The Informed Degenerate Protocol

What's going on? How are we doing? I just posted the Alcohol Protocol, and immediately after posting that and sharing it on my socials, I got a lot of people in the replies just blankly saying alcohol is bad for you, you don't need alcohol, this is stupid, you're dumb, we don't need alcohol, you know, forget alcohol, takes X, Y, and Z instead. And I get that all the time. This is always the case whenever you discuss something as sensitive as alcohol, right? People saying, oh, you've never lived with an alcoholic, Here's the deal. This black and white thinking is what gets us humans in so much trouble. This treating certain topics as taboo and thus not speaking of them only gives them more power and it removes the power away from you being an informed individual on how you're supposed to formulate your relationship around said substance, thing, whatever it may be. So I can say that alcohol may have utility without promoting alcoholism, just like I can say that high sugar diets may be instrumental in certain cases without condoning type 2 diabetes. Anyway, I digress. This video's objective is to give you guys a scaffolding and understanding of how to approach substances as a whole. And when I say substances, I don't just mean like drugs. I mean mainly drugs like central nervous system activators, whether that's a stimulant, psychoactive, psychedelic, whatever it may be. But this concept of leveraging things for utility— I don't like seeing people take things willy-nilly. I don't like seeing people take things, whether it be a supplement, whether it be you know, an action, a behavior, just to feel normal. So I've found a lot of utility in drugs, right? When I say drugs, that can mean tea, coffee, certain nootropics, right? THC, even cannabidiol, alcohol, for just a few of them. I found a lot of utility in them. My life has also been ruined by drugs. The difference is the drugs that ruined my life were the ones that were prescribed to me by doctors, by the same people saying don't do drugs, drugs are bad. Bad for you, right? Accutane wrecked me. Adderall destroyed my dopaminergic system. Some of those dopamine receptors that I lost probably will never come back. That's okay. That's neither here nor there. And SSRIs were the nail in the coffin. SSRI made me anhedonic for 2 years. For 2 years, my brain was zapped and fried, and my strategic use of drugs, in my opinion, was what I think got my brain back to where I needed it to be. At the end of the day, modern problems do require modern solutions. Regardless, drugs are not a modern solution. Drugs are not a modern thing. Every single civilization has some history of fermenting alcohol. Somehow we all just independently came to the conclusion that, hey, if we let this thing sit for a little bit, maybe even distill it, it makes us feel weird and it increases our social productivity to a certain extent, right? It increases social cohesion. It innovates for new ideas in this myopia that you get. But the thing now is that because modern society and modern life is quite depressing for a lot of people, It is the crutch that a lot of people use to their detriment. Same with marijuana. I see this particularly with marijuana. It's just more subtle, right? Guys that are getting blackout drunk on a Tuesday have this negative stigma and connotations towards them. But I know plenty of dudes that get baked every single Tuesday through Sunday, like they get baked every single day and it's not looked at the same way. Now granted, there's not as many first-order issues that come with like consuming cannabis. Yeah, you become a pussy. Yeah, your dopaminergic system flatlines. Yeah, your T lowers and you become estrogen dominant, but it's not as aggressive or affecting of other people 'cause you just sit inside your room. In my opinion, from a societal standpoint, that's just as damaging, right? Having a generation of people that are innovators and ambitious and supposed to be going out there and doing things are now docile, sitting in their room, ripping the blinker and scrolling TikTok while ordering DoorDash. Here's the thing, like that's where people that govern you want you to be if they want you to be just in this consumer loop. If they don't want you to act on your ambitions and goals, if they don't want you to build a life that you wanna live in, build the world that you want to live and bring up kids in. So they kind of want you there. And that's why these drugs, selective drugs, are becoming more socially acceptable, right? They had no problem pushing SSRIs onto millions and millions of people, right? I mean, what Americans are, what, like 5% of the global population? I'm butchering that. It's definitely not 5. It's like 15, 20% of the global population being very liberal here, $300 million towards $8 billion. I'm just bad at math, but we, we make up 70% of the pharmaceutical use, right? Like why, when I went into the doctor as a kid, they're like, yeah, he has seasonal, like his moods fluctuate in the seasons. He gets a little anxious and down in the winter because he lives in Minnesota under blue lights doing no sports or whatever. Okay, cool. Give him these drugs that have no long-term studies, are only meant to be used for short-term use, and we don't even know the actual mechanism that's causing the antidepressant behavior. And then, oh, even if he gets better, you can't take him off it because his brain is adapted to that super physiological level of serotonin and his serotonin receptors are shot. Anyway, replace SSRI with benzos, right? With anti-anxiety, with anxiolytics, with Adderalls and ADHD medication, particularly stimulants. All of these things are not only damaging the brain, they're damaging the individual because they're forming their sense of self-worth or not even their sense of self-worth. Their sense of self with who they are on these drugs. So what I'm saying is use drugs strategically, even if it's caffeine, even if it's nicotine. Identify the pros and cons and convince yourself why not to take something before you ever convince yourself to take it, particularly when it comes to alcohol. But when it comes to caffeine and other things instead, identify the highest utility use case and only use that substance when you are using it for that use case. So for me, I only consume nicotine when I'm doing something that requires enhanced dopaminergic activity enhance acetylcholinergic activity, aka when I need to be motivated, focused, and have sharp memory. In a certain example, making this video is a perfect use case for nicotine. I'm only going to use alcohol when there's a utility behind it, and I'm always weighing the pros and cons of every single time I taper up. I know if I have one more drink, it's going to cost me X number of recovery points, it's going to cause this level of endotoxin release, and it's going to make me feel like shit for like X number of hours. It's going to impact my liver in this way. I know what's happening under the— oh, dog's out there. I know what's happening under the hood, so I'm very strategic about using it. They won't tell you this. This is why the D.A.R.E. program was a fail, because they didn't tell you how to approach these things. So when they inevitably come up, you're like, yeah, whatever, I'm just gonna do everything. I apply the same thing to THC as well. I think that for a majority of people, THC is a net negative, right? There's specific use cases, PTSD being one. Guys that have a problem can use it medicinally, but what happens is guys that don't have problems use the medicinal argument to justify their consumption and rampant misuse of a substance. If you're smoking weed every day, you're cooked. If you're strategically using THC as a psychedelic in small doses, right, in conjunction with other cannabinoids like CBD, then you can actually render some utility from it, being that it is a psychedelic. And what psychedelics do is if your brain is a sledding hill and every time you take an action, thought, or behavior, you go down that hill, you start creating these ruts. And when you create these ruts, if you go down that certain area, you're more likely to fall into that rut, which first, which further deepens that rut, which causes ingrained behaviors. So what happens when you use a psychedelic like THC, and I'm calling THC a psychedelic because it is, it's treated like a fun party drug. It's a psychedelic. You're adding a fresh layer of snow. Now, will THC add as fresh of a layer of snow as, say, psilocybin? Probably not. The risk case, the, uh, the risk of overconsumption and sending you into an ego death is lower though. But I honestly find THC to be more potent than psilocybin. I find a lot of use case in psilocybin microdosing as well. I also took ayahuasca. That's neither here nor there. I think for a majority of people it's just not even worth going to that level. A lot of people that I saw doing that same substance kind of like didn't use it to utility, they didn't integrate it. I made the objective of taking ayahuasca and becoming more grounded, right, and becoming more entrenched in reality. Um, that's neither here nor there. With THC, use it sparingly if you're going to use it at all. It's a sticky substance, right? From a— I think it's traditional Chinese medicine, I don't even remember what school, but they call it a sticky substance because not only is it quite literally sticky, but it's very habit-forming, right? And it quickly dulls you down. Use it once, you're good. Use L-theanine to mitigate some of the neurodegenerative effects, you're good. Have like leverage the utility while you're quote unquote high— not quote unquote high— while you're high to actually do something productive with it. Don't sit there and scroll. That's just going to ingrain that behavior more. The same applies to stimulants. I was prescribed Adderall as a kid. I never really used it because I didn't like the way it made me feel. It took away my personality and most importantly, it took away my unique edge. The thing that you have to realize is a lot of the things that they'll medicate you for are the same sword that on the other side is the root cause and root source of all of your unique skills, right? Your unique edge. So when I was taking Adderall and a lot of these people were taking Adderall, it was destroying that thing that made them special. The ability for the other parts of their brain other than in the orchestrator, which is the frontal lobe, to go crazy and create this extreme level of pattern recognition and innovative behavior. It dampened that and it made me good at looking at type sheets and reading textbooks that I didn't like. Now, if you were to take that dose, say 20 milligrams of extended release Adderall, if you're prescribed Adderall, and if you go down to like 2.5 to 5 milligrams of instant release, that's a barely noticeable amount. And you consume that with a choline source like Alpha-GPC or even like egg yolks, which is just straight choline, That would put you in this perfect window where you're not so excitatory that you're destroying dopamine receptors, but you're still getting this heightened dopaminergic state. So what Adderall does is that it increases the level of dopamine points you get from any activity, right? Non-selectively. So if sending an email usually gives you 3 dopamine points, sending an email on Adderall is gonna give you 15. But if playing video games gives you 50 dopamine points, playing video games on Adderall gives you 500. So the solution there is if you are going to take some sort of stimulant-like dopamine-raising, substance, don't do things that you don't want to continue doing because it'll just make them more enjoyable and addicting. If you are going to take that or any other dopaminergic like L-tyrosine, like Maquina, which I wouldn't take Maquina— Maquina is just L-dopa, which is way too close of a precursor to, uh, like molecular dopamine or biological— biologically identical dopamine. Uh, it's too close. If you are taking a stimulant, do things that you want to create a feedback loop of in your brain. I did this when I was about 22. I was prescribed Adderall. I was kind of sick of taking Adderall, didn't take it for a while. I took a microdose for 2 weeks and removed all distractions, all entertainment. I made my life as boring as possible. I literally didn't listen to any music. All I did was write, read, and work. And that completely changed the behaviors that I craved, the behaviors that I seek dopamine from, and it made me extensively productive. So in the short term, I do think maybe like at that dose it probably did still have some negative effects. It definitely dampened my personality. It definitely made me, made me a lot more rigid and linear, but I was able to go off of that and leverage the utility of that segment. So the question is not whether the first-order effects of any substance are bad, because if anything's having some significant impact on your central nervous system, it's probably doing things you don't like as well. The question is, will be this, will the second and third orders of effects be worth that initial damage from the first order? So if I'm drinking alcohol and I'm making new connections and I'm enjoying life more and I'm learning how to become more present and I'm able to slow down and relax and be less stressed, that's going to outweigh the first order effects of it damaging my liver, my brain, and my gut. So that's how I want you guys to look at all substances. That's how I want you guys to look at all things. Am I getting the utility out of this? And does that make up for the damage that's accrued? Good example is lifting, right? Or exercising. You exercise too much and your immune system will go down, your joints will start to ache. Your hormones will suffer and you'll be tired all the time and your work will probably inhibit, right? A lot of people continue to work out because it's an addiction, right? The David Goggins types that are now on thyroid and TRT. So you have to ask yourself, does the push outweigh the shove? Is there still utility at this level? If there's not, I'm going to stop. If there's not enough, I'm going to push it up one more. That applies to everything. Anyway, guys, this is just a framework that I want you guys to use. To become more informed individuals, to be more scientifically literate, and also just to just think for yourself. I'm not like promoting drug use. I think if you do need to use something to feel normal, there's a deep, deeper problem at stake. You should be able to go every day without anything and feel fine. That's what it means to be antifragile. That's what it means to be sober. And that was, that's what it means to be in control of your own biology. But you are also like in control of your own biology, right? So you can choose to use substances when they have utility, just make sure they have utility or abstain. Anyway, guys, have a good one.