way. And I didn’t used to for the longest time, I would just hit the gym right away and just drink water when I was in there. But I feel a difference.

DEREK MUNRO: What about. I thought step one was cold plunge.

Stem Cell Treatment and Recovery

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it depends. I haven’t cold plunged in the last three weeks because I got some stem cells and I’m still sauna-ing. So it seems like there’s a lot of controversy about this in terms of what you should and shouldn’t do post stem cell injection.

I have a very minor Achilles tear. When I was elk hunting in September, I twisted my ankle pretty bad. And I didn’t think anything of it. I stopped limping after 15 or 20 minutes. And I was like, I think I’m okay. And I was wearing, at the time, I was wearing very light boots. They’re just a real light boot that you wouldn’t do for heavy mountain trekking. And we did some steep elevation. And then the real problem is going down and you’re, you know when you’re going down several thousand feet over the course of an hour.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s f*ing brutal.

JOE ROGAN: And I twisted one of my ankles. And then the next day I put on a much higher, more rigid boot with great ankle support and I was fine for the rest of the trip.

DEREK MUNRO: But then that’s the f*ing worst when you just got to stare at the ground the entire time you’re walking. Because the littlest off step, you just roll your ankle or not only that.

JOE ROGAN: You go down, you know, you could die. We were in pretty steep country in Utah, but interestingly, I didn’t notice anything was wrong until I’d get into a push up position, which is weird. So when, you know, I do 100 push ups every morning. 100 push ups, 100 bodyweight squats. That’s my warm up before I do anything.

And so when I got into a high push up position with my butt up in the air, it’s a lot of stretching on the Achilles. And my left Achilles was fing killing me, sharp pain. I was like, f, this hurts. And I thought maybe it needs to stretch out. So I did something like jump rope doesn’t bother me. Jump rope doesn’t bother me. Nothing else bothers me. But that position bothered me.

And it was bothering me for five weeks. And I was like, all right, I got to get this looked at because it seems like it might be getting worse every time I do that. And so I got it scanned and there’s a minor tear in my Achilles. And Achilles tears are a f*ing nightmare. You know, if you blow out your Achilles, that’s a nightmare. It’s a long rehabilitation process.

DEREK MUNRO: Blood flow to the area is pretty.

JOE ROGAN: Especially at 58, it’s a fing. That’s a long recovery. It’s like I’m looking at a year before I could do everything again. Then you lose all your gains, all your cardio, gain everything. You can’t move. Right. You’re fed.

So I got a stem cell shot in there. And there’s a lot of debate about when you should be able to cold plunge after stem cells. And a lot of the literature seems to say three months. It doesn’t seem to think sauna. There’s more indication that sauna is probably therapeutically beneficial for the stem cells because the idea is that these stem cells are still in the area trying to heal the tissue.

When you cold plunge, you kill them. But when you’re doing sauna, you’re increasing blood flow and it might help them. So what they said is I wouldn’t do anything for a couple weeks. Nothing. And then after that, just sauna for a while. So I haven’t done a cold plunge in over a month.

DEREK MUNRO: Seems excessive.

JOE ROGAN: Not that I’m scared to go back in.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because I was so used to it.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, you got to get over the hurdle again.

JOE ROGAN: So scared. Every time I do it, I almost don’t do it. Every f*ing time I do it, I almost don’t do it. So for the past month, it’s just been get up and just work out and then sauna afterwards.

Recovery Protocols

DEREK MUNRO: What’s the rehab stack? Is it any different than what you were already doing? Or is it kind of like BPC-157, TB-500?

JOE ROGAN: That’s it. It’s definitely improved.

DEREK MUNRO: BPC local in the Achilles?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

DEREK MUNRO: Or you just pinch the sub-Q area and kind of.

JOE ROGAN: I shove it right in there. I think local is the way to go. I’ve done it subcutaneously, in the side and love handles. It doesn’t have the same effect. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: If you can get it to the area, it’s why not?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think BPC-157 locally is the way to go, but it’s definitely getting a lot better. It doesn’t hurt at all anymore. I’m just making sure it fully heals up.

FDA Changes on Women’s HRT

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Interesting note on the hormone support stuff. This past month, the FDA actually removed most of the black box warnings off of women’s HRT products.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

DEREK MUNRO: Pretty amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, really amazing because so many women were lied to for so long. They were told that there’s all these negative effects of supplementing your hormones. But my God, how many fing people just lost quality of life for fing nothing? For no science at all. It’s just complete horseshit. But there’s so much bad f*ing science out there, man. It’s a real problem. It’s hot as shit in here. There’s so much bad science out there, man.

DEREK MUNRO: It almost gets to a point where you almost have to look at things through the lens of, does this sound like nonsense?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, and then where do you go? Who do you trust? You know, unless you’re well versed in who the respectable online people are.

The Limitations of Studies and Anecdotal Evidence

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, you might see us, however many studies that say fill in the blank exotic compound is totally ineffective. And it’s like, who was it tested on, for how long, what was the dosage like? It might be a completely useless interpretation for your specific nuanced scenario.

And if you hear hordes of anecdotes from everyone in your circle you trust who actually knows what they’re talking about, has been in the trenches, knows their body well, you can’t really ignore that.

JOE ROGAN: What was the narrative about female hormones? And why did they do that for so long? Do you know?

The Women’s Health Initiative and Horse-Derived Estrogen

DEREK MUNRO: So I think it was in the 90s. The Women’s Health Initiative were assessing the viability and safety profile of hormone replacement therapy. I might butcher this a little bit, but in general the overall context is relatively accurate, I’m sure.

And it was like of a thousand women or something that they tested HRT. When I say HRT, they put in air quotes because like estrogen, not even human bioidentical estrogen. It was like equine horse piss derived estrogens.

JOE ROGAN: Horse piss?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: For real?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So it was literally the most synthetic, animal derived sh*y estrogen that is not bioidentical at all. And also a synthetic progestin that is not bioidentical to progesterone. It’s just a progestin analog essentially, that fulfills activity at the receptor, but is otherwise the equivalent of putting you on a microdose of nandrolone or a microdose of, fill in the blank, progestin derived compound or 19 nor derived compound that facilitates progestogenic activity but just is not progesterone.

So it’s like to try and say, this horse piss derived estrogen formula and the synthetic progestin we apply to these women is the equivalent of you having been on what you would otherwise produce as a young, healthy, vibrant woman. From a bioidentical estradiol and progesterone perspective, simply not accurate.

But that’s essentially the comparison that they made and presented it as such. And the result was a relative risk increase of breast cancer incidence, I believe to the tune of like one of a thousand women. And the absolute number was like three of a thousand in the placebo arm had breast cancer incidents. And then I think four out of a thousand had breast cancer. So then the media ran with a 26% increase in risk.

JOE ROGAN: So everybody got panicky.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, and I might be misinterpreting one or two variables, but high level, that’s essentially what it was. And it caused mass hysteria and panic and basically dictated the facilitation of black box warnings being put on hormone therapy. So the most aggressive FDA warning that shows basically any clinician that’s looking at it or anybody who’s going to take the risk of using it, this is the most dangerous drug you could use with the highest risk of lethal side effect potential.

And then on top of that, it just wasn’t representative of what is actual replacement therapy with what is the hormone you would be producing naturally. So for years, we went thinking, oh, it’s going to cause clotting issues, it’s going to cause cancer, it’s going to do this, it’s going to do that.

And only in the most nuanced edge case scenarios is it justified because that person just absolutely has a quality of life deterioration is so significant that it’s worth it to take the risk to use hormone replacement therapy.

And it’s now, similar to some of the common sense interpretation of things, this doesn’t make sense. Look at all this literature showing the cardioprotective effects, showing the neuroprotective effects, showing the bone support and integrity. Look at what you lose if you don’t take these hormones.

You’re essentially giving yourself a worse quality of life inevitably and deteriorating your health unquestionably. With men, there is some semblance of residual activity you can maintain. And some men maintain vibrant, reasonable testosterone production till old age. But with women, it’s kind of right when the lights shut off.

JOE ROGAN: Drops off a cliff.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

Testosterone Replacement and Cancer Myths

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting how the initial narratives get stuck in the public zeitgeist forever. Like the initial narrative for testosterone replacement was you can get testicular cancer, prostate cancer. And it was just so many people, I don’t want to mess around with testosterone replacement because I could get cancer. And then Brigham Buhler explained that study.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And explain the real results of that study. And it’s like it didn’t show that anybody got prostate cancer from it. It’s just not true.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And it’s even the mechanism by which they argue it would cause it doesn’t even make mechanistic sense because it’s like the only way you’re going to increase the prostate growth is via DHT. And it’s like, of course, when you use hormones that are androgens, you’re going to grow tissues that they’re exposed to. But it doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing necessarily.

And if you’re a hypogonadal male who has low T and it goes up to just the threshold of barely acceptable, that’s where the growth essentially stops. And if you go beyond that into medium normal, high normal, even super physiologic territory, your prostate doesn’t linearly grow in exposure. Otherwise bodybuilders would have massive prostates busting out of their bodies, giant d*s. We wish didn’t have it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, how come it grows enlarged clitorises in women?

DEREK MUNRO: Because the physiology is essentially interchangeable in that you could have gone in any direction dependent on your exposure to these hormones. Yeah. So if a man exposes himself to significant amounts of estrogen and has hormone deprivation, there are some irreversible anatomical changes because they’ve already matured. That will not go away.

But with women, it’s the inverse. And you could otherwise get closer to that extreme scenario where once your voice box gets a certain anatomical development, you can’t necessarily go back to your high pitched voice.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s the problem with detransitioners. They keep that voice forever. And the real problem is it never even becomes a man voice. It just becomes weird. You know what I mean?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Trans men never develop a voice like Isaac Hayes.

The Dangers of Aggressive Testosterone Dosing in Women

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. That’s one of the tough things with HRT too, is as much as I think it’s so amazing that it’s being educated about and there’s widespread attention being brought to the importance of it. There’s also the cowboy docs who almost go to the hyper extreme of optimization and are putting women on aggressive dosages of testosterone, saying, “You’ve been lied to. This is actually what you need to feel good.”

And for a woman who’s been asexual for years and feels, has no energy, and they are told this guy is the cutting edge doc who everyone sees, they will probably trust his guidance.

And as early as before I started Merrick Health, which is my company, my mom was getting hormone therapy guidance from a doc who was relatively well respected. And the dose he put her on of testosterone was so aggressive that her voice was changing within weeks. And I had to cut the cord on. I was like, what the hell is this? And her testosterone levels were in the three hundreds plus.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So you’re essentially low, low, normal, healthy male territory. Not actually, but on a clinical reference range and absolutely potential for masculinization.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And also horny as f*, potentially. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: But it’s like, you didn’t need to go there probably to get to horny as f*.

JOE ROGAN: My wife has a friend who got on it and she’s a British lady and she had a very funny. She goes, “This stuff makes me feel like a bloke.” She goes, “I’m horny like a bloke.”

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And testosterone can be helpful in women for sure. And it’s an overlooked hormone that is absolutely important in women just the same as it is in men. It’s just you got to kind of know what you’re getting yourself into too, when it comes to what is reasonable for a doctor to tell you you need, and at what concentrations you should expect blood level targets to be.

Because if you just go in blind, you might end up with the most exotic Beverly Hills doc who thinks you should be on the craziest cocktail ever, because he knows you’re going to feel it right and respond really, really well immediately, but then also might just f* you up permanently.

The Trans Debate and Social Contagion

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is also the problem with transitioners. When you’re becoming a trans man, the initial impact is alleviation of anxiety and euphoria. You start feeling great because that’s what testosterone does for you. It doesn’t mean you’re supposed to have that. Your body’s going, what the f* is this?

And now you’re essentially, you’re changing the whole cocktail of your body and you’re going to give permanent changes that if you make a decision when you’re 14, 15 years old, they put you in this stuff. Those detransitioners are some of the saddest stories, man. Because they’ve become sterile, they’ll never have children, and they lose their tits because they go to a doctor thinks you should have your mammary glands chopped off when you’re 15.

We’re in the weirdest of times with all this stuff because it’s like what gets accepted and not accepted and what. Because again, we were talking about the zeitgeist. When a thought gets out there and then it’s very difficult to move away from that. It’s like, “Oh, you’re affirming your true self.” Really with synthetic hormones that didn’t exist in your body before. That’s your true self?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Are you f*ing sure? It sounds like this might be a social contagion sweeping through the land. And one of the things that’s really interesting is the drop off of kids identifying as trans. It coincides directly with Elon buying Twitter.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Immediately when you. Because he used to not be able to talk about it, you still literally, if you deadname someone from Twitter. Meaning, if you changed your name to Dominique and I called you Derek, I could get banned from Twitter for life forever just by using your old name. If I called Bruce Caitlyn Jenner Bruce, I would get banned from Twitter for life.

DEREK MUNRO: Damn.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nuts. But it’s this very bizarre social contagion, this weird mind virus that went through the whole country and everybody just signed up for it, and no one wanted to be a bigot, so I don’t want to be a bigot.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I think as much as I think access to drugs is super, you should have the full liberty to do whatever you want. That’s where the importance of educating yourself is so critical because you really don’t know what you’re subjecting yourself to. If you have an immature brain, too. You have not even had full frontal lobe development to try and think you’re going to make a sound decision with how you’re going to impact your lifelong physiology. It’s probably you can’t even have a tattoo.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not even legal to get a tattoo and get your penis removed. It’s fing crazy. It’s fing crazy. Oh, they know. Some people know as early as three. I’ve had conversations with people on this podcast. I have friends that have trans kids and they knew right away. Are you sure they didn’t have a f*ing insane mother and a gay child? Because that might be what was going on.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And now this gay child will never have an orgasm again because you’ve convinced them they’re not a gay child, that they’re a woman, which is, in fact, completely homophobic.

Biohacking Adolescent Development

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah. Interesting extreme of the scenario, but maybe on the opposite is guys who are in adolescence who are so hyper educated that they use the knowledge to biohack their development into becoming as maximally tall and infrastructurally sound as adults as possible. And that’s a really interesting predicament because any reasonably ethical doctor will be like, there’s no f*ing way I’m touching that case of any overseeing anybody’s care who was doing that kind of thing.

JOE ROGAN: I was watching a podcast about this where this guy was talking about his son, and he’s short, and his son is short, and his son’s friends were also short. And their parents got the kid on growth when they were. And they grew a lot bigger than the parents, which is Alexander Karelin. Do you know Karelin’s story? They called him the Experiment. He’s the freakiest wrestler that has ever existed.

DEREK MUNRO: I know who it is, but I didn’t know that specifically. It was in adolescence that he was subjected to.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is speculation on my part. Have you seen my photo that I have out in the gym? The photo that I put up to remind myself of what a pussy I really am?

The Experiment: Karelin and Soviet Athletic Dominance

DEREK MUNRO: Is that when he’s like, about the f*ing hoisting that girl?

JOE ROGAN: That picture, that one?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that’s a famous one.

JOE ROGAN: That guy was 300 fing pounds and moved like a cat. Unbelievably mobile and flexible and had an insane record. Yeah, I think it was like 280 and 1 or 280 and 2. Fing insane. One of the most dominant wrestlers of all time.

But there’s, they call him, in Russia, they would call him “the Experiment.”

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And you see his parents. His parents like, 5’5″, 5’7″, small people, and he’s this f*ing behemoth of a person. And of course, the Soviet doping program is legendary. The movie Icarus highlights that, but everybody knew about that.

The eastern block weightlifters, the females, they set records that were never broken again. These women completely became men. There’s a lot of evidence that they were doing that to their athletes. The fact that they wouldn’t do it to their most dominant wrestler in the history of the f*ing sport, and the guy who was the absolute biggest freak in the history of wrestling? There was nobody like that guy.

Lionel Messi’s Growth Hormone Story

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. We should talk about some of those Russian drugs. I heard you bring up trimetazidine with somebody the other day. But before that, have you ever heard of the Lionel Messi story?

JOE ROGAN: No.

DEREK MUNRO: Okay, so did you know that he was destined to be a dwarf if he didn’t get on huge amounts of growth hormone?

JOE ROGAN: Really?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So he got supplied with pharmaceutical growth hormone by the team that was trying to get him to basically be with them.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s a small guy as it is, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So he grew to what is otherwise an acceptable adult height, but he otherwise was destined to be literally a dwarf, whatever the socially acceptable term is.

So they either paid for his pharmaceutical growth hormone and admitted, got it for him, paid for it major, he was taking it, or he didn’t become the greatest, some argue, the football player of all time.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also, you have to take into consideration, how much of effect did that have on his performance?

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, that guy can do things.

JOE ROGAN: That no one else can do.

DEREK MUNRO: Well, he definitely wouldn’t have grown to the height he is.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s not just the height, it’s the explosive movement, his ability to change direction, better than anybody.

DEREK MUNRO: The infrastructure is obviously supporting of it. I don’t necessarily know. It would be impossible to really quantify that. There’s no AB test of it.

JOE ROGAN: Right. There’s no placebo controlled trial.

DEREK MUNRO: But, you know, if he didn’t do it, he would not be even playing.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. I did not know that.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s probably one of the most overlooked but wild cases of a professional athlete who needed to go full bore to the tits when it comes to…

JOE ROGAN: How old was he when they did that?

DEREK MUNRO: A young teen, if not a child.

JOE ROGAN: Seeing 11 years old.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It was like, you either take this at the dose that is going to push you to maximal IGF-1 output territory and we get you to as high of maturation as possible, or you’re not going to be a professional player.

JOE ROGAN: How tall is Messi now?

DEREK MUNRO: Five seven.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Yeah. That’s crazy. You know I told you the Yoel Romero story, right?

Yoel Romero: The Cuban Machine

DEREK MUNRO: Probably.

JOE ROGAN: Yoel Romero is the biggest athletic freak I’ve ever seen in my life. And I’ve seen a lot of athletic freaks. When he, I believe it was in Australia, he was fighting and after the fight, goes to a doctor to get checked up. He had a fractured orbital. He had, you know, rough fight.

The doctor examines him and then says to the UFC, “Where did you get this guy?”

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Can I tell you this?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And they go, “He’s great, right?” He goes, “No, no. His tendons and his eyes are three times the size of a normal person.” They said his orbital bone is already healed. “What did they do to him?”

Because he was on the Cuban Olympic program, and the way he talks about it, the program was so regimented. In fact, they had tiers of athletes, and the highest tier ate three times a day. The tier below that ate two times a day. So it motivated you literally to get more food to compete.

And you’re competing with these guys that their entire life is wrestling. That is everything. And it literally can feed their family. It’s a matter of whether or not their family gets food, whether it changes your social status.

And he goes, “And because of that, you become a machine.” That’s how he’s saying it. I can do a good Yoel. “You become a machine.”

And he’s the biggest freak of all time. In fact, everybody who fights him says, hitting him hurts.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What Robert Whittaker said is like hitting metal. He goes, “Dude, he’s like, you hit the guy, he doesn’t feel like a normal person. He goes, it’s like you’re hitting metal.”

DEREK MUNRO: He’s still competing, but in, was it One Dirty Boxing?

JOE ROGAN: His dirty boxing was his latest one. He’s doing, he’s almost 50, jacked as f. Now he’s a heavyweight, full six pack, almost 50 years old, fing gigantic. I mean, now he’s got to be geared up. I mean, I would imagine because he’s in these fringe leagues that, you know, their drug test is a f*ing multiple choice. What do you want?

“I’m on Jesus.” He had that famous speech. He was saying, “Don’t forget about Jesus.” He goes, “Don’t forget Jesus.” And everybody thought he was saying, “No, gay Jesus is not gay.”

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: And so they thought he was homophobic. He’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Forget Jesus.” He was saying, “Don’t forget Jesus.” Jesus is important. And everybody’s like, “Oh, my God. Yoel Romero used his platform to say homophobic things after a fight.”

No, he can’t speak English very well, and he’s religious.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that guy, I always felt like if he just kind of threw himself into the fire more, he could just crush it.

JOE ROGAN: The problem is cardio, when you’re carrying around that much weight. You know, first of all, wrestling. His wrestling was above and beyond anybody else.

DEREK MUNRO: But he was just like slug when he didn’t need to.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they get in love with knocking people out, first of all. And that guy’s explosive capacity was, he knocked out Chris Weidman, one of the f*ing scariest flying knees I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a great fight up until the moment he put Chris Weidman into the shadow realm.

But he hit him with this flying knee. Just explode. He lulls you. So what, he’s tired or whatever, then he jumps on you. And his ability to close the distance is so, it’s like you think about wrestlers. Did you see Bo Nickal’s last knockout? He knocked out Rodolfo Vieira with a head kick.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Bo Nickal and the Art of Closing Distance

JOE ROGAN: It was spectacular. But what Bo Nickal is, an elite wrestler, like a top shelf blue chip wrestler. And one of the things that wrestlers have is this ability to close distance because they’re on the outside and they could just shoot doubles.

So that explosion naturally lends itself to closing the distance and striking, because it’s the same kind of thing if you develop good striking. And Rodolfo Vieira, who’s f*ing super jacked, but he’s a gi jujitsu guy. Gi jiu jitsu is all about strength and control, technique as well. But it’s a tight game. It’s not a game of jumping, moving across distance quick. It’s a game of they’re gripping each other and then, you know, it’s a lot about strength and it’s a lot about technique, but it’s not about closing distance.

So Rodolfo Vieira is like a plodding, really super jacked guy. And Bo Nickal just lied on his feet, moving on the outside and just closing distance, cracking him, getting out. And he hits him with his f*ing bomb head kick and puts him to sleep.

But it’s that ability to close the distance. Nobody did that better than Yoel. Yoel was the best at that because he’s just f*ing unbelievable athlete. And with Izzy, he fought Israel Adesanya. And Izzy said, “Dude, I had to stay on the outside with that guy. I could not just go after him because the counters would come so fast.”

DEREK MUNRO: He…

JOE ROGAN: Yoel caught him with a big left hand early in the fight, and he was like, “Oh, well, f this.” He’s like, “We’re going to make this a boring fight. Yeah, I’m just going to win a decision on this motherfer.”

Because it’s just the consequences of being too close to him where he can do that. It’s just you have to fight a technical fight with that guy. Stay on the outside, pick at him, move a lot. Don’t set your feet ever. Never be in a place where he can just launch on you and blast you.

Khamzat Chimaev’s Dominance

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. On the flip side of that, the leaping in the middle way of Chimaev, ruthless to watch. That was like the most painful fight I’ve seen recently.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, the Dricus du Plessis fight.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s just levels and levels above everyone else.

DEREK MUNRO: Just closing distance even when you know it’s about to come. Can’t stop. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Once he gets his hands on you, you’re f*ed. There’s something about that kind of wrestling from the Chechens and the Dagestanis, and maybe even him more than any of the other ones, it’s just so aggressive. And he chains things together so well.

And if you’re not training with guys like that, Schaub told me that he went to see Chimaev when Chimaev is in training camp for Dricus du Plessis, and he called me up, he goes, “Dude, listen to me.” He goes, Schaub was a top 10 UFC heavyweight. He’s been around forever. He was in camp with Georges St-Pierre when Georges St-Pierre was in his prime. Nate Marquardt, when Nate Marquardt was his prime.

He’s like, “Dude, I’ve never seen nothing like this.” He goes, “They were bringing in world class wrestlers. He’s fing ragdolling them.” He goes, “He’s a freak. He’s going to f Dricus up.”

I go, “Really?” He goes, “Dude, if he gets a hold of that guy, he’s f*ed.” Turned out to be 100% accurate.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it was like the most obscene example I’ve seen.

JOE ROGAN: His wrestling. It’s obscene. That’s a great way to put it. His wrestling’s obscene. And if you can’t compete, that’s one thing that I said about Dricus after that fight was like, that gap is so wide, that’s like jumping across the Grand Canyon. You’re not going to make it.

You would have to start, you’d have to get a time machine, go back to the time when you’re six and start wrestling in Dagestan. You’ve got to have those kind of skills to compete with that guy.

Only an elite wrestler who can also strike is going to be able to f with that guy unless he gets silly and decides to strike with someone and they KO him. Other than that, I just can’t see anybody fing with that guy.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I mean, it’s, I guess, needs somebody stylistically to match up to. Really?

JOE ROGAN: Bo Nickal.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But Bo has to grow as a fighter, you know, he has to grow as a fighter, and he’s doing that. I mean, he’s an unbelievably dedicated and disciplined guy. And if anybody can do it, he can do it, because he’s got that elite wrestling.

If they had a wrestling match, it would be fantastic. But Chimaev is a much better striker right now, at least has been up until this last fight with Vieira, which was a huge knockout. But Vieira was kind of a standing target for Bo.

DEREK MUNRO: What did you think of the Usman positive test result? Kind of interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, the bigger Usman?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, his older brother. The older brother, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a duh. He’s f*ing huge.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, unfortunate, you know, because the heavyweight division is so devoid of talent.

Gable Stevenson: The Next Heavyweight Phenom

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Gable Stevenson is the fing guy. That’s the guy. That’s the guy. He’s not even in the UFC yet. Olympic gold medalist, fing freak athlete, 250 pounds, moves like a cat. That’s the guy that he’s every. I sent a text message to Dana White. I sent him a video of Gable’s last fight. I said, everyone’s fed up. Everyone’s fed when this guy comes out.

He KO’d this guy with a left hand. He KO’d this guy with a left hand and then took him down as he was knocked out. Watch this knockout because it’s so fing crazy, the speed that this guy has. First of all, really good striking already, and he’s only been striking for like a fing year. But watch when he KOs this guy. He hits him with a punch. Boom. And then takes him down. Jesus, dude.

DEREK MUNRO: Everyone’s f*ed.

JOE ROGAN: And then, just let me. That’s just nuts, man. That kind of speed is nuts for a heavyweight.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that left hook. Boom. Takes him down. Smash. And then.

DEREK MUNRO: That’s like a video game combo.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. And he can do backflips and shit. When he fought in dirty boxing, he knocks the guy out, and then he leaps over the top rope and lands on the apron. Just leaps over the top rope with like effortless freak. Just a real freak.

And again, just like, watch this KO when he KOs this guy. Well, first of all, this guy has no business being in there with them. But this is just boxing. This is what they call dirty boxing. Boom. So you could ground and pound guys.

DEREK MUNRO: So is this like the modern day D.C. sort of?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s maybe even better and bigger. A lot bigger. See how he jumped over that rope? Watch that again.

DEREK MUNRO: Super athletic, but like doesn’t, kind of unassuming, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, not really unassumed. He’s a f*ing house man.

DEREK MUNRO: He just doesn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Higher body fat. Yeah, but look how he jumped over that rope.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah. When you see that, of course.

JOE ROGAN: Watch it. Show that again.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. That was insane.

JOE ROGAN: Look how the effortless. Look at, just effortless leaps over that f*ing. That’s like five feet. He just jumps over like it’s nothing.

DEREK MUNRO: And after fighting.

JOE ROGAN: After fighting, but literally with no effort, just hops over it like it didn’t exist. Lands perfectly. He’s a freak, man. And he’s training with Jon Jones, and you know, he’s training with like some of the best fighters, and he’s training and he’s trying to fight every month. He’s trying to get as much experience as he can before he gets into the UFC. And he’s coming and everybody’s in trouble.

DEREK MUNRO: How old is he?

JOE ROGAN: 25.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, geez.

JOE ROGAN: They’re all fed. Yeah, everyone’s fed. I mean, everyone is f*ed because there’s no other than John. There’s no one that can wrestle with that guy in that sport. And the thing about a guy who could wrestle like that is if he can strike like that.

The problem with wrestling is you’re always worried about the takedown, so that opens you up to strikes because you’re always like, every feint, you’re thinking he’s going to shoot for your legs, but then, boom, he catches you with a left hook. And the speed that guy has, it’s like a lethal combination of athleticism, speed, power, size, and an insane wrestling pedigree. I mean, Olympic gold medalist, as good as it gets with wrestling.

DEREK MUNRO: I think the last time I heard you talk about a guy like this, at least when I was on, was Pereira before he came in.

JOE ROGAN: Similar. Yeah, similar kind of thing where he’s a specialist, you know, but you’re like.

DEREK MUNRO: Watch out for this f*ing guy. Yeah.

Alex Pereira’s Devastating Power

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. I remember D.C. was like, “Come on, man.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m telling you, this guy is different.” Because I had been a huge fan of Pereira when he was fighting in Glory, and you know, you’d watch him hit guys and they’d go flying across the room.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what the f* is that guy made out of?

DEREK MUNRO: And when you.

JOE ROGAN: Like when I interview him, like, I put my hand on him, it’s like this table, dude. He’s like made out of oak. Like, he’s f*ing dense. And there’s something about the way he throws punches. Have you ever seen him punch that, that machine, you know, that machine that like generates like.

DEREK MUNRO: It shows you, but it’s like super high power.

JOE ROGAN: He hit it with his right hand because his left hand had been bothering him. And he got 190. Like Francis Ngannou got a 129. He got a 190 with a right hand. It’s fing insane, dude. I got like 150 with a kick. This guy got 190 with a punch. 190 is insane. And it’s his right hand. I bet his left hand is probably 200. It’s, f. See if you can find that video. It got deleted.

DEREK MUNRO: The way it’s being advertised when you Google it, it broke the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: People, like, hide it somewhere else, bro. He hit so hard that Mark Goddard, after he fought Khalil Rountree, after he just beat Khalil Rountree across the Octagon. Mark Goddard, when they were announcing the KO and, you know, raising his hand, Mark comes up to me at the end of the fight. He goes, “The sound. The sound it makes when that guy hits people is ungodly.”

He goes, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, mate.” He goes, “It’s ungodly.” 170. Oh, my gosh. Play that again. Play that. Just look at the force that this guy generates. There’s something about, there’s, it’s the leverage because of his take. It’s us watching it. 170. That’s nuts. That’s nuts.

He’s got, power’s a weird thing, man. You’re born with it like nothing else. Like, there’s a lot of skills that you can acquire, but there’s a threshold to how hard you’re going to be able to hit. And I think it’s based on body mechanics, it’s based on the frame, it’s based on the size of your hand. He has massive hands. It’s based on, there’s just a lot of factors. Explosive, fast twitch, muscle fiber.

Some people don’t have a lot of it. Some people are more of an endurance fighter and they don’t hit as hard, but they could just get you with combinations and they put you away eventually. But Pereira is different, man. It’s like in it, like, like David Goggins always like to say he’s uncommon amongst uncommon men.

Weight Cutting and Brain Health

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s interesting that his chin seems to be holding up really well at light. Yeah. And he, you know, has been knocked out before. He’s getting older and like, he seems fine.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s because he was not cutting weight anymore. There’s nothing that f*s your chin up more than dehydration. When he was losing weight, he was getting down to 185 pounds and he was weighing in the day of the fight at 226. 226. Weighing in at 185. You cut weight and then rehydrating up to 226 a day later. Like, you don’t rehydrate your brain, man. And so you can’t take shots. You can’t take shots as well.

And it’s a common thread amongst fighters like Jack Hermanson. He got knocked out by Gregory Rodriguez at 185. And Gregory Rodriguez is another one. He’s a freak. Just a giant 185. It doesn’t even make sense. You’re standing next to him. I weigh 200 pounds and I stand next to him. I’m a little short maybe, and I’m like, how, how the f* are you 15 pounds lighter than me? That’s not even, it’s not. This is science. Like, it doesn’t even make sense.

And so Jack went down to 170 and just got KO’d the other day. Bad, just bad. Because I think that you’re way more vulnerable like Frankie Edgar is a perfect example because Frankie, when he was in his prime at 155, didn’t cut any weight. He was one of the rare guys that was a 155 pound champion that was actually 155 pounds when he fought. And just amazing durability because of that, because he didn’t, he didn’t dehydrate himself, so he was like optimal.

And there’s like this point of diminishing returns where you’re physically bigger, you’re stronger, but you can’t take shots. And you also fatigue quicker because your body essentially almost dies 24 hours ago. Yeah, I mean, these guys get to death’s door to make weight. Their whole face is sucked in, their eyeballs are pulled back in their head. Yeah, it’s kind of crazy.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I think more attention is going to come to how to actually ensure your brain stays safe in the sports for longevity purposes as people kind of realize how impactful like the weight cutting especially can be, but also like if you end up getting knocked out. Yeah, you might not come back the same. And some of the strategies that should be employed after those fights as well, to actually restore as quickly as possible and avoid permanent degradation.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s like there’s two schools of thought. There’s one school of thought that I’m in, which we need to expand the weight classes so we have more weight classes, and we need to somehow or another institute some sort of hydration policy where you cannot dehydrate yourself and weigh in and pretend that you weigh 170 when really you weigh 210, because there’s a lot of guys doing this. And the other school of thought is they should be able to hydrate with.

DEREK MUNRO: IVs, because they used to be able.

JOE ROGAN: To hydrate with IVs. The blood-brain barrier and the hydration of the brain. It takes much longer to rehydrate your brain than it does to rehydrate your muscle tissue. And so these guys are going in there, their muscles are full, but their brain is dehydrated, and they’re vulnerable to getting knocked out.

And I think that’s what happened with Pereira, particularly with the Izzy fight. But Izzy caught him with a picture perfect right hand, just right on the chin, and then followed it up with a left hook. But it was just, he didn’t have the durability at 185 that he has at 205. At 205, he’s been dropped like Khalil dropped him. Guys have dropped him, and you know, Ankalaev rocked him, but he can take it. He could take it at 205.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And now he’s talking about going all the way up to heavyweight, which is kind of crazy.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I mean, like, all power to him if he does. Who doesn’t want to see it?

Dream White House Fight Card

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. I mean, I would love to see him fight Jon Jones at the White House.

DEREK MUNRO: And what’s your ideal White House card look like?

JOE ROGAN: Jon Jones versus Pereira, for sure. Conor McGregor versus Michael Chandler. That would be awesome. You know, you want to have some fun. Like, that’s a fun fight, you know, and then you would probably want like Islam Makhachev versus Ilya Topuria. That would be insane. You know, maybe even at 155. I don’t know if Islam even wants to make 155 anymore. But Ilya said he would fight him at 170, which is crazy because Ilya is smaller than me, like, that’s, that’s what?

DEREK MUNRO: Another walk around?

JOE ROGAN: Wait, I don’t know. I don’t know. But that’s another guy that has the touch of death. There’s guys that just have freaky power.

DEREK MUNRO: Hopefully he doesn’t let his personal shit derail whatever is happening. I know, like, you’re in your late 20s and it’s like, not the time, bro.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s crazy. I don’t know what happened. Do you know weird with the wife?

DEREK MUNRO: I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but I mean, you can’t. I’m sure the Internet has their speculation, but the timing is very odd with like one of these interviews he did where somebody was almost seemed to plant in his head that like if you meet a wife in Miami, that she’s probably like not a, you know, good, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Is that where he met her?

DEREK MUNRO: I think so, yeah. And it was like, but he lives in Spain. And somebody, I forget who it was, but somebody like jokingly said, “Oh, you met, like, it looks like you can meet quality women in Miami. Crazy. Like you would have never thought.” And then he was like visibly shook. He was like, “What do you mean by that?”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no.

DEREK MUNRO: And the guy was like, “Did I just offend you and you’re going to f me up or like, what is happening right now?” And he was just seemed to like almost internalize that. Is there a reason I shouldn’t trust Miami women? And I haven’t considered it. And then it’s just like, you can’t help but think with the timing, the fing wheels are turning.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God. I didn’t know that he met her in Miami. I don’t know if that’s even true.

DEREK MUNRO: Because he lives or if it even is relevant at all. But it’s just weird timing.

JOE ROGAN: I would imagine it’s relevant meeting a woman in Miami.

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, the factors certainly support that. It’s a more likely chance that she’s not the person she represented herself as potentially.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not just that. It’s the culture of Miami. I always say that if you want to starve to death, open up a bookstore in Miami. It’s like people are just partiers. It’s like, you should have a passport to go to Miami. It’s barely America.

Yeah, it’s fun, great city, a lot of fun. But it doesn’t really lend itself to the kind of sturdy, stay at home mom support for a world champion. Because the discipline involved in being not just a world champion, but a world champion on Ilya’s level, you know, like two division dominator goes on up, knocks out Charles Oliveira like it’s nothing. Which is crazy.

Not only that, had a celebration the night before the fight. Celebrated his victory.

DEREK MUNRO: That was almost like Gordon Ryan sh*t. Like times two.

Ilya’s Dominance and Perfect Mechanics

JOE ROGAN: And even apologized to Charles. “I’m sorry it has to be you. You know, I love you, you’re a great guy. Sorry it has to be you.” Like, super respectful of Charles. He’s a legend, you know. And then flatlines him in the first round like he said he was going to. He said, “Trust me, I’m going to knock him out in the first round.” One punch. Boom. Touch of death.

It’s like there’s guys that have, and for him, it’s like not a big guy, right? Like not extremely muscular. Like there’s nothing. It’s not massive, but it’s mechanics. His mechanics are fing perfect. His timing is fing perfect. Belief in himself, technique, everything. It’s like all the above.

But it’s like there’s guys that you can’t let hit you. And Ilya is one of them. And I think that probably carries all the way up to 170. I just don’t, I mean, the difference between 170, look at him and then look at some of the big 170s like Jack Della Maddalena. He’s a fing big guy. Like, there’s big guys like Michael Venom Page. He’s fing huge.

That would be a nightmare matchup for Ilya if he really did decide to go to 170, a guy like Venom, because you can’t hit that guy. Like, if you can’t hit that guy and he can hit you and he’s a point fighting champion. So that is the absolute best style of the blitz of being able to close distance quickly. Nobody does that like MVP. He’s the best at it. The best at it maybe of all time.

DEREK MUNRO: I wonder if it’d be kind of like when Canelo tried to go up and then it was kind of like…

JOE ROGAN: And he fought Bivol. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: I could see that sort of being the outgun where it’s not as…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, could be. But Canelo, it’s like later in his career, you know, but it’s like there’ll be a…

DEREK MUNRO: But also you have the disadvantage of it’s actually MMA versus boxing. But the guy is one of the most exciting guys to watch. Has, is a great representative too. When he was on your show, dude. Oh, he’s amazing. Oh, my God, dude, could you have said more right things?

And then that just is unfortunate for any misalignment of your personal life at this time of your career. Somebody’s got to get him a bad woman. He’s got to get his boys in his corners, get his mind, you know, dialed.

JOE ROGAN: He has children with this lady, too, so it’s like, oh, God.

Personal Life Challenges

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I mean, it’s like, you know, that’s what it is, regardless of what he’s saying. You know, when he’s like, “I got to get my personal life in order” and the timing of everything. And I think there’s actually, is it publicly media about the, there’s like a divorce now or something?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, it’s public. Yeah. Well, she’s taking photos with rappers and sh*t. Oh, yeah. Putting it on Instagram.

DEREK MUNRO: No.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You know how they do it? They try to steal your soul. Put a f*ing knife right in your spirit.

DEREK MUNRO: Dude, that’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, man. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.

DEREK MUNRO: Well, hopefully that helps him think he made the right call then, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: Buddy, does that help? This is the mother of your children, and this lady is a monster.

DEREK MUNRO: And there’s nothing worse than feeling psychologically duped by somebody, too.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t know if it is psychologically duped or if it’s like once she’s not on your side, you know, then it’s just burn the house down.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, there’s a lot of ladies like that because they feel like you hooked up with a guy who’s an incredibly special human being. The rarest of rare. You have not just UFC world champion, but a two division world champion superstar who the whole world wants to see, and you’re his wife.

So you’re like, “Oh, look at me, I’m married to the baddest motherfer alive.” And then he doesn’t want to be with you anymore. Like, “Oh, really? Well, I’m going to fing take you down.” And women, that’s what they love is reputation destruction. That’s what they’re really, that’s what they really are experts in when sh*t goes sideways.

DEREK MUNRO: What’s the typical outcome of these cases where it’s super famous person, wife claims that she is 50% responsible for their success, tries to take half. Is that if there’s no prenup? That’s kind of just what happens?

JOE ROGAN: Depends on where they are.

DEREK MUNRO: Right.

JOE ROGAN: So I don’t know where they got married, you know where they’re getting divorced? I was like, is it in Spain? What kind of laws?

DEREK MUNRO: He seems like a super traditional guy who probably didn’t even get the right sh*t set up.

JOE ROGAN: God, I hope not.

DEREK MUNRO: He seems really innocent, you know?

JOE ROGAN: It looks like a perfect marriage.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

The Ugliness of Social Media

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s crazy. But this is the ugliness of social media, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Is that everybody wants to put out this pretend image of perfection, that everything’s perfect. And so you have photos of you holding hands and walking together and kissing. “I love you more than anything in life.” And you post it out there for the world, and you’re putting on a show for the world, but meanwhile, there’s all sorts of internal bullsh*t that’s going on you’re trying to work through, and you’re hoping it works out.

And then when it falls apart, f*. And then you got to go back in your Instagram and delete all those pictures.

DEREK MUNRO: Isn’t it better to just not talk about any of it publicly and just keep your relationship sh*t private?

JOE ROGAN: I think most of your life you should keep. I think social media in general and that not just for famous people, just in general is way worse for people than it is good. Especially Instagram.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I think many a person has ruined their life on Twitter. Many a person has said things on Twitter that’s tanked their career, ruined their life. You know, it’s just the motivation to get attention for your words and your images is very toxic, very dangerous, and you’re playing with explosives. It’s just not smart. It’s just not a good thing to engage in.

I am much happier when I rarely am on social media. And so I dip my toes in, see what everybody’s mad about, then I get the f out and move on with my day. And I never try to portray myself in any way other than who I actually am. I don’t, I’m not interested in some fing, you know, some video montage with fing music and inspirational quotes. If somebody else makes that, that’s fine. I’m not involved, but I’m not putting anything like that up and checking the likes. Get the f out of here.

That’s bad for you. I think it’s bad for you. The good and the bad. The negatives. The people hating on you is bad for you. Like, “Oh, that’s not me at all. Hey, why are you saying that?” And then the good’s not good for you either. You start believing your own bullsht and think your sht doesn’t smell. It’s crazy. It’s bad for you.

It’s the opposite of mindfulness. It’s the opposite of being in the moment. It’s the opposite of that because you’re living for other people’s attention that you don’t even know. You don’t even know these people and you’re allowing them to comment on your wife and your family. You’re holding her hand and you’re renewing vows. You’re on your knee, presenting her a ring in a video. What the f* are you doing? Why would you do that? That’s a private thing.

If it’s real love between the two of you and if you’re really working, work hard in silence. What is this? What are you doing? What is all this about? But it’s just for likes. Everybody is addicted to these likes. “I want to see the numbers. Only 6,000 likes. This is crazy. I bared my soul for you.”

I just think it’s really bad for people. And also it’s like most people don’t know what fame really is. They think they do and then they get it and then they think they can manage it. And then the f*ing psychology behind it and the spinning that goes on in your mind when you’re trying to go to bed and you’re worried about all the mean things people are saying about you. It’s just bad. It’s just not good.

Disconnecting from Social Media

DEREK MUNRO: What’s the strategy now for, you have burner phone or how do you, do you just divorce yourself from…

JOE ROGAN: I just don’t read it. I don’t read anything and I don’t…

DEREK MUNRO: You did a burner phone for a while?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I, well…

DEREK MUNRO: Or just f*ing annoying.

JOE ROGAN: I do have a burner phone. Well, I don’t have a burner phone. I have a phone that I give to people that are just annoying or that I don’t really want to. I leave it at home and never check it. So there’s certain business stuff. And I don’t want business stuff to be entering into my life all the time. So I want to, I have regimented times where I check things and respond to people.

But I think my next phone number, which I’m changing soon, is going to be no social media at all. And then my other phone number, I’m just going to do that with it. I’m just going to do my social media posts. All the stuff that I have to do. Like, “Hey, I got a show coming up,” or, “Hey, this guy was great. It’s a podcast.” Happening posting. Ghost is what I do. Post, then get out of there.

But I’m not going to have any social media on my new phone. I just generally think it’s bad for you and it gets in the way of, it’s an abuse of precious resources. That’s what I think.

DEREK MUNRO: Do you have podcasts and stuff on it or how do you entertain yourself with actual social media or…

JOE ROGAN: No, I’ll entertain myself with YouTube.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s hard to not have this sh*t infiltrate when you have a taste of it. It’s like, before you know it, you’re sitting on the toilet looking at social media.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a nice, another nice thing that I like to do is not look at my phone when I’m on the toilet. Just go to the toilet and just leave it there. I’ve been leaving my phone on do not disturb, too, which is also a nice thing. I like doing the put it on do not disturb and check it occasionally. Every now and then check it.

And, you know, you could set up do not disturb where certain people can get through. Like, my wife can get through. My kids can get through. Best friends can get through. But it’s just, I think that for the most part, what you’re doing is you’re using very valuable resources on things that aren’t valuable at all.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s part of the reason I work best late at night. As much as I would love to have the perfect circadian rhythm and, you know, go to bed at the perfect time and align it with the sun going down. It’s like the only time my phone and all the stuff is not blowing up is in the middle of the night. And I can just focus and not have to think about stuff, you know, blasting me.

Late Night Creativity and Paranoia

JOE ROGAN: Me too. Yeah. My best writing is always late at night when everyone’s asleep. Yeah. And that’s also, it’s like, there’s something about late at night where the world seems a little bit more crazy that I think my mind is like a little more tuned to danger and chaos and just like, it seems like more heightened.

And because it’s dark out, you know, it’s dark out and everyone’s asleep, I’m like, what is the world really made out of? Like, that’s where I do my best thinking.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s funny because when I look out, I just see like calm. There’s no traffic, and I’m just like, this is nice.

JOE ROGAN: Death too. But night is when I worry about war. That’s when I worry about, oh God, dude. I know it’s not good. Sometimes I let it get in my head. That’s when I get my most anxiety about the future of the world is like night. There’s something about that.

DEREK MUNRO: Do you still smoke weed? A fair bit or?

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly, yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: How’s that?

Cannabis as a Creative Performance Enhancer

JOE ROGAN: It’s great for writing. Oh yeah. That’s not good for paranoia. Yeah, well, it makes you hypersensitive to danger. Yeah, but it’s really great for creativity. For creativity, there’s nothing like it. And for comedy, it’s a steroid. It’s like the best. It is the best performance enhancing drug ever created for writing comedy.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s nothing like it. Like, especially edibles. Like, you have thoughts that, like, you’re like, okay, I don’t know if I would ever have that thought without weed. Like, that thought is weed. Wrote that joke. I barely, barely had anything to do with that.

DEREK MUNRO: What’s the ideal edible dose?

JOE ROGAN: Depends on your tolerance.

DEREK MUNRO: Talk to zero tolerance.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, 10, 10 milligrams might f* you up, though.

DEREK MUNRO: Maybe five.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe five is good. You know, that’s like in the places where it’s legal. Like if you go to New York or LA, they, I think LA has a 10 milligram threshold. I think you can only get 10. That’s the highest you can get. 10’s a lot for someone who doesn’t do it.

But you know, Joey Diaz will pop like a 250, he’ll pop a 5, he’ll pop 250s. He’s a f*ing freak, though. Like, his tolerance is like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life. He used to dose people. He would take like a 25 milligram edible and he’d take the wrapper off and put a 250 milligram edible in and give it to his co-host.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh my God. It’s like, I think it’s funny, but like, I’m not.

JOE ROGAN: It’s only funny because it’s Joey. It was anybody that is in love, you’d be like, what the f* is wrong with you? But when Joey does it, just like, oh my God.

DEREK MUNRO: So you just think you’re dying, like unreasonably or something.

JOE ROGAN: You just know. And he’s over there laughing.

DEREK MUNRO: And you’re just sitting there spiraling, knowing how you f*ed you up.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he just always says, “I want to see the death.” He was, “f* this microdosing. I want to see the Devil.” He likes seeing that. He likes getting freaked out. He likes it. But I mean, for creativity, I think it has a place.

DEREK MUNRO: That’s the comedian juice right there.

Social Media and Creative Time Management

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I think, you know, not for everybody. Some people don’t like it at all. You know, I know some really great comics that are stone cold sober and for them it’s just, they just like to sit and think.

But a lot of the best ones that I know, they have switched over to either a flip phone or a phone with nothing on it. No social media at all. I think eventually you realize like that time you’re spending just scrolling mindlessly through things, it’s such precious resources. You only have so much time in a day and you’re spending time just looking at nonsense.

But also the other side of it is you do want to have your finger on the pulse of society. You want to kind of know what’s going on in the world.

DEREK MUNRO: If you’re a comedian, how do you even like talk about pop culture and stuff that’s trending or whatever?

JOE ROGAN: Well, interestingly enough, I get sent enough things.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, it’s like consolidated for you. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I get sent enough things by my friends that are f*ed up that I don’t have to go looking. So I go, Jesus, is that real? And then I’ll maybe, you know, do a search and find out that it is real and then read about it and like, what.

But that I think is probably valuable because it’s keeping you informed. It’s the endless mindless scrolling that I think is the most detrimental and the one that robs you of the most time. Because, you know, you could be sitting down at the kitchen table and all of a sudden you have this plan for the day. Going to get going. You’re drinking a cup of coffee and then, you know, 45 minutes is gone.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, 45.

JOE ROGAN: You get a brutal f*ing workout in 45 minutes. But you didn’t do anything.

DEREK MUNRO: There’s nothing more guilty feeling than having wasted like your 6 to 8 really sharp mental hours. Any part of that on something that dumb.

JOE ROGAN: I feel so bad when I do it.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: When I have done it in the past.

DEREK MUNRO: I just feel it’s like, how do I do it again? You know? Yep.

JOE ROGAN: How did I let it get?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. It’s like you feel like an idiot or like a druggie or something. It’s like, well, you are, you’re a.

JOE ROGAN: Low level druggie. You know, it’s a low drug. It’s not even a good one. It’s not even like, I feel great. This is amazing. It doesn’t even do that to you.

Sean O’Malley had a great quote. He said, “Even when I’m just regular scrolling, even if it has nothing to do with me,” he goes, “I get a low level anxiety.” And I’m like, yeah, me too. Like, it’s weird. And I think that low level anxiety is like a little bit of, as you know, you’re wasting your time, you know for sure.

When he fought Merab the second time, he got totally off social media for like months and months. Months.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, probably the best strategy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It still didn’t help, you know?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I mean, at least he put in, like, did what he thought would work, though.

JOE ROGAN: Did his best.

DEREK MUNRO: There’s a lot of people that will succumb to the pressure at the max level and check the, you know what people are saying about them. Who’s going to win?

JOE ROGAN: That’s the worst.

DEREK MUNRO: Watching your training footage you posted and seen if people like it, whatever.

Bodybuilding and Social Media Criticism

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, some people thrive on it. They like haters.

DEREK MUNRO: Bodybuilding is the worst for it too. I’m sure it’s just as bad as MMA, but it’s like your entire physique is like your social media brand. So you post your physique and then the feedback you get, you kind of have to look at, I guess, because it’s like what you compete with too.

So you’re literally taking judge feedback that’s subjective and taking what they’re telling you is wrong with your body to fix. And then you’re just bombarded by people in the comments section are like, you lost because of this. You’re lazy. How’d you not get in shape?

And even down to the lighting on stage can make you look much worse than you actually are.

JOE ROGAN: I’ll be like, you showed up with soggy glutes, bitch.

DEREK MUNRO: And it’s like, I’m f*ing shredded. Like, what are you talking about?

JOE ROGAN: Soggy glutes is hilarious.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And it’s like back in the 90s, I don’t know what it was, but it was like some of the lighting too was almost so bad that it gave this granular shark sharp, kind of like pixelated but like etchy look to the physiques. And it would look like they were more cut and defined and just better down lighting overall.

And some of these shows, they’re so washed out with the high resolution and like the perfect, I want to say perfect. It’s like almost overexposed lighting to show what’s going on on the stage that they look watery and fat even when they’re like. And I say watery and fat. Like, you know, like the perception of the fitness industry, it’s like proportional to what you’re expected to look like, but it’s like they could be shredded out of their mind.

And like having worked so hard to show up in shape and then just get decimated online from some fing keyboard warrior who’s like, your back is like too watery, bro. Go back to the fing elliptical, you know?

Physique vs Performance in Combat Sports

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also like bodybuilding is the sport of ego, right? Because it’s only about what you look like.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the whole thing. It’s not about how fast you are. Like, look, Gable, I was like, he’s not shredded, you know, but he’s ultimate freak, you know, look like BJ Penn in his prime. Like, there’s a lot of guys who are, they were never shredded. They were always just smooth and people up.

David Benavidez, another one like elite world class boxer, light heavyweight champion. A little muffin top is. Did you see his last fight? Benavidez fought Anthony Yard. Okay. Perfect contrast just happened last weekend.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, I missed that one.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Yard is shredded. He’s an Adonis. He is a Greek God. He’s literally like, you look at him, there’s no way. If you saw the two of them, you would say that guy on the left that has no abs and his smooth is going to f*ing destroy the guy on the right. Nobody would believe it.

See if you can find, yeah, the two of them together. There’s no way. There’s no way. David Benavidez is one of the scariest guys alive because he’s relentless. He’s so f*ing skillful. He’s so fast, is brutal combinations. But he’s so unimpressive physically.

Looking at him and Yard looks like, like you would expect in a movie. Like the perfect, the perfect scary opponent. Like there’s Benavidez. Look at him. I mean, he looks like an athlete, right? Looks in shape. But now where do you see Yard? Look at Yard. Shredded. F*ing shredded. And brutal power too.

But he just couldn’t f* with Benavidez. See, go way deep into the fight before he stops him. Yeah, I mean, Benavidez was just putting it on him. Just stand right in front and Yard. The thing about having that much musculature, there’s just a reality of your, you know, the oxygen.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just beat the shit out of him, man. Yard’s really good, man. He’s a really good boxer. But Benavidez, like, look at the difference in the physiques, man. His physique is perfect.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I mean, it’s almost like a limitation for some people where you’re just like sapping up so much oxygen carrying capacity to supply the tissue.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s all, you know, it’s also there’s a skill gap. I mean, Benavidez is super f*ing skillful. And this is a guy that people say Canelo’s been avoiding. He kind of probably has because Benavidez is the up and coming Mexican champion that everybody loves, and Canelo is, you know, the king.

And everybody was like, this is the big fight at 168. And so Benavidez had to go up to 175 to get big fights because Canelo wouldn’t fight him at 168.

DEREK MUNRO: Canelo is, is he just kind of like picking and choosing?

JOE ROGAN: Look at this, bro. Come on, man. This guy’s good. He’s so good.

DEREK MUNRO: How old is this, right?

JOE ROGAN: He’s young, man. I think Benavidez is, is he 28? How old is David Benavidez? He’s young, okay? Young and elite and going through his prime right now. How old is he?

DEREK MUNRO: 28. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

NHL Players and Unassuming Athletes

DEREK MUNRO: You know, he’s even more unassuming, is like half the NHL players that play hockey. Oh, really? Oh, dude. Like, have you ever seen somebody look more like a frat bro who does not play sports? NHL players.

JOE ROGAN: Well, those guys have crazy cardio.

Hockey Players and Athletic Physiques

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that’s racist. But you would never think, like, I used to bounce downtown Vancouver and we’d have the teams come by that would play the Canucks, and they would come party at the Champagne Lounge and the club that I was bouncing at. And he’d be like, this guy is like, you know, a professional athlete. It’d be the whole team, and half them look like, you know, some dude that’s like, you do like a f*ing keg stand with at like, you know, a party. And that’s like the max of his athletic capacity is being, like, held up to chug some beer or something.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I bet those guys drink a lot.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, out of all the athletes that drink, it’s got to be hockey players at the top of the heap, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And they’re f*ing super athletic or a good endurance, you know, it’s like just so unassuming, physique wise. It’s like it’s all legs.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s got to be all legs. I bet they’re shredded from the waist down.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s crazy seeing, like, the sport specific translation in actual, like, physical, like physiology that’s conducive to your sport. You see a sprinter and it’s like, you know, he’s a f*ing 100 meter sprinter. And then you see, you know, another guy and it’s like, you might not even think he plays sports.

JOE ROGAN: You know, I thought that when I went to the professional soccer team here in town, Austin FC. These guys have these fing quarter horse legs and then like real thin upper bodies. Like, they don’t use their arms. They don’t use, I mean, literally, unless you’re a goalie, you don’t use them. Yeah, so they have like tiny little upper bodies, massive fing legs, and insane cardio because they’re constantly sprinting. They sprint for 90 minutes. I mean, they’re just running around sprinting.

DEREK MUNRO: There’s a couple outliers that do. Look up, Adam, Tre Ori, I think it is. I might be totally butchering.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Ronaldo. Ronaldo’s…

DEREK MUNRO: Ronaldo’s pretty jacked.

JOE ROGAN: He’s, yeah, he’s jacked.

DEREK MUNRO: He’s like the hyper optimizer too.

JOE ROGAN: He really is. I mean, that guy, remember there was a thing where they tried to give him a Coca Cola and he f*ing took it aside? No agua.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And Coca Cola lost like a billion dollars in stock. Whoa, look at that guy.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that guy’s a freak. Yeah, well, there’s always going to be freaks out there.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. But it’s crazy to see a guy like that excel so well too, at a sport, that you would think he’d kind of be like, barely chugging along.

Genetics and Athletic Performance

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s probably just because he’s been doing it his whole life, you know, and he has unbelievable genetics. Yeah, genetics are a nutty thing, man. You can’t outrun genetics. But they don’t always help. Like, look at yard. Yard has perfect genetics, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then Evitas, you would look at them and you go, oh, that’s not the best genetics. Genetics. Like, if he was a bodybuilder, you, like, get the f* out of here.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s crazy too, because sometimes you might just have, like, nice looking around muscle bellies, but you don’t actually have, like, mitochondrial density to support athletic endeavors. So you’re kind of just like a show thing. You’re just like a cosmetically pleasing athlete, but not actually able to translate it into anything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s weird. I always thought that was weird. I always thought that was weird and striking because there’s a lot of guys that are just built like brick shithouses, then you see him hit the bag and be like, this is nuts. Like, you have zero power.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And it’s like, you would think objectively more muscle equals, but sometimes they’re like, weak as shit, even in lifts. It’s just like the development, the hypertrophy they get from it is just disproportionately better.

JOE ROGAN: That’s weird. Can that be optimized, though? Like, if they have, like unbelievable looking physiques, is it just that they’re not doing as much because they don’t need to to look great? Right.

DEREK MUNRO: I think there’s definitely specific training for purposes that would be conducive to sport that maybe they, some might be neglecting, for sure. And ways to optimize for, like, like, for example, you don’t do hypertrophy work for bodybuilding because it’s not conducive really to what you’re trying to get. And I think some, some people, they want the best of both worlds and they want to, like, look the part and also perform. So they might be sapping bandwidth that could be allocated towards more optimal things that don’t make them, you know, as cosmetically pleasing.

Yeah, there’s definitely things you can do from a support standpoint when it comes to, you know, nutrition supplementation, etc. But like, you are ultimately going to be capped to some extent by genetic coding when it comes to like, density of certain receptors. And like, you can upregulate it to whatever capacity you can, but, like, you can only push it so far before you’ve kind of, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: Capped it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting because, like, the really bulky guys, they just never have the same fluidity that the guys that are built like Benavidez have, where the punches flow and this effortless combinations, perfect technique. The really jacked guys that look like…

DEREK MUNRO: They’re destroyers, the flexibility is so much more limited too, when you’re like that, though.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Unless you really work at it.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Really work at it. Yeah. And you have to have a intentful approach to making sure you can maintain, you know, the flexibility that might otherwise just be innate to somebody who doesn’t have to deal with a giant deltoid that, like…

Muscle Mass and Mobility

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right. You know Jocko, you know Jocko, you know, I’ve hunted with him before, and Jocko, like, correct archery release. Correct archery release is you’re supposed to get a surprise shot. So as the shot breaks your arm kind of goes back like this. Jocko is so jacked, and he has such limited motion that his archery release is like this. Like it doesn’t. But he’s doing it correctly. But his, it doesn’t move the same way. It’s all just Jocko smash.

You know, he’s just, his body is designed to choke the shit out of you. Like that’s all it’s for. His body. His body’s designed to get a hold of you, take you to the ground, snap your f*ing arm in half. That’s what it’s for. It’s just force and, and strength and you know, and it’s like, it’s funny. I’m sorry. Like, like, does your arm not move that way? He’s like, no, it doesn’t go back. I’m like, that’s funny because I, I’m watching him watching his archery release. It’s perfect.

But there’s, you know, you watch like a, like a Levi Morgan, a world champion pro archer. Like as the shot breaks, their arm just goes back like naturally, just like flows. His just goes, just moves a little bit.

DEREK MUNRO: When I was at my peak of bodybuilding size, I was in the middle of the, of a job as a lifeguard and teaching swimming lessons to kids. And part of the teaching swimming lessons would involve showing how to do the different strokes of, you know, back crawl, front crawl, breaststroke, all the different things. And when you’re like a 265 pound bodybuilder, it gets pretty difficult because not only do you just sink harder because you’re, you know, mostly muscle, but also like just even trying to get a straight arm past your head, it’s impossible. So I actually she had to stop teaching swimming.

JOE ROGAN: Your ears, your f*ing shoulders are slamming in your head.

DEREK MUNRO: Like it would look like you couldn’t even do what you’re trying to teach. Like a f*ing six year old or something.

JOE ROGAN: Very few guys work on mobility. A great example of someone who does is Arman Tsarukian. Arman Tsarukian, who just won. He beat Dan Hooker 2 weeks ago or a week ago. His mobility training is f*ing super impressive. Like suit, he is jacked. Have you seen Armand?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, he’s pretty shred.

JOE ROGAN: He’s the guy that like doesn’t pass the smell test.

DEREK MUNRO: There’s a way to improve mobility, by the way. It’s just a lot of bodybuilders like do not care, right? And like there is some anatomical limitations ultimately if there is muscles literally in the way but just want to put out there, like I’m sure I could have figured it out if I cared.

JOE ROGAN: At the time perhaps. But a 265 with your frame.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah. It would have been limited by like the actual, actual anatomy, but like I had no care for optimizing mobility or anything. I was just like, what’s my max bench?

Derek’s Bodybuilding Days

JOE ROGAN: Show a photo of Derek when he was jacked. When he was super jacked. There’s some photos of him out there that are. You were preposterous.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Do you miss those days? You ever look at that physique? Damn, I look pretty f*ing good.

DEREK MUNRO: No, I mean, I feel like I’ve come to peace a while ago with not looking like that anymore. It’s a lot of upkeep there, dude, to like…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, look at you then. Is that your height? I think you were a little bigger than that at one point.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I think this is like a profile picture. So. Yeah, that. That was a more recent one. It’s probably like how I lost 75 pounds in the bottom left is probably. Yeah, right there, the fat. It may be one of those. That shot probably is one of the bigger, bro.

JOE ROGAN: You got big at one point in time. Was that how you were before you started lifting? Look at that old school BlackBerry. You have the date that just by the phone.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah, yeah, it was. I was like trying to be a competitive bodybuilder and I just kind of realized that I could look good for, you know, like fitness industry, I guess, for kind of looking jacked for Instagram or whatever and like doing okay at like a regional level for, you know, a lower tier level of, of physiques but like bodybuilding to take it to that next level, it was just like a level of stress I wouldn’t be able to, one, be willing to sustain.

And then two, it just wouldn’t have been worth it because it was like I had tried pushing drugs and like I just wasn’t responding to a level I knew I needed to to continue and justify using that much.

JOE ROGAN: Is it a genetic thing?

Androgen Receptors and Drug Response

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, so it’s like your androgen receptor content is a, a largely predetermined thing. There are some things you can do similar, like mitochondrial density and things of that nature that you can do to upregulate and improve it and certain supplements you can use. But ultimately your number of muscle fibers are going to be limited. Like there’s going to be people who are just at baseline, you know, Chihuahua looking humans that if you put them on gear, they just become bigger Chihuahua humans essentially. But like they’re never going to be. Yeah, they’re never going to get, you know, Mr. Olympia caliber.

And there’s a certain like muscle belly that’s more conducive to looking bigger. And also being able to support certain body weights is even like a health thing too. It’s not just how well do you respond to drugs, it’s also how long can you take them without dying, you know, so it’s like some of the most highest performing and like excelling athletes are individuals who can tolerate this stuff and not go, you know, crazy.

From the, some people mentally cannot handle these level of androgens and they, you know, it wrecks their sleep, it wrecks their blood work, it wreck. They get really early cardiovascular disease psychologically too.

JOE ROGAN: They go crazy.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen deaths in, you know, late 20s, mid-30s.

JOE ROGAN: And there was a guy that was Vitor Belfort’s trainer when Vitor first entered into the UFC. So Vitor when he first fought in the UFC weighed 200 pounds in his UFC debut. When he fought Trey Teller, that was UFC 12. And he was like a super athletic, fast, lethal black belt with vicious hands. And then when he fought Randy, go to her. He was 240 and his neck started at the top of his head.

DEREK MUNRO: It was looked like a giant f*ing trap.

TRT Vitor and the Garden Hose Era

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was just ridiculous. He was just ridiculous. And the guy who was working out with him, this guy Curtis, wound up dying very young. And we used to call him “garden hose” because this guy’s veins were, he was so vascular. It was f*ing ridiculous.

We worked out next to him like, “Bro, you got garden hoses for veins. Is your fing insane?” He was just insane. And he was so big, like so big. 300 plus, 5’10”, 300 plus pounds. Just fing jacked. He was so big and, you know, he had Vitor convinced that that was the way to go. Just f*ing hit the gas full speed.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I mean, at its, he was one of the sauciest dudes, or at least, you know, he was like the perfect hybrid of athleticism meets like crazy looking physique, I would say, at least at the time, from what I can recall.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the TRT Vitor was Vitor on the gear when he was younger and then no gear for a while, lull period. And then when they had TRT in the UFC where they allowed it when it was legal, which was a crazy few years, people call it the TRT Vitor years where Vitor was just dominating everybody. Yeah, it was terrifying.

DEREK MUNRO: Him and Overeem are like poster child.

JOE ROGAN: Overeem was the dad, is the poster child. See if you can find a video of Armand Sarukian’s mobility workouts.

DEREK MUNRO: Do you have it?

JOE ROGAN: Because he does really interesting stuff.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Mobility Training and Elite Grappling

JOE ROGAN: Like, stuff I’ve never seen UFC athletes do, but I would think would be really conducive especially to, like, scrambles and weird grappling positions where you want to have strength and, like, odd, like, odd positions of your body where you’re stretched out and…

DEREK MUNRO: There’s one on…

JOE ROGAN: The side just showing.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, yeah, I can’t imagine.

JOE ROGAN: So this, this kind of stuff. Like, this kind of stuff?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, look at this. Like, look at all these things. So he’s doing these kind of things all the time just to maintain that kind of flexibility along with, with all that mass and all that power that he has.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Getting out of some of those awkward positions, you got to be able to get into weird spots comfortably. And…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, this is, look at that. Like, that’s crazy. That’s crazy. Rotation of his back. Yeah, he’s got amazing mobility, but I do have to say he also has back problems, and it might be one of the reasons why he does this. I mean…

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, when you go exorcism on the f*ing tensor machine, I can imagine he probably end up with something.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think that’s what caused it, honestly. I think it’s probably grappling. He’s a really elite grappler. There’s a video of him grappling with Khamzat, and he keeps up with Khamzat, and they’re two weight classes separated, and Khamzat is f*ing fantastic. And, you know, they’re scrambling, and it’s like a very competitive grappling session.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, and circling back to some, like, you know, the sauce days and, like, the garden hose guy. I do think it’s good that the education is out there, though, for people to be able to know how to not, not die from this stuff now, because it’s…

JOE ROGAN: Whoa, that’s Curtis. Yeah, yeah, that’s him.

DEREK MUNRO: Because back then it would just be like…

JOE ROGAN: Go to that photo again in the upper left. That upper left photo. That’s crazy. Guy was so vascular. Like, look at his bicep. Bananas.

DEREK MUNRO: Right?

JOE ROGAN: Look at that. Right bicep. And his chest. He’s got garden hoses on his chest.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Full chocolate, but chocolate face, too. He had chocolate face.

DEREK MUNRO: Or Melanotan, not the wazoo.

Melanotan and the Tanning Peptide

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, the guys that do it now, where they keep their face white because they don’t want to be called out for having black face. Have you seen that?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that’s funny.

JOE ROGAN: It is funny.

DEREK MUNRO: Have you seen the, I think we looked at the Melanotan people.

JOE ROGAN: Is that a peptide?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Melanotan 2 is a, one of the, I don’t know if it’s an obscure one, but I guess maybe proportional to some of the more widespread ones nowadays. But it’s like a melanocortin receptor agonist. And actually an analog of it is used for women for, for hypoactive, like, low sexual drive.

So it actually enhances sexual drive too. So there’s like a component. There’s a version of the drug that doesn’t tan you, that just like, makes you hornier, that women are prescribed called Vyleesi. And then men, there’s no drug approved, but you could theoretically take it. But it gives you boners and also makes you tanned if you take the Melanotan 2.

Yeah. So it’s like for bodybuilders. And it also suppresses appetite as well.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. It really does that. That’s cool. That’s a weird, the, the lighting on that one is weird.

DEREK MUNRO: For us from the date. Let’s see.

JOE ROGAN: It’s right on the Daily Mail, though. It seems like they might have…

DEREK MUNRO: No, no, dude, this is actually possible.

JOE ROGAN: I like how it says that too.

DEREK MUNRO: You can literally manually become black with this drug.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t some lady take that? She was on, like, one of them Sally Jesse Raphael shows.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. She claimed she was black.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. And she’s like, “Look at me. What are you going to tell me? I’m not.” Yeah. She started talking like, oh, God. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How wild.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What if it did it to your hair too?

DEREK MUNRO: It does, because it’s all pigment related. So it does make your hair blacker as well. It makes your facial hair darker.

JOE ROGAN: What does it do? Is there something like that for guys that have gray hair?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, like, it does it to your…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, this is, the lady forgot about this. Look at her boobs too. Oh, my God. That lady might be insane. Like, I’m guessing. Yes.

DEREK MUNRO: And it’s like you almost wouldn’t even think it’s real if you weren’t told by somebody that you actually can go that far. Like, it’s, it’s literally you pick your dose and the exposure to the sun will dictate via the dosage, like, how dark you get. And you can go all the way.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Like full chocolate body.

JOE ROGAN: Is there any side effects?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, you get really nauseous if you overdo it. It’s actually a really potent appetite suppressor. So it’s like one of the, back in the day, I, you could find my before and after. Type in Melanotan 2, More Plates More Dates. You’ll see mine before and after the last time I used it.

JOE ROGAN: And did you use it for bodybuilding?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, because I’m pale as s*. So, like, for me, the thought of having a tan was pretty awesome. There’s me with my CPAP mask on.

JOE ROGAN: Why did you take it with a CPAP mask on?

DEREK MUNRO: I was just like, I look on a f*ing traded. I’ll take a pic.

JOE ROGAN: That’s funny.

DEREK MUNRO: If you scroll down, you’ll see my back before and after. If you keep going there, right there.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: And that’s like weeks apart.

JOE ROGAN: Does tan you?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Dude, you had fing giant lats, man. That’s nuts. Yeah, you could jump off a fing cliff and fly like a squirrel. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: What a weird pose. They just standard, like…

The Reality of Bodybuilding Training

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, bodybuilding is weird, period. Yeah, it is odd. It’s just like the whole idea is not the function. It’s not performance. It’s just looking giant. Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s like some of the exercises don’t even translate the way you think they would do. Like, you do a, you get really good at the bench press, then you do something else that you think is, like, pushing related or like forced production. It’s like, “Oh, I’m weak as here for some reason.” Even though you thought it would translate.

But there’s not like a, it’s almost training neuronal patterns too, more than even just like the muscle and you get hypertrophy. But you’re also kind of just like training yourself to get really good at specific movements in a way that has like, no application to a lot of sports, typically just to look jacked.

DEREK MUNRO: There are more, like, functional choices, obviously, but, like, the ones most conducive to bodybuilding and not getting injured are oftentimes like, you know, the typical kind of like, beachbody style things. But there are, they’re more intelligent choices, for sure. It’s not all that.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s the thing, though, is like the, the guys who lift the heaviest and do it. That’s, that’s a very odd thing. Like, and then they wind up getting like, Ronnie Coleman wind up really getting f*ed up. Ronnie was like, famously one of the heaviest lifters as a bodybuilder.

DEREK MUNRO: And for what it’s worth, I’m absolutely not like, like, above this style of training. This is like, what I still kind of do, to be honest. So it’s like, I do, you know, I’m still a fan of bodybuilding. I don’t want to, like, speak poorly on it or anything.

And we oversee some of the best bodybuilders on the planet right now as well and make sure they can do it as safely as possible because it’s still a dangerous sport. And you know, you got to take modern knowledge to not screw yourself up nowadays.

Having the Hard Conversations

JOE ROGAN: What do you ever tell a guy like, you just don’t have the genetics to ever do this at a professional level, do you? You ever have to have that conversation with people like you’re, you’re pushing the gear so hard and it’s not responding.

DEREK MUNRO: Like if I had a friend, I guess maybe similar to your like heart to heart you had with Schaub about MMA at the time when it was like not really worth continuing to expose danger wise. Yeah, it’s, you know, often a lot of these kind of situations happen in bodybuilding where it’s like you have a close friend who’s taking exorbitant amounts of drugs and you know, it’s just like, like killing him and you know that the like you’re not going to make it to the Olympia.

So really like, what are we doing this for? Yeah, you have better opportunities elsewhere. Like I’ve had that conversation a couple times. But in general it’s kind of like you kind of have to have the self awareness to know.

And I think fortunately that’s part of where the education comes in is back in the day you wouldn’t know that you had the bad genetics. You just think everyone’s taking more than, than you because you wouldn’t really, you thought there was a secret that you didn’t know there was some special drug that they sourced from Europe that you’re not getting.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

DEREK MUNRO: You know, they have the secret, you know, fill in the blank thing that the guru at the Olympia level who’s coaching all the top bodybuilders has and you just need to get to the next level and get your IFBB pro card. And then maybe I’ll get to work with that guru and then he’ll give me access to that drug and then I can take it to the next level.

And then before you know it, a lot of these guys are still grinding for really like low level shows or like to place poorly even at like the entry level of professional. And their health is a wreck and they’re not really going to make it to where they think maybe they’re on the path to.

And so I don’t know, I think the more, you know, transparent look into it has made a lot of people more self aware to check themselves and also to know if they’re even, you have to respond well from a health standpoint too. It’s not just how good do I look in the mirror.

If you have wrecked blood work or you have an abnormal anatomical structure of your heart before you start subjecting yourself to hormones, these are things that are all checkable now proactively. And you could tell beforehand if you’re a good candidate, not just from a muscular response standpoint, but also from a health tolerance standpoint.

The Future: Genetic Engineering in Bodybuilding

JOE ROGAN: I wonder what, if any, what factor genetic engineering is going to play into bodybuilding.

DEREK MUNRO: Myostatin inhibition. There is gene therapies that are being utilized now.

Myostatin Inhibitors and Modern Fat Loss Drugs

JOE ROGAN: They’re just not that efficacious. Myostatin inhibitors, are people using them now?

DEREK MUNRO: Pharmaceutical pipelines are trying to integrate them in order to offset muscle catabolism induced via GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, so it’s kind of a unique time because not only do we have really aggressive fat loss agents that actually work now that are not simply stimming your brain to high hell, which a lot of the previous drugs worked like that. Now it’s like we have these effective things but they make you eat so little that the next thing is there’s all this attention on how to lose healthy weight and not a bunch of muscle weight because there’s more education around the importance of losing fat and not muscle, which is metabolically active tissue, health supporting.

Whereas if you just end up skinny fat, you might be no better off than when you started depending on the person. So some of the more refined current fully being developed drugs are like these fat loss appetite suppressing agents with concurrent thermogenic properties for energy expenditure and then muscle preservation mechanisms built in that inhibit myostatin or act through other pathways to try and keep the muscle on you.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Brigham from Ways to Well was explaining that they’re using, some people rather, are using GLP-1s in conjunction with IGF and they’re combining a bunch of different things to offset the bone density and muscle loss and then also encouraging weightlifting while they’re doing it because a lot of people are just taking them and then just shriveling because look, if you starve yourself you will lose weight, but you’re going to lose bone density, you’re going to lose tissue, you’re going to lose everything.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that’s like one of the, I think most important components of the usage of them is especially with women who might be otherwise not even integrating it into their regular life, they just end up eating less of what is already a nutrient poor or protein poor diet and aren’t strength training as much as I guess proportionally to men. It’s becoming more prevalent among women obviously, which is great. But the bone loss and muscle loss is significant among anybody who is depriving themselves of nutrients like that.

JOE ROGAN: And heart tissue too.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. I mean everything. You’re basically self-inducing malnutrition.

The Discipline Debate: Natural Weight Loss vs. GLP-1s

JOE ROGAN: Can’t you just diet? I mean it’s really a discipline thing. Not with people that are severely obese. Like I’m in favor of GLP-1s for people, like if you’re 500 pounds. But I do have to say Jelly Roll did it on the natch. He did it on the natch. He did not take GLP-1s. He’s not taking nothing.

DEREK MUNRO: Man.

JOE ROGAN: That guy is just working out every day and he just cut all the bullshit out of his life. He got rid of his phone. He didn’t have a phone for, he has one now, but he didn’t have a phone for the longest time. Even his, when you text him, the little image that shows up when you go from, it’s a phone with a red line through it.

DEREK MUNRO: What does that mean?

JOE ROGAN: Like not interested in phones, man. He decided not to have a phone for a long time because he realized it was negative for his mental health and he wanted to lose a bunch of weight. But he did it naturally. He really did. He did it just through hard work and discipline and just, you know. Have you seen the images of him now?

DEREK MUNRO: No.

JOE ROGAN: Bro. There’s him on stage with Alexander Volkanovski and he doesn’t even look the same guy. He’s lost 200 plus pounds.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, nice.

JOE ROGAN: He looks f*ing great. I mean it’s amazing.

DEREK MUNRO: One of the things that’s tough when it comes to ascertaining that it’s more a willpower thing than anything, in many cases I do think it is. There are a lot of people with unhealthy behaviors and psychological tendencies to just be, it’s easier to be lazy than not.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also the food addiction because you have to eat.

DEREK MUNRO: But there are some people who just, if you ultimately have a genetically higher baseline perpetual level of appetite signaling, it’s kind of hard to tell that person, like just, you know, wrench it out, bro. Like you got this. And it’s like, I know a lot of people in the fitness industry. Look at him.

JOE ROGAN: Look how much weight he’s lost. Isn’t that incredible?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, it’s great.

JOE ROGAN: Dude, he looks f*ing great. It’s really amazing.

DEREK MUNRO: No, especially impressive for individuals who are that obese to make that big of a change. It’s like it’s the hardest to make that first step and get that big of a weight cut.

The Power of Momentum: Extreme Transformation Stories

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And then it’s momentum after that. I watched an incredible video yesterday, one of the most motivational videos I’ve ever seen. I’ll send it to you, Jamie. It’s this kid and this guy is, he’s out of shape. He’s got high body fat. And the video is him saying that he wants to work out like David Goggins for a hundred days. He doesn’t work out at all.

And he goes from, I’ll send it to you, Jamie. He goes from being this guy who’s completely out of shape to at the end of the video he does a f*ing iron man. You found it. Yeah. So this is the guy. So in the beginning, in the beginning he’s kind of fat and like that’s what he looks like. And you know, he’s motivated by Goggins.

So the first day he runs, he gets up at 5:30 in the morning and he runs 13 miles the first day. I mean he’s never, he doesn’t run at all. He doesn’t work out at all. He eats junk food. He’s running, running past McDonald’s and shit. He’s all fat. By the end of it, he’s doing an ultra. Well, he does an ultramarathon halfway into it. And then by the end of it he does an ironman.

And now he regularly runs 100 mile races. He got down to 140 pounds. He’s shredded now. It’s really, really impressive.

DEREK MUNRO: That’s awesome.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s just all discipline. Look at the difference. 145, 9% body fat. He started out at 184, 27% body fat. And look, he’s all lean now and healthy and he’s running 100 mile races now. It’s really amazing because he just did it with sheer willpower and documented the whole thing. He’s in agony. His ankle’s all f*ed up from running. So he swims and he swims in the pool and then he decides to swim with weights on. He really becomes obsessed.

DEREK MUNRO: Have you seen the guy who fasted for a year straight?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, that’s an old story, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I think that’s still the record for longest period of not eating and just adhering to a diet.

JOE ROGAN: And he got vitamin IVs. And the guy who did that, what’s interesting is he also lost skin. So his skin shrank along with his body, which I thought was fascinating.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine that to some extent there’s some elasticity depending on how long you’ve been fat. And also like, I don’t know, maybe just the tissue itself. There is some level of, 382 days, I’m sure your body’s fiending for energy from anywhere it can find it. If there’s some way to, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: But I think the interesting thing is he didn’t come around, come out of it looking like a lot of these people do, where they have to get all their skin removed.

DEREK MUNRO: You know, I mean, I feel like there’s got to be loose skin to some extent.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a shirtless, but that was part of the narrative. His skin actually shrank along with his body because he wasn’t eating at all.

DEREK MUNRO: I want to see that.

JOE ROGAN: Does that make sense?

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, I was trying to play along for a sec, but now I’m like, if there’s not a pic, I don’t know, dude.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it was also, it’s 1960, whatever it was.

DEREK MUNRO: Sounds like an interesting tale that might have passed through the grapevine.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that, though.

DEREK MUNRO: No, that sounds crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And then once you start eating again, how do you just keep the f*ing floodgate from…

The Psychology of Extreme Dieting

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I mean, that’s the interesting thing is some people, psychologically, it’s easier to adhere to something when they’re full bore. And then, I know a lot of people who, they’ll commit to a competition because they know I’m accountable to step on stage. I don’t want to look like shit when I’m on stage. And they do it. They get a bunch of photos done and then after they go off the rails and they’re right back to where they started within, you know, a month or two.

JOE ROGAN: That happens to a lot of fighters. They get done with fighting and then…

DEREK MUNRO: They get really fat.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really common. It’s really common because they also develop real eating disorders because you’re cutting weight all the time.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah. I mean, for some of them, it’s like you’re basically doing bodybuilder, essentially.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Paddy Pimblett’s the best example of a current active fighter.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, that guy’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: He gets so big dude, his moon face.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s like the best in the league, bro.

The 382-Day Fast: An Extreme Case Study

JOE ROGAN: So here it says 382 days. From June 14, 1965 through June 30 of 1966, he consumed only vitamins, electrolytes, an unspecified amount of yeast, a source of essential amino acids, and zero calorie beverages such as tea, coffee, and sparkling water. Although he occasionally added milk or sugar to the beverages, especially during the final weeks of the fast.

Barbieri began his treatment in the hospital, but for most of the 382 days, he lived at home. Okay, it says stool samples were not taken, but he reportedly went up to 48 days between stools. Wow.

DEREK MUNRO: Which sounds crazy, but it’s like, what’s there going to…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, what will be coming out? His starting weight was 456, and the fast officially stopped. July 1966, he reached his goal weight of 180 pounds. Wow.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that’s nuts.

JOE ROGAN: The next 10 days, doctors placed him on a diet of salt and then sugar in preparation for solid food. Though some sources record the fast being 392 days instead of 382. Wow.

Genetic Factors in Appetite and Body Composition

DEREK MUNRO: Now, one of the things that’s tough is it’s like, even though maybe that case study exists and there’s people who just brute force willpower their way through it, some of those people otherwise might have genetically been able to tolerate, you know, the hunger signaling better than somebody else who literally cannot focus on work or anything when they’re that hungry.

And it almost sometimes doesn’t even come down to the diet quality as much as somebody might tell them. Yeah, it does, it does to some extent, but, and it’s certainly getting rid of the shitty processed foods and getting on a good exercise regimen and doing all the things to set yourself up in the best position will probably take care of most people.

But there are some individuals who just at baseline, even on the inverse side, I know a lot of people who simply aren’t hungry and they have to force feed themselves to gain muscle because they’re just perpetually shredded. And they have the opposite problem because their hunger signaling is so low.

So it’s like people look at them as an example in the fitness industry of like, oh, this guy has the best discipline. He’s so shredded all the time. And in reality, that guy’s like, I hate food.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so weird.

DEREK MUNRO: There’s one guy in particular. His name’s David Laid, and he’s like, I don’t know, like a teenage, well, he’s in his 20s now, but teenagers look up to him. That’s kind of like a fitness industry icon of aesthetics. And he’s perpetually had a shredded six pack. He’s pretty jacked. He’s tall, he’s handsome. And he literally says on camera, “I hate eating.” And he’s serious about it. He’s like, “I can’t stand having to eat meals.”

JOE ROGAN: What?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s not even just to be a bodybuilder. He’s just like, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: What is he eating? How is that possible?

DEREK MUNRO: Good, high quality food. Best picture I can find.

JOE ROGAN: I can’t tell. You can’t tell? Looks, yeah, it looks like he’s got some fat there. Yeah, it looks like he’s got a bunch of extra skin there.

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, it’s just like, how could he not. Yeah, yeah.

The Most Shredded Physiques in Bodybuilding

JOE ROGAN: How could he not find a picture of that other guy? Who’s the guy that they call the most shredded guy alive?

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, Helmut Strebl.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

DEREK MUNRO: That guy. That guy’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, find that guy. That’s ridiculous.

DEREK MUNRO: H E L M U T. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this guy and then S T R E B L. Did it come up? Helmet shredded is coming up. That guy, Helmet Strebl.

JOE ROGAN: Is this him? Yeah. Oh, Jesus.

DEREK MUNRO: That.

JOE ROGAN: That is insane.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that guy’s physique is “the man with 0% body fat.” That’s hilarious. That’s not possible, folks.

DEREK MUNRO: You want to see even more shredded?

JOE ROGAN: Is that really possible that he’s got more? There’s someone more shredded?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. Type in Andreas Munzer.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I’ve seen that guy. But what is this guy’s body fat? Zero is not possible. What is that, six?

DEREK MUNRO: Five or six, maybe? No, that would be like stage super, stage ready beyond most bodybuilders, even after the best of the best in terms of conditioning. So I don’t know, maybe like six, seven. And it’s kind of tough though, dude, because it’s like some of these guys.

JOE ROGAN: They have like, oh, Jesus Christ. Go back to that picture. That’s nuts.

DEREK MUNRO: That’s like aggressive filtering and sharpening to whatever.

JOE ROGAN: Whatever it is. That is real body. That’s insane.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, even.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s obviously like the best possible lighting for that effect.

DEREK MUNRO: There’s distribution of fat and water that some people, it just looks more shredded than another person who might otherwise store any excess fat on like their a or like their love handles or whatever. For a guy like that, not only is he diced and obviously he’s just diced, but he has like a dry look to the skin that enhances the kind of perceived leanness.

And it’s like, I forgot what it is. It’s not “dick skin lean.” I forget what the terminology is, but it’s like white guy something. And it’s just like, if you’re certain white physiques are known to look more like you’re almost so pale and dry that it enhances the perceived leanness, if that makes any sense whatsoever.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the weirdest thing about bodybuilding, right? You have to be super dehydrated to look great, and you’re almost dead.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah. And then you have to go chocolate body and stuff.

JOE ROGAN: But those guys, they’re like, they black out sometimes backstage, don’t they?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which guy’s that?

DEREK MUNRO: That’s Helmet.

JOE ROGAN: That’s him.

DEREK MUNRO: 4% body fat.

JOE ROGAN: I might be 4%.

DEREK MUNRO: I might be totally butchering his name, by the way. So if I’m, I hope, bro Helmet, I hope I’m saying it right.

JOE ROGAN: I would never wear a shirt. Why would I wear a shirt?

DEREK MUNRO: But it’s like, you would not.

JOE ROGAN: He’s 47. Wow.

DEREK MUNRO: In this article, too, which is probably like five to ten years old.

JOE ROGAN: What does it look like now? I wonder. I wonder if he keeps it up because, I mean, I would be so hungry.

DEREK MUNRO: Unless you’re on a GLP-1.

JOE ROGAN: This is him. This is him now. Wow, that’s crazy.

DEREK MUNRO: No, that’s not. That’s going to be the same photo.

JOE ROGAN: Someone else. Oh, somebody else put it up there.

DEREK MUNRO: He has an Instagram. It doesn’t seem like, that’s one of the weird things when you’re such an OG of the industry that you just have weird residual fan pages and you don’t even know if it’s the guy or not.

Old School Fitness Influencers

JOE ROGAN: What’s that old guy? He was bald in the old days. He had like the hair on the side. Scooby. I don’t know, maybe white guy. He was like famous shredded guy back in the early days of bodybuilding. He was not big, he was thin, but he was like super f*ing ripped. God, I can’t remember his name.

DEREK MUNRO: Was he?

JOE ROGAN: But he had like the hair on the side. Like weird, like old man bald. You know what? Didn’t have a full shaved head.

DEREK MUNRO: Old man bald. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He looked like when people went bald in the 50s and they didn’t shave the side of their head.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, I’m sure if I saw it, I would know who you’re talking about.

JOE ROGAN: He was famous for teaching. You got him.

DEREK MUNRO: I feel like you have enough.

JOE ROGAN: What’s his name? I didn’t get a name yet, but this him? No, no, that’s not him. It’s older, I bet you from a long time ago.

DEREK MUNRO: Who’s the, what’s your preferred AI search tool? Use that and type in what you just said.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, put that into Perplexity.

DEREK MUNRO: Old man, bald, OG fitness influencer.

JOE ROGAN: You have to give me a better search for a time period. Like 90s. Yeah, yeah, 90s. Yeah, 90s. Oh, God. His name is at the tip of my tongue. Oh, this is driving me crazy. Yeah, he would teach people how to be shredded. He had like this protocol for how to lose weight, but his whole thing was being shredded. He wasn’t that big. I mean, he was, you know, fit, but not like, you know, bodybuilder jacked.

DEREK MUNRO: And he was Caucasian.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, it’s telling me.

DEREK MUNRO: Billy Blanks.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no, no. White guy. F*.

DEREK MUNRO: I was going to say Athlean X, but there’s no way that’s who you’re talking about.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no.

DEREK MUNRO: He’s got great hair.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a long time ago. No, Athlean X has got wonderful hair.

DEREK MUNRO: It’s not right either.

The Future of Hair Loss Treatment

JOE ROGAN: Speaking of hair, there’s that new thing that is the study out of UCLA where they’re going to be able to grow hair back. Yeah, isn’t that wild?

DEREK MUNRO: You don’t believe it or not, dude, it’s like every week it’s some new thing, like “rodent regrew hair after being shaved bald using UCLA mediated broccoli extract” or whatever the f. And it’s like now every Reddit scientist is dumping fing broccoli juice on their head or whatever.

It just never really pans out ultimately and it’s pretty shocking. I think I even mentioned this at one point, that we have all these refined AI tools and drugs and some of the most developed and refined nearly side effect free drugs for some things that are pretty significant routes of disease, but like hair loss, no one has a clue how to fix it.

JOE ROGAN: Or dick size. Hair loss and dick size. Two big ones we know to max.

DEREK MUNRO: Out your genetic capacity for dick size though.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the nuttiest thing that I’ve been paying attention to lately is so many guys that are getting their legs broken to get taller.

DEREK MUNRO: I got an update on that guy if you wanted to.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, the Sasquatch guy. Yeah. How’s he doing?

Leg Lengthening Surgery Update

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, he’s walking, but it’s not perfect.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s been a few years, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, but he’s also like the most extreme edge case example of, it’s almost if it was unfair to use a guy as a reference point. It’s like this is the heaviest, tallest example. So it’s like if anyone.

JOE ROGAN: Because he was 6 feet when he started and he got to 6’6″ and he was not walking like a year later.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. So he crutches. He said, let’s see, I could send this to you if you want to put it up on the screen. Or I could just show you here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, just text it to me. What is he? Is he okay?

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, he got sued by the company that did his surgery.

JOE ROGAN: He got sued?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why did he get sued?

DEREK MUNRO: Because he was talking about all the mishaps that happened when he got, because it’s kind of like there are good clinics and bad clinics in terms of quality. And he kind of was, I guess, too forthcoming about like, I did a podcast with them and they didn’t like it.

JOE ROGAN: They’re suing him.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Literally. Well, they.

DEREK MUNRO: They did sue him. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How can you sue someone for telling the truth about a procedure that didn’t work out so great?

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, great question. That’s what I said.

JOE ROGAN: How could you win? Maybe you could sue somebody.

DEREK MUNRO: Maybe it’s just like bury them in fees or something.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Yeah, probably. Probably.

DEREK MUNRO: All right, check see if this came through. Hopefully my LTE is good.

JOE ROGAN: Nope, not yet.

DEREK MUNRO: You can airdrop it to my computer if it pops up.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there you go. All right. So you still.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, one sec.

JOE ROGAN: God d*, man. Yeah. I was watching this guy yesterday on Instagram. This fairly thin kid. He wasn’t big, but he gained 5 inches. He was like 5’5″, now he’s 5’10” and real happy with it. But I was like, Jesus Christ. And a year later, again in crutches. One year later. Took him a year and a half before he could walk normally.

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, some people, that’s still worth it to not have to.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I guess.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, if you’re 5 feet tall and then all of a sudden you’re 5’7″, I guess.

DEREK MUNRO: Here, see if it, did it come through for you? Yeah, I was trying to figure out what to play. I airdropped it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you, I got it.

DEREK MUNRO: I got, I got on the screen.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so, so this is 2023. Oh, wow. He did it way back then.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God, look how skinny his legs are. That’s crazy. How skinny his legs were to have that much mass up top. That’s crazy. That’s probably the problem, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Well, it definitely is. Like I said, the most extreme of circumstances to impose for what was seemingly a poor quality clinic. And then also trying to go from a height that’s objectively tall to a height that’s objectively extremely tall with the most heavy guy that’s probably ever done the procedure.

JOE ROGAN: You would think, yeah, he’s 300 pounds.

DEREK MUNRO: I think he was way more than that.

JOE ROGAN: You would say, like, hey, man, if you’re going to do this, lose upper body weight and then gain it back just so you can give your legs a chance to grow. Oh my God, that’s so crazy. It just, it makes me freak out because I’m getting anxiety. They’re just going to snap and he’s going to fall over.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah. There definitely is something a little bit unnatural about watching, even like the strikes on the ground.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: It makes you feel like something’s just going to snap.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

DEREK MUNRO: But to his credit, I mean, the guy literally couldn’t even walk before and he’s optimistic about it still and he thinks he’s going to make a full recovery.

JOE ROGAN: There is now November 2025. So that’s two years later. Two years later he can walk there if he has to run from a fire, you know what I mean?

DEREK MUNRO: He’s f*ed for sure. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, also the mechanics, like your body’s used to moving legs that are 6 inches shorter and now like the knee has different pressure and you know, it’s got to be really strange.

DEREK MUNRO: He said, let’s see, bones are mostly healed, just have a lot of weakness. As legs strengthen, the pain decreases and the spasms.

JOE ROGAN: Also, he’s got to be on the sauce too, right?

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So even that’s not helping.

DEREK MUNRO: I mean, if anything it would help in some of the recovery for bone, but it would also keep him yoked and like more pressure on that too. So, like, maybe it’s a bit of a double edged sword there.

He says major hurdles cleared infection. Knee tendinopathy will probably walk normal within a couple months. I can hunt, but we’ll need to strengthen much more in order to really jump, jog and run. Planning to have a US doctor fully fix any remaining issues, but for now, legs are good.

JOE ROGAN: Where’d he get his surgery done?

DEREK MUNRO: I did a podcast with them last year and I think it was Thailand clinic where it’s like he did a bargain.

JOE ROGAN: He got a bargain. Did he do a Groupon?

DEREK MUNRO: It definitely wasn’t the best show.

JOE ROGAN: This guy got it. He’s nice years post surgery. They were doing this nine years ago.

DEREK MUNRO: So this guy, as far as I know, he is a bit of a unique case in that he was actually correcting an asymmetry. So he had, I’m almost positive, I don’t want to misspeak. I’m sure he’ll correct it if he sees this. But I’m pretty sure he had one leg was unusually asymmetrically shorter than the other one. And then he was kind of evening it out to what would otherwise be his genetic symmetrical match.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, interesting.

DEREK MUNRO: So there’s different applications to which people do this. And it’s not always just pure vanity. I want to get really tall. It’s sometimes to correct a functional asymmetry. It’s just a lot of people you hear about the cases of I want to get really tall for superficial reasons.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just a matter of time before they’re just genetically engineering everybody to look like Thor. This is a matter of time.

DEREK MUNRO: I think there’s a lot of people that don’t want this to work though too, because it’s like if it’s almost too easy or doable, it’s just some people. I see a lot of people unreasonably shit on these people and it’s just, you know, just take the content for what it is.

The Future of Genetic Engineering

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, no, that’s true. But I’m saying about with the genetic engineering, there’s a lot of people that are not want that to work either, but tough shit. You’re not going to hold back science because you don’t like the fact that if, especially if someone has poor genetics and they just look gross and their whole life they’ve looked gross.

And then all of a sudden something comes along and now you’re a supermodel and you’re six foot six and like, Mike, it’s you. What the f* happened? I went to this clinic in Turkey and look what they did.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, that was you were asking about what, bone smashing?

JOE ROGAN: What?

DEREK MUNRO: I just saw a video about this.

JOE ROGAN: Then thought it was fake, but this seems like a place to find out if it’s real.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh yeah. So people are like…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, what? Whatever they can do.

Bone Smashing and Extreme Body Modification

DEREK MUNRO: I’m pretty sure this is not an, it’s a clickbaity thing among the people that do this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute, wait a minute. He’s hitting himself with a f*ing hammer.

DEREK MUNRO: A kid was just using a trophy, just banging his face all day. He’s like, “I’ve been doing this for years.” So they think that they can induce acute bone remodeling in the area to kind of enhance zygoma development or what have you, and get better, you know, whatever asymmetry or deficiency they deem to have cosmetically corrected.

And some of them, they’re just punching their face essentially before they go out at night time to get a temporary pump in their teeth. So think about back in the day when you went to the club and you’re like, I want to hit push ups first. Yeah. Oh, my God, you’re laughing and they’re probably like, bro, it’s the same thing.

JOE ROGAN: You’re f*ing punching your cheekbones to get them stick out more. Oh, God, it’s so dumb. There’s so much out there, man.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah.

Wrapping Up: Gorilla Mind and Merrick Health

JOE ROGAN: Listen, man, this is great. Congratulations on this. So for everybody that wants to buy it, Gorilla Mind, I’ve been drinking it for two hours now. Three almost. It’s great works.

DEREK MUNRO: Oh, thank you.

JOE ROGAN: I feel like I haven’t had a cup of coffee the entire podcast. That’s unusual for me, but it tastes good too. How many flavors you got?

DEREK MUNRO: A lot, man. Fifteen plus. We got to narrow it down to the best ones, though, to really dial in the catalog.

JOE ROGAN: But if somebody wants to buy this, order it. Where’s it at?

DEREK MUNRO: Gorillamind.com. We’re in GNC vitamin shops across the country. We’re going to be in Circle K soon and soon to be more spots, hopefully.

JOE ROGAN: Congratulations on that and for everything else that you do. Gorillamind.com.

DEREK MUNRO: Yeah, yeah. And merrickhealth.com if you want to get preventative medicine expert oversight when it comes to diagnostics optimization, etc.

JOE ROGAN: All right, brother. Well, it’s always good to hang out with you. Very fun.

DEREK MUNRO: Thanks for having me.

JOE ROGAN: My pleasure, my pleasure. And again, congratulations. This is legit. I’m going to buy it. All right, bye, everybody. See you.

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