This title isn't clickbait. I think TRT is more dangerous than steroids. Now obviously doctor proscribed doses of androgens aren't as physically dangerous as a bunch of black market Tren, I get that. But everyone gets that, and that's the point. Everyone knows steroids are a bad idea, and while a small percentage of the population are willing to take that risk in pursuit of athletic success, most men never will. Whether to avoid side effects, because of stigma associated with cheating or taking illegal drugs, or just wanting to fully own their own achievements, most men just aren't going to take steroids. Steroid use is a problem sure, it can be very dangerous for the relatively small percentage of the population who actually take them in high doses, but it is a fairly well contained problem, it basically only effects high level athletes, gym rats, and wannabe gym rats, (sad that that's a thing) a very small, contained portion of the population. Not a big societal threat.
TRT, on the other hand is insidious, the dangers aren't as obvious as 29 year old bodybuilders having heart attacks, so it bypasses a lot of the defenses that would prevent many men from even considering buying steroids from that big guy in the parking lot of the gym. As TRT becomes increasingly normalized it is likely that far more men will choose to use it, and presents a lot of potential problems that buying illegal drugs in the parking lot to get jacked just doesn't.
Before I get into it, obviously this is a subject that requires nuance, because TRT can indeed be valuable, even lifesaving medicine for those who legitimately need it. Who legitimately needs it is a grey area that I'll go into later, but for now, let me make abundantly clear that nothing I say here is an attack on anyone who takes TRT for legitimate medical reasons, nor am I in any way advocating that people in these categories stop taking their prescription. No, what I'm talking about here is the normalization of men taking TRT for made up medical conditions such as “Being over the age of 30” or hell even “being over the age of 20” now, and “I went to the doctor and my test was low.” We've got Alec Eubank taking “TRT” at like 23, I think we can all agree that there's a grey area that needs to be addressed between that and and a veteran with a war injury right?
For these men in that grey area, TRT presents a unique psychological danger, one that's completely absent in “taking steroids” (even though they're physically the same thing.) TRT promises all sorts of wonderful things, better mood, better ability to work and make more money, better sex drive, maybe a better physique. (By the way, real TRT from an honest doctor probably won't noticeably improve your physique by itself but there are a ton of guys out there claiming to be on “sports TRT” creating the perception that it does.) All that is required to get these wonderful things, is to admit that you are fundamentally, biologically speaking, inadequate as a man. But don't worry, once you do admit that, and ask for help from your local pill mill you'll get all the trappings of masculinity, you'll be able to rise and grind get the muscular physique, the beard, the tattoos, afford the 100 thousand dollar pickup truck, so it'll be ok! A long as you keep getting your injections that is... See how insidious that is? You can have everything you want, you just have to admit that you're inadequate first in a way that's almost reminiscent of religious submission.
Steroids don't do that. Hey, I'm a good baseball player I want to go pro, so I'm gonna take drugs. Simple. It doesn't hit the same right? Steroids don't require you to make yourself a victim first. And you can say that's just wordplay, but I think it matters, I think it makes a huge difference, I don't think taking drugs to achieve superhuman performance is nearly as psychologically dangerous as having to take medicine just to achieve masculinity. Plenty of successful athletes are happy to go off cycle and be nowhere near their peak after they proved what they had to prove, there isn't the same level of psychological dependence there because they're returning to normal, not returning to inadequacy.
To have a bunch of good things that are contingent on something outside your control is stressful, in many cases the precarity is more stressful than just having less. There's tons of precarity in the modern world already, it can't be helped, no man is an island, and like it or not we absolutely are dependent on people and circumstances outside our control for many of the good things we enjoy. However, I think the last thing modern men need is for their very masculinity to become yet another area of dependency, another subscription service they need to make sure they can make the payments on, another pair of golden handcuffs, another reason to hustle and work overtime to make sure you can make your masculinity payments alongside your electric f350 Utahraptor HD payments.
Speaking of payments. Lets talk about what Testosterone Replacement Therapy is. It is a drug. One that is HIGHLY likely to cause lifetime dependency. I'm not an expert on this stuff so I'm not gonna get into the science of it too much, but the expert consensus as far as I can tell is that if you go on TRT, you should expect to be on it for life. It will suppress your natural testosterone levels, and may prevent them from ever going back to normal. I'm not saying no one ever comes off, people do, but being able to come off unharmed is not something you should count on when making that decision..
Are sure you want to give the medical industry that much hold over you? Really??? Are we looking at the same medical industry? I know the argument against this, its, “Nah dude, they don't want you on TRT! If they get you on TRT, then you'll start exercising and get in shape and then you won't need statins and diabeetus medication and all these other way more profitable drugs. They actually Underprescribe TRT because they're afraid of the out of control alpha male you'll become if they give it to you!”
That is absolute nonsense for several reasons. First, this narrative that doctors are too reluctant to proscribe TRT so many men are suffering because they can't get the medication they need should set off alarm bells for everyone over 30 because that's EXACTLY the kind of propaganda that the Sackler family pushed to try to push Oxycontin. Before the 90's, Doctors were quite rightly very reluctant to prescribe opioids except when absolutely necessary out of 100% justified concern for addiction potential. But the Sacklers paid for articles bemoaning an “Epidemic of Untreated Pain” resulting from an outdated superstitious fear of addiction potential, and that was a big part of the process of changing the culture regarding opioid prescriptions in the medical industry.
The other part of that process was of course that doctors who turned their practices into oxy pill mills got filthy fucking rich. Because of course they did, how could they not, they're selling a highly addictive, dependency creating drug to whoever wants it! Except instead of having to make sure you're in good with the CIA so you can get shipments from Afghanistan or Columbia or wherever they work hand in hand with kid touching warlords to produce the stuff, and worry about the opps sending some kids wearing shiestys and skinny jeans to slide on you with a switch, you can just sell it legally from your comfortable office. Perfect business model right? Only problem is that eventually, people are going to notice that more Americans are dying of opioid overdoses than all wars combined and crack down on some of the worst offenders.
What would fix that business model? Having a dependency creating drug you can sell legally from pill mills that doesn't cause overdose deaths! Problem solved, TRT Pill Mills are the perfect business model! Now the objection of course is that it isn't expensive enough for that to work, that's where the “medical industry doesn't want to give you TRT” argument comes from right? Its been around for years, there are generics, its fairly cheap. And sure, all things being equal it would be more profitable to have someone on statins and all the other obesity drugs than TRT. So if it were a pure either or choice that would make sense. But it isn't. You could give someone both TRT AND Statins, plenty of men are on both! And there are also plenty of people who won't ever take statins or insulin but might be persuaded to take TRT.
Remember, we're dealing with the same class of people who has funded both sides in every war. They're not “on the side” of 300 lb body positivism influencers taking tons of drugs so they can pretend eating 6000 calories a day is “health at any size” and opposed to podcast listening bros with tattoos and blacked out American flags on the back of their oversized pickup trucks, they want a product to sell to each side. They're thrilled to provide “gender affirming care” to 12 year old girls whose peer groups decided to make irreversible medical decisions on a whim, but they're also happy to provide gender affirming care to 35 year old men who don't feel like the guy on their favorite podcast says they should. Overall, they'd probably rather have him subscribe to femininity for the rest of his life, because his surgeries will be a massive one time paycheck and the drugs he'd be on for the rest of his life in that instance would be way more profitable, not to mention the psychiatric drugs they'll then be able to sell his kids down the road as well, but if all they can sell him is masculinity as a subscription service, hey, that's still good reliable money, way better than nothing. Subscription services may not be that expensive, but they provide reoccurring income.
And we're deep enough in the subscription service economy that we all know how they work. They start out cheap and super convenient, you wonder at first how they can afford to provide so much value for so little money right? All this stuff was good enough back in the day that you didn't really look to closely at how they were making it work or what their long term business model was and then as soon as they get you to the point where they've destroyed the competition or otherwise made unsubscribing really difficult or inconvenient, they jack up the price and lower the quality. And in this case the product is being a man.
Unsubscribing from masculinity is gonna be a little harder than netflix. Right now, they're in the growth phase where they provide you with a “miracle drug” that'll make you jacked financially successful, pretty much everything good in life with 0 downsides at an affordable rate, but you don't think they're going to jack up the prices once they have whatever they deem is a big enough customer base literally by the balls? Really? I want to hang out with whoever you're hanging out with to have this much trust in the inherent goodness of humanity. And even if you implicitly trust the influencer running your favorite online pill mill for whatever reason, quit being naive about the modern economy. Private equity is buying up every business that can possibly squeeze vulnerable people. They'd be comically evil if it weren't so horrifying and sad. Nursing homes, veterinary clinics, hospitals.
Go into a private equity owned nursing home. Everybody should to understand what's happening to this country, what awaits all of us, both metaphorically and literally. Any chance these demonic vultures have to squeeze more money out of someone vulnerable they will. If you hate these people, I guarantee, you don't hate them enough, there are more rabbit holes you haven't gone down. Anyway, even if your favorite influencer wouldn't squeeze you, once TRT pill mills are deemed to have a large enough percentage of the population dependent on them, the vultures will make him an offer too big to refuse, most likely somehow using someone elses money, probably yours somehow, what little of it isn't going overseas to fund kid bombing and kid touching, and they'll buy your favorite influencer out and then once they have you by the balls they will squeeze for all they're worth.
And it isn't just about the money, so don't say, eh, I don't care, I'm rich, I can afford it. First of all, if you're rich, and you're considering going on TRT, fuck that, pay me instead, I will get you plenty jacked, more jacked certainly than real TRT could ever get you, and probably more than what they're calling “sports TRT” except in a much more satisfying way, as you'll have something no one else at your country club has, the real deal, and the strength, the function to go with it. Imagine everyone else at your country club was wearing fake Rolex and you were the only one with a real one. I don't care about watches personally, but I'm assuming that would be pretty cool for someone who did right? Well having a great natty physique feels better than that. Way better.
But secondly and more importantly, just, because you have money in the bank doesn't mean you don't have to worry about drug dependency being used against you. One of the big things our overlords are excited about now is Central Bank Digital Currency, basically programable money that the bankers/tech overlords/ Mob/Frankists can decide how/when/if you can use based on their surveillance and algorithms. They're openly telling you they want to be able to use control over what you can and can't buy as a tool of social control, you don't think they'd use access to the medication you depend on to be a man as leverage to make you fall in line??? I want some of whatever you're smoking. Staying natty isn't a total solution, this is gonna be a massive problem for all of us, but we should all be trying to have physical control over as much of what we need as possible, the last thing you want to do right now is hand your balls over to our overlords to squeeze.
Not that we need the tech overlords to be successful in creating an inescapable digital panopticon to imagine a situation where being dependent on a medication for your test could be a huge liability. The only thing worse than economic collapse is trying to navigate economic collapse with crashed test levels. This wouldn't have to be mad max level stuff, (where was the Lord Humongous getting gear from in the wasteland anyway?) just enough to disrupt supply chains. Imagine the great depression, except you also have near 0 testosterone. How are you supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps then? Look, I have no idea what's gonna happen in the next couple decades but if you're comfortable being dependent on an external source of testosterone through what's coming, you're a lot more optimistic than I am.
But lets shift gears, lets assume that things continue to go on as they are now or maybe they even get a little better, and they very well might, who knows. So we don't have to worry about supply issues, or anything like that. I'm still very very concerned about the normalization of TRT usage for a couple reasons. And lets be clear, that's what a lot of people are pushing for. You see these narratives that all modern men inescapably have half the testosterone of their grandfathers and a quarter that of their great grandfathers no matter what they do because of microplastics or endocrine disruptors or whatever, that is what they are trying to do. They are trying to make the case that it is normal for men to need exogenous testosterone to be normally masculine. That's the case they're making with that kind of rhetoric.
That comes from a variety of motives, from people who are genuinely concerned about environmental toxins and declining male health, but also from people who want to sell the cure to that particular poison, and I suspect there are also a lot of people who just want to take steroids who feel better about it if they can claim that they're just trying to get back to normal in some way, and also position themselves as saviors trying to educate and help other men. And obviously there is some truth to it, there are a variety of harmful compounds in the modern environment that we should be aware of. However, the really big claims about how insanely high the average man's testosterone was back in 1900 or whenever are barely a step above speculation. We hadn't even identified testosterone in a lab back then, so obviously we weren't testing for it.
Now there has certainly been a general decline in testosterone levels since it started being measured, but a lot of that is obesity and lifestyle. Given that the scientific establishment still considers the sun and red meat to be poison, I'm not at all convinced that this data means that a modern man who lives a healthy lifestyle will have lower testosterone than his lead poisoned granddad to any practically significant degree. And I think it's important that we hold our ground against the idea that it is normal for a man to need exogenous testosterone in order to build a good physique simply because he's in his 30s or 40s. I've got a 1 year old son, by the time he's in my position it'll be 2061. If a bunch of us give in, and go on TRT and then even more of the Zoomers, who are already blackpilled af, by the time he grows up and reaches his middle age, is there gonna any expectation at all that its possible to be in any way masculine without drugs? And even if I can somehow raise him right, will my daughters be able to find husbands who are able to be men the old fashioned way? I'd like at least the option for my descendants to just be regular analog people who do normal stuff without needing exogenous injections you know? I feel like once the toothpaste is out of the tube it's gonna be really hard to put back in, because everyone who goes on has to prostheletize to feel better about their decision. If we don't want this to become completely ubiquitous, I think we need to push back as much as we can now.
Because lets be real, life is fucking hard for men in their 30s and 40s right now. Microplastics aside, the economy is fucking rough right now, when we have kids, we're raising them on the hardest difficulty mode in history. Raising kids as an atomized nuclear family with one man, one woman, and no help unless you pay thousands a month for it? That's fucking hard. You want to give them anything remotely like what you had growing up you have to be bringing in bare minimum six figures while also doing more parenting than pretty much any men in history. They say having to be a stay at home mom in the 50s was oppressive, and in a lot of ways it was, one woman alone was never supposed to do all the childcare, it was supposed to be done as a community where each mom had tons of community help, but now you as a man have to do a whole lot of what made 50's housewives turn to pills while also being on your grindset as a provider, an entrepreneur, right? Its tough, so its easy to hear these influencers paid by the pill mills pushing their miracle drug that gives you energy, boosts your mode, makes effort feel good, and think, that's what I need! But struggling with the situation that you're in doesn't mean you have low T, it means the situation fucking sucks.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, that's the saying right? And you know what? I don't want large numbers of men taking drugs to adapt to increasing levels of blackrock/vanguard/hedge-fund imposed hustle culture. I don't want to spend every waking moment contributing to making Big Line Go up, I want to spend as much time as possible doing absolutely fuck-all to contribute to the economy, raising my kids, walking around looking at trees and waterfalls, reading old books, lying in the sun etc. so I don't want a bunch of morons taking TRT so they can wake up at 0400 six days a week to grind at their Panzi scheme driving housing prices up even more. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against hard work, but very few of these grindset productivity types are actually doing anything that would traditionally be recognized as “Hard Work.” In fact, they look down upon it, that's “trading your time for money,” which is what the poors do, people without a “growth mindset” you're supposed to be an entrepreneur, start a business teaching other people how to get rich for exorbitant sums (have to invest in yourself!) so they can teach other people how to get rich for exorbitant sums!
And I took it in that direction for a reason, because in addition to allowing adaptation to overwork and hustle-culture, I think that as TRT becomes increasingly normalized, it will increasingly allow men to adapt to and contribute to the increasing scamification and looting of the economy. Like I was talking about earlier, Hedge funds, Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. are buying up every business and squeezing them for every penny of short term profit they can get, making everything from healthcare to firefighting equipment production suck, new start ups are mostly just Ponzi Schemes to extract as much venture capital as possible before being outed as vaporware, and at our level, you can't look at reels anymore without seeing an add for a get rich quick scheme teaching you how to scale your online coaching business to to six figures a month. Nobody wants to actually train clients anymore, even though there are tons of people who will be happy to teach you how to make absurd sums of money doing it! It seems like everything is a scam.
Now obviously I don't blame testosterone for the broader issues in our economy but I do think that the normalization of TRT can exacerbate the problem by allowing a much larger number of men to adapt to and thrive in this environment. Here's the thing about natural testosterone. Even if you have relatively high levels overall, it ebs and flows. Sometimes you feel like you're in in the cast of predator, but not all the time, and I think that's for a reason. I think we need to be able to be that guy when we need to be, but not all the time. I think it's important for us not to feel like bulletproof men of action all the time, constantly moving from one item on our daily routine to the next, I think its important for us to have times of reflection, where we don't feel bulletproof, where we question ourselves and just kinda rawdog reality as the zoomers would say, deal with it sober, not high on testosterone 100% of the time.
Because it is kind of a high right? It feels great. And if you can be high like that all the time, maybe you can skip some of the boring reflection where you wonder if being a successful entrepreneur really matters if your business doesn't actually provide any value to anyone but yourself and just focus on the external metrics of winning instead. I don't think its an accident that a lot of these scammers are on some form of gear, it isn't just to look jacked with less effort, I think it also helps them to quiet any doubts about what they're doing. And this is where the normalization of TRT has way more potential societal risk than steroids. Leaders, whether academics, political figures, buisnessmen, are probably not going to buying cheque drops from the big dude at their gym to get their bench press up, or at least not commonly. Honestly, it might be cooler if they were. I'd vote for a roid raging powerlifter as long as he wasn't on the epstein list and wasn't taking money from one particular foreign lobby. But that's probably not a huge overall concern. TRT on the other hand is something that is becoming increasingly common with our thought leaders in all fields and at all levels.
They say testosterone is an anti-depressant for men, but you know what? I kinda want the men of my generation to be depressed, at least sometimes. Things are fucking depressing. I don't trust a man who's happy all the time, because he doesn't care about the world my kids will inherit. Now obviously I don't want you to be cripplingly depressed where you can't take any kind of positive action, but I also don't want you to be one of these pharma addicts who says, “I don't feel amazing all the time, what can I take to make this go away. I want you to sit with reality some, but then actually do your best about it. We're in the weak men created hard times part of the cycle and its our responsibility to make sure the hard times create hard men and hard men create good times part happens. Now I don't know what to tell you to do about that, this is a fitness channel, I don't have all the answers about the complex problems we're dealing with, but fitness isn't a bad place to start, because that's at least under your complete control.
You can't control whether the economy you live in is good, you can't control whether the profession you chose remains worthwhile or gets ruined by hedge funds, politicians or myriad other insidious and destructive forces, you can't control whether other folks are raising good peers for your kids to grow up with, but you do have full control over your diet and exercise, and at least some control over stuff like sleep, going outside, etc. so physical masculinity can and should be a last bastion of independence against the ever advancing encroachments of modernity. It may seem pointless, because some of the other problems are so big, but at the end of the day, you have to think globally, but act locally. Put your energy into what you have direct control over until a bigger opportunity reveals itself.
Think about how in Lord of the Rings, Aragon realized that the ring had moved beyond his control and he could no longer have an impact on the main point of their mission, so rather than despair, he chose to go rescue two hobbits. Even though they were completely irrelevant to the bigger struggle, it was at least something positive he could do, so then he and gimli and legolas ran for like 3 days straight giving everything they could to that seemingly minor goal. And then eventually bigger ways to contribute did present themselves. So don't ever feel like its pointless to focus on fitness, and especially to focus on your ability to stay in great shape Naturally without reliance on pharmecuticals. You never know what good it might do, maybe your strength will make a huge difference someday. Or maybe you just keep the tradition of building muscle naturally alive long enough to pass the torch off to my son when he gets old enough.