For at least two years, every night. Combing through all the forums. Page counts getting to the hundreds. Reading messages posted by guys a decade prior, with me wondering if they were still even alive the day I was reading their posts. Flip flopping between opinions on what I needed to do, or start with. I’d read all the cycle logs. I’d listen to the bro philosophers break down why “X“ hormone was the best, why it gave you “Y“ look. Reading the same starter advice over and over, from so many different voices and people that had been in the game for years. Somehow thinking I was too good for it, or I’d be different. Typical stubborn young guy shit. As usual with my life, I needed to learn the hard way for it to click.

That starter advice I was ignoring? The golden fucking rule for your first cycle or blast:

Testosterone only.

I dove head first into my blast, with a healthy mix of NPP, Dbol and Testosterone. For my first time. Estrogen is a finicky little bitch, to say the least. And everyone, I mean every fucking single person, responds differently to it. That first cycle of testosterone only should be serving as your guiding light for the path you’re about to likely embark on for a good portion of your life. Its going to show you two very important things:

• How you respond to testosterone in general.

• How you are affected by estrogen.

This is because testosterone is, and will forever be the base of all your cycles. You need testosterone to feel good. I shouldn’t need to explain that low test as a man puts you in a slow, perpetual kind of hell. Your body will forever take the lazy route. Any time you introduce exogenous hormones, whether it’s test, deca, dbol or equipoise, it signals to your nuts and HPTA axis to shut down the natural production. Testosterone is and forever will be, a staple in your enhanced career. There is no single hormone that will provide better risk adjusted gains for you, dollar for dollar. Cheap, effective and easy to source. Not only will it provide some of the best quality of gains, it will also provide the least amount of side effects when properly managed. Quite the deal. Understanding how you respond to it at varying doses pays fucking dividends in the long run.

Even your first time running testosterone solo, you don’t know shit. You don’t understand what your body is trying to signal. You can’t make the distinction yet. Many high and low estrogen symptoms mimic each other. You’re probably paranoid of gyno and rubbing your nipples like a freak when you think nobody is looking. You don’t have multiple cycles or years worth of bloodwork results to verify what you’re seeing and feeling.

My dumbass, like most things in life, decided “go big, or go fucking home”. And I got big. Real big, real quick. But I felt like shit. I couldn’t tell if it was estrogen from the test fucking me up. At the time, I didn’t even realize Dbol aromatized into Methylestradiol, which my AI wouldn’t have done shit for anyways, and would my bloodwork would have missed it as well. To build on this dumb decision, I couldn’t tell if it was NPP and the typical 19-Nor prolactin side effects giving me hell, and I didn’t realize that they would have been heavily aggravated from my fucked up estrogen situation either. I introduced three unknown variables at the same time. It made bloodwork meaningless. The complexity didn’t give me more like I had boldly assumed, it gave me less. I had less control of my body. Trying to troubleshoot my side effects was like taking a shot in the dark. Might as well have been in a casino, pulling on the fucking slot machine hoping to hit a jackpot to solve my problems.

My body and strength was enhanced, but my life was not. If you’re going down this route, you should always be aiming for both.

That’s the name of the game. Life enhancement.

A game you have to learn on your own through trial and error. What works for some, may not work for others. Once you understand your response to estrogen, and you figured out a way to manage it in whatever way your body agrees with most... It’s smooth fucking sailing, on a nice, calm sunny day.

By comparison, on the cycles where I blasted Deca or NPP, it was like taking a boat into a fucking hurricane at times.

Emotionally flat, dull or depressive. Hard to describe, not an aggressive mental state, but not a good one either.
Numb, half broken dick at times that was very hard to dial in. Part of the game with 19-Nors, and why understanding your estrogen response early on is crucial.
Bloat that made testosterone puffiness look mild. Looking like the moon faced Michelin man.
Lingering side effects for months after, if I used Deca. The clearance time on that stuff is much longer compared to your typical enanthate or cypionate esters.

Sure, I was strong. Strong as fuck. Put on some good weight. My joints did feel better as well. But me as a person? Fucking awful. And if you’re anything like me, you like to finish what you start. Deca’s a long, slow haul. Minimum 5 months if you want to do it right, ideally a bit longer than that. That’s a long time to be suffering in the name of packing on a few pounds. Unless you’re making money off of your physique, or you’re one of the few that genuinely respond well to the stuff...

Who could forget Tren? It’s a vicious compound that has earned its reputation. I had a massive love and hate relationship with it for many years. It got to the point where my ex told me she’d break up with me if I kept taking it. In fact, thats probably one of the best ways to describe Tren. It’s like that toxic ex you keep going back to. You know the one, she’s hot, but completely fucking crazy. Ruined your life once or twice. All your friends tell you that you need to stay as far away as possible... But you just can’t help it. Every once in a while you gotta go back for a little more. If Deca was like sailing into a hurricane, Tren was like taking a paddle boat into an oncoming tsunami.

You can’t sleep. You stare at the ceiling in a pool of cold, musky gross sweat that turns your pillow yellow. All you can hear is your heartbeat.
Every once in a while, you nick a vein while injecting and get to experience the joy of Tren cough.
You will be horny enough to fuck a hole in the wall, and when you do fuck, you cant cum.
You’ll be so horny that your standards will evaporate into nothing. Fat, skinny, whatever. They can all get it.
You’re probably taking it to cut, so you’re not only sleep deprived... You’re also hungry as fuck, and a bit of a cunt.

Tren is, and was something else. I looked great. I was very strong, deep into cutting phases when I wouldn’t have been otherwise. But mentally... I was somewhere else. Not always a good place either. Vivid nightmares. A definite change in character that you don’t notice until you come off of it and people suddenly ask if you’re doing better. An exhausting experience for myself, and sometimes the people around me. And for what? A few extra veins in my arms and legs? Some extra plates on the bar when i’m near the end of my diet and basically eating dust? It eventually ends, and the look goes with it regardless.

The physical strain was real as well, heavily reflected in my blood pressure, heart rate and bloodwork. Coming from the GH15 era, I used and abused far too much trenbolone. We all did. It is what it is, and it taught me a lot. There’s a time and place for it for sure, but that time and place is for a select few that actually compete and step on a stage. It provides a unique look that in many cases can’t be beat, but at very real mental and physical costs.

My testosterone cycles?

Happy.
Hungry.
Horny.

Three words to describe a properly executed testosterone cycle.
Most cycles and blasts might have one or two of those words as a description.

Easy work. Predictable. No sleep issues. My mental state was sharp, clear and driven. Confidence was always high. No depressive, obsessive or jealous thoughts. Libido was high, but not at the degenerate levels provided by Tren. Dick functioning great, with none of the 19-Nor numbing effects. No need for cabergoline or pramiprexole. After I figured how my body responded to estrogen, I was able to ditch AI’s all together as well. Quality muscle and strength packed on month to month, with little to no downside mentally or physically. Blood pressure and resting heart rate were always in much better shape, and bloodwork always looked much better too.

Toss in a few units of HGH daily, or on a 5-2 schedule. The way HGH complements testosterone is perfect. After about 6 months you’ll see the skin and joint benefits. A near constant fullness. Better, deeper sleep. And you’ll lean out much quicker while dieting as well. Increasing those already existing endogenous hormones through exogenous means truly is the way to go. You could conceivably run testosterone for the rest of your life within reason. And these days, that’s giving you an unfair advantage. Look around. The average male consumes nothing but slop, and swims through an ocean of toxic shit while possessing negligible levels of testosterone. Most don’t do anything to better themselves physically. The bar has never been lower. This is a good thing for anyone with some agency; it’s never been easier to help yourself rise to the top.

The worst side effects?

Mild acne issues. Looking and feeling a bit bloated, but still okay. A distractingly high libido, but nowhere near tren levels. Over time, I began to pick up on the subtle signals my body would show me. Estrogen just became less and less of a problem. That paranoid fear of gyno, or it being too high, or too low just faded away with experience... It was as easy as staying lean, using a strong androgen to complement it (i.e masteron, winstrol), or by pinning daily, whether it was short or long ester. The hormonal rollercoaster caused by the peaks and valleys with infrequent pinning in particular is what causes most issues in the first place. Most will do better pinning their test every day letting their estrogen creep a bit to the higher end, than they will trying to play god with aromasin or anastrozole. If you know, you know. You only need to truly crash your estrogen once or twice to know what an awful experience it is.

Testosterone done right enhances your entire life, without sacrificing your longevity the way some of the harsher hormones can. That should be the overall goal of steroid use and lifting. I spent far too many years and blasts feeling like shit, or mentally unwell for the sake of throwing up a few extra pounds and getting a little more shredded. Looking back, this was not worth it. At all. Once I started primarily using testosterone for basically everything... it was just so much better.

Keep it simple.

Enhance your entire life, not just the few hours you spend in the gym.

A year feels like a long time, but it passes in the blink of an eye. The older you get, the faster the time moves. A fucked up paradox that comes for us all, and sometimes keeps me up at night. Getting completely sober, and just raw dogging life, no matter what the days brought, was brutal at times. You’d be surprised at how little time you spend thinking about the bigger picture when you’re going through the motions of bouncing from bender to bender.

THE AMOUNT OF TIME WASTED

I used drugs and drank for nearly 20 years. Started at 12. Ended at just before 32. I had a few stints of being “California Sober”, but it was bullshit. Instead of drinking, I’d wind up blacking out in K-holes and breaking shit. Instead of coke, I’d take adderall or vyvanse by the handful and get geeked out of my fucking skull for days. This past year was the first time I truly cut it all out. Everything. No booze. No weed. No psychedelics. None of the fun party stuff. No ADD meds.

Fucking nothing.

I opened this piece with a breakdown of the time I have spent dead sober so far.
Let’s crunch the numbers for the 20 years I was not:

20 years.
240 months.
1042 weeks.
7300 days.
10,512,000 minutes.
630,720,000 seconds.

The difference is glaring. When you break down the numbers, it’s almost painful to read. Obviously, I wasn’t high for every single one of those seconds, but I was for a gross majority. And for the ones in the shit, and the ones that got out of it, you already know those sober ones when you’re caught up in that lifestyle just count less. Less productive. Less fulfilling. Feeling like shit. Trying to catch back up to the time already wasted. A vicious cycle that many don’t get out of. I lost track of all the friends and acquaintances that died along the way. They never made it out.

A PAINFUL CLARITY

Being sober has provided a painful level of clarity. If anyone reading this has ever been in an NA or AA meeting room, they’ve probably run into a common character there.

He’s fully committed.
Loves the game.
Loves the room.
He fucking loves you too.
Preaches from his soapbox every chance he gets.
Dubs the program and sobriety as a fucking miracle.

Getting sober isn’t a fucking miracle. It’s not magic. It’s not going to immediately solve all your problems.

The level of clarity you get after an extended period of sobriety (6-9+ months) is uncomfortable. It’s painful. It’s going to make you question everything about yourself and your life. But that’s a good thing. Because for the first time in years to decades your brain is finally escaping from a fog. From fried neurotransmitters. From extreme sleep deprivation. From operating out of a survival instinct. From poor nutrition and physical health. From poor mental health. From fucked up relationships that drain your body, mind and soul more than you could’ve ever realized in the moment.

Whether you do the steps or not, this clarity will eventually force you to do an inventory on yourself, your friends, your position in life, your career, and your finances.

The things you did good.
The things you fucked up miserably.
The things that slipped right through your fingers because you were too high to do anything to stop it.

And that painful clarity leading to some hard life analysis is what will begin the internal sparks for some actual change and upheaval in your life. People will come, people will go. You will quickly outgrow anything around you that was previously holding back. It will keep you awake at night. I know it did for me.

But now I’ve got some baseline data to pull from that wasn’t skewed by a fried and sleep deprived operating system. I can see where my time goes. Which choices have been beneficial, and which were utter failures. Exactly how and why and I was living in denial. Denial might not even be the correct word for this; insanity is much closer.

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MENTAL SHARPNESS

While using, if I wanted to be productive, I’d usually have to be on a metric fuck ton of hard stimulants to get going. To stay awake. To stay focused. Just to have what I would now consider a basic level of memory recall. I was what most would consider a high functioning addict. On enough drugs to break the average human, but still able to function normally at work, school or in life. Only the ones closest to me could tell I was high, we all have our tell tale signs. If you think you don’t, the people closest to you just don’t know how to break it to you. Trust me on this...

This is something that took a while for me to notice. Once the fog began to lift I noticed I needed less coffee. My memory was much sharper. I was able to crunch numbers much quicker. My attention span improved. The work ethic I had always possessed grew stronger, week in, week out. Even the way I spoke sounded clearer. I was no longer tripping over words sober. Or having the occasional slur while trying to pronounce something. Forgetting where I was going with a topic. Conversations flowed more freely. Books became interesting again. This improved my confidence and sense of wellbeing. Multiple raises and promotions at work followed.

It’s truly something you don’t notice until you have some time dead sober. While I was doing the California sober attempts, this just wasn’t there.

I told myself the same lie over and over again:
“At least I’m not drinking or doing coke”. That never gave my brain or mind a chance to rewire and heal the damage done.

Real physical and mental recovery doesn’t start until your system is fully cleaned out, and anyone who tells you otherwise is still coping and struggling, whether they realize it or not. It takes a while, in some cases years. At day 0, a few years sounds like an eternity. But at day 365, you can’t believe it’s already been a year.

FINANCIAL GAINS

No more $500 nights out at the bar that led into another $300 the following morning to grab another 8 ball of coke. No more worrying about getting DUIs while driving, or dealing with the tens of thousands in legal headaches that come with getting one. No more missed work. No fights, no drunk tanks.

All of a sudden, you’ve got the extra dollars to keep DCA’ing aggressively in the stock market or bitcoin. Think about it like this. Run the numbers. Every single dollar you spent on coke, or whatever the fuck your choice of poison was. The dollars lost to legal issues. Shit, maybe your use led you right into a nasty divorce. You crashed a car. Maybe two. Credit score nuked from missed payments, and now you’re drowning in loan shark levels of interest payments. Take those numbers, and run the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of those same dollars sitting in something like BTC, or NVDA. Think about the opportunity costs of having those dollars sit and compound for a decade or more, instead of getting vaporized in your nostrils on another Saturday night that accomplished fucking nothing. The math is brutal.

YOU’RE RUNNING THROUGH LIFE BLIND WITHOUT REALIZING IT

You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your reputation.
You’re blind to the damage you’re causing your loved ones.
You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your body.
You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your mind.
You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your soul.

You just don’t see it. You either don’t realize it, or your subconscious will pick up on it, only to have your conscious mind beat it into submission with a heavy dose of your preferred poison. You’ll cope. You’ll live in denial. You’ll tell yourself next week will be different. Next month will be different. Next year will be different. Time will fly by. And you’ll find yourself high. Again. Years later. Repeating the same lesson in an infinite loop. And the more time that slips through your fingers, the more the damage compounds. It will rot everything in your life slowly. Under the surface. Where you can’t see it, or choose not to see it.

You’ll lose relationships, marriages and friends.
You’ll probably lose a few jobs, or burn your business to the ground.
You might spend some time in jail (the drugs are there too).
You might lose limbs.
You might lose motor function of body parts due to bad reactions from years of abuse.
You might die.

YOU CAN STILL HAVE FUN

You probably got into drinking at an early age. End of elementary. Maybe the start of junior high. Start out raiding the parents’ liquor cabinet, stealing it from stores, or standing around outside of one to get someone to buy you a bottle. That’s how you learned to have fun. The harder stuff comes out as you get older and from there, it’s just the status quo. You can’t imagine going out to a bar or going to a concert without a few bottles of wine and bag coke in your pocket. You might be so used to the liquid courage derived from liquor that you’re now convinced you can’t socialize without it.

I’ve been there. Those first 6 months, where it just fucking sucks. You might white knuckle a few nights out at the bar with your friends, sipping on water, coffee, or a red bull. Probably slightly irritated with the drunk people around you, looking like they are having fun, and you’re just lost in your own head. If you can tough it out, it genuinely gets better. Over time you’ll begin to appreciate hanging with your drunk friends at bars, weddings or other events. You’ll like the fact you only spent $50 on a nice steak, instead of $250 on drinks, half of which you spilled all over yourself. You know you’ve got your car parked close by you can hop into at any time. You’ll be able to scan the area and know right away, when it’s time to leave. And you’ll wake up the next morning feeling great, losing zero days to being hungover.

You’ll find new hobbies, or you’ll start taking care of shit you’ve been neglecting. Buddy of mine, 9 months sober, spent the nights he would’ve spent in the bar finishing his basement. Piece by piece. And he fucking loved it. For him, up next is an appraisal on the house, and then pulling some equity to purchase another property. All it took was 9 months. That’s what those benders were robbing from him for years.

OVERALL

If you’re struggling, and you’ve had the thoughts of quitting, go for it. Do whatever you need to do. Hit a meeting or two. Move if you have to. The fact is, you are running out of time. And your benders act as a direct multiplier on the burn rate for whatever you might have left. No more looking at yourself in the mirror after a multi day bender, seeing the light slowly dim in your eyes. That spark of your soul, slowly getting extinguished and dying inside you.

I’m truly lucky to be alive, and to not be in jail. And even after almost going through with both, I still didn’t end up getting sober. It took many more years of self inflicted punishment to wake the fuck up.

Too many rock bottoms to count, because they do not truly exist. It will just compound and get worse.

Just focus on the next 24 hours.
Then do it again.

The alarm clock is ringing again. That specific fucking sound. The ringtone you hear in public that makes you snap your head back and reach into your pocket out of habit.

Everything hurts.

My back hurts. The two herniated discs at 19 healed but left a mark. Phantom nerve pain persists and haunts me sporadically during the year. Occasional electric shocks move down my nerves from my lower back to the top of my calf muscles. It’s been so long that when it happens, the pain no longer registers like it used to. The degeneration in the thoracic region of my spine leaves a dull ache that I cannot get rid of, no matter how many times I crack my back and roll it out on a foam roller. The way through the pain is more pain. It gets worse when I don’t work out. The pain from the gym stabilizes the never ending pain in my back.

My eyes are burning. The blue light from staring at my computer monitor at work feels like it is disintegrating my eyeballs. Like the cells are slowly being radiated, and dying a cancerous death. I can feel how red they are, like the bloodshot veins have a heartbeat of their own. My gums are bleeding, again. The nicotine pouches that lost their effects a long time ago have begun to cause the inevitable wear and tear nobody seems to consider when they start using these cursed pouches. It doesn’t matter. The smooth flavour of Coke slowly seeps into my mouth, accompanied by a painful burn I have come to enjoy. It gives me heartburn, especially when paired with this shitty black coffee that the office trailer provides, but it will do. My focus and execution are a requirement; the heartburn and bleeding gums are the price I will pay to keep the production high.

Deep breath in, deep breath out. Our civil subcontractor has fucked up for the fourth time in a row. Production is slow. We are behind. The schedule we originally pulled ahead multiple months is now trending back to baseline. Concrete and rebar are now being pushed in the wrong direction. Despite the fact that I do not operate the equipment, drill the holes, pour the concrete or move the dirt, I am still responsible. The trade off for any management position. My head hurts. I haven’t had a single sip of water today. I don’t have the time for anything that lacks the caffeine keeping me alive. We push onwards.

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It’s cold outside. Very cold. The wind penetrates my winter coat and sinks into my layers. Canadian winters are unforgiving. The windchill eviscerates whatever winter protection I thought I could bring with me to the work area. The piling rig drills into the surface of the earth, one casing at a time. There is no time to take days off anymore. We must continue forward. My worn out workboots are barely held together, with insoles so broken they no longer provide support. There is nowhere to sit, nor would it be a good look for management to be sitting down, staring down an entire crew of men actually performing the work. I must ignore the pain creeping into my knees, through my hips and concentrating into a burning ball of electric pain between my shoulder blades. There is concrete to monitor. There is piling to monitor. The pain is irrelevant. The more you fight it, the worse it gets.

The new guy is green. Green as grass. He has never seen a construction drawing in his life. He has a good attitude, but this is more or less due to him not having his soul slowly crushed by impossible deadlines and room temperature IQ stakeholders that must be kept at bay and managed. It’s almost a childlike innocence. For now, he is shielded from the reality of the industry that is about to swallow him whole. There is a direct correlation between the sky high number of divorces and substance abuse in the construction industry. Here, correlation does equal causation to the keen observer who watches his peers crash, burn and struggle to survive. My body hurts. My head hurts. My soul hurts. But I must teach, and teach with patience. He is making slow progress, but will be useful over time. He doesn’t realize the tsunami of grunt work that is slowly creeping in his direction. I will keep his head above water for some time before letting go. He will either swim or drown. Once he begins to drown. I will pull him up. Over and over. Until he learns to swim or he wisely walks away from the endless black hole that is construction management.

Another meeting. These meetings are useless. They accomplish nothing. They only serve to feed the people the furthest removed from the actual work. It is another form of mental masturbation I despise with my entire soul. The pain of these meetings courses through my veins. I have so much to deliver in limited time, and that time gets eaten by hour long blocks that accomplish absolutely nothing. Microsoft Teams is a modernized version of digital torture. Whoever created it probably didn’t understand the degree of mental lacerations it would inflict on employees and companies forced to use it. I hear Teams notifications in my nightmares. I hear it walking down the street. I feel that distinct vibration in my pants pocket, even when my work phone isn’t there. My leg shakes. Not from anxiety, but as a way to calm myself down. These people are talking about useless nonsense. I should be in the field, or getting invoices processed and work plans drafted.

The day is over. Progress was made. Small steps. Baby steps. Probably baby steps backwards but something was done. The only thing to do is to make the shit list for the next day and dive into an email inbox of infinite demands. To a degree, this job involves babysitting consultants with no real world experience, and babysitting drug addicts with impressive criminal records. Engineers are simultaneously the smartest, and yet dumbest people you will encounter in your life. Painful to deal with, even if they mean well. I look at my superintendent. He looks at me. We repeat some jokes that would likely get us fired in an instant if we were in the corporate office. Dark, terrible humor is our only reprieve on days like these. I am his right hand, he is my mentor. Together we push forward into an abyss of madness, quality issues, budget restraints, incidents and a schedule being endlessly pushed to the right.

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My boots come off. I sit at the desk in the office trailer. I stare at the computer blankly, visualizing my life somewhere farther south with a beach. My neck is stiff, my back is burning and my eyes are ready to bleed after too many hours spent staring at Excel spreadsheets, trying their best to organize chaos that can barely be tracked. I’ll have to work tomorrow. More unpaid work. I let the new guy know to go home, and to take the weekend off. It will be more efficient with just myself. I can tell he is soft and sheltered, but there is something there I can work with. It needs to be paced. No need to drown him just yet. I’ll take whatever support I can get.

It’s time to leave the office. The work day is over, but the day is not. I pack up things into my backpack, lock up my laptop and head out the door to the parking lot. I start my car. I am tired. I am in pain. But that does not matter. The universe does not care about your exhaustion. My bills don’t care about my pain. Money does not make itself. My body does not build itself. I must push onward. The roads are slippery, the snow is thick. I can barely see 5 cars ahead of me. The warm heat of my car is the only comfort I have felt all day. But it is deceptive. It begins to lull me to a sleepy state. I am driving with one eye open trying to stay awake. The coffee has long worn off. My nicotine tolerance is too high. I begin a battle with myself to stay awake while I drive. Hopefully I win.

I open the doors to the gym. There is nobody here but myself. I am not here to make friends, I am here to build my body, to a mentally ill degree. 20 years of work have blessed me with compounding gains and a physique that I am proud of. The dumbbell preacher curls hurt. They hurt bad. The tendonitis in my right arm is again flaring up. Multiple rounds of peptides and HGH have helped tremendously, but decades of abuse remain, as stubborn as I am. I must push through. It hurts, but I still enjoy it. As I move forward it gets worse. But I do not give up. I embrace the pain and keep moving.

The treadmill creeps up to incline 12. I set the speed for 3.7 miles per hour. As I begin to walk, I can feel my hip flexors tighten up. The back pain from before creeps back into my shoulder blades. It does not matter. I have signed an unwritten contract with myself. The contract states that I must push for a minimum of 35 minutes no matter how I feel. Pain and exhaustion are not exclusions. There are no exclusions. There never will be. My abs are already visible, but it does not matter. I must get leaner, by any means necessary. I am trapped in a sick game I love, fueled by pain I strangely enjoy. I zone out and snap out of it. The time has passed. My contractual agreement has been met. The treadmill stops. It’s time to go home.

I walk through the gym covered in sweat with a slight limp. My back is burning. My neck is burning. My eyes are burning. Everything hurts.

I start my car again. The heated seat brings minor relief to the physical pain. My mind wanders as I drive home. I begin to replay memories of friends who have long since died, and how I wound up here. Why are they gone, and why am I still alive? I will never know. Driving in silence is powerful.

I get home. Drop my bags. Hit the shower. My mind is cooked. My body is cooked. My soul feels cooked as well. But I have come a long way. I am not dead. I am not in jail. Against all odds I am still here. Previously, this feeling would have warranted copious amounts of cocaine and alcohol, followed by ketamine to make me comatose. That is no longer the case. I have been dead sober for a while. I have been embracing the pain. I have been making progress. My money is legitimate, and so am I. I no longer spread pain by dealing those substances.

I have lost a lot of people along the way. My marriage has disintegrated. I left her a long time ago. Many friends did not make it and are no longer alive, or they had to be left behind. You cannot save everyone. I never expected to live this long, but I am surviving.

Keep moving forward, and embrace the pain.

It’s literally that simple. I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of gym bros and regular people alike who have had their lives cut short all because they neglected one of the most basic rules to life:

“Move or die”

Thousands of years ago, move or die was as real as it got.

Don’t want to keep moving? Some sort of predator might tear you to pieces.
Don’t want to keep moving? Cool, you’ll be stranded in a frozen hell hole and be buried beneath the ice.
Don’t want to keep moving? Shit, enjoy dying from starvation if you can’t hunt down some food.

But we’re spoiled now. Living in a golden age of an abundance of food, information and otherwise general slop. We are at the point where the most effort a human needs to make to get food is to break the dopamine drip hooked up to their brain from TikTok for a whopping five minutes so they can order groceries or Uber Eats.

Cardio, simply put, is probably the closest thing we have to anti aging currently. Sure, you can take some peptides, some supplements, or be as neurotic as Bryan Johnson but none of it can do what a steady regime of cardio can provide.

And this is coming from a gym bro who spent the better part of a decade juiced to the gills who thought:

“I dont have the time for this shit, I’m here to lift”

And how did that turn out for me? Shit, dilated cardiomyopathy diagnosis at 26 years old. Sure, there were other factors at play such as stimulant and alcohol abuse, but I’m not one of the delusional gym bros that think steroids come at zero costs. At the end of the day, your heart is a muscle. And just by applying some broscientist logic we can ascertain that muscles get stronger when you work them. How do you work your heart?

Fucking cardio.

One of the main ways I managed to navigate out of that mess and recover from an ejection fraction just one percent above what is considered the starting of heart failure, is cardio. Relentless, painful, but oddly enjoyable, cardio.

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Every single person on this planet can benefit from strict, or at the very least, a consistent cardio routine. Even if you’re someone who despises weights and refuses to lift, cardio should still be employed.

The benefits are nearly endless...

Everyone knows (or should know) how harmful high blood pressure is. Sometimes it’s genetics. Sometimes it’s the slop people eat. Sometimes it’s from cramming an extra CC in your Monday morning pin. Regardless of the cause, it can’t be slept on. The conventional wisdom from any doctor will always be to push pills. This is partly because A) most doctors know literal fuck all about health and nutrition and B) a large portion understands how lifestyle changes can bring dramatic health results, but also understands how fucking lazy most people are. The choice between a pill and actual hard work? I’d wager 90%+ take the pill.

Don’t be that person. While BP meds and beta blockers definitely have their place and are great at treating acute issues (i.e heavy steroid cycle, or damage sustained by years of abuse of juice and drugs), you don’t want to sign yourself up for a lifetime of prescriptions unless absolutely needed. The irony here is that I had a cardiologist tell me high blood pressure would nuke my kidneys long term...

Was he right? Yes.

But if you look into the longterm side effects of most ACE inhibitors for example, they wind up nuking your kidneys in the longterm anyways. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t. So you might as well make the effort to either get off them, or prevent yourself from needing a prescription in the first place. Easiest and in most cases free way to prevent this?

Doing your fucking cardio.

PUT IN THE WORK

Cardio is what took me from a 110+ RHR with 140/90+ BP, rocking a 39% ejection fraction to 60-70 RHR, 120/70 BP and a 53% ejection fraction. Yes, I did use meds as well. And supplements. But I saw fuck all for improvements over the first year. From there, I doubled down on cardio. The result? Year on year improvements to the above. Do I take meds now? Nope. Just cardio and a solid heart health stack.

For all the brothers in the gym, balls deep in a bulk. That bloated, shitty, tired feeling paired with a bloated, shitty looking physique that we’ve all run into at some point in our lifting careers? You know the feeling. Heartburn kicking in. Digestion is fucked. You pull out your third tupperware container of the day, and begin to question how anyone can get morbidly obese. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. You might be there right now. Such is life on the never ending treadmill of body dysmorphia and a mental disorder disguised as a hobby. It doesn’t need to be like that though.

Simply put, your insulin sensitivity is fucked. Being insulin sensitive means your cells respond to smaller amounts of insulin to do the same job. Insulin acts as a shuttle. If you’ve got high insulin sensitivity, this is a good thing. Insulin will help your body shuttle calories towards muscle glycogen and oxidation. If your insulin sensitivity is fucked and you’re insulin resistant you have higher levels of insulin circulating in your body. This is what happens when the cardio is dropped and the greasy food starts coming in on the tail end of most bulks for the average guy. This means the calories you eat are more likely to be stored as fat, and the reason why so many guys wind up adopting the same frame as the fridge they can’t stay out of. Don’t get lazy.

This runs upstream to your brain as well. Your brain runs on glucose. Those glucose receptors thrive in an insulin sensitive environment. That brain fog you probably felt when you were fat and out of shape, or just let the bulk slide into a permabulk? Yeah, all roads lead back to your fucked up insulin sensitivity. Being insulin resistant primes you for brain fog, slower processing, poor memory, and a reduced ability to focus. Something I’ve personally experienced too many times at the tail of one of many dirty bulks. When you’re insulin resistant, your brain can’t properly use the glucose as fuel. There is a lot of research now indicating that this might even be a cause of Alzheimer’s, referred to as type 3 diabetes. If you’ve ever seen a family member struggle with that shit like I have, you understand how painful it is to watch someone decline and lose themselves completely over time. Just some food for thought, literally..

One of the most underrated benefits of cardio is the fucking discipline it will carve out in you. There’s no need to skirt around the fact that cardio can be hard. Agonizing. Soul crushing. I remember puking, too many times to count trying to keep up with some of my Muay Thai classes and sparring sessions. Even if you do truly enjoy it (you will with time), you’ll often find yourself in a miniature version of hell for the first 5-15 minutes until you get your second wind and your body kicks in gear.

But that’s good. Doing hard things is good.

You don’t need to be a David Goggins running on broken bones, but repeated torture sessions on the stair master or Muay Thai class build mental fortitude, and a discipline muscle in your brain. It’s called the anterior midcingulate cortex. A region of your brain that activates and grows specifically when you do something you don’t want to do. That hard shit. The shit that causes mental friction. That 5 AM workout you just couldn’t give a fuck about as you lay cozy in your warm bed, trying to shut off your fucking alarm. Think of it as the brain’s physical wiring for willpower. The more you train and reinforce this wiring, the more capacity you’ll have to override impulses and push through the hard shit that needs to get done. And that spills out in every area of anyone’s life. A muscle worth training, and maintaining.

There is a form of cardio for everybody.

Many people assume that cardio needs to be something like the following:

Muay thai.
Boxing.
Marathons.
Ultra Marathons.
Circuit Training.

But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. While those activities provide incredible benefits to the body and mind, you don’t need to push the limits of human existence to reap the rewards.

Every journey begins with a single step, so get fucking walking.

ANTI AGING AT ITS FINEST

I have an elderly relative. Let’s call him Old D. Old D is a senior. He’s pushing into his 90’s.

What does the average life look like for most 90 year olds these days?

Assisted living facilities.
Canes.
Walkers.
Motorized wheelchairs.
Literal handfuls of pills just to keep their body operating at a very low state.

Old D?

My man Old D lives by himself. Not only does he live by himself, when you open up the door to his townhouse, you’re met with a steep flight of stairs. A long, steep flight. Old D doesn’t take a single pill. No blood pressure meds. No statins. No antidepressants. Old D takes some basic supplements for his health like fish oils and magnesium. He keeps it simple, and eats simple. Old D is sharp as a tack. Fully there, snappy conversations. No issues with his memory. Completely independent, still living life in his 90s. Some people are going to quickly pull the old genetics card here. And sure, maybe Old D was blessed with a resilient body. That might be a factor.

But what does Old D do, every fucking day?

Old D goes out for a jog. Or a walk. He never stops moving. This man loves to exercise. Old D isn’t out there breaking records and throwing heavy weight around. Old D is just going for a nice daily jog, at his own slow pace, for the love of the fucking game. And I truly believe that it’s the single biggest factor in his remarkable health for his age. I remember seeing him at my wedding. This guy danced, all fucking night. While people 20 years younger than him could barely stand for an hour, or had to leave early because they couldn’t hack it.

Do your fucking cardio.
Move or die.

The infamous midcurve midwit bell curve meme.

Even as a blank template, this meme speaks volumes. To the left, we have a satisfied and happy retard. No cares, no stress, not just surviving, but thriving. To the right we have our hooded high IQ jedi. The man who has seen it all, been through it all, and has come to terms with how simple things really are in the end.

And the middle?

We have the midcurve midwit.

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WHO IS THIS MIDWIT?

He’s stressed. His cortisol has been spiked, through the fucking roof. Mogged. Mogged in every fucking domain. And he has no idea why. How could this happen?

He’s educated.
He keeps up with the “current thing”.
He planned.
He read the studies.
He did what the media told him was right.
He did what his teachers told him to do.
He got lots of upvotes in his reddit echo chambers.

This is the trap you need to avoid at all costs. Don’t ever be the midwit.

In simpler terms, the midwit is the normie. The NPC. The person who needs to be told what to think, when to think it, and how to feel about what they were told to think. That life is black and white. That grey areas don’t exist, or they are “bad” because something else told them before they could form their own opinion on it through self experience. They need permission to do nearly anything. Someone other than them, who they have dubbed as more important or intelligent, needs to grant them the hall pass to make a decision.

And that decision?

Well, we just covered that. That decision was never their own. Their “ideas” have been planted in their subconscious by minds and influences other than their own.

The midwit lacks the ability to critically think and question things. Either that, or they are scared to do so and deviate from the approved narratives. They lack the self awareness to be able to step back and observe the world around them through a lens they’ve created through their own lived experiences and independent opinions. They view the world through a lens that is largely formed through the approved sources, i.e. mainstream media, mainstream finance, mainstream health, or whatever else the government deems as acceptable. They are unable to see that their best interests will rarely, if ever, align with those of a government or multi billion to trillion dollar corporate entity.

Our retarded friend to the left?

He simply doesn’t care. Most things fly over his head. He doesn’t think too much, he thinks just enough to get by. He wants to start a business? He starts one.
He wants to try something new? He just fucking does it. He sees a stock or asset that he has identified as something valuable? He buys it, and keeps buying despite what other people think. He doesn’t overthink, he just executes. Retardmaxxing at its finest. Simple as that.

Our Jedi to the right? He realized long ago that overthinking gets you nowhere. That over planning on its own produces no results. In fact he clearly sees that over planning is just another form of mental masturbation. A better term: mental gooning. He’s been down that rabbit hole and realized it gets you nowhere in life. He can perceive that no institution or government cares about him, and that nobody is coming to save him. He’s seen through the veil of motivation porn and the endless self-help dopamine trap. This trap is particularly dangerous for a very large amount of the population.

Why?

It’s simple. You crack open a book. Something relevant to an issue you’ve been struggling with. Maybe you’ve hit rock bottom again (be careful here, a true rock bottom doesn’t exist) and you’re trying your best to find a way out. You crack open a self help book. Throw on some Alex Hormozi content. You listen. You read. You feel good. Finally, you’ve found the keys to success! A secret library of knowledge. The stuff that was neglected to be taught in schools. You begin to see the veil, but you’re still trapped within one of its many layers.

You listen. You read.
You listen. You read.
You listen. You read. Maybe you plan a bit.
But then you listen, and you read.

And it feels great. You cap off your day with some motivational content. It paints a pretty picture in your mind’s eye of what your life could look like.

But what are we missing here?

Execution.

There is no action. Nothing is actually happening. You are consuming content designed by default to spike your dopamine and trick your brain into thinking you are making progress. You are essentially laying around, jerking yourself mentally, thinking you are going somewhere.

The reality? You are going in circles. Thoughts without action will never materialize. A goal without action is just fantasy. Write all the affirmations in a journal you want. But if that is ALL that you do, how can you expect anything to change?

The hard truth for many to accept is that no amount of morning routines and motivational videos will save you. It doesn’t matter if you spend the first three hours of everyday:

Waking up at 5AM
Sitting in the sauna
Doing a cold plunge
Sitting in the sunlight
Doing your stretches
Going for walk
Journaling

The list goes on...

Because you have done everything, except for the thing that actually pushes your progression forward. You have avoided the hard thing, by stacking easy things. Yes, staying in shape and getting up early is easy. That is the bare minimum. You’ve done what every human should be doing, and have taken zero risks. This might be a hard truth for many, but that morning routine garbage is just more mental gooning.

Do you think the real operators, the real money printers, the guys that actually build successful enterprises or have risen to the top of their craft or companies are actually following that garbage, day in and day out? That those activities are the reason for their success?

Fuck no.

They’re probably getting out of bed. Having a smoke. Chugging a cup of coffee. Taking a few minutes to analyze the highest leverage activities of the day and just getting to fucking work.

The ones that do have those 3 hour morning routines are the ones that have already made it. They have access to leverage, support, money and systems they have built over time that you currently don’t. Once you hit the top of your game or business, you have things running 24/7 in the background via assistants or systems you’ve built through trial, error, pain, wins and losses, and the money is flowing… feel free to do some mental gooning for hours a day.

Otherwise, you have some fucking work to do. That hard stuff you’ve been avoiding.

These high performing operators and money printers are both the jedi and retard in many aspects.

The midwit is mentally gooning with his journals and sauna sessions accomplishing nothing, but feeling like they are doing something.

The jedi and the retard are out in the trenches, ruthlessly executing their plans, giving zero fucks, learning as they go and adjusting plans as needed.

As you can see, this mental gooning is a very dangerous trap.

The retard to the left avoids this by default. This is his hidden superpower that allows him to coast through life largely unscathed by the optimization trap. The jedi is smart enough to see through the bullshit and apply leverage, time and money to the areas that count.

Unfortunately for the midwit, he is highly susceptible to it. As much as some of the typical motivation content messages do ring true in life... most of it is just another form of porn ensnaring endless amounts of midwits. Just one more video, right? The next one has the key they’ve been missing.. That one ingredient that will finally make things click. The plan just needs one more thing before executing... thats all, right?

THIS APPLIES TO EVERYTHING IN LIFE

This isn’t just about entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs trying to get a business off the ground or currently in the day dreaming stages drowning in motivation porn. This meme, or lens which you can view life through, applies everywhere.

Fitness and health is a prime example.

How many times have you seen someone that drops hundreds to thousands of dollars on supplements, tries all the trends, applies “science” based lifting, tries to time protein intake, and appears to be a living and walking encyclopedia that can recite 20 PubMed studies off the top of their head?

Only problem is... they’ve looked the same for years. Or they don’t even look like they’ve touched a weight in their life.

Enter the fitness midwit.

You’ve seen them everywhere. They’ll proudly proclaim that science based lifting is cutting edge. That their kinesiology degree taught them the secret sauce. That the BCAA kool-aid hits hard. Instead of just taking testosterone, they’ll double down on SARMS or they actually believe that peptides build muscle. He just thinks he needs to be taking peptides, without realizing they have specific use cases (i.e are you injured?). Or maybe, they are one of the delusional naturals high on imaginary pride. They argue endlessly about what their PubMed studies say, despite having little to no skin in the game or a physique to reflect their body of knowledge.

He’s turned his diet into a religion. There cannot be a middle ground! The greats that came long before him with real results are all wrong, including the monsters in their own gym..

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They just get fucking nowhere.

Our retarded friend? He shows up to the gym 3-5 times a week. He doesn’t really listen to the noise. He’s not concerned with the current fitness trend. When he’s sore and beat down, he takes a day off. His body is telling him something, so he listens. Runs a solid bro split. Why? Because it feels good. He likes the pump. When he can, he throws an extra 5 or 10 pounds on the bar or stack. He’s largely done the same exercises for a long time now, sometimes switching them out from a pool of other ones he thinks feels good and he performs well. He eats lots of protein by default. Tries to avoid processed junk, doesn’t stress out about it. He just slaps on his headphones and throws some weight around for a bit and he’s out. If he’s enhanced, he’s never even heard of a SARM. He just pops some dbol and blasts a little bit of test. Mogs over half the gym by default. Just happy to lift. This is how he escapes. A friendly well known giant who’s always around to spot you on the bench. A living embodiment of keeping it simple.

The jedi? He does damn near the same thing. He’s read the same PubMed studies the midwit did, but he can tell these studies don’t truly extrapolate to real life. Why’s that? He understands the nuances, and gets that hands on experience in any domain will forever count more than some data captured in books and studies. He operates from a fusion of good data and real results, applying what works and ignoring the rest of the noise. He understands that fitness influencers are basically recycling the same base concepts with shiny new wrappers to confuse the midwits and profit from it. Maybe there’s a nugget of gold here and there he identifies, and he pulls it into his routine. He’s tried all the diets, and realizes they are all tools with specific use cases, but that they don’t need to be followed as gospel. The Jedi is the friendly monster that will help the newcomer or midwit separate the signal from the noise.

Both the retard and the jedi are the biggest boys in the gym. They both keep it simple, and either aren’t aware of the noise or they simply ignore it. They just know what works.

Let’s expand a bit further here.

This ironically applies to money as well...

You’ve probably heard the old saying “the best investors are the dead investors”. Why? Because they aren’t around to second guess themselves. Nothing ever changes. They made their bets, and the portfolio never changes. It just appreciates in the market due to time and inflation factors.

This is exactly how our retarded friend invests. The retard finds something he likes. Or maybe he was given knowledge by a friend who would be found the right side of bellcurve. He got told to double down and dump money in the VOO or SPY. Ignore all the noise. Every paycheque, dump a portion of it in there. No research required. He concentrates all of his capital into the easiest play that will still on average out perform most money managers. He’s on autopilot. He might not even know how to sell. Its just another savings account for a rainy day. Nothing changes. Every 7 years his money doubles. Feels good man. He’s probably doing it in a tax shelter without realizing it. Ironically, the retard probably owns some bitcoin too. Why? It’s the most valuable one. It just keeps going up. Buying memecoins and bridging through defi protocols is too much. Easier just to smash buy the orange coin. Orange coin is number 1. Orange coin good. Orange coin can be bought everywhere, including his brokerage accounts via proxy by ETFs now. Easy and simple. The retard doesn’t really watch the news. He doesn’t care.

The jedi winds up following a similar strategy. He identifies single stock plays that have potential. No need to complicate it. He concentrates his wealth into a few large bets on single stocks. No need for diversification. A few good plays with large upside is all you need. He gets it. The jedi has seen through and experienced the raw brutality of the crypto shitcoin casino trenches and understands that it’s all gambling outside of bitcoin. He quietly hoards bitcoin as well. Its just a simple bet on supply and demand at the end of the day, with the biggest first mover advantage and network that will never be replicated. Like the retard, he keeps it simple and maintains high conviction. He understands that the media endlessly spreads FUD and are largely owned by a system that does not want the average person to build wealth. He ignores the media understanding it as an artifact of boomer brainwashing. He verifies things himself, through his own lens, not the one of others.

Now the midwit....

The midwit really struggles here. The midwit follows every finance account he can on X. He is drowning in a surplus of information, mostly regurgitated AI slop he is unable to detect. He’s subscribed to all the right subreddits. He routinely quotes Warren Buffett, or Charlie Munger thinking if he emulates them enough he’ll somehow wind up billionaire without understanding the nuances of a rapidly changing economy and a rapidly depreciating dollar over the past 100 years. The midwit takes his low five figure sum.... and diversifies it into over 10 stocks and ETFs. He didn’t choose these assets either. They were preselected by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. He is incredibly risk averse to the point where he is actively shooting himself in the kneecap before embarking on what is essentially a decades long marathon to build wealth. If he’s into crypto, he thinks bitcoin had its run, it costs too much and he’s suffering from unit bias. The only way to win is to gamble shitcoins.
So many influencers on X made it with shitcoins! The midwit doesn’t realize how easy it is to manufacture bullshit or that many of these influencers or KOL’s are simply building a base of other midwits just like him for exit liquidity. He can jump from chain to chain, reads whitepapers and thinks his shitcoin will solve world hunger. He roundtrips his bags. He’s so diversified with stocks, his portfolio barely budges and slowly drowns as inflation continuously grows. The midwit doesn’t realize it’s not just death and taxes that he can’t avoid, but inflation as well.

JUST DONT BE THE MIDWIT…

As you can see, the right and left sides of the bellcurve reap the rewards. The retard and jedi are similar because they either don’t think, or know when to stop thinking and execute. They don’t see the noise, or they just ignore the noise. They are both willing to take risks. They don’t need to read hundreds of studies to feel smart and productive. They either don’t read them at all and form an independent opinion, or they take the useful bits they read and apply them to their own real life experiences.

Keep it simple. Take risks. Just fucking do things. Make your own decisions and have conviction. If it doesn’t work? Cost of tuition, on to the next play. Execute and learn, or learn and execute.

You might be thinking the midwit is dumber than the retard to his left. This isn’t true. The midwit’s problem isn’t in his intelligence. He lives in the middle of the curve. There are some wheels spinning in his brain. The midwit’s problem is his blind obedience to anything that has been deemed as an authority figure. The midwits obedience has shut down his critical thinking and ability to question things on his own. His thoughts, feelings and opinions have been outsourced.

The retard never listened in the first place.
The jedi has learned to stop listening.
The midwit can’t stop listening.
Don’t be the midwit.

I’m not talking orange juice.
Or those weirdly tasty chewable vitamin C pills from the store.

Im talking Cialis. Tadalafil.

The literal wonder drug that is criminally undersold as just a “boner pill”.

Which is such a disservice to what this drug is, and what it can do. It’s scope reaches far, far beyond turning your dick into weapon of mass destruction. That’s just the generally accepted favourite side effect. The real sauce is in the other health benefits.

I remember when my heart diagnosis came back. It was bad. I was down bad. Barely above heart failure levels, feeling like a shell of a human. I had no idea what to do, or where to go. The pills prescribed to me barely made a difference for me in that first year. My low ejection fraction had barely budged. I was stressed. I was young. I had fucked up, and I had to figure it out quick.

I had started to incorporate more cardio.
Joined a Muay Thai gym.
Taken a step back from bodybuilding.
Dropped down to true TRT dosages.
Leaned out, lost weight and shed the bulky frame.

But that wasn’t enough. I had to optimize every single fucking area. The supplements. The food. Any additional medicine. I had to do everything within my power to improve this mess. It was a legitimate threat to my life.

I had sporadically used Cialis as a preworkout here and there. It was often thrown in as a freebie in my larger steroid orders. Had a bit of a surplus built up. Definitely liked the stuff, but had no idea how beneficial it could be. To me, it was just better boners and really solid pump in the gym. Made the veins pop a bit more..

One of the beautiful things about it is that it doesn’t just increase blood flow to your dick.

It increases blood flow to your entire body.

Okay, maybe thats not 100% correct. Thats a bit of a bro science tier explanation. Lets break it down a bit more accurately here..

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Cialis and other drugs like it are referred to as PDE5 inhibitors.

While I dont take the FDA seriously, its worth mentioning that Cialis has received FDA approval for erectile dysfunction, benign prostatic hyperplasia (a.k.a prostate issues), and pulmonary arterial hypertension (high blood pressure in the lungs). No other PDE5 inhibitor accomplishes this. But it’s health benefits still have a much larger scope. From cardiovascular protection and remodeling, to neuroprotection, metabolic improvement, and effects on body composition that have nothing to do with the bedroom...

You could almost describe this as the best multivitamin for men ever formulated.

To understand Cialis, you really just need to to understand one enzyme (PDE5) and one signalling molecule (cGMP).

PDE5, phosphodiesterase type 5, is an enzyme whose job is to break down cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). cGMP is a secondary messenger that tells smooth muscle to relax. When smooth muscle relaxes, blood vessels dilate, blood flow increases, and tissues downstream get more oxygen and nutrients. PDE5 is not always acting in our best interests. This is where Cialis comes in to help out.

Cialis inhibits PDE5, the enzyme responsible for degrading cGMP. This increases cGMP concentrations, resulting in vascular smooth muscle relaxing and vasodilation. This is what we want, and where the benefits are found.

The key here is that PDE5 isn’t just in your dick.. Smooth muscle exists throughout the body, which means PDE5 inhibitors like Cialis can improve endothelial function systemically. The enzyme is found in the blood vessels in the lungs, the prostate, the bladder, the coronary arteries, blood vessels in the brain, the kidneys, and skeletal muscle. Block PDE5 anywhere it’s found, and you get improved blood flow and oxygen delivery in that region.

This is why Cialis gives you great boners, helps with prostate symptoms, lung hypertension with a ton of other systemic benefits on the side.

Hopefully now you can see why calling Cialis a “boner pill” is simply underselling it, by a large margin.

Now that we have a better understanding, lets dig a bit deeper..

THE SYSTEMIC BENEFITS

This is what really took me down the Cialis rabbit hole when I was trying my absolute best to manage that dilated cardiomyopathy diagnosis. Cialis is something much bigger than what’s on the label and what its typically prescribed for.

In men without known heart disease, Cialis reduced blood pressure, both systolic and diastolic (systolic is the top number, diastolic is the bottom number) and improved how elastic their arteries were.

Stiffer arteries are one of the strongest predictors of cardiovascular death..

The fact that a daily low dose of Cialis can reverse that progression deserves far, far more attention than it gets. But it still gets better from here..

The most critical finding is that Cialis improved endothelial function. Endothelial function can be thought as the health of the inner lining of your blood vessels. And this was regardless of how bad someone’s ED was. What this means is that vascular benefit isn’t a side effect of better erections.

It’s a direct effect of the drug on your cardiovascular system as a whole.

In men taking 5mg daily for BPH, arterial stiffness markers improved at 3, 6, and 12 months. And a large study found men using PDE5 inhibitors had a 19% lower risk of cardiac events and a 44% reduction in mortality.

Read that last number again. Forty four fucking percent... Just from taking a pill that not only gives you insane pumps in the gym, but insane pumps in the bedroom as well.

There’s also some good animal data that hard to ignore.

In mice with induced heart attacks, daily Cialis cut infarct size by almost a third, reduced fibrosis by more than half, and dropped heart cell death from 6.7% to 2.1%.

In a sheep model of advanced heart failure (which is much closer and more comparable to a human heart) Cialis improved the heart’s ability to contract, reversed structural damage at the cellular level, and restored the heart’s response to adrenaline.

Heart failure progressively disconnects the heart from its own signaling system.
Cialis appears to reconnect it.

For what its worth, I saw my most significant raise in LVEF the year I started using a daily dose of Cialis. From the 40’s back into the low 50’s.

This next one most people don’t know about, I didn’t for a long a time either. I had noticed improved cardio sessions after a preworkout dose, but never really connected the dots. So Tadalafil isn’t just sold as Cialis...

it’s also sold as Adcirca, used for high blood pressure in the lungs.
Same drug. But with a different label, and different dose. For a different purpose.

When the arteries in your lungs tighten, pressure builds, the right side of your heart has to work overtime. When this happens your ability to do anything physical starts to fall off a cliff. Cialis opens those arteries back up by doing the same thing it does everywhere else:

Blocking PDE5 and letting cGMP do its fucking job.

Great for endurance athletes, runners and martial artists prioritizing cardio. While you definitely do not need to push a dose anywhere near this high to reap these benefits, the dose for lung hypertension is 40mg daily. Which is eight times the typical daily dose at 5mg. Which tells you the margin for safety on this stuff. You’re not gonna overdose.. Worst case, you have a stuffy nose and heartburn. Maybe a headache.

For the enhanced guys reading this, whether its TRT or far beyond it, prostate issues can be a legitimate health concern after a while. This can also apply to the natural guys above 40... so this next part is relevant to most guys. It’s your prostate. For some reading this it might already be making your life harder. Things like frequent urination, a weak stream, getting up multiple times a night etc.. that’s typical BPH shit.

Fortunately, Cialis got FDA approval treatment of it in 2011.

The issue is straightforward...

PDE5 is found in the smooth muscle of your prostate and bladder neck. Block it, pressure on your urethra drops, and urine flows better. Doses as low as 5mg daily significantly improve these symptoms across the board.

But here’s where it shines compared to some other prescribed methods..

Cialis is the only drug that handles both ED and prostate symptoms with one pill. Alpha blockers can help you pee, but they can kill your erections or cause retrograde ejaculation. 5-alpha reductase inhibitors shrink the prostate but can kill your libido by nuking your DHT levels systemically (i.e fina and dutasteride, please never take these, ever).

Cialis avoids all that bullshit. One pill, two problems solved, no sexual side effects, just sexual benefits.

It comes with some cognitive benefits as well. Lately I’ve seen the biohacker crowd start writing about it. Cialis also crosses the blood-brain barrier. This was debated for years, but the end result of studies was that the compound gets into your brain, and with chronic use, it accumulates there. In Alzheimer’s mouse models, chronic Cialis use improved memory performance and reduced the buildup of one of the two proteins (tau) responsible for the disease progressing. The mechanism isn’t just blood flow here... Cialis appears to reduce brain inflammation directly, lowering pro inflammatory signals and shifting immune cells in the brain toward a protective rather than destructive posture. For those that have seen the effects of Alzheimers or dementia on a family member, this is worth noting. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on any other human being.

THE GYM AND YOUR HORMONES

This is where it just continues to get better...

Daily Cialis improved lean abdominal muscle mass in non-obese men, confirmed by DEXA scan, without any changes to diet or exercise. The effect reversed when they stopped taking it. The study also found increased androgen receptor expression in skeletal muscle cells....

This tells us Cialis has a direct effect on muscle tissue that goes beyond just getting more blood to it.

Performance wise, Cialis can improve athletic output, especially under low oxygen conditions. So basically, the harder you’re pushing and the more oxygen starved your muscles are, the more Cialis helps. If you’ve ever taken it before a workout and noticed the pumps hit different, the vascularity looks freakish, and the endurance lasts longer, the research backs up what you felt. Many years of my personal use supports this as well....

Electrolytes + Carbs + Cialis + Caffeine = One hell of a workout. Would recommend, and will do you much better than any tub of overpriced Kool-Aid from a supplement store.

While I am a huge proponent to TRT and will always advise against taking supplements to boost testosterone (please dont fall for the scams), men with metabolic syndrome taking 5mg daily for three months saw testosterone levels jump 44% on average. Not bad, I will admit.

Beyond testosterone, and something important to note here for the ones on TRT or beyond, is that Cialis shifted the testosterone to estradiol ratio in the right direction, by reducing estradiol.

It appears to have a direct effect on aromatase. Thats the enzyme that converts your testosterone into estrogen. So you’re looking at a compound that simultaneously improves blood flow, raises testosterone, and blunts estrogen conversion. In one pill. Which is wild. In my experience, it does assist with this. I’ll probably discuss this further in another write up, but the use aromatase inhibitors is out of control and over prescribed in the bodybuilding and TRT world (read: parroted by people with little to no skin in the game), so a combination of staying lean and utilizing Cialis could help many men avoid the rollercoaster of dialling in estrogen levels while on testosterone.

The chart above provides a clean visual summary. As you can see, Cialis puts in some serious work, system wide.

WHY CIALIS, WHAT ABOUT VIAGRA?

Every benefit above is amplified by one fact that separates Cialis from the rest of the drugs in its class... the half life. Longer half life = longer time in the bloodstream. Cialis has been around for a minute, but when you bring up boner pills, most will default to thinking of Viagra. While Viagra is still useful in a pinch for the obvious prescribed reasons or as a preworkout additive, it still falls short of our boy Cialis who tirelessly works around the clock.

Basically, Viagra has a half-life of 4 hours.

Cialis on the other hand? It has a half-life of 17.5 hours.

The chart above makes helps map it out clearly. Viagra is essentially gone from your system by hour 12. Cialis? At hour 12 is still sitting at roughly 60% of peak concentration. Even at 24 hours, you still have meaningful plasma levels. The curves overlap. You never go to zero. You just keep reaping the benefits.

Once you hit a steady state concentration from daily dosing, the exposure is 1.6x greater than the same dose taken intermittently. Basically, this means a daily 5mg dose delivers the equivalent effects of about ~8mg around the clock, without peaks and troughs once daily dosing is established.

Cialis is also unaffected by food or alcohol in most cases, unlike Viagra which can be impaired by fatty meals. You take it, forget about it, and your vascular system (and cock) runs better all day, and into the night. And the next day.

Another win…

Okay. Lets take a step back and look at what this beautiful compound actually does...

Improved blood pressure and heart function.. I can personally vouch for this.
It crosses the blood-brain barrier and reduces inflammation in the brain.
It improves body composition and testosterone to estrogen ratios.
It gives you skin splitting pumps and insane vascularity when utilized as a preworkout.

And It does all of this with a safety profile spanning over two decades of clinical use and a half-life that allows once daily dosing at 5mg. My personal preference is 10mg.

Cialis is generic now. A 90 day supply costs less than most people spend on coffee in a month. Dirt cheap. You can find it everywhere online. And if you go straight to the source, you could order a lifetime worth of raws from China for less than $1000.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it gives incredible boners as well.

Your girl will love it and appreciate it just as much as you will.

Dont forget to take your vitamin C.

References, for those who care:

1. Drugs.com — “Adcirca (tadalafil) FDA Approval History” — https://www.drugs.com/history/adcirca.html

2. FDA Prescribing Information — ADCIRCA — https://pi.lilly.com/us/adcirca-pi.pdf

3. FDA Prescribing Information — CIALIS — https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2017/021368s029lbl.pdf

4. MIMIT Health — “Tadalafil (Cialis): Anti-Aging and Pre-Workout Benefits Backed by Science” — https://mimithealth.com/blog/tadalafil-cialis-as-an-anti-aging-and-pre-workout-supplement-science-backed-benefits

5. Nature / Scientific Reports — “Phosphodiesterase 5 inhibition improves contractile function and restores transverse tubule loss and catecholamine responsiveness in heart failure” — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42592-1

6. PMC — “A review of the use of tadalafil in the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4054509/

7. PMC — “Direct comparison of tadalafil with sildenafil for the treatment of erectile dysfunction: a systematic review and meta-analysis” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5603624/

8. PMC — “Tadalafil and Steroid Hormones Interactions in Adipose, Bone and Prostate Tissues” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9024809/

9. PMC — “Tadalafil once daily in the management of erectile dysfunction: patient and partner perspectives” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2778425/

10. PMC / Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy — “Tadalafil Prevents Acute Heart Failure with Reduced Ejection Fraction in Mice” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8529582/

11. PMC / Frontiers in Medicine — “Efficacy and Safety of 12-week Monotherapy With Once Daily 5 mg Tadalafil for LUTS/BPH” — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8545998/

12. PubMed — “Chronic treatment with tadalafil improves endothelial function in men with increased cardiovascular risk” — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15661417/

13. PubMed — “Effects of taking tadalafil 5 mg once daily on erectile function and total testosterone levels in patients with metabolic syndrome” — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28295481/

14. PubMed — “Evaluation of arterial stiffness and cardiac function in patients with vascular erectile dysfunction” — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27928151/

15. PubMed — “Tadalafil crosses the blood-brain barrier and reverses cognitive dysfunction in a mouse model of AD” — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22776546/

16. PubMed / Endocrine — “Tadalafil improves lean mass and endothelial function in nonobese men with mild ED/LUTS” (Aversa et al.) — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28133708/

17. QuickMeds — “Does Tadalafil Improve Athletic Performance?” — https://quickmeds.co.uk/blog/mens-health/erectile-dysfunction/tadalafil/does-tadalafil-improve-athletic-performance/

18. Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry — “Can Tadalafil Protect the Ageing Brain?” — https://shanghaiarchivesofpsychiatry.org/en/214067.html

19. StatPearls / NCBI Bookshelf — “Tadalafil” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK603743/

20. Taylor & Francis / Aging Male — “Administration of daily 5 mg tadalafil improves endothelial function in patients with BPH” — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13685538.2017.1367922

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I look up. There’s about 150 people in front of us. All of the subcontractors and our own carpenters and labourers. The superintendent to my left is still talking. It’s still not registering. Overhead power line safety? Something like that. I look down at my tattered up steel toe boots on the asphalt of the parking lot. I’m standing in a puddle, with some snow and ice slowly melting on the side of it.

The boots are off. My feet are in the sand. The breeze is different. It’s humid now, that tropical air and smell. The puddle is replaced by ocean water, being pulled back and forth through my legs and over my feet by the tide. I look forward and the office trailers are gone. All I can see on the horizon is the endless ocean. The soothing sound of waves crashing. It does something for my soul. Something that the drugs and dealing came close to but could never touch. The ocean is calming. Peaceful. Emotions washed away, instead of amplified. I dont want to leave this place, ever. I must have lived by the ocean in a previous life or the universe has been dropping hints my whole life.

And I snap back. Like a slingshot, my mind is ripped away from the beach and shot back into my fucking skull in the parking lot. Fuck sakes. Its been a long journey but I’m still so far away. But god damn, I dont know how much more of this my soul can take. Not my mind. I can deal with this grind. My body can take the abuse of near daily training and redlining caffeine and cortisol while sleep deprived.

But my soul.

My soul feels like its coming to die here. Ironically, death was something I was trying hard to escape. From a burning building to what appeared safe and comfortable. The safety and comfort were a trap that I couldn’t recognize at the time. I had to make a move. A decade of dealing had worn me down. It had worn my fiancé down. I was tired. The world was shutting down. Drug benders had left me broken. The end of every bender felt like it had stolen a small piece of my soul. Piece by piece, and I still dont know if I ever got them back. I couldn’t walk away from the money I was making into minimum wage bullshit. The business we bought with the drug money turned into a casualty of COVID lockdowns.

I dont know what I was expecting. I guess it was anything but the current situation. Could be worse. Could be better. This was yet another pivot while I hung on for literal life. Keep moving, hold on, no complaining. Just grind it out, and get somewhere else. Anywhere else. Before it swallows you whole and leaves your fiancé and family organizing your funeral.

The meeting is over. My coworkers thank everyone for coming to the meeting. Good job, no incidents, we’re all in this together, lets set good example… same old generic shit.

In the puke green cubicle again. The blue light from the dual monitors is slowly cooking my eyes and my motivation. My email inbox is an infinite to do list. No matter how many I open, more seem to appear. No matter how clearly I try to communicate, the message just doesn’t get across to some of these people.

I can feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head. We’re just going in circles on these email chains. The lead time on some of these procurement items is too tight for my liking already. I’m dealing with engineers that have never worked an actual day in their lives because they got too accustomed to “consulting”. Whatever the fuck that means. Must be nice.

I can smell the tropical air again. The monitors are gone. My computer chair is now a beach chair. I look around. It’s just me. On an empty beach. The sand is white. The ocean is bright blue. So blue it doesn’t even look real. Ice cold drink in my hand. I made it back. I dont want to leave this place. The office and construction site is so far away. The back up alarms have been replaced with seagull noises and waves crashing. My soul has been pulled towards places like these for my entire life. My mission has always been to escape.

“We have the owners meeting in a half hour, can you please review the meeting minutes from last time and lead this one?”

I am violently snapped back into my office wage cage.

Fuck.

“Absolutely. I have a list of outstanding items they still need to address as well” I say back to my boss.

Back in the deceptive cage of comfort. I was so close. These daydreams get vivid sometimes.

I have a lot of work to do to get there.

I give up my soul for more dollars. And eventually I’ll be giving those dollars up for the beach.

Either that, or I die in the process.

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Not from the time of day.

Not from construction.

Not from the holidays.

From the infinite wisdom that governments seem to possess regarding health. Despite the fact that the average health minister looks like an obese land whale and requires 6 different types of meds to keep their blob of body functional, they’re somehow qualified to dictate health policies for others.

Today was different though. Right when they invoked the emergency measures act, I knew shit was hitting the fan in a bad way. War time measures for some truckers honking horns because they don’t want to take a failed vaccine? The same one that gives you myocarditis? We could go on here but that isn’t point of this.

It was when they froze their bank accounts. That’s when it hit me. Hitting me is putting it lightly. More like a cosmic slap across the face to wake the fuck up.

A government literally froze the bank accounts of citizens, who didn’t want to take an experimental and high risk vaccine for a low risk virus because they protested. And it wasn’t some BLM, burn down a city riot. It was a truckers honking horns, with bbq’s and people camping out type of protest. That same government who took away so many people’s ability to work, pay their mortgage and support their family over failed lockdowns and bullshit mandates, just went after their savings as well.

The point of this isn’t the distaste for the pandemic, or the hate for a corrupt and poor government that clearly being manipulated by pharmaceutical companies. Everybody either agrees, or still wearing a mask by themselves in a car. The point here is those fucking people just showed the entire world that if at any time, you get sick of their shit and abuse and start barking back they’ll just say…

“Fuck you, we’ll just take whatever fucking money is leftover after taxes too.”

Absolutely not. Couldn’t be me.

And shouldn’t be you either.

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I remember thinking to myself ..“How in the actual fuck do you short a company 140% of it’s existing shares?”

I had grazed over this thesis a few times. As much as I hate that cesspool, echo chamber, shit hole of site reddit… there were times years back where very niche corners of it were actually useful. You might be familiar with what I’m talking about already. That mind melting GME short squeeze of 2021.

I’m not sure what it was, but something was compelling. In any other situation, there would have been zero chance I would’ve put money in GameStop. I’d been investing for a while already and made some good money off of weed stocks from the Canadian weed legalization bubble and was playing around with options on the side. But something just didn’t make sense. Seriously. How the fuck can something get shorted 140%?

That means, by definition, more shares have been borrowed to short than exist.

Let that marinate for a bit. How the fuck is that allowed?

I listened to roaring kitty’s YouTube rants. Read his stuff. Honestly, it just clicked. New consoles coming out soon. New CEO and leadership rolling in. And a serious supply issue with the shares. The most basic principle of supply and demand tells you when the supply is short, price goes up. It was really just that basic for me. Few potential catalysts, and a company that was so incredibly shorted into the ground that I couldn’t even believe it.

Fuck it, we ball. Tossed in about 10 grand. The world was shut down anyway, and Canadian and American governments were handing out money. Good time to be risk on.

I still remember looking at my phone that day. My OG buy in price was around $40 a share. I thought my fucking phone was broken. It just kept going up. Every time I refreshed the app. $100. $200. $250. $300. $330. $370. Breaching $400.

What in the actual fuck? How is this happening?

Yeah sure, short squeeze.

But how was it this bad?

You might have seen Thomas Peterffy from IBKR admit on live television that the stock market almost ripped in half.

That they had to halt the buying.

They had to prevent people from exercising options.

They just had to stop retail.

Why? Well, its simple. If you haven’t noticed, central banks and governments are massive fans of privatized wins and socialized losses. And that ratio nearly flipped on them hard. There was collateral damage. Entire hedge funds got clipped and went under. Congressional hearings and lies. Fortunately, I still made good profits on that trade. The dips and rips that followed over the next year were incredible money making opportunities for swing traders and option sellers (and sometimes buyers, but that was whole other level of degenerate gambling).

The nice thing about that niche corner of reddit that obsessed with this trade was the top tier, weaponized autism grade research done by people with absolutely nothing better to do during pandemic lock downs. People who got burned when Robinhood locked them out of buying shares or exercising their calls. People who just witnessed the system win once again. No stone left unturned, and some of the stones turned were disgusting to say the least.

Thanks to the diligent detective work of unhinged internet autists, I began to get familiar with naked short selling, and the various tactics employed along side of it. To be honest, its a brilliant strategy. Find a failing business, like GameStop. Start shorting it. Run hit pieces on CNBC. Open useless lawsuits and civil cases that go nowhere. Spin up the negative sentiment in the masses. Open massive naked short positions and dump them into the market. Utilize loopholes and workarounds to never deliver the shares borrowed.

The price keeps crashing. Company is in serious trouble. Once the company is bankrupt?

Congratulations. The billions you made shorting it into the ground are now tax free. The shares that you failed to deliver for years on end? No longer an issue. The real details are more technical, but that isn’t the point here.

What this should highlight is the fact that no stock or asset held by a custodian is truly safe.

The brokers will deny access to funds if needed. The brokers will even prevent you from buying or selling if they see fit to do so.

Privatize the wins and socialize the losses. By any means necessary.

You are the collateral damage. Always have been. And will continue to be.

Unless you make an active choice not to be.

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I still remember 2008.

In painful hindsight, it should have been clear what was going on. The people getting approved for loans that had 0 business owning homes were a burning red flag. Unfortunately, unless you were aware of what CDO’s were, you had no chance. And as usual, the media lead the masses to an absolute slaughter.

A complete fucking bloodbath.

Peter writes, “Should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there?”

No! No! No!

Bear Stearns is fine. Do not take your money out. If there’s one takeaway, Bear Stearns is not in trouble. I mean, if anything, they’re more likely to be taken over. Don’t move your money from Bear. That’s just being silly. Don’t be silly. - Jim Cramer, March 11th, 2008.

Bear Stearns’ stock was trading at $62 per share. Five days later, it crashed due to the liquidity issues that nearly tore apart the entire US stock market. It was later “bailed out”… at a whopping $2 per share.

The writing was on the wall at that point for anyone paying attention. But for the average person? No fucking clue. This was a last ditch effort for the institutional and wealthy investors to dump whatever they had before it imploded. To make it even better, even if they got clipped, many of these fuckers got golden parachutes the whole way down, funded by your own tax dollars. Often rolling into another cushy executive job shortly after.

Yep, degenerate strung out wall street bankers, who took on more risk than any system should have ever allowed, nearly took out the largest stock market on the planet. The ripple effect was massive. Pension funds gone, decades of growth reversed, jobs decimated and lives destroyed.

And what do they get? A slap on the wrist, and bail outs funded by your own tax dollars. In fact, the only person that did any sort of jail time for the bullshit they pushed only did 6 months..

6 fucking months

At a minimum security, adult day care after they made in year what most people will never even see in their entire lives..

The system is and has been broken and rigged beyond belief. And when it breaks you get to experience the full force of the impact, then pay to fix it after too.

It’s the same shit every time. Over and over

The pattern keeps repeating. And it will never stop repeating itself either. The question is, do you allow the pattern to continue to burn you, or do you opt out?

Control systems are getting tighter. More rules and regulations regarding your money, privacy, freedom and freedom to speak are being proposed and passed every year..

Fiat currencies are being printed non-stop worldwide. Forever diluting and inflating away the purchasing power of the whichever local currency you use. Neel Kashkari, the president of Federal Reserve in 2020 during a 60 minutes interview was asked what he would say to someone rushing to an ATM to withdraw cash during the COVID pandemic. His response?

“You don’t need to. Your ATM is safe. Your banks are safe. There’s enough cash in the financial system. And there’s an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve. We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that there’s enough cash in the banking system.”

When asked if the Fed’s ability to flood the system with money had any limit:

“There is no end to our ability to do that.”

Sit with that for a minute. It’s complete bullshit. Absolute madness…

But what’s the solution to this madness?

That solution is some “fuck you” money.

Enter Bitcoin.

When I say fuck you money, my definition is slightly different than the typical. Most people think of fuck you money as a number. A number of dollars that allows you tell people, like your boss for example, fuck you. A number that buys you financial freedom.

To me this is partially correct. Fuck you money should definitely have a high number associated with it, but what about it’s properties?

You could have 10 million US dollars. This is your “fuck you” money number. You’re done working. You feel free. You’re gonna go live your life without worry.

But what happens if:

You get divorced and she wants half (or more)?

You cause a car accident and somebody dies, and now you’re getting sued?

The government doesn’t like what you’ve posted online or participated in and is now freezing your bank and brokerage accounts?

You’ve found yourself in some legal trouble and the courts are trying to seize all your assets?

You need to leave your country ASAP, but the banks and brokerages are giving you the run around. Their multiple business day to business week timeline isn’t aligning with yours.

Well in this case, you’re fucked.

Your fuck you money number isn’t as strong as you thought it was, and now you’re broke and back in the wage cage, or off to jail with nothing waiting for you when you get out.

What would have happened if that 10 million was in Bitcoin?

You’re getting divorced and she wants half? You can say FUCK YOU.

You’re getting sued.. sure they can go after the assets they have on paper and in brokerages but the Bitcoin? FUCK YOU.

Courts trying to seize your assets, but you’re the custodian of your cold storage bitcoin… FUCK YOU.

Need to leave the country ASAP? All you need is 12-24 words, a phone or laptop and an internet connection… FUCK YOU.

Bitcoin does not give a fuck, and it is by definition fuck you money.

As they say, tick tock, next block.

Look around and see the pattern. The corruption. Your rights and privacy slowly fading away.

It all makes Bitcoin a compelling asset. As Satoshi once said in 2009 “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.”

It’s safe to say at this point that its caught on. If you look at the rate of returns since its inception, a little bit can go a long way. A nice little fuck you nest egg, or gigantic fuck you net worth. That’s for you to decide.

But just remember, it will happen again. And you’ll be the one footing the bill.

You have a unique opportunity to say fuck you, in a way that actually works.

The calls continue to roll in. One after another. I line them up, and knock them down. $60 here, $100 there, $280 here, back for another $100…. it’s getting late but buddy needs $200 before I shut down for the night. Lap after lap, the pain in my lower back continues to creep up my spine. I realize I’ve been in the car for nearly 13 hours at this point. I open my centre console and damn, there’s probably about $4000 in there. Should probably stash some of the bills and load up on some more bags. But that will have to wait, I’ve got another call.

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Hopefully I don’t get pulled over. Puking up over a half ounce of product was painful last time and I blew my blood vessels wide open in my eyes. I looked baked out of mind for weeks. And I didn’t even get every single bag out of me. Thankfully my digestion has always been weird. I shit out entire blueberries and pieces of lettuce, a few bags of cocaine should pass as well.

The first few times you swallow the stash can be nerve racking.

Am I going to die?

Do I even care if I die?

How fuck else am I going to make money?

Soon it subsides. And you’re left feeling like Patrick Bateman, doing laps of your city all night, dropping off coke and crack to every soul that calls your number.

Your own soul? You see such a different part of the world.

Raw. Unfiltered. Unsheltered. On the other side of the fence.

People with too much money to spend, and people with literally nothing at all trying to give you their last few dollars. Normies getting ready to head to work or start their day, opening their car doors at 6:45 AM on the street. While you cruise past them with one of their neighbours in your front seat who is on the cusp of entering day two of their bender.

How did I wind up here? Im not sure. Hopefully the next $1000 bender doesn’t kill me. I’ve had too many people around me die already.

I remember when I tried to go back to school to quit dealing. The first people I became friends with? Building a coke phone for a well known local supplier. Before I knew it I was knee deep in shit again, ripping rails, running my own phones while my peers made pointless PowerPoint presentations. Well, I guess they weren’t completely pointless. They all graduated, and I dropped out half way through that waste of time to chase money. Oh well, at least I tried.

I’m fucking exhausted. Holding my head in my hands at my desk, I look up at my puke green cubicle. Cup of shitty coffee to my left that’s already giving me heartburn, and a mess of supplier invoices to the right I still haven’t had the time to touch this week. I let out a deep sigh. Fuck sakes. Some days it feels like I walked myself out of one cage and right into another…

The monthly invoicing is behind.

The client won’t approve a change order.

We had the third incident this month and we’re shutting down for the day. So much money wasted. The budget is nearly blown already.

Not exactly my fault, but management will forever bear 100% of the responsibility regardless.

My heart keeps racing. I continue to take deep breaths. I should probably cut back on the coffee and nicotine. And then out of nowhere I realize… and it kinda makes me laugh.

Straight up fucking giggle.

What the fuck am I stressed about?

Remember driving around with enough drugs to earn a 5-10 year sentence?

Or what about that time when there were cars full of people hunting us down to rob us?

Or how you felt when you figured out how cheap it really was to get someone shot?

And I’m sitting here worried about things like some bullshit spreadsheet that isn’t working. Cozy in an office.

I probably shouldn’t be here.

But here I am.

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From the outside, I am okay.

I smile.

I laugh.

I crack some jokes with the boys that would have me cancelled or fired in an instant.

I learned from a young age to internalize it. Whatever it was. Push it down deep. Nobody cares. You cannot show weakness or sadness. Fight back, or get clipped.

What better way to bury the emotions than drugs? They were everywhere, supplied by me and my friends, and their friends as well. At first, they numb it. Or they distract you from it. They temporarily fill an endless void. But it’s like a loan with interest. It always comes back. With more.

That night it came back with a fucking vengeance.

I don’t think there is a much worse feeling than failing to kill yourself. It already takes a tremendous amount of self hate, failure, depression and soul crushing apathy to manifest those actions. What they don’t tell you about trying to hang yourself is how much it hurts if you don’t do it correctly. It requires some prep:

A proper rope, with the right thickness and strength.

The right knot.

A solid anchor high enough to keep your body suspended a couple feet off the ground

Which was nothing I had on hand, or had prepared when I stumbled in the door at 4 am. All I had was a shitty leather belt and endless amount of self disgust. It fucking hurt. Ironically, the coke probably kept me alive. Kept me sober and stimmed up to not be numb enough to sink right into it and fade to black.

I still remember sitting there. Just thinking…

“God damn. I can’t even kill myself”

That’s a type of low I hope nobody experiences. And for those that have, keep moving.

You need to keep moving. Because exactly three weeks later I met the next love of my life that I spent nearly a decade with, and at one point was married too. Someone who I still to this day don’t think I ever deserved to have met.

It’s not over, until it’s fucking over.

I was feeling awfully tired for weeks.

Not the usual tired that comes with obsessive dieting to produce a body that after a certain point, only other gym bros admire.

A deeper one. Falling asleep while driving. No matter how tired I was and how early I managed to get to sleep, just pure exhaustion. Nothing left in the tank. Redlining on empty all day. Every day. And you cope with the usual. More caffeine. More stimulants. Just white knuckling through the bullshit and work.

I always have thought that the smart watch health metric tracking fad is some stupid typical normie shit. Seriously, who the fuck needs to track their sleep scores over a year to determine the nights where their sleep is mediocre? It just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy: my gay little watch filled with sweat, dead skin and grease just told me I should feel tired today. Or the people obsessing over closing their rings… I have a painful truth for that crowd. If you needed to gamify your fitness to actually stay on track, you were never gonna make it either way.

But, I did make an exception to this. I could tell something was way off. The one thing that bodybuilding, steroids and nutrition can teach you is how to read the subtle signals your body gives you.

My heart rate was all over the place. I couldn’t tell if it was the tren, the caffeine, the nicotine, the pre workouts with god knows what the fuck blended in it, or the residuals from a weekend where I finally fell asleep on a Sunday afternoon after starting on a Friday morning. My mother, bless her heart, just wanted to buy me something nice for Christmas and suggested a Fit Bit. I figured, why not? Maybe this will help me narrow down why I’ve been so exhausted. I’ll give it a go for a bit and track some trends. The more data the better. I learned that the hard way trying to self diagnose problems while blasting steroids without proper bloodwork.

The trends?

It ended up being a heart rate of over 120 bpm walking down the street. On a day just fuelled by some morning coffee. Hadn’t done any partying for a while. Backed off the pre workouts.

Yep, the heart rate was largely just me existing.

My resting heart rate? Over 100. Tachycardia status achieved. No wonder I felt so tired all the time…

I had a great doctor for many years. Very down to earth, and not condescending in the slightest. Would have conversations with me like he would a colleague, and was always hesitant to push more pills which I greatly respected. We had a deal: he would monitor my bloodwork and consult me based on the results, but he wouldn’t be prescribing me anything to enhance my steroid fueled ventures. Pharma grade Anavar and a TRT script was off the table (Canadian healthcare has been and continues to be very far behind the U.S, but that’s a whole other subject)… oh well. Hell of a deal still. It was hard enough getting doctors at walk in clinics to actually run the blood panels I needed despite my taxes contributing to their paycheques.

He pulled some strings and expedited an echocardiogram. We both knew something was up, and while he always admitted his knowledge on steroids wasn’t very deep, it wasn’t hard to identify an obvious and serious issue.

I still remember sitting in the room on one of those medical chairs covered with a sheet of that cheap oversized toilet paper. Heart beating faster than it should be. Hands drenched in sweat. That uncomfortable weight of anxiety slowly crushing me. The door opened. I could tell by looking at him it wasn’t good.

“The best way I can describe it is… your heart kinda looks like a deflated balloon. Your left ventricle ejection fraction is at 40%. Heart failure typically begins to manifest at 39% and below. From what we can identify right now, it looks like a form of cardiomyopathy. I’m going to expedite an appointment with a cardiologist for you.”

Always learning the fucking hard way.

I knew this day would come eventually. This was the culmination of cocaine abuse starting at 15. Binge drinking starting at 12. And everything in between with the exclusion of crack and heroin. Mix in over 6 years of consistent blasting and cruising on steroids, along with a near endless supply of money and cocaine due to my, lets just call it, occupation at the time…

And you’ve got one hell of a mentally damaged human trying to brute force life with enough drugs and hormones in his blood to cripple a mosquito.

Just like that, it felt like it was over.

Despite the rampant narcotic abuse, I was just as much addicted to lifting weights and nutrition as I was to the drugs and partying. That was a core component of my identity. I was always the jacked guy. The guy who got you your first cycle if that was were you wanted to go. The guy who coached you through the ups and the downs. The guy who saved you from popping too many aromasins, nuking your estrogen and dick function at the same time. The de facto bouncer at bars and parties. It was also a bit of suit of armour I wore while selling drugs. I’m not saying lifting weights makes you a good fighter (it doesn’t) but a menacing looking physique can save you from a lot of trouble, potential robberies, and fights.

My identity was gone. My health was gone. I was now wrestling a drug addiction that became much more lethal. The prognosis for dilated cardiomyopathy was poor. 50% mortality rates, creeping up to 75% after 5 years. I was 26 years old. I was still in a relationship with that woman I met shortly after a suicide attempt years ago. She was an incredibly kind and loving woman. How could I do this to her? Who the fuck cares about me, what happens to her if I die? How could I be so fucking selfish? All I could picture in my mind for many, many nights was her discovering my pale and unresponsive body.

All of this was done with my own two hands. Make no mistake, this was my fault and mine alone. I was waiting for my vision to get blurry, and feel pain shoot up my left arm before my consciousness dissolved into nothing.

Following the diagnosis it was rough. I immediately ceased anything above true TRT. Tried my best, and failed many times trying to stay away from the cocaine. It was all around me. There was nothing more soul crushing than suffering a come down from coke, knowing how close I was to a potential death. If you ever find yourself in an Alcoholics or Narcotics anonymous room, they talk in depth about the insanity of addiction. There could not be a more perfect definition. On meds, with a fucked up heart. Still railing coke like a degenerate with a death wish.

I began shrinking. The gym wasn’t as fun. My soul had been crushed. Prior to the diagnosis I had gotten to the point where competing was looking like a very real thing within the next year. Now that was gone, for good. The cardiologist wasn’t much help either, he was just another pill pusher, and my family doctor largely stayed out of it with the exception of writing scripts for my heart medication if I found myself running low.

But something in me wouldn’t let up. I did not want to be consumed by pills. I did not want to concede. Deep down, I knew the conventional advice was bullshit. I was told not push too hard, take it easy and take my pills. Follow that same generic diet advice that turned an embarrassing amount of North Americans into fat, disgusting slobs.

Bullshit.

I remember thinking to myself…

My heart is just a muscle. My heart is weak. How do I make a weak muscle stronger?

I train it. With cardio, obviously.

But conventional cardio isn’t going to cut it. I don’t care what the doctors say, some half assed walk a few times week isn’t saving nobody. I can’t run away from this problem on a treadmill. My body and mind are weak. I need to be pushed to the absolute limit. I had never made real progress in anything in life without extreme effort. I thought to myself, what is the most diabolical form of cardio I can do, consistently?

Enter Muay Thai.

There was nothing more humbling than stepping on to the pad for the first few months. Never had I experienced such gut wrenching, puke inducing, thinking I’m going to collapse and die on the mat right there, workouts. It was a new gym with an ex world champion as the lead coach. A real old school motherfucker who took pride in destroying every part of your body for an hour or two straight. Pushing you right to your limit, then making you blow right past it. Gotta puke? Don’t care. Cramping? Keep moving. Kicked in the head? Cry more, nobody cares. A perfect place for someone with a broken body, mind and soul.

I began to lose weight. My cardio drastically improved. I cut out booze successfully and my ejection fraction began to rapidly climb. After a few years, I was back in a normal range. My cardiologist couldn’t believe it. The kid who forced him to switch medication protocol by citing medical studies on his phone, refused to come off TRT, and was damn near in heart failure just bounced back. A patient with some actual agency who prioritized lifestyle changes over just popping some medication. Apparently a rare case in this day and age.

I felt like I had nearly fallen into the void and managed to climb back out, again.

It’s not fucking over.

I didn’t hear no fucking bell

These are just a few examples of the many peaks and valleys I’ve had to climb up and out of. Periods of extreme volatility. Maximum pain. Emotional decisions leading to either catastrophic losses or unbelievable wins, with no middle ground in between. Life is a war of attrition. Whatever the fuck this existence is, it’s testing you. You’re testing yourself without realizing it. And all you have to do is something fairly simple:

Just keep showing up.

Because it isn’t over until it’s fucking over.

It isn’t over until the bell rings, and your vision fades to black.

Keep moving no matter what, even if it’s just inches per day. Even if it’s the most painful few inches per day. The best times have come after some of the most soul shattering moments of my life. The contrast between the highs and the lows is what gives life it’s spark…

The volatility is the vitality.

Jokes on them. I’ll be smashing rails on the weekend. What they’re witnessing is peak performance. Whether they realize it or not.

The modafinil flowing through my system has my dopamine receptors lit up like a Christmas tree. Little bit of phenibut to level me out and take the edge off. And who could forget nicotine? My upper lip is slowly eroding from these pouches, but they hit so, so good. The constant caffeine. If I could get a straight caffeine IV drip I would. My heart rate is higher than I’d like it to be, but that’s the trade off with the ephedrine I pair with my coffee a few times a day. A man has gotta stay lean, and when I take clen I can’t even sign my name without looking like I have fucking Parkinson’s. (This was well before the GLP-1 gold rush, you guys have it easy these days).

And who could forget. The nectar of the gods. That sweet amber honey. That gives me a coughing fit that sounds like Im about to cough half my lung up when I nick a vein.

Good ol’ trenbolone. I mean, of course I’m running it with Test. That’s a given. I love testosterone. They should be handing it out to most people I see these days.

But god damn, that twilight between not sleeping enough, not giving any fucks and being horny enough to fuck a hole in wall gives you a mental drive that’s dangerous for productivity and getting shit done. And hitting PR’s while starving yourself.

I’m in the zone. Time to get back to work.

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AN IMAGINARY MORAL HIGH GROUND OF COPE

One of the strangest mindsets I have observed has come from the crowd that places an unholy sense of righteousness over those that have chosen to enhance their lives. You know the type:

• They graduated reddit university with honours

• Skinny fat, “science based” lifter

• Spends hundreds, and hundreds of dollars on expensive amino acid Kool aid mixes and natural testosterone “boosters” monthly

• Shows up to the gym twice a week. Has looked the same for the past 3 years.

• Prefers soy based protein and is a craft IPA connoisseur

• Comments on other people’s progress picture “Wow steroids” “Doesn’t count, not natty lol”

• “Your balls are gonna shrink!”.. They always seem to be obsessed with the size of other mens testicles

The list goes on…

It’s understandable. Really. Taking a few steps back, I get it.

If you’re viewing it through the lens of something like steroids, it comes with risk. There is no free lunch in life. You might not know when. You might not know how. You might not even know why. But there is a hidden cost to everything. Nothing comes without risk. It just is what is.

But when we examine the keyboard warrior who thinks his kinesiology degree has endowed him with more knowledge than a life long lifter who has lived and breathed the pain of trial, error and bad bloodwork…

The pattern becomes obvious. The cost becomes obvious. The risk becomes obvious.

That risk?

It’s the artificial ceiling you place on yourself. That imaginary moral high ground that is nothing more than insurance for mediocrity. The imaginary safety net, reinforced by nothing but pure cope.

In short, the risk is, simply taking no risk at all.

By choosing to cope. Cope that has metastasized into a warped sense of false superiority. It’s like a comfort blanket. Every single time they see someone doing better physically, mentally, financially, they get triggered.

Instead of putting in some work. Doing deep dives on biology. Nutrition. Training. Endocrinology. Pubmed studies. Pharmacology. Learning some new skills..

Instead of taking some risk and investing some time. Or admitting that what they’re criticizing might be too complicated for them to understand at the moment, because some things truly just take time and nuance to begin to grasp.

It’s easier to point fingers. Roll eyes. Demean the work. Downplay the achievement. Ignore all the risks taken..

He or she crossed a line I wouldn’t, therefore the work is invalidated.

Whatever makes them feel better, right?

I do hope these people understand the hidden costs associated with this mindset and the way it can infect other areas of their life as well.

THE TOOLS DONT REPLACE THE WORK, THEY ENHANCE THE WORK

We live in a world where there are people that legitimately believe things such as olympic athletes or professional sports players are natural.

It’s insanity. Truly.

If you believe, even for a second, that an athlete performing at the highest levels, at the literal pinnacle of their craft, isn’t doing everything within their power and grasp to make even the tiniest of improvements to continue to dominate and live out their life’s mission to the highest potential…

Take a step back, and try to apply the long lost art of critical thinking.

Nearly every single one of them, in some way, shape or form, are enhanced. And there is no shame in that game. Whether its steroids, peptides, pharmaceuticals, nootropics, narcotics, it doesn’t matter.

The drugs are the icing on cake. That perfect, delicious glaze of cream cheese icing on an already soft and chewy cinnamon bun. The beautiful stone veneer wrapping around a robust and perfectly framed house. The tools don’t replace the work, they take the work to the next level. They refine it, and act as a force multiplier.

The drugs didn’t get someone up at 5 AM. The drugs didn’t make them autistically track every single calorie that entered their body. The drugs didn’t spend every Sunday meal prepping for the next week. The drugs didn’t drag them to their gym or training, day in and day out no matter how they felt.

The drugs didn’t give them an unhealthy obsession with their life’s mission that drove them to ruthlessly chase their goal like a crackhead carpet surfing for another piece of rock to smoke at 4:34 AM.

The drugs took those inputs and maximized the outputs. Combine that with a high horse power, high agency motherfucker who will grab life by the throat and squeeze every single goal right out of it?

That’s synergy.

YOU CAN’T COPE YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

A while back, I remember every time tax season creeped up, a regular client would jump up from his usual one to two gram weekly purchase of coke to weekly quarter ounces. Sometimes even more, if some of his coworkers wanted in too. And these guys weren’t partying. These bags would be dropped off right in front of his downtown office in the middle of the day. This was how they ruthlessly crushed tax season and extreme workloads.

Our lawyer we kept on retainer? One of the deals we had with this guy was a discount or favours within reason provided we could give him a couple bottles of Adderall or Dexedrine every month. One hell of a deal, because a good lawyer will forever be worth every penny.

Shit, I even remember a graffiti artist we knew who did his best work while sniffing bumps of ketamine. And his work was phenomenal.

You think anyone of these people had a moral or ethical dilemma about this? Not even for a second. They had work to do. Goals to crush. A mission to chase. People that actually perform at a high level in any field or sport aren’t sitting around trying to cope their way out of mediocrity. They’re using and exploiting every single edge they can find and get their hands on. The people that dont aren’t even in the same league, or dont even produce work that’s worth enhancing.

There’s no pride in being a natural. That pride is mediocrity wrapped up in a cozy blanket of cope. Whatever your domain is, grab it by the fucking throat. Your mission? March towards it relentlessly and obsessively.

If you want to perform at your highest level, be prepared to use every single edge you can find, because that is exactly what your competition will be doing.

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Nobody.

Nobody is coming to save you. Nothing. No person, no entity, no organization, no government, no doctor, no sponsor, no meeting. Nothing. There is nothing in this life that will save you from yourself and your own decisions. That’s right. The thing you need saving from is yourself. You are the only one responsible. You are the only one to blame. Do you really want to be the guy that watched the game last night? Or do you want to be the guy that played the game last night?

Rock bottom does not exist.

There is no rock bottom. There is no floor that you hit, where you magically stop falling and failing. You push through to the sub floor. Then the foundation. Then through that concrete foundation. And continue to crater into the depths of your own personal hell until you have been fully consumed by it, and die. You must put yourself back together. Piece by piece. You must seek your own help, and your own truths. Because nobody, not a single soul, not even your own mother can save you.

Be the the fucking penguin.

In Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog questions a marine biologist. He asks if it’s possible for a penguin to go insane. A penguin not only abandons his own colony, but his feeding ground as well. He turns his back on his two most meaningful and only known sources of comfort and belonging. He marches straight towards mountains over 70 kilometres away. The normie thought process would label this penguin as depressed. Marching towards a certain death. Taking steps towards his own suicide. He has gone insane.

You must reject such mental framing.

While the penguin may die, he has chosen adventure. Hardship. Risk and uncertainty. The great unknown. Over all comfort he has ever known. The penguin may die, but he will die doing something he feels compelled and drawn to do. Realizing his potential, or at least trying to.

Be the penguin. Live a life worth living. Nobody is coming to save you.