Fitness Program & Syllabus: 2025
This project began as an elaborate shitpost where posting gym selfies would pipeline people into reading socialist books. As stupid as that sounds — it has been wildly successful.
More seriously, there has been an endless amount of mainstream media think-pieces that desperately seek to connect weight lifting with right-wing politics. Blue check journalists have done just about everything they can to villainize the most popular American pastimes (exercise, video games and more).
For the past few years, I’ve released an annual summer syllabus and fitness program. From the hundreds of messages that I receive throughout the year, the most frequently expressed sentiment is: ‘this $5 syllabus is a better education than my fancy university’. Of the many layers of trolling at work in this project, this is perhaps the most satisfying.
As the scale of this project has grown, I’ve had to consider that my audience is no longer a niche intellectual publication designed to troll a handful of journalists and academics. Instead, this newsletter has become a participant in mass culture and the broader alt-media landscape. For me, an “exercise program + syllabus” is a much harder troll when its point of comparison is a university course. But when it exists alongside actual influencers and fitness content, it starts to feel less resonant. For all of these reasons, this will probably be the last fitness syllabus that I publish.
In summary, this year’s program is comprised of all the most impactful links and course materials from the previous 4 years. Everything contained here is freely available online. (You don’t need to buy any additional books or materials.) If you’re new to this project — this is the ideal place to start and quickly be brought up to speed.
This is a 9 week program. Its a bit shorter than previous iterations and so the weekly course materials are proportionately heavier. (Think of this as low rep + heavy weight, intellectual hypertrophy training.) Once you complete this program, you can go back and do the rest of them in order: 2024 & 2023. If you finish all of them— congratulations, you’ve been working out for 75% of the year and you should upgrade to something that isn’t also a college syllabus. And yes, this is the actual program that I do. I wouldn’t assign you anything that I haven’t already done myself.
The Wall (for him)
“The wall” is an internet slang term used to describe the point at which a woman's attractiveness rapidly starts to fade. It is often seen in the context of; most women hit the wall in their early to mid thirties. Far less is said about male aging and desirability.
Growing up in the US, during the era of zero percent interest rates (ZIRP), every aspect of American culture became suffused with the ethos of ‘fake it till you make it’. In this environment, the only path to upward mobility was bootstrapping a cultural product or service with the hopes to quickly catapult it into luxury status. This general economic road-map applied to culture (fashion, artworks, gentrification and virality), as well as the basic financial model for all start ups. This was the common sense of the time.
During the ZIRP era, this underlying economic structure drove culture to create massive hype cycles. During these hype cycles, people hoped to get some form of investment before the bubble collapsed. Start ups could begin in your garage and then skyrocket to a blue chip stock. Collectibles, such as toys or streetwear, could quickly multiply in their resale value. In a speculation-driven economy, all commodities began to function as financial assets. Anything that did not catch this wave of attention-capital would eventually wither and dissolve.
ZIRP lasted from 2008 to late 2015. It began in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis. It ended when American populism shattered the Overton window. This era is what Mark Fisher called “zombie neoliberalism”.
On an individual level, ZIRP culture created strong incentives for fraud while punishing those who put in hard work. This unique environment heavily rewarded clever start up pitches, like Theranos’ ludicrous $9 billion valuation, over the retirement funds and pensions of workers (most of which evaporated in the financial crisis of 2008). To our generation, it seemed foolish to dutifully clock into work every day when a good pitch deck could make you obscenely rich overnight. But now the bubble has burst and it is never coming back.
Today, many of us are looking around and wondering how we made it through such an insane hype period with so little to show for it? We didn’t walk away with high value financial assets but we also never set aside the time to build something long term. (Spoiler alert: hyperstition is a pseudo-intellectual way of rationalizing an investor culture of cheap money. The Federal Reserve always beats Nick Land.)
On a personal level, ZIRP meant that few of us internalized the value of hard work. We never got to experience the fruits of slowly and steadily working on something. As the first digital native generation, we were raised to gamble via online culture. (Our best bet was to one day get lucky on the internet slot machine.) Now, in our early to mid thirties, we are realizing that we never actually read the important books, seriously considered the maintenance of our health or basically looked out for any long term prospects whatsoever. We neglected the steady cultivation of our minds and bodies because our society was hyper focused on the short term.
This is the philosophical, physical and intellectual wall that many young people are now hitting. This inflection point helps to explain the break in mainstream consensus as well as the post-2016 cultural shift toward both the left and right. As people are unable to access the benefits of the mainstream, they move to the further edges of the political spectrum.
You were likely raised with general progressive values. You may consider yourself to be well educated and you may even have a degree of some kind. But while scrolling your newsfeed, you come across a viral clip of some NRx ghoul quoting Joseph de Maistre and you actually have no idea what to say. The best you can muster is to scoff and dismiss it as “problematic”. But somewhere deep inside it sits with you. Looking back, you never actually read the canon. If we’re being honest, you never even read Karl Marx. You just felt like you “absorbed it” by hearing people talk about Judith Butler.
During ZIRP, our intellectual climate was all about “faking it” and demonstrating the proper elite codes “till you make it”. You didn’t actually need to read it, you only had to prove familiarity when you got name-checked. As a result, many people don’t really know what backs up their ideas. They only have a general sense of acceptable social codes. Right now, our political opponents are winning. Not because they rigged the game, but because they slowly and steadily built on a project while we never actually put in the work.
At the same time, there’s a physical transformation happening. Liberal folklore insists that men grow more attractive as they age (because somehow patriarchy). But actually looking at anyone over the age of 40 will instantly dispel this myth. Its cute to be a waifish 25 year old boy who parties all night, shows up hung over and lives life on the edge. But its sad to see an overweight, pushing 40 guy who drinks too much and can’t get his projects together. You can choose to laugh this off and sink into denial. Or you can put in the effort to take care of yourself like an adult. The truth is that its your responsibility. Exercise is fully unalienated because no one can lift the weights for you. The same goes for reading.
In particular, people who have left-wing politics are especially susceptible to this kind of social infantilization. Culturally, we have become allergic to any sense of personal responsibility. This happened for a good reason.
Beginning in the 1980’s, under the ideological project of neoliberalism, state-run universal programs were privatized and their costs were pushed onto all of us as individuals. This process of responsibilization was meant to penalize, by way of the market, individual bad behavior. In this way, bad actors were disincentivized from selfishly over-exploiting public resources. Well, that is how it was ‘supposed to work’ lol.
In reality, everything got way too expensive and society was put through a paper shredder. Ironically, the administrative cost of means testing often proved more expensive than the old universal programs. During this period of privatization, inarticulate rhetoric within most left-wing academies and subcultures developed as a knee-jerk reflex to all proposals for personal responsibility.
But this well intentioned intellectual defense has reached a crisis point. It now prevents personal and intellectual growth. It also obscures the necessary hard work that is required for movement building. Its no coincidence that today’s political commonsense is to start a viral hashtag campaign and hope to get lucky overnight.
At this point in history, and in your own personal life, it seems like the right time to reevaluate the bad assumptions that we were brought up with. Its time to focus on slowly and steadily building things that are long lasting. There is no shortcut to hard work. Stop faking it and actually make it. Otherwise, enjoy twink death and finally admit you’re a libertarian.
The Program
This is a 9 week program. Don’t do it for more than 9 weeks. If you finish this program and want further instruction, do these:
In this program you will find a new list of exercises and educational materials. This program is an upper / lower + A / B / C program paced at 4 days a week. Its especially good for maintaining muscle mass while cutting fat, if that’s what you’re doing this summer.
Super Secret Syllabus v.2025 — Summer
This syllabus is drawn from materials discussed in the Discord and videos reviewed on the live stream. Coursework is portioned out to ~90 minutes a week over a 9 week semester. If you’re only here for the syllabus, scroll all the way down.
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