the drugs work.

it's nearly one in the afternoon and i haven't read a fucking email this year.

this was supposed to be a serious day. deadlines. targets. catholic guilt. presbyterian duty stomping around the room like an angry motherfucker.

instead i'm still in my silk bruce lee pyjama bottoms, three coffees deep, magic potions mashed into yoghurt, watching my laptop quietly devour the morning.

this is a field report from inside the machine.

adhd. drugs. barefoot running in tropical heat. mouth taped shut. russian garment dye. cannabinoids. kratom. tequila. sleep. pain. recovery. the strange optimisation ritual required to keep the trapdoor open and the lights on.

i'm not trying to live forever.

i'm trying to stay elastic.

plastic.

interested.

somewhere between the beach, the sea, the pharmacy and the bar, i've assembled a system that allows me to function. not calmly. not normally. but function nonetheless.

the drugs work.

until they don't.

then i change the mix.

Transcript

somewhere between the serious and the absurd.

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And deux, trois, quatre cinq ladies and gentlemen. I am the acid capitalist, also known as Hugh Hendry Me, and you know what I'm transmitting, as always, from the beautiful, the slightly ridiculous, but the endlessly surprising island of da-da-da-da, drum roll, same bars. You'll find me somewhere between the Atlantic and that damn fine Caribbean water. Between the serious and the absurd. Between a man, a man who should know better, but one who has absolutely no intention of stopping. I am the Asset Capitalist. And this is a weekly dispatch from the edge of markets, from the edge of molecules and whatever else I've gotten myself into since we last spoke. If you're new here, I'd like to welcome you. I believe you've arrived at an interesting moment. And if you've been here before, thank you for coming back. And I think I guess you already know there are no warm-up acts on the show. None. We go straight. We, you, I, me, I, I'm ready to jump in, shall we? Before we do, a small tiny request. If this podcast, this one, The Acid Capitalist, if it has ever cracked something open for you, if it's made you laugh, if I've made you think, if I've made you think what a wally I am, if at times it's felt slightly uncomfortable, in a way that felt kind of like everyday useful, then I'm begging you, I'm on my knees. It's embarrassing. But a five-star rating? It costs you nothing, but it means the world to me. The human touch. We spoke about the SAS apocalypse the last time. The human is the moat. I need a bigger moat. I need you, I need your thumb, I need your index finger, I need a five-star rating. Okay, that's it, let's go. Today's episode. I've carried this in the can, so to speak, for a while. I've been unsure, but as I sit here on Friday morning in Bosselect, and I am awaiting the arrival of 14 people. We will be a party of 19 this weekend. Somehow I thought I thought this one was appropriate. And it's called The

the drugs work.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Drugs Work. When I was writing this, it was nearly one in the afternoon. I was sitting in the ghetto and I hadn't read a fucking email all year. That's how that's what it felt like in my brain. I dragged my skinny bone ass out of bed much earlier. My targets for the day were lot. I had synchronicity. Deadlines, of course, like deadlines always were howling at me. And my Catholic guilt was punching. Hmm. I'm a funny cure. I'm a funny queer mix of Catholic guilt and Presbyterian duty. I mean, I ain't a Presbyterian, but there was a lot of them in Scotland. And those Presbyterians, they're stomping around the room inside my head like an angry motherfucker. I call them the voices, the voices in my head. A torrent, a rage, a rage imploring me to do more, to do better. And this was supposed to be a goddamn serious day. Instead, I'm sat still in my black silk Bruce Lee pajama bottoms. Three coffees already slammed, magic potions mashed into my yogurt and my laptop quietly devouring the morning like a silent thief. And you know what? I didn't drift here. I have to say, I chose this outcome. I cracked my eyes open. I fired up the screen, and the hours, the hours was at a vanishing point, but they just disappear when I'm locked in that daily extinction code. Have I welcomed you to St. Boss? I don't know, I can't remember, but have I told you I'm called Hugh Andrew? I built you see, I come, I sail perilously close to the extinction code every day. This week's podcast is inspired by those annoying, supercilious, condescending, smug motherfuckers on YouTube. Every time I I present free content, where are you when I need you on Substack? But the freeloading people, you know the ones. They lean back, they sigh, and they write. The drugs don't work, kids. Like like they know, like they're judging me. This one is for those smug motherfuckers. Who am I? Why is the sky blue? But who am I? My dear friends, I am the asset captionist. I'm that stranger who who swims alone and stares at waves. I yeah, I stare at waves way too long. And I hunt for answers in the daily debris of markets, of global markets. My calling card, the thing I search for, the thing that lights me up, is irony and paradox. I'm seeking to collect universal anecdotes to test them, to keep what works and throw the rest back. I'm a fisherman of ideas. Let me say this plainly. Let me say this slowly. I use drugs deliberately, strategically. I use drugs with intent. Not to escape this blessed aisle, not to numb some uncomfortable feeling. I have no shame. I don't take drugs because I'm broken. I take drugs because left untreated, my mind will eat the fucking furniture. And then it will eat itself. I've got that kind of mind. Now don't get me wrong, I've tried the normal way. What is the normal way? Showers first, the gym, lunch plans, friends, small talk, lists, meditation, doctors. None of it works for me. And so me, I built I built something else. And let's just stop there because if that bothers you, good. It should. Thank you, thank you, my brothers. Like, drop me a line. Share some of your own personal anecdotes. I would be fascinated. We're gonna do sexures.

the brain: ADHD as signal to noise problem

SPEAKER_00 6:40

And we're gonna look at the brain. It's a bit like Acid, my icon on the screen. It looks like A C D CD, which is a way an incongruous introduction to discussing ADHD. I haven't, I've not, I promise you, I've not been formally diagnosed. All my kids have, of course. It's not like a big deal. It's a setup. It's a it's a it's a cosmic joke on non-AI earthlings. It's a baseline, it's it's a magical baseline that purrs very low, but I consciously can hear it. A baseline that purrs unless the project feels alive. Novelty gets my attention. And boredom, boredom is like all those taxes you Brits have to pay for the benefits. It bores me. Working memory is my it's my scratch pad. And my scratch pad and my browser get crowded really fucking fast. Details get discarded when there's a distraction, which is to say constantly. I promise you, at the end of the day, I have like 25 browsers. The computer speed is perilously close to the extinction code. Hyper focus for the acid capitalist. It exists, but it's buried very deep and is narrow. And I gotta tell you, it's rare. But it's there, it's rare, but it's there. I am not broken. I'm just configured for a different journey. My brain wants a better signal-to-noise ratio. My brain needs a higher sharp ratio. And that's the job of the drugs. Raise the signal, draw the noise, name one action, take it, take it now. I've got this new wonderful girlfriend. And she tells me to do shit. And I do it, I do it now, and it's like it's quite satisfying. Maybe she's another drug. We'll come back to the ladies. Let's just focus on the drugs, the work. We don't know if the ladies work. But you know, when the ratio, the noise, the signal ratio, when it's when it's kinda wrong, everything feels everything feels heavy and impossible. But when it's when it's right, work is moving, is transcending. And time behaves. My mind

morning stack for a usable day

SPEAKER_00 9:12

focuses. The morning drugs. What are the morning drugs? My drugs are plural and taken together, when combined, my brain, it doesn't feel chemistry. It feels weather. Not whether I should or whether I don't. It feels like the fucking weather. Pressure shifts, static thins. The day becomes usable. I get utility from the day. Not calm, but again, usable. Usable is the holy grail. Calm is overrated. There are two roads that I can think of. The narrow road runs on prescription stimulants. Clean lines, tight corners, a reliable, steady force, and it works. Thank God it works for many, but not necessarily for me. It's too straight, too too obvious, too not me. Maybe like in the car, like gripping the steering wheel too tight. The wider, more expansive road begins with obviously caffeine. The coffee in the morning. Coffee is not energy necessarily, it's kind of permission. The coffee that I take is telling the whispering, it's telling the voices in my head. Just give me give me a while. And these are the modest drugs. And then I've got the L. L tianine. It's an amino acid found in in green tea. I never drink green tea. I drink the caffeine. But the the tianine, it stops me from turning into a jittery, jittery, arrogant toit. Sometimes. Maybe it doesn't, maybe it doesn't work. And then you've got Tobromine. Am I making this up? But God, I love that son of a bitch compound. It's the stimulant hiding inside every bar of dark chocolate. It stretches the arc of my imagination. My flights of fancy, they don't spike and then vanish immediately. They they linger. And I can contemplate. Did I tell you I watch waves way too long? It's the Teo Bromi. And then you have rhodiola. What a beautiful word, rhodiola. Rhodiola does nothing in the here and now, and it does everything later. I mean that could almost be the motive for acid capitalism. Nothing presently, but there's a lot coming. It's an ancient Ayurvedic. Memory sticks a little bit better. The recall gets sharper, but kind of like six weeks from now. It's white people dismiss shit. I'm drawing closer. And I mention these weird, strange little things because they're all wrapped up in a cannabinoid. It's a wheat pill. But it's a wheat pill which is cultivated with these ancient herbs. And I take like the green and the yellow pills, the energy and the intelligence pill, and suddenly the ADHD is pushed away, and again I find utility in my day. I mean I'm not paid to say that. I am I am merely an ambassador spreading the word. The cannabis it it bends the perspective when the job needs a different lens. I love my mind. I'm not seeking to make things disappear, I'm not seeking a vanishing point. I'm simply seeking to tilt salience, to concentrate, to run faster, to sleep deeper, to feel bliss, to try and reduce the pain, to feel is love a real thing? Can you feel it? From another human being? Send me an email. Send me a WhatsApp, I don't read emails. This is not meant to be teenage fireworks. I think this is respectability. Because the feeling I'm after is not excitement, it's usability. Usability, utility. Make me a functioning adult, make me able to navigate my way through the busy room. Dear God, dear God in heaven, allow me to finish my sentences. And you know what? With the right combination, my thoughts, you know, they kind of stay seated, behaving properly long enough for me to get paid. Paid in the comp the compensation of your subscription, of your attention. We're morning time, I've taken a mother load of coffee, and I've taken my two pills, and my mind is beginning to act like maybe like your mind. And I'm getting things done. But I know it won't last. And as

barefoot beach run as reset button

SPEAKER_00 14:04

midday approaches, we have to talk about the run, the beach run. Because instead of just sitting endlessly at the screen, do we feel sorry for I never feel sorry for myself. Do you know why? Because I run. I run into the fucking tropical midday heat on an empty beach while everyone else stuffs their faces with lunch or hides indoors from the cruel sunshine. This is not bravado. This is necessity. Five hundred meters one way, turn and five hundred meters back. A kilometer look. No sun lotion, which I've been paying for recently. Black shorts, I'm bareback. There's no mountain. I'm barefoot. Stay with the barefoot. I've got music blasting in my ears. My stride is locked in. This isn't some pretty boy aesthetic bullshit. This is raw circuitry. The feet are a much deprived intelligence unit. Jammed, jammed with sensors, engineered to decode chaos. I love what feet are capable of doing. Soft sand, unstable as fuck, blasting a non-stop torrent of data upstream through my body to my brain. Balance pressure, microcorrections. The foot brain axis ignites and it screams bloody murder. And that shit, that synchronicity from the extremes of the body, it's getting rarer because modern man hat the line to the soul. And I blame those fuckers at Nike. I blame those foam-heeled cocksuckers. Cushioning the step, castrating the feedback. I don't see the aesthetic attraction of the runner. I see knees wrapped. Joints protected. Why? Because when you put that foam intermediary between the soul and the brain, the brain's the brain's hearing something, but when it when it gets distilled and refracted through that Nike cushion, it kind of turns your English into Chinese. You know, like, qu'est-ce que if you don't speak French, maybe you didn't understand me. And that's like your brain and your soul. And so the brain's like, I mean, the brain's having a cigarette, like, honey, like this is too confusing. And the brain just throws chemicals and like random shit. And that's why you end up with a sore knee. Listen to your soul. Remove the heel, run barefoot. Feel the burn, reconnect the wires in the sand. Savage grit. I love the beach. I go to the Saline Beach. Now, and here's here's what drug drug free. I grind a kilometer in about eight minutes. A six-tenths of a mile. Raw, honest, resistance. But I've got this green pill that's got caffeine and the cannabinoid, and I slam back another three coffees. My lap time drops by a minute. I'm kinda doing a kilometer six tenths of a mile in about Yeah, seven minutes. I am not the flying Scotsman, but the pill reduces the drag like oiling a rusty fucker. Before I run, I feel like a rusty fucker. I love saying rusty fucker. That little pill that packs the cannabis, which is muzzling the inner voices in my head, suppressing the doubts. It has the caffeine, of course, which is unlocking the vault. So I've got a lot of fatty acids spilling out, making the muscle fibers clench. And there's there's zero haggling. It's like, yeah, we, yes, sh, yes, yes. Your wish is my command. Remember the teal brominine? The chocolate is the secret stimulant? That's prolonging the surge without the spike and the crash. The cycle is longer. And then we've got some galangalal. Galangalau? I don't know if I'm making this up. It's ginger's spicier stranger cousin from Thailand. I mean, what's not to love about Thai cousins? If ginger is jazz, galangalal is techno. The galangal negotiates with the inflammation and it does so quietly, but it doesn't ask permissions, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And my my muscles turn rude and my muscles are more ready to rumble. Pain shh shove to the back burner where it belongs. We don't need pain. Well, the cost of the effort seems less and less. What can I say? The drugs fucking deliver.

mouth taping and hard-ons

SPEAKER_00 19:41

I mean, this is a little bit personal, but I'm gonna share. I have no shame. Sometimes I tape my mouth shut. I mean, there's a lot of people who wish I'd just taped my mouth permanently. But I'm trying to force nasal, nasal breathing. You know when I'm writing about Marcus and I'm saying find the constraint? This is about finding the constraint. Carbon dioxide tolerance, carbon dioxide training. It's how calm you can allow your body to remain when the air feels thin. Like climbing in the above above 3,000 meters, it's the death zone where the oxygen is thinner. It's trainable, and so that's why under the harsh tropical Caribbean sunshine at midday, I am taping my taping my mouth. And I gotta tell you, the first 500 meters are brutal. The tape blocking my breath, it forces forces the blood flow elsewhere. Gives you a raging hard-on that throbs like a motherfucker. My face flushing, my heart fucking ready to explode, the body lighting up in ways that feels excessive, confrontational. It's obscene. Oh, that the hard-on dies away. It's concussed by the journey. It's a dare to see how long I can stand being gagged without gagging, without bargaining, without pleading, without begging. It's a test to see if I can push through pain. If I can quieten the body's alarm system, you know, it's like a car alarm, boom, and I'm trying to make that disappear. And when it when it breaks, suddenly there's a lot of space out of out there in front of you. And that's beautiful. My body fully awake for the first time in the day. The mind stripped of its voices, two kilometers in, it is bliss. And the sand, the sand gives nothing, nothing, no quarters. It takes nothing back. Every fucking step demands attention. I mean, there's like pebbles, there's I don't know, like seed every. This is a wild, coastal. Island, beach in the Caribbean. Sensation piles on the heart scorching, the grains grinding, the wind whippling. This is poetry on the beach. The sea slamming the shore like a pissed-off beast. And the physical overload, it it denies every stray thought entrance into the temple of my mind. You know what? There is no room for rumination. None. It's like mental flossing with a rusty wire. Me scraping off the debris of yesterday. On the beach I chant like a savage, of course I do. I breathe deep, I stride hard, and the raw, brutal beauty of the beach handles everything else. At the

sea-salt baptism and the nude beach

SPEAKER_00 22:55

end of 5,000 meters running bare feet on the beach, I plunge straight into the sea, bowls out naked. I have no shame. A savage sea salt baptism. A baptism of savage sea salt awaits me. The sweat melted off with yesterday's regrets. This beach, Saline Beach, sprawls like a shallow North Atlantic dump, slapped into the Caribbean's lap. Is known for its nudes swarming like unashamed beasts. Sunbreakers slapping in the wind like limp dicks. A parade, a parade of raw flesh, stripped of the bullshit costumes and the fake ass intentions of modern life. That bitch is weird as shit. The human body minus the boner is a mind fact. Like you got naked people, you're running, you're passing through them. And when you're not arousing, you're just concentrating on them, on the form, the physicality of the human being naked, it's a mind fact's a lot. It's really hard to work out what it's all about. Anyway, I salute their the ballsy audacity of the brothers and the sisters out there who stride naked. Just I just one thing I'd ask. Men, no jogging. Apart from no jogging, I think those who who tat about the nudists, I think they're gutless pricks. I fucking worship the freaks of Celine Beach. Before we go, I was gonna say before we go deeper, or is this a shallow trough with little, if none, market commentary? I mean like markets are going up, right? They're gonna keep going up until SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI have listed, and they'll probably peak about six weeks later. Okay, back to the summer camp.

summer camp invite and quick markets take

SPEAKER_00 25:00

I need to share a word about it because I am genuinely excited. So many of my brothers and sisters have already signed. I think this is gonna be the biggest one ever camped for. It's gonna be extraordinary. Same bars, the second to the sixth. On the Thursday, I'm gonna take you all to this beautiful beach restaurant. If you heard me go on about the camp and you've been thinking, God, I want to be in a room there, you know, where where the conversation and it doesn't take place in in rooms, it takes place in my gigantic table at Blanc Bleu. If you want to have that conversation with me in person and with the amazing people coming, remember five days. Real people, real ideas, the kind of unfiltered altogether thinking, the proximity, it makes it worth the trip. Come.

metabolism throughput and longevity compounds

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Anyway, metabolism. My metabolism is running hot. Metabolism isn't weight. I think metabolism is throughput. How fast can I turn inputs into usable energy? I think of the throughput of my metabolism as again trying to engineer a means of clearing the debris of the mess. At a certain age, the the metabolism wants to slow down, and I will I will not allow it to slow down. Because I don't want my insulin sensitivity to slip. I don't want my mitochondrial. God, I love the mitochondrial, you know, it's like power plant that doesn't burn coal or diesel, but it burns molecules of oxygen or oxygen molecules. I don't. But I don't want those plants getting lazy or inefficient. Every cell needs to be pumping out the energy, and that's why another part of my daily regime is trying to shock the metabolism, keep it awake. I'm like, come on, keep up. The barefoot run and the heat, tick, that that works. We haven't mentioned I go to the Zion gym and I do the hula hoop and I sit in a cold bath for like I mean, I'm working my way back, but I did five minutes yesterday. Five minutes of like, oh cold water baths are my religion. Rotation instead of routine? It's another way of shocking the metabolism. And then some days, okay, most days, almost every day, stress, but some days restraint. On the seventh day, even the acid capitalist rested. Did I tell you that I swallow methylene blue? You know the Russian garment dye? What do you mean you haven't tried it? Russian garment oil is like amazing. And it supposedly helps the red blood cell, it allows it to grab more efficiently, cleaner, better the oxygen. Because remember, the mitochondria, we're trying to get the oxygen and we're trying to burn it through the power plant that exists in every cell in your body. And we want that process to run like a BMW, like smooth, efficiently. The slow hum of a youthful metabolism. And if my piss has to turn green because we're mixing blue with the yellow, so be it. But with the methylene blue, the lights turn on behind my eyes, and the words stop slipping sideways, and even sometimes I finish my sentence. There's also the quieter longevity machinery that we have to conceive of. The red wine, the compound that researchers get excited about. I don't drink that much wine these days. I take a magnum of the resveratrol pull. I mean, me with these compounds, I'm like, the more the merrier. There's a constant need for me to calm. And so quercetine, quercetine tells my immune system, chill, brother. And I take the alpha lipoic acid. Take that in the morning. You're kind of gonna take it with some yogurt or some fat. Uh makes it better to be absorbed. It's a senolytic blend. We are trying to purge the body of old damaged cells. Sentient cells. We're trying to identify, we want to tag, and we want to eliminate sentient, dead, fucked-up cells. Like bad politicians that always refuse to leave. The quercetine, alpha lipoic acid, the resveratrol, the NED. These are cellular eviction notices. Not for feeling again, but for throughput, metabolism, energy moving forward, not resting, being efficient, seeking utility from the day, for keeping the background clean so that my foreground can dance. I was gonna say I'm not trying to live forever, but why pretend I am trying to live forever? But in the here and now, with this daily procedure, I am trying to stay elastic. I am trying to say to stay plastic and interested. The danger isn't that it all stops working, the danger is it that it works too well and I that I forget to downshift. Because this these compounds, man, I am burning, burning, burning oxygen. But youth is not intensity, it's not just intensity. The allure of youth is the recovery or the time to recovery, quicker recovery. That's the metric I'm watching over. How quickly I can come back. You know that song? the sun comes up, I must have left the blind open last night. It's how clean the mind feels on Monday morning. I don't know if we'll use this, but I also wanted to talk about cortisol. I

the 2:14am cortisol trap

SPEAKER_00 31:10

am the cortisol man. Around 2.14 to be precise in the morning. I wake, or I used to wake. Not because of the noise outside my bedroom window, but because of something that's alive, that's living inside me. It's a hum. Oh my god, it's a deep hum in my legs, a jitter in my core, my body vibrating as if I'm sitting on an electric fence. My muscles twitch like there's like there's music that they can only hear. I mean, I'm lying there and I'm like shaking Stevens in bed. And I've I've had those monitors, and and it tells them my heart rate variability, it stays low. See, that's a measure of how well your nervous system recovers between the the heartbeat. And a low score means your body is is stuck in fight mode. I'm like, come on, you motherfuckers, come on, he wants to fight me. At 2 14 in the morning, I'm unable to downshift. I was, past tense, unable to downshift. This cortisol signals disregulation, it signals chaos in the mind. Or I was literally dying in bed and I'm not the only one. Previously I tried cutting the caffeine at noon. I stopped drinking water before sunset. I've seen countless kineologists and osteopaths for the twerking limbs. I've had notions, I've taken potions, I've met people. And the conclusion is my body is entired. My body is wired. I'm like a Ferrari in a locked-up garage. My engine scream, give me a road. Give me a road that doesn't exist at 2.14 in the morning. All of that is called cortisol. And for the longest time, it really fucked me up. And it forced the adaptation that I'm trying to share with you. Without a doubt, cortisol was my boss. It ran the acid capitalist show. It was a steroid signal, two small glands sitting on top of your kidneys like tiny fucking African dictators, exaggerating every move. Burning my muscles for jet fuel and dumping sugar into my blood at 2.14. Shutting down everything else, digestion, reproduction, repair, everything put on hold. Heaven, if you will, being cancelled, having to wait. It's the hormone that won the Cold War between species and chaos. Sabre-toothed tigers we overcame. Drought, we overcame. Famine we overcame. Nazis, we overcame. Nothing is a match for cortisol. It's the dark algorithm of human survival. But the enemy that hounds me now isn't a predator. It's a push notification on the blue screen of my telephone. I suffer because I track capital markets worldwide 24-7. There's a phantom vibration of the phone at 214. My cortisol buzzing the same way. My tired body is hustled, is hoodwinked into obeying the taunts of the cortisol machine. And you know, like your brain sits in permanent darkness. Like there are no portals, there are no windows. The brain has no ability to clarify or confirm the signals that you are delivering. It survives on the scraps that we throw at it. What I feed my brain with? I feed my brain with the theatre of the apocalypse. The purbaster of my brain believes that I'm a ground force commander and that I'm under constant live fire. I'm gonna die. I if I said that one time as a hedge fund manager, I'm like, the markets, oh my god, they found me. My friends, it's been a pleasure serving the unit, but we're over, we're gonna die. When you feed your brain that kind of bullshit, it does it drenches the blood with a biological nighttime. It's like napam, not in the morning, but it oh yeah, in the morning, but 2.14 in the morning before the sun comes up. I persuade my brain that I'm storming the gates of Fallujah when all I'm doing is staring at the ceiling. That's the great betrayal. My body playing war games against phantoms that don't exist. Not a malfunction, but today has become the perfect execution of a survival script that's become obsolete. There are no saber-toothed tigers, there are no gates of Fallujah. Not for me. I am not talking about burnout. Burnout is like Instagram fucking theatre. This is betrayal at the molecular level. Stanford have a sleep laboratory and they ran numbers on very high performers, you know, like fighter pilots, SP 500 CEOs, you know, the kind of freaks, mostly men, that never stop. Endurance runners who turn pain into a sacrament. My brothers and my sisters, my peer group, my tribe. And what they found consistently was cottage all spiking in the dark hour. This warrior-like tide flooding the blood system at two in the morning. But when dawn broke, when the sun came up, it was flat line. There was nothing left in the tank. And these guys, these were the very best of society artists. Not weaklings. These are the like the wolves in the the cockpit of the F 17, 19, whatever, the fighter pilots. The graph and the lab data didn't care about their heroics. These guys woke tired and exhausted because of the midnight rambling in their minds. And then they dragged themselves through the rest of the day. Men trudging through sludge. Mythology says that these heroes have an edge. The data says their edge was eating them alive. That's how I felt. I was being eaten alive. Remember where I said to you, I stare too long at waves, and that if I don't have a procedure, that I will eat the furniture, because if I don't eat the furniture, I will eat my mind. That's the cortisol. Cortisol is not stressed, it's the beginning of a structural collapse, and I ain't collapsing for nobody. Cortisol was like an acid capitalist suicide pact, which I've reneged on. If the cortisol chapter made you think of yourself or someone or you recognize that, send them this episode. It's better that we share this. It's celebrated with myth that these high achievers are trudging like sludge because their mind is flooded with insanity as they try and sleep. Share it with friends, and if you haven't left us at the five-star rating yet, now would be a beautiful moment just to express some of your thoughts. Anyway, the baboons.

sapolsky’s baboons and stress hierarchy

SPEAKER_00 38:24

The baboons knew about it before we did. Robert Sapolski saw it first. And he didn't see it in the corporate glass tower in Wall Street. He saw it in the plains of Africa. Robert Sapolski is someone who studies the chemistry of stress. And he studies that in living climates. He's particularly focused on the baboon and their social and very fucking brutal hierarchy. Alpha males all swagger ruling with sharp teeth and muscle. But the real carnage was never on splay in the canopy above you. The chaos was in the bloodline. You see, the lower ranked male baboon, the lowly ranked baboons carried the biochemical shrapnel of their feisty fraternity. What do I mean by that? I mean they were carrying cortisol levels, twice 2x that of the dominant baboon. Every hour, every day. These baboons, they aged like milk. They sickened sooner and they died younger. Cortisol sucks. Then something happened. Meat less with tuberculosis. This is Africa. And there was a garbage dump. And they found meat less with tuberculosis. I don't know why. And of course, with the hierarchy needing to be respected, the chief baboon, the king, eats first. Who would have thought about the benefits of being king turned out to be a suicide pack? Guess who perished first? Leaving the troops leaderless, but of course increasingly peaceful. As the hierarchy was brutally dissolved by the tuberculosis, cortisol levels for the other primates normalized permanently. The slaughter of the tuberculosis turned wild animals into something closer to household pets. And the great professor, if he taught me anything, he taught me stress is not a mood, stress is social architecture. Here's what hit me hardest. Despite words to the opposite, I am not a baboon. But the hierarchy that lives inside my head is just as brutal. The WhatsApp pings, the subscriber counts. It used to be my assets under management as a hedge fund manager. The YouTube comments. The scoreboard of social comparison. Me, I've built a cage of alerts and deadlines as feisty and nasty as those alpha baboons. And my brain, my sad old reality-deprived brain, it doesn't know if these pings are predators sent to destroy me. It just registers the threat is like, uh, danger, alert. And it drenches me in fucking cortisol. Makes me think I'm about to be torn apart. I'm gonna die. And that shit was making me age like milk. And the fix is there a fix. The fix is you don't beat stress with brute force. You gotta edit the architecture. You've got to dismantle the terror of the false hierarchy. You gotta control which signal is gonna tilt your nervous system into danger mode. You've got to create safety cues. It's okay. Space without the pings and the notification, light without the blueness. Work rhythms and thoughts that do not mimic trench warfare. My liberation is not a beach in Saint Bots. My liberation is reprogramming my internal thoughts. The enemy was never cortisol. The enemy was the blueprint, the architecture that keeps its finger on the trigger. The enemy was receiving the toxic chemistry sent by the brain to fight false demons. You know what I thought? I thought to myself, if a troop of baboons could rewrite their biology, could burn down their social hierarchy, I think I could do

weaponizing my molecules.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

it. I don't rest and I I glitch constantly, but I concocted a formula, but again, like financial advice, I can't give medical advice. I I'm just like a not a dumb, but you know, I I was a hedge fund manager, I was not a doctor. But I I trained myself to to weaponize my my molecules. I built protocols, I built a stack of supplements that I took morning and evening, and they applied like brake pads, brake pads on like personal runway. These molecules are not vitamins. I think of these molecules as keys unlocking the prison doors. The prison the prison doors of a 24-hour siege. I'm gonna ride roughshod over this. I'm gonna mention them, give them an honorable shout-out. Glycine! Glycine is the gentle assassin. Tasteless almost holy. It's an amino acid, one of the building blocks of protein. And you know what? You can take a ton of it. And it's so small it slips straight through the blood brain and barrier, and we like that. It it goes into the brain and it jizzes things up. But it was protein, it applies the handbrake on my Out-of-control synapsis. Sometimes it tricks my neural pathways into surrender and I sleep. Then, of course, magnesium glycinate. Everyone thinks it's for muscles. It's for sleep. It's for the brain. It steadies the nervous system's response. I mean, they say take two to four hundred milligrams before bed. I take I take a thousand. The magnesium sends a safety signal to an over-alert nervous system. And when the magnesium hits the spot, when it hits the spot, it feels like somebody took the knives out of my bloodstream. I mean, there was a time when I took about five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten magic potions. The list was long. I am not going to give you that list. I'm gonna move on in this sleep section. I'm gonna just I'm gonna continue with this idea of the tight rope, which became sleep.

hell's lumber.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

Pain changes everything. Pain reorganizes your day. It reorganizes your day, your sleep, your temperament. I aren't mine the old-fashioned way. Mountains, ice, altitude. Not attitude. Well, some attitude thrown in, but mostly altitude. Some might call it stupidity. Stupidity dressed up as courage. One day I should have died on hell's lumber. I'd left Edinburgh and travelled by car to Avymore with a buddy. I'd gone straight up an ice chimney in the Scottish Highlands. It was magnificent. 3,000 feet of a sheer spectacle of bravado. At the top, there was a precice, a corniche of soft, pregnant snow. The exit route was blocked. We were attached to the ice. And my body had tried repeatedly but failed. And that's where the bravado kicked in. The asset capital said, Step aside, I have this. And with my two ice axes, I gave it everything. And the ice axes found no traction. And instead of rising, I found myself falling. Down the ice chimney that we call hell's lumber. I had three ice screws connecting me and my buddy to the ice. One came out immediately, two came out. The third, obviously the third held. I wouldn't be telling you this story. I woke up with blood coming out of my cheek. I woke up, which was incredible. But my spine took on the rest. And what came home with me was pain, lots of pain. Nerves firing, muscles refusing to stand down. Shallow sleep interrupted constantly. Cortisol. Pain. It was a shallow grave that I climbed into every night and clawed my way out, exhausted every morning.

kratom warning

SPEAKER_00 47:04

Confession time. I tried Kratum. If you're in the UK, I bet you've not heard of Kratum. Kratum you buy in smoke shops, cheap smoke dives in America. It's still legal. And it's a plant from Southeast Asia. It's chewed on by labourers. They've been chewing it for hundreds of years because it dulles, it dulls pain. And it makes work or sleep tolerable. It's not heroin, it is not morphine. It's Kratom. There was a girl. Pretty girl. She told me about it. And she had suffered. Oh my god, if I had fallen off hell's lumber, she was dating a really rich guy. And during COVID, she dived into the swimming pool. There was no water in the pool. What the Kratom has is alkaloids. And they lean on the pain receptors as as they they resemble an opioid. They do enough to tell the pain to fuck off. But not enough to break up the entire system. Not enough to intern you in a daze, in a coma. The attraction was not euphoria. The attraction was silence. Silence. Imagine the background noise finally switched off. The first time I tried out, the girl, she she was adding it to tea. She said, You want some? And it was the end of the night. I was like, Well, I don't mind. I think I will try some. And it was quite a large amount. And I was driving home and I'm like, woo! Woo! This is interesting. I want to say I didn't sleep. I I I floated. I had one of those, you know, those 432 hertz music for like breathing and relaxation. And I don't know, was it was like tropical rain? It was fucking beautiful. I swear I I I wept. I I'm not a weeper. I wasn't stressed. I was open. And I awoke without anxiety. And I awoke rested. And that that never happens to me. A deep, biblical sleep. The kind where you kind of drop through the bed and you wake up eight hours later feeling like something's been repaired. But the thing about opioid receptors, and they're a bit gnarly. You gotta be careful with the opioids. The opioids get they just get fucking bored of you. You have to take more and more to feel the same. Which is to say the dose creeps higher and higher. And the sleep gets shallower anyway. It's a quick fix. And you're back to where you started. Plus, you've got look over your shoulder, Mr. Dependency is like, I got you. Which is to say, I quit. I quit because my kids were worried. They were worried that if if I went too deep into the sleep, maybe I wouldn't return. Kratom is a night lay tightrope. Step carefully and you cross, step poorly and you fall into a world that I do not want to visit. And so I stepped off. Now,

i've drank more tequila than a man has ever seen.

SPEAKER_00 50:08

all of that was past tense because now my magic potion is I take half asleep gummy. Of course I do. And you can buy it legally in the same parts. And you're 10 milligrams THC. Imagine my brain, this is my brain. This is your brain, this is my brain. I was clenching my fist for you. For those of you listening and not watching, watch it on Substack, people. The THC stops the mind from running the nightly audit. And then there's the 40 milligrams of the CBD, kind of preventing the THC from making me paranoid and helping me just lie there. I mean, I just lie there still throw in five milligrams of melatonin. Melatonin, the darkness hormone? I always think of melaton again, like smoking a cigarette, and I was like, ladies and gentlemen, the spectacle is over. You all gotta leave. This is new knowledge. Have you heard of CBN? Charlie, bravo, November! CBN is a cannabinol? What the fuck is a cannabinol? It's what THC grows up to be with age and exposure to air. CBN is THC that's grown up. It's THC that's retired, that's quit the game. Same receptor, but quietly sedative. No high, no stimulation. A cam hand on the shoulder says, lie down. I love CBN. And that half gummy, that half gummy removes all the reasons why I used to lie awake. The goal here is a negotiated nightly surrender. Nightly surrender with my nervous system. Half is the point. On top of all of this, I used to drink. Past tense. I drank more tequila the last three years than a man has ever seen. And stimulants would only make me want to drink more. I was ordering tequila like it was fate. I was ordering again and again and again. I would wake up with no hangover. It doubled my Saturday and it murdered Monday. And so alcohol had to go. Not going, it's going. We're working on it. I am Benjamin Button. I am determined to get younger and younger. Metabolism. Alcohol was pulling me the wrong way. I fucking hit DK. I won't have it. But the mouth doesn't get a vote. So I I removed alcohol, I removed cigarettes, I removed vaping. And my nights are my nights are better. I seem younger. Well, I mean, let's close. Let

a high functioning addict

SPEAKER_00 52:48

us close. Oh my god, this has been so long. And we haven't even discussed markets. Marcus, the drugs work. Take drugs. So this was the memoir. This was the audio memoir of a high-functioning addict. That word matters. Not addict, but functioning. The other word is for the fuckers on YouTube. I watch Monday. I watch my breathing. I watch tolerance. Do you know what? I watch tolerance the way I watch markets. I promise you, I I don't lie to myself what I'm doing and what this entails. I chose the higher wire because the ground below was already killing me softly. Does that sound like the foo geez? I returned from the run, the beach run. I returned cracked open and laughing inside. Because it worked. The trapdoor lifted. I feel free, I'm jubilant and dangerous in a good way. The way that scares small men and excites markets. I write obsessively. Writing is where the noise lines up. Silent is small, my heart isn't. Most days I'm seen, but I don't see anyone. I think, I run, I adjust, I write. My optimization now comes naturally. I am not healed, but I am aware of circumstance. Awareness is crucial in markets and in life. Awareness is the first weapon. Reverse decay. Stay dangerous. Keep your mind alive. And tomorrow morning? Come on, it's summer in the Northern Hemisphere. I want to see you running barefoot on the beach. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Hugh Hendry.

outro

SPEAKER_00 54:26

I've been transmitting outside the Bar Select on the Blessed Island of Same Parts. If this episode meant anything to you, and look how, because there'll be video versions. If you're listening audio, there'll be a video version somewhere. Five-star rating, people, summer camp, second to the sixth. I'd like to meet you in person. You, you, you. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, I love you to bits. Bizoo to you all. Substack, Patreon, Instagram, YouTube, at Henry underscore Hugh. I'm a virus, I'm everywhere. Come and find me. I love you. I need your love. Let's stay young together. Bizou, bye bye.