2026 Update

Ladies and gentleman! I hope you all are doing well.

I must first apologize for the total lack of videos. Certainly I know a crude and archaic blog post will not suffice as my first update in over a year. 2025 was a busy year for me. Most of you know I’ve moved from California to NYC. This move required a significant rewiring of the frontal lobe. There’s a level of adjusting that must take place to live and work in this city. Some say this God forsaken city. I had a lot of preconceived notions about the city before moving. I was wrong in some aspects and dead-on in others. I’ve met some of the coolest people here without a doubt, but there’s some things I don’t think I’ll ever fully adjust to.

I won’t lie – NYC is a tough place to endure if you’ve lived in slow environments your whole life like I have. California made me soft and slow. Everything here is hard and fast. You better move or you’re gonna get mowed over. People here move like Jack the Ripper is right behind them. I get it now though – people want to get home and out of the streets as fast as they can – in part because NYC weather is rarely comfortable. You’re either freezing or melting so you always want to get indoors somewhere. From what I’ve experienced, you get 3 absolutely beautiful weeks in the spring and autumn. I’ve seen some of the nicest days here in the city. There’s mind blowing days here where you can’t imagine living anywhere else. It really does seem to all come together for brief moments during the spring and fall.

Most of the other days range from mildly palatable to downright disgusting.

I also think I forgot how tiring working full time is. In California I worked but certainly not 40 – 60 hours a week. I’d say I mostly freelanced in California and my work was sporadic. I’d have a few client jobs during the week and maybe some of you remember my old boss. I worked for him but not a whole lot. In other words, I had a lot of downtime to shoot and edit videos.

Here it feels like all I do is work. On top of working my total daily commute time is 2 hours. Commuting here in the city is easily the biggest drag of all. The city busses are absolutely crammed, and I’m talking about nose to nose crammed. I take a city bus and then a subway train the rest of the way to work. The subways are filthy to put it mildly. You get used to it.

Luckily I really like the job and the people I work with. Honestly got pretty lucky with this work. I’ve had a couple raises since I started so that makes everything a bit easier to endure.

So that’s the first thing. I haven’t had a lot of time to make videos.

I also had some big time technical problems with my old gonootropics.com website. I ended up losing a lot of the content and I thought I lost the domain name. Luckily I was able to recover that. If you’ve emailed me in the past year you probably noticed the emails bounced. Fortunately I have all that sorted so you can contact me once again by email.

Despite my absence I’ve been reading the YouTube comments. No, I have not gone back to Kratom! It will be 2 years no Kratom as of next month which is crazy to think about. It’s hard to believe I’ve gone that long and its been all upsides. Kratom has no benefit to my life anymore. These days I take the pain straight on the chin.

In fact, I even managed to quit my addiction to ZYN as well. In that time I pumped out a whole book on the subject to keep myself constantly distracted. The ZYN started causing me all kinds of problems, including panic attacks. I started getting them at work and knew it was time to quit. I tell the whole story in the book.

I’m doubling down on quitting these useless substances and have my sights set on coffee next.

Other than that I’m keeping the train rolling. Still happily married to my wife Christine.

I have plans for a lot more books.

As far as videos go I’m gonna try and set a schedule and get something up soon. I fell out of the habit but I think a few videos a month is a reasonable goal.

As always, thank you for your continued support!