Impact of Steroids on Sex Drive

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Whether you're tackling a big job or just keeping your tools in check, Husky tool storage is designed to work as hard as you do. Find it now at the Home Depot, how doers getet more done Your package says deeliver But delivered where exactly? The hallway, the lobby, your neighbor's apartment? Instead of playing detective with your deliveries, get a mailbox at the UPS store. We'll sign for your packages. teext you when they arrive. And keep your deliveries low key. Under locking key, get three months free mailbox services with a new annual agreement at the UPS store For full details and to get your coupon, visit the UpSore d. com slash offer. From Kaleidoscope and IHart Podcasts. I'm Chris Guaamali This is superhuman I did a ton of interviews over the course of this series, and one that really informed how I think about this whole world was my conversation with doctor Mike Israerto. Mike has a PhD in sports physiology, co foundounded the fitness company RB Strength, and is a competitive bodybuilder and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu bllack belelt. He's also one of the most candid voices on the internet when it comes to what performance enhancement actually feels like from the inside We didn't talk about whether steroids are good or bad We had a conversation about what steroids do to your body, to your mind, your recovery, your mood, your relationships, and your judgment. We also get into where he thinks all of this is heading, and his answer might surprise you. He's not a cheerleader for the status quo He thinks the entire category of anabolic steroids may be obsolete within a decade And he makes a pretty interesting case for why Hey guys, my name is Dr. Mc Gizratel. I have a PhD in sport physiology. I've been a professor at several major institutions and taught courses like nutrition Eercise science courses, personal training courses I'm a co founder of the company HarP Strength. And I regularly produce content for social media that attempts to educate people about how to get more jacked, more lean, and have a little bit of fun while we're doing it Mike, thanks so much for doing this, man. So a little background on us for both martial arts bros. So you have taken over both of our algorithms in very powerful ways online. That sucks, I'm sorry. No, it's good shit, man. Yeah, if you don't mind, can you tell us a little bit about your basic athletic background Yeah, you bet. So I was born in Moscow, Russia in nineteen eighty four And my first involvement with sport was Paying soccer indoors in Russia When I was younger I really like to wrestle my friends and stuff And eventually that led me to start wrestling in high school I played basketball recreationally but at three intersections of Jewish five foot six. And un athletic, basketball just didn't really work for me. I had aspirations of a career And so it took to wrestling pretty decently. Wrestle in high school and then I started lifting for wrestling, fell in love with lifting. How lifted competitively in college and then started bodybuilding competitively when I was in my PhD program. And then after my PhD. got my first professor job at the University of Central Missouri where during the interview process, I met A future would be great friend of mine Dr. Jen Case And she was already highly competitive at Jiu Jitsu. And so I started my Jiu Jitsu journey when I was twenty nine years old or something like that. I Yeah, two years ago, ish. I got promoted to Blackbout in Ji Jitsu And so wrestling, powerlifting, bodybuilding and Bziling Jitsu, that I think is most of my athletic competitive careers. How did you get into power lifting in the first place? I was b proaying at the Jewish commommunity Center in Metropolitan, Detroit. There was a local gentleman named Bill who was a competitive powerlifter. once he saw me bench and He was like, Hey, like you know if you have talent, you could actually like learn to bench press. And I was like, teach me, please. And he just taught me how to arch and retract, which is like the two things most people don't know about bench pressing and that unlocks like fifty pounds on your bench within a few weeks. And he's like, I'm gonna teach how to do this. Here all the principles took five minutes. And he's like your bench is going to go down at first and it's going to go way, way up And I was like, okay, cool, I bit the bullet. and then I learned how to bench And my bench went down and then went, b, b, up I looked up some Federation records And I realized I could break like a Federation world record with my bench presss when I was nineteen. That was benching we three hundred sixty three hundred seventy raw at L one hundred eighty ish pounds So I went competed in Bench press only competition, broke that Federation record And it was really fun and I was really jealous that the other guys got to squat and deadlift too I was full send into powerlifting for like four years after that. Holy shit, man. What's your PR now for the bench? My PR for the bench is three hundred and eighty pounds Wow. Yeah. Aazing It's not amazing at all for my size and the amount of steroids, but I do like that you say that I had a chest injury when I was power lifting And it prevented me from really getting as good at benching as I would have liked Were the injuries sort of your entry point to being curious about steroids and PEDs? No It was u Really the fact that when my friends and I were coming up and being fans of bodybuilding before we ever did any bodybuilding, the predominant meia on bodybuilding was of enhanced bodybuilders And that's just something we thought, like you just get something you just become enhanced. That's just what you do And so that's just what we do It' about as simple as that. You know, it's like, you know, Michael Jordan wears basketball shoes. Eventually you have enoughoney buy basketall shoes Do you remember what the first PED that you tried was? Yeah, testosterone and amphate at five hundred milligrams per week Oh wow. And what did that do to your body and your mind after a week or so of trying it After a week or so, it did absolutely nothing Yeah. Several weeks in, the first thing I felt was that my work capacity was really substantially higher My recovery ability was higher, both acutely and chronically. so I have a distinct memory of doing, I think it was like bent over Rows. And typically like after four or five sets of rows, I would just be like systemically very tired, like uh, that feeling? And then I remember that a few weeks of maybe a month or two on Steroids I had done multiple sets of bankros, nowusi I feel fine I could just keep going and I did And so I was like, whoa, okay, that's different. And then the next thing I felt was, s clinical grade health anxiety So I would hear my own heartbeat as I was falling asleep and I was like, this is for sure like my last heartbeat ever. So the anxiety was like like insane and has persisted for a long time. Oh my gosh. U And then what did sort of like layering on new like treatments look like after that for you So I got into some EQ, Aquriapos I think that was like an extra three hundred milligrams on top of that This is eight hundred total and I had done a fat loss phase during that time and I lost zero strength during the fat loss phase and At the end of that phase, it was like the first time in my life I had ever seen a semblance of abdominal muscature and I was like, whoa, that's neat I' never happened before And then a little bit after that, triried some tren becausecauseuse I was hanging out mostly with powerlifters and they just had a really prepared simple way of doing things The first time I tried Tren, I did seventy five milligrams of Treren in one injection because that's that's what you did Every other day it was kind of a starting dose. And I had like unbelievable maybe panic attack is how you could call it. L I was very aware of what's going on But I remember feeling in a sensation of imminent death Like I knew I was going to die real soon. I didn't know it logically, but I felt that I was going to die really soon. And this happened like twenty four hours after injecting actually one home and got my laptop open and just started journaling my thoughts. I was like, Wa, this is this isn't neat donon't want to feel like this for much longer And I talked to a friend of mine who iss a neuroscientist And I was like, dude It's crazy seventy five' is the starter do, but for me it's nuts. I was like, I should maybe cut it in half. And he goes, whyy don't you cut it in a quarter? I was like, eighteen, seventy five, are you nuts? Nobody does that. He's like, tryry. I tried it I was able to do eventually, so I did that for two weeks and then I did another week and a half or so thirty seven five. that really eed me in And I remember losing like like a visible amount of body fat while I'm trend in just three and a half weeks, I was like, whoa, holy shit And I felt very, very different strength wise There's lots I can talk about how the sensation of being on PD's feels a little different. I had another experience with Anavar a little bit later, which was simimilar as far as how strength feels when you're on drugs And so that to me was like holy crap. And so I messed around with Test and NPP natrialone phenop proropanate and Trend and EQ for several years with I was putting on plenty of muscle, but I didn't really know what I was doing drug wise and I would absolutely not recommend taking that specific path for people who want enhancement. Where were you getting your information from? Was it from online or from people that you knew? A little bit online, a little bit people that I knew, prior combination of the two, and a lot of internal reasoning to see what ideas had coherence and what ideas didn't Either online or in person When you talk to any one source or read any one source, You can take sort of two things from it, at least One is the actual literal information And the other is the degree to which that information has two kinds of coherence. One is internal coherence and the other is external coherence So Internal coherence means like somebody gives you a paragraph about drugs But here's how Trend works. If the internal coherence is low, you're like, there are parts of this paragraph that contradict other parts. And actually the whole thing is largely fucking nonsense And so you're like, okay, I'm going to heavily discount this source becausecause it doesn't seem like this person is somebody who's making any sense If it high internal coherence, you're like, well, okay, so in this little paragraph everything lines up And then external coherence would be like, what about like how this lines up with other things I've heard low external preherence would be like it just really contradicts the things that I've heard H externalherence, be like, actually makes a lot of sense in the grand scheme And then a kind of applied coherence the last one is real world coherence. It' like, actually, does this match my own experience and how things work because once you do drugs for long enough, you like start to know how things feel and how things react. You get a really, really good sense of like, in the real world though, is this going to work 'ause people say all kinds of things about enhancement and a bunch of them are like super spot on. and a bunch of them are like, that this person is hypothesizing or're had a very rare case And it does not generalize And so based on Kind of judging coherence and taking information from real humans and from foreign people And reading like a blog post and websites like mezoarx. com back in the day. they have like article entries for each kind of steroids, sorry, but consumed a lot of that and I was kind of building my world model of like what What do steroids do? What do they not do? how to properly use them And that's kind of how I went about it. Tell me a little bit more about the strength you were feeling. Did you feel like a superhero? Like what did your body sort of feel like? I'd say more like a supervillain than a superhero I was Alexanderone, An of our And I was doing the hackquots And it was nearing what I thought was failure And then I realized like with gear Funny enough it's called gear I like a second gear I could switch into. And I just started pushing harder and I realized two things. One, I could just keep going. so I just kept doing reps. And the other was the degree of perceptive tension I felt in my muscles, like the tension in my quads to be so high that I instantly had a realization of, oh, this is how people tear muscles off bones when they're on steroids. becausecause like the amount of tension I was feeling was like nothing I had ever willfully imposed on myself and And I'd competed in power lifting I'd squaded five hundred for reps by then and I still never felt my quads contract that hard And so I stopped the set because I was like, this's dumb. this could be really bad. And so from then on, I really started to respect the amount of oomph you can get out of your muscles if you're enhanced From then on, I kepped my relative effort pretty pretty decently, how hard you work in anyone' set because I realizeed that it's those tail end two or three reps that have a much higher chance of injuring you if you're enhanced and you can just flip that switch and just go crazy Aur muscle tears is pretty common if you are on steroids. Much more common than they are when off steroids There are two factors largely that countount for that One factor is that when you're stronger Your muscles are stronger and they're pulling on your tendons They can just pull it higher force. And so there have like a higher probability of breaking those other structures anytime anyone's stronger, the probability of injury goes up if they're pushing themselves. The probability of injury going goes down in all of like standard life tasks. because those have a certain level of strength requisite that's just stable So like probability you get hurt falling goes down exponentially as it gets stronger. It's just the same you and you fall the same distance and then your muscles are stronger, tendons are stronger But the probability you get her bench pressing exponentially skyrockets when you go from three hundred pound bench to four hundred pound bench to five hundred pound bench. Every six hundred pound bench is testing the limits of am I gonna pop my peacks today And the other reason is the steroids can radically increase the strength and size of your muscles But they don't increase the strength and size of your connective tissues like your tendons nearly as fast. And so especially if you're early into a steroid cycle, you're going very heavy It's just been a few weeks and your strength is escalating really fast. the probability that your muscles are now so much stronger than your tendons and so absolutely strong. And it multiplies together and it forms a little perfect storm for evvulsion and injury where your muscles tear, come off the bone All that other stuff. I mean ne gentleman at theymob' training in North Carolina He took his bench from three hundred fifteen for one rep Max to four hundred and five for one R Max in one month which is an outlier even for Trend, but possible. If I were him, I would have never attempted four or five after a month becausecause that is like the exact case, Chris, we're like That's how you tear your shit. J think about it, your tendons adapt on months and years of timescale, not weeks. And so he's roughly the same tendon strength as he had a month ago But his muscles were exhibiting a strength that was twenty five, thirty percent higher. You're asking for it. He didn't get hurt, but everyone who doesn't get hurt is a testament to the fact that absolute risk of injury in the gym is very low The relative risk when you're on a shipload of drugs is much, much higher Is there a story that comes to top of mind for you about feeling more aggressive or particularly anxious after you've been taking this stuff I was headed to the gym quite recently Mm and are just taken Bom Oal Anne ofar We're Alexandra one And I was driving to the gym and the var hits pretty fast especially if the tablet dissolves in your mouth. And so it's kind of like like a little rocket ride you go on. And I was listening to a podcast and it got me thinking about something totally unrelated And that totally unrelated thought process made me angry And I just spent like twenty minutes in a car. Fuming. super fucking pissed And I was aware very, very coherently at the time that this was pharmacologically induced the thought stream of angry thoughts just kept going nonetheless and just very uncomfortable And so at the same time that I'm experiencing this anger. I'm experiencing a tremendous amount of anxiety about the lift I have coming up. I was hurt at the time, like had a back injury, and so I didn't even know if the libr guy I was driving to was even gonna to happen or if I was going to discover like, oh shit, like I can't train for a little while because my shif fucked up So it's just absolutely nothing fun about that whatsoever. That's how it feels sometimes. Have any of those episodes hit you while you were training Ju Jitsu Yeah What was that like B because Ji Jitsu allows you to express some of that better, but also sometimes worse The degree of impatience that I have rises when I'm steroids and the degree of anxiety rises And I remember drilling and just just kind of wanting everything to be over. Like I just don't want to fucking be here at me anywhere. And that's like not really a good attitude to have for training sport. And then one time I was peeking for a bodybuilding show And I was taking a steroid called phloximestrone, halotestum, AK halo Halo is not somethingle I tick can very likely because it makes me really, really angry. Not anxiously angry Reously angry And so I remember I had I was a white belt And I had Past somebody's guarb in the ge and went to Niam Balin my first thought that I had was, oh, I should reached out and open up their rib cage Like that was actually like a thought that entered into my mind that you should do that. And obviously, as I had that thought, I was like, what the why? Why? It's not a Jiuitsu move. It's wildly unrealistic. It would kill this person. Everything's wrong with it. They can be wrong with it. And I was like, holy shit, that's an interesting thought. But the amount of like dedication and energy for passing guard that I got from Halo was like monumental. Like if you ever roll with someone and they're like trying to pass your guard and you're like, can't they just give up Like can't they just get tired U And with Halo, you don't really feel like giving up or getting tired. You're just like a door jamb, just bludgeoning the fucking door. And you know, there's a reason that lots of people introdute toJ steroids. You know, enough steroids will give you kind of confidence to some extent. L, you know, some people get like pre comppetition anxiety. like they'll see the other guy across the way and you know, like you're registering at your table or whatever in competition You you know, people get some thoughts about doubt and stuff like that. likeike, Oh man, that guy, like he's got old team and's got a bunch of stries on his belt and we the same belt rank? Maybe he's a killer. You know, that thought, like the maybe iss a killer thought or whatever And like if you're on enough steroids and you have pretty decent sports psychology It's easy to get in the mind frame of like, dude, this fucking chomp madeade a stupid decision signing up for my bracket and I'm going to show him why. It's really offensive to me that he decided to come here like he shouldn't have And he's going to be in a real nasty, nasty world as soon as possible And so if you have that kind of mindset If you're also good, it can help. So however good you are, that kind of confidence mindset of like fuck this chunk that helps. And you know, that's like That's cool, I guess, it's not fun, but it works. So Wow When you had that thought about wanting to rip you know your trading partner's ribcaage open, what was your reaction in that moment? Did you pause and bow out or did you keep going just chest to chest and went north south and started assertting gee chokes know what I'm doing, but I was kind of giggling in my head like, whoa, that was weird. It was like surreal, you know, like holy fuck. It's like you know, if you're on mushrooms and you're at a gas station getting a drink and the person behind the counter looks like Their head looks like the sun or something. you're unlikely to just be like, Ohh,h, sorry, I don't want a drink from the sun. Yourre p's still like, Ohh, here's my credit card while you're like, oh my Godd, I just don't say anything and you walk out and you're like, Ohm like, I just see that guy's face and just, Yeahah look crazy and're like laugh at it. Like, that's kind of how felt. It wasn't like He didn't throw me off or anything like that. And it's just like a little blip in the radar like, Ohh, that's interesting This is Lil Pons from Site three hundred five with Lip Pons Game day at my house. Chaos like in a fun way The TV's ready, the remotes are ready, the kid stores are going off, and somehow everybody needs batteries at the exact same time That's why I keep Duroso stocked. And Duroso just released limited edition Duroso and Messi battery packs. 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When you need tweezers What we want from steroids typically Maybe an enormous fraction of what we want our steroids is muscle growth Just skeletal muscle hypertrophy. What we get from them is a hormone that wasn't simply designed to enhance scale of a muscle hypertrophy. Can you briefly explain how hypertrophy works? So basically like you have a variety of mechanisms in your muscles sense a few things and respond by telling the muscle to grow more of itself. The number one of these mechanisms is mechanical tension detectors. when your body detects that there's a lot of mechanical tension in a given muscle, it kind of gives the signal to the rest of the cell different parts of the nucleus like, hey, let's start growing some more muscle. And if you get this in a high signal, like not just one rep, but multiple reps, not just one set, but multiple sets and when you're recovered enough halfway through the week to do another multiple sets again, you get this repeated consistent signal, grow, grow, grow, grow. and then all of a sudden you're getting more jacked. And that's kind of the core of how hypertrophy works. So you resistance strain lift heavy things, impose mechanical tension. and then if you eat enough protein and calories, then you get more jacked over several months. and then if you keep going several years and so on and so forth. the testosterone Hormone is designed to do one very specific things to masculinize an entire organism And that means grow hair Increase the amount of oil secreted by the skin Deepen the voice. give you more male like thoughts Agression a lower verbal fluency all these things that just have absolutely nothing to do with muscle growth and So what we're looking at now is a very different environment. where AI powered drug discovery is going to be like the big story of the late twenty twenties. And so we're also in this world where we' this incredible constant proof of concept with the weight loss drugs that have recently come up So like Osmpic and Mjaro and all these other drugs And so it was possible to get drugs that does like a really, really good job of promoting fat loss And it just doesn't have full like a tonous side effects compared to steroids via long shot And so because of that proof principle, the pharmaceutical aspect of the medical field is kind of starting to turn its eye of Sauron towards the non androgenic anabolics which are drugs that would increase salonal muscle eyppertrophy, but have very few side effects, very specific targeting. And they're gonna crack that. They've probably already cracked you in the lab, and it's just a matter of getting through animal trials and inhan trials And these non androgenic anabolics are going to be an unbelievable revolution for athletes and for people who just want to be more jacked becausecause then I suspect most people that are thinking it through will end up being on testosterone replacement therapy. So just enough testosterone to make you feel better and be healthier, which is like a much narrower range that people take for enhancement And then the rest of your anabolic drives will come from these drugs. that will have ten times fewer side effects thanced steroids, and they think these drugs are going to hit the gy market, I would say if I had to like guess slash hope, mayaybe twenty twenty eight or so kind of the real golden fleece would be an oral small molecule, non anrogenic anabolic which means you could just take a pill means it survives the digestion process It doesn't screw up your liver or something and it just grows muscle and does almost nothing else The medical incentive and the pharmaceutical profit incentive forcovering such drugs It' not only massive, but it's been well described in the literature because now we have older people that are using these weight loss drugs and they're amazing for their health, but they're losing tons of muscle. And you can tell them to lift weights and eat more protein that absolutely helps. But well, they're already using a drug to help them lose weight. Might as well use a drug to help them keep the muscle on. And so I think these drugs are inevitable. And I think they're gonna do an unbelievable thing for the sport community because they're going to make people stop or curtail their use of steroids that are fucking poisonous and destroy your body and your mind and replace them with drugs that are just categorically better. I think that's coming really soon They are likely to have probably zero psychological effects probablyably won't have any effect on cardiac tissue. ' probably not could be much involvement with heart. P probably going to be no involvement or minimal involvement of liver and kidneys And probably not going to be neurodegenerative like many steroids are in high amounts I predict in the late twenty twenties You love older folks, taking a combination of the most advanced Weight loss drugs of the time. And in combination with the most advanced or available non entrogenic anabolic drugs of the time And like over the course of like six months to a year, you'll see lots of people drop. twenty to thirty pounds of fat and add ten to fifteen pounds of muscle at the same time But that's just like a total transformation and health wise, it's just going to be a total renaissance I'm curious about when you first heard about the enhanced games and what they were trying to do and what your first impression of, you know, this whole experiment was. Yeah, I think it's wonderful. I was really, really pleased that somebody's trying to do this sort of thing because I remember u We have like a seminar of class in my Master's program where it was a kind of debate format and I took the position that there should be an enhanced Olympics or a non tested Olympics and a tested Olympics it would just sort split into two. But I think at some points I was the only person in a class of like thirty people who was arguing my position. And I thought I made some pretty compelling points at least in my own head U And so I thought it was kind of an open and shut case that enhanced competition was not just better for the overall state of competition but it was actually better for natural competition because you no longer had to do this pretend A so currently, the Olympics is mostly pretended We pretend that the athletes are drug free, They pretend they're drug free. The test of committee pretends it's ahead of the curve. That's almost never ahead of the curve If you had an untested federation, of the Olympics, you could just be like, look, check this out. You ped. F drugs. in the natural arm. cheating, you get ca calledght cheating. we have one of two things we could do. One idea is let's say you get popped in a drung fver Every single record of yours is completely stripped And you are allowed now to compete in the enhanced version, if you'd like So it's like accounts for Tests being false positive, you know, because like sometimes you fail a test, but you never really learn anything. Like statistically it has to happen with some fraction ts. It's a low fraction,. You're testing thousands of athletes, five or six every year, going to be popped for drugs and its never took And so that's like a very nice way to do it The other way to do it is everyone signs the contract beforehand they say, if you ever get popped for drugs in the natural Your records get stripped You're never allowed to compete in that sport or in any sport associated Olympics ever again. Enhanced or not So just don't fucking lie, you're good to go And so that Right there is a model that's similar to what they do in natural versus enhanced bodybuilding and powerlifting today And the rate of drug cheating in those sports is phenomenally lower than it is at the Olympics. becausecause if you want to take drugs, there's a place where you can do it and just compete against the best guys And since the best guys compete in the drug version anyway, its the probability that people chooot to win a local natural bodybuilding entit list is like way way smaller But if there was just one bodybuilding show and it had to be drug free, and if national pride was on the line, then yeah, everyone would cheat like they do currently in the Olympics So that was kind of my thought process at the time. And then when I saw that the ennhanced games were happening, I was like, whooa, this is cool. someomeone's actually doing some version of this. so I got really p But what do you make of the argument that Usada and Wata and other governing bodies make sports more fair U Good argument. It's marginally true, except the margins be small You know, the mistake, I think a lot of people make very, very hest mistake is assuming that testing is a guarantee or mere guarantee that people don't cheat And it's not It's just a certain level of effect Right? It's like if you're a super rich famous person and you just have no security, and then you have a security apparatus in place, like you hire bodyguards The bodyguards do not guarantee that you're not going to die. Some of them could just take a sniper shot from really far off, and even if you have the secret service As we clearly saw with President Trump Recently, people still take shots at you. So there's no guarantee all effects are bn drown. And I think a lot of people think like, oh, like there's testing thelyim bitits. That means it'su free and it's like no, no, no. That just means the probability it's drug free goes up There's a very big difference between more fare. and totally fair L huge difference and I think that gets lost a little H Do you have any sort of concerns about what the enhanced games are going to do in terms of normalizing PV use in the future of sports Youicion They could hit younger demographics and normalize PD uses and give them heroes to look up to and people are going to want to run the kitchen sink And that's definitely a thing So again, that effect is going to be marginal And in fact, it's highly modified by messger The thing is it's nothing new We you know, when Billy, the eight year old, who loves baseball, So finds out that, you know But a lot of talented athletes also go to strip clubs often And some of them are very disrespectful to the opposite sex, even physical at times Some of them drink alcohol, I know, it's crazy, and use recreational marijuana and even cocaine. You know, it's typically quite easy for mom and dad to be like, now so when older people or adults, they do some adult stuff and you've got to do kids stuff great athlete, just don't look up to him for that stuff that he does outside of sport It's hypothetically roughly as easy to tell a kid look. These guys use steroids and all this crazy stuff because they're adult And it doesn't screw up their you bodies. And that's true. Like if you stairs when you' younger it screws you up like way, way, worse, totally different ways too And so I think that normalization should be put into context of it's absolutely a thing and could absolutely raise rates marginally but an honest discussion about that this is an adult thing and an honest declaration about this ist for everyone It has side effects could have an effect of both normalizing, contextualizing, and making the use less extreme. Here's another really trippy thing that happens to teenagers that I think a lot of people don't account for When you make something forbidden and cool and you lie about it The tes just want to do it When you make it a technical quality that advanced athletes like compose on themselves and you make it nuanced and you make it acceptable, but like it's gnarly and you talk about all the side effects openly all of a sudden they're like yeah, I guess I'll use that when it comes time to it, but I'm not rushing into to it because it's not even like it's not forbidden. You look at like what's happened with weed since it became mostly legal in the U.S. and most teenagers are like Yeah Someone's like, do you want to do weed? Like, My dad does weed? No, I'm fine. And you're like, rightight, okay. So if you normalize use of various compounds for adults, it does take the edge off, which actually could drive more responsible use potially in some. ome cases. 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Shop fourth of July savings on Riyobi Outdoor Power only at the Home Depot While supplyiess last pricing valid june twenty fifth through Julyhently cease for online for details Is there like a general like baseline age one should be if they're curious about enhancing themselves They are like physiological developmental landmarks so you hit. And I would say by your mid to late twenties, your brain has matured in macroructural ways that probably steroids won't reverse or inhibit So I'd say like after age twenty five, I think it's a fine time to get on Before age twenty five, I just wouldn't do it. Um the other thing is before age twenty five, you are In the prime of your life, physically and getting incredible gains anyway. And so might as well build a huge natural base and really milk out everything you can out of like your natural physique natural abilities and then have a really fun time enhancing over the course of the next ten years. Rather than shooting your load early, enhancing when you're eighteen and then by twenty four, you're out of the sport with a torn packed torn bicep and like a shitoad of kidney problems. How does the current state of steroid use, how does that affect sex drive? You can affect sex drive in a few different ways. and it depends on what you're taking, what doses, how you respond to it. One of the classic most common ways is it increases sex drive It's not just a quantity difference, it's a quality difference The other two ways that are common, there's a bunch different ways that are One is like they had redued sex drive. So for example, if you take some kinds of steroids that don't convert into aestrogen