Codex of Jeff
This is where I keep my thinking — on health, on MS, on money, on death, on how to actually live. It’s a codex because it’s a running record, not a finished book. I add to it, I contradict my past self, I sharpen.
Everything below is my opinion. Not a doctor’s, not an organization’s, not advice you should take because a website said so. I’m one hard-core, hyper-focusing jerk who reads a lot and runs experiments on himself. Read it that way. If a piece changes how you see something, good. If it makes you mad, also good — go write your own.
- The Foundation: Eat Meat, Lift Heavy, Bike Hard Three pillars, not negotiable. The minimum viable life of a body that wants to keep working.
- Show Up The only habit that matters is showing up for yourself. Everything else is a technical problem. Most people will show up for their kids and never teach the kid the same habit. That's the trap.
- Reasonable This site is hard-core. You do not start hard-core. This is the on-ramp — four steps that build the base from which the rest of the work becomes possible. Most people skip the on-ramp, try the elite version, fail in week three, and conclude the protocol does not work. The protocol works. The on-ramp is the part that was missing.
- Weight Loss Is a Terrible Goal Stop chasing the scale. Chase the things that move it.
- Eat Fat. Real Fat. Why the anti-fat consensus is industry-funded nonsense, and what to eat instead.
- Hire a Trainer You owe yourself the education. Pay someone to teach you how a body actually works.
- Poor vs Broke There is a magic compounding machine sitting in plain sight. Stop being broke.
- Red Light The stupidest-feeling intervention that actually works, and why your bulbs are wrong.
- Fluoride The water, the food, the air, the products. We did not evolve with any of it, and the institutions will not protect you.
- Carnivore Keto is the science. Carnivore is keto with one rule and the cognitive load removed. Eat the animal.
- Get Off the Chair Sitting is a choice. The floor is the gym. Stand up without your hands.
- Cold and Hot We did not evolve for eternal summer. The Contrast Boot is how we get the range back.
- No Excuses Knowledge was the bottleneck for the entire history of the species. It is not anymore. Use the window before it closes.
- GLP-1 Semaglutide is the new opiate crisis. The shortcut is the trap, and the needle does not stop.
- Fasting I do not fast cold. I prime the body with zone 2 cardio, drop into the fast already half-empty, and stack the whole thing with recovery so the rest does as much work as the fast does.
- Conservative The data is unambiguous — a conservative disposition produces happier people. You can choose it tomorrow morning.
- Lifestyle Fat people are not smart. Talent is not intelligence. Health is the foundation, and if you cannot run carnivore for six straight months you are too weak for the life on the other side.
- Mindset Master mindset or slave mindset. There is no third option. The world is built to make you a slave to its distractions; mastery is the practice of refusing, every day, against gravity, on the only currency you actually have.
- Hell Yeah or No A lean set of priorities is the master move. Most people drown in meh shit they politely said yes to. Pick the few hell-yeahs, draw the line, hold firm. Everything else fails on purpose, by design, while you do the work that actually matters.
- Forgive the Past The past is read-only. The only useful operation it supports is *read* — extract the lesson, take the action, walk away. Forgiveness is the tool for putting the experience down so the carrier can keep moving.
- Trauma Trauma is a multiplier. Same input, two possible outputs — broken fast, or built to greatness. I only care about the people who pick the second one. Here are a hundred of them. The broken, simply put, don't matter.
- Retire Wanting purpose from your employer is the final form of the slave mindset. Retirement is the master's liberation. Most people would rather stay in the harness than take responsibility for every hour of their own day.
- Labels People wear labels now like the label is supposed to mean something. It isn't. I care about outcomes and actions. The rest is a Wendy's drive-through and I'm not the manager.
- Others Find the few you would fight for. Build the ring. Defend it. Treat the outer world according to the radius it occupies. Stop being the supporting cast in anyone else's stuck story.
- Games Worth Playing Life as a game is the lens. JRPGs taught it to me. Math, code, retirement, fitness — all single variables pushed hard. The remaining question is which game is worth playing, and the only honest answer is the one you set for yourself.
- Progressives Are Doomed The current secular-progressive cohort is structurally doomed because its members do not have children at replacement and the religious tribes do. The math is unambiguous. The optimal move is to pick a tribe, form a family, and stop pretending atomized individualism reproduces.
- Fascism? Maybe... The word "fascism" gets thrown around constantly now, and the technical definition isn't what people are reaching for. What they're reaching for is "your priorities are too narrow and they're against my values." Fair enough. I'm narrowing mine further. Call me a Health Fascist. I'll take it.
- Tyrant I know I sound like an asshole. I am a tyrant about my own standards because my life depends on it. The intensity is the mechanism, the standard is set high enough that failure still trends upward, and if you don't like it, the not-liking is part of the filter working.
- Lose "It Depends" In engineering, "it depends" is honest work. In health, it's indecision wearing a lab coat. I quit it, and I'll take every label that comes with acting instead of thinking forever.
- Self-Deception The thing standing between you and a great life is you. The lies you tell yourself are the heaviest weight you have ever asked your back to carry. The practice is recursive, daily, and best done with external constraints because willpower alone keeps losing to the version of you doing the lying.
- Therapy Therapy, as the modern industry packages it, is mostly a trap. Useful only after a solid foundation is built, and even then the better tools are action and the careful use of psychedelic shamanism. Neither Effie nor I do talk therapy. For children, it's actively harmful.
- Boomers A generation that lived inside a historical anomaly and mistook it for the new normal. Three structural sins — housing as asset, reliance on comfort, and materialism — are the inherited bills the next generations have to pay.
- Honest Debate Honesty is a two-way street. Before I spend mine, I ask one thing — can you steel-man the other side? Almost nobody can. So I've learned to spot bad faith early and walk away.
- Intel The brain has one job — efficiency. In the modern environment, efficiency means comfort-seeking, and comfort-seeking builds you a comfortable prison out of a body that decays. Discipline equals freedom. There is no other way.
- Surveil the City I believe in freedom, hard. I also believe a city is a prison the inmates built themselves, and once you've signed that deal, the surveillance state is just the contract being honest. Load the cameras.
- The Real Asset The only fundamentally real asset a human can hold is land. Everything else is paper, denominated in a system that may or may not continue. The master mindset has a natural endpoint, and the endpoint is dirt you can work, water you control, and a body that knows how to use both.
- The System The modern economic system runs on a vicious cycle — shareholder pressure to CEOs to quarterly returns to pension solvency to retirees who depend on the returns — and the cycle is eating its young right now. Capitalism is still the least-bad arrangement we've ever tried. The endpoint is AI. We may not make it there. Either way, the system as we know it ends.
- Joy After the work, there is a reward. It is real, it is chemical, it is daily, and it is the part of the protocol almost nobody on the outside believes exists until they have done the work long enough to feel it.
- Brain Wash You are being brain-washed every day. The only question is by what. I hung posters in a gym, chose my own inputs, and built a corpus I can return to. This site is the long version of the same practice. The Testament of Jeff, so say we all.
- Stoic I wish I could read Marcus Aurelius once and be done. I can't. Stoicism is not knowledge — it is a practice that lives in moments, runs for decades, and only works if you keep tuning it against the actual data of your own life.
- Hyper-Individual Maximum personal freedom has produced maximum personal loneliness, and the two facts are the same fact. Collectivism only scales to the village; capitalism scales to the planet by atomizing everyone into a market unit. The path out is not the Amish farm, but it is not the algorithm either. It is the deliberate rebuilding, by hand, of the shared layer the wrecking ball took down.
- Fat Kids and Liability I see fat kids everywhere and I cannot fix it. The system that prevents me from fixing it is the same system protecting them. Both are true. The honest place to land is that this is not my problem to solve, and the fact that it is not my problem to solve is itself the problem.
- The Big Question The line "no one is coming to save you" runs through this site as the reliable spur for individual action. It is also a description of a civilizational failure I do not know how to fix. I want to ask the question seriously — is this the way we want it to be?
- Roles Effie and I decided not to have children before we married. Her reason was the disease. Mine was ego. I judge other people's parenting anyway, which is unfair, and the unfairness is part of what this essay is about. There are roles a man can play that require going all in without children. Here are five, with examples.
- Death I am going to die. I know this because I have been close enough to see it. The fight against the inevitable is the entire question of how to live — and the answer is not a bucket list, not an empire, not the technical win. The answer is much smaller and much better.
- The Paradox of America America is the only country that started with an idea instead of a tribe, and the idea — everyone is equal — fights reality on every front. It's the fairest game ever built, and you can't play it on naive hope.
- Anger Anger saved my life. I watched the system kill my mother by inches and it had me lined up next. The day that clicked, I got furious, and the fury is what dug me out. Aimed right, anger is the cleanest fuel there is.
- Think Less, Do More The great sin of having a brain is that you can think too much and do too little. The thing was built to hunt lions, not to invent them out of your inbox. I feed mine board games to chew on and keep everything else deliberately stupid.
- The Great Paradox In my heart I believe agriculture was a mistake — the biggest gamble our species ever made. The paradox is that it's also the only road to the stars, and the thing most likely to stop us isn't physics, it's each other. Collapse feels close, and the Amish may have found the actual sweet spot.