Yesterday a high school senior slid into my DMs and immediately demanded I tell him which steroids to inject. Like every Zoomer, he had already ingested a chronic dose of Nick Fuentes, trenbolone acetate, and thyroid hormone by the age of eighteen.
The thyroid hormone is what puzzled me. Steroids I understand; they have an obvious teenage logic. But thyroid? Why are Zoomers taking thyroid hormone?
Then I remembered Ray Peat. Peat’s metabolic framework treats hypothyroidism as the master pathology behind fatigue, fat gain, bad mood, bad skin. Throw thyroid at everything and see what improves. I would bet the kid has never read a word of the man. He got it fourth-hand, compressed into a syllogism, from someone who also never read him.
And that’s when the whole exchange started to feel nostalgic. Teenagers asking strangers which Chinese chemicals to inject, in a chat room? Are we back in the 2000s chat room meta?
Yes. We are, but it took four decades of institutional collapse to get here.
If you are a normal person, and believe it or not some of my subscribers are normal people and not post-human Space Marines, you are probably thinking: My God, a teenager blasting steroids? Teenagers should not be making these kinds of decisions. And I agree with you. They should not.
This was handled better in the eighties and nineties, when everyone bought and injected their steroids in the gym locker room. That is why, if you have ever set foot in a classic gym, there is a sign on the wall asking you not to inject steroids in the locker room. Which, ironically, makes you want to inject steroids in the locker room. Imagine the camaraderie. Everyone pinning together before a workout, or before a baseball game, then getting completely cracked out on ephedrine, which is now nearly impossible to buy because it can be cooked into biker meth.
Those were the years of responsible steroid use because distribution ran through a human being who had to look you in the eye. Your gym dealer would only sell to you if he was confident you were not going to lose your mind and start throwing dumbbells at people in a roid rage. He wanted to know you would use them properly, because his supply and his reputation were on the line. He was, functionally, a licensing body.
In fact, most teenagers back then trained hard specifically to impress the gym steroid dealer, so that he might eventually consider them worthy of a cycle. You had to earn it. You had to demonstrate discipline to a man who would actually be around to see the consequences. Those were the good old days of anabolic steroid responsibility.
At some point the dealers realized they did not need to run a business out of a locker room with a bunch of dicks flapping around. They could take orders via the internet and mail the product. EliteFitness, Anabolic Review, MESO-Rx, and eventually the bodybuilding.com boards carried a strange transitional order from the late nineties through the mid-2000s, where the gatekeeping did not disappear so much as get abstracted into reputation systems.
You could not simply show up and order. You lurked. You read the stickies. You posted a blood panel and got told to come back in a year. Sources were vouched for by people with post counts and history, and a scammer could be exposed to thousands at once, so the vetting that used to happen through eye contact now happened through public record. The forums even produced their own scholastic tradition, with Bill Roberts writing what amounted to peer-reviewed pharmacology for laymen, and men reading it more carefully than they had ever read anything in school.
Then in 2007 the DEA’s Operation Raw Deal took out the domestic sources, the Chinese raw powder trade filled the vacuum, and the whole apparatus of reputation and lurking came to an end.
Reddit swallowed the forums the way the forums had swallowed the locker room. r/steroids became the closest thing the subculture ever had to a public institution: a wiki, a harm reduction framework, moderators who banned source talk to keep the feds away. The gatekeeper was no longer a dealer but a Reddit bureaucrat. Sourcing moved off-platform into private lists and PGP encrypted email, which meant the man explaining aromatase inhibitors to you had no financial stake in whether you ran a cycle and no idea who you were.
The information was better than anything a locker room ever produced, with real citations and real insistence on bloodwork. Information was never the binding constraint. The constraint was a person who self-appointed himself as the gym pharmacist. Shooting steroids is a transhuman project, and every upgrade in the speed of sale made it less human.
A wiki cannot tell an irresponsible teenager to go fuck himself. What replaced the dealer was excellent guidance, addressed to nobody in particular.
Between 2018 and 2023, Reddit obliterated itself via increasingly draconian waves of censorship. The culture migrated into Discord servers, Telegram channels, and Twitch streams, all of them invite-only, unsearchable, and unindexed.
Tate’s Hustlers University is the purest case. Access itself becomes the product, not the information. The accumulated public knowledge of the forum era gets locked behind subscription walls and rebuilt badly by men who did not have the knowledge to begin with. The dynamics change entirely, from pseudo-scientific inquiry to narcissistic hero worship and Animal Farm Discord politics.
And because none of it was ever public, none of it survived. Tate goes down, the servers get nuked or go dark, and twenty years of accumulated knowledge vanish, because it was hostage to a personality. What is left is an eighteen-year-old with no forum, no wiki, no dealer, and no mentor, cold-messaging a stranger because that is genuinely all there is.
Think about the naked old man drying his balls with the locker room hair dryer. Everyone assumes he is looking for his clothes. He is not. He is looking for something you are too young to have ever known existed, which is a friendly professional standing between the lockers who takes one look at you and says, you seem tired, kid, have some ephedrine. Or, no offense, but your nipples look a little puffy, let me get you some Aromasin.
People talk endlessly about men’s spaces and locker room talk, and they never once stop to ask what men were actually talking about in there. Steroids. And with whom? A drug dealer. Everyone forgot the positive male role models we lost along the way. Nobody wonders why the sharps disposal bins sit empty and unloved in gym bathrooms across the United States.
The kid in my DMs does not know either. He has never met the man who would have told him to wait a year, get bloodwork, and put on twenty pounds before blasting tren and losing half his hairline.
He has read more about endocrinology than that man ever did, and understood none of it, which is why he is taking thyroid hormone he does not need on the authority of a biologist he has never read. That hero is gone, and what replaced him was me, a stranger with an esoteric Telegram channel. The internet is healing.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.