Today is a big day for me. I'm officially moving away from taking aggressive ADT hormone therapy to treat a recurrence of prostate cancer. And in about an hour, I'm heading to the hospital for my first PSA blood test after 184 days of Orgovyx treatment. I should find out the results in a few days.
Why am I writing about this on a build in public project? I'm not entirely sure. But it's on my mind, it's shaping everything I'm doing right now, and if this is supposed to be an honest account of building a business, then leaving out the thing that's been running underneath all of it for six months would be... well, dishonest.
What ADT Actually Does
For anyone unfamiliar, ADT stands for androgen deprivation therapy. The idea is straightforward: prostate cancer feeds on testosterone. Cut off the testosterone, starve the cancer. Orgovyx (relugolix) is a GnRH receptor antagonist — it blocks the signal from your brain to your body that says "make testosterone." Within a few weeks, your testosterone drops to near-castrate levels. That's the clinical term. Castrate levels. They don't sugarcoat it.
The cancer-fighting part works. The side effects are something else entirely. Hot flashes that hit like someone opened a furnace inside your chest, and that's real. Waking up multiple times in a night with a soaking wet T-shirt, sheets soaked. It's not fun. Fatigue. Joint pain. Loss of muscle mass. And the emotional side — this is the part that caught me off guard — mood swings that make no sense. One minute I'm crying over the loss of Finn in a conversation with someone, the next minute I'm laughing and making dark quips about my own mortality. I've been an emotional wreck for six months and I didn't fully understand why until I started reading about what near-zero testosterone actually does to the male brain. As my wife says — 'You're a hot mess,' and I own that.
The short version: testosterone doesn't just drive aggression and libido. It regulates emotional stability, confidence, risk assessment, and decision-making. Take it away and you don't become passive — you become volatile. The emotional baseline disappears. Everything is amplified. You feel everything more intensely, but with less ability to regulate the response.
Not me, the drugs. I assure you.
The Keto Angle
To further combat the cancer, I also took on a ketogenic diet. This came from a friend's tip based on the work of Dr Thomas Seyfried, a biology professor at Boston College who's been arguing for decades that cancer is fundamentally a metabolic disease, not a genetic one.
The mainstream view is that cancer begins with DNA mutations that cause cells to grow uncontrollably. Seyfried's position, which he laid out in his 2012 book Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, is that the mutations are a downstream effect. The root cause, he argues, is damaged mitochondria — the energy-producing structures inside cells. When mitochondria stop functioning properly, cells revert to a more primitive way of generating energy: fermenting glucose. This is something Otto Warburg observed nearly a century ago, and it's well documented. Cancer cells consume glucose at rates far higher than normal cells.
Seyfried's argument is that if you restrict glucose availability — through fasting, caloric restriction, or a ketogenic diet — you create a metabolic environment that healthy cells can adapt to (they switch to burning ketones) but cancer cells cannot. They're stuck on glucose. Starve the fuel, and you push those cells towards apoptosis — programmed cell death.
Is it proven? Not in the way that surgery and radiation are proven. The clinical trial data is thin, the oncology establishment is sceptical, and Seyfried himself will tell you this is still emerging science. But the underlying biology is sound, the logic tracks, and I've read enough to believe it's worth trying alongside conventional treatment. Cancer, at least from my perspective, is not about curing. It's about managing and monitoring. Adding metabolic pressure through diet is one more lever I can pull.
And the keto mental clarity? That part is real. My brain has never been sharper. Whether that's the ketones, the absence of blood sugar crashes, or some combination, I don't know. But it's noticeable and it's consistent.
The Cocktail Effect
So here's what's been running through my system for the last six months: near-zero testosterone from the Orgovyx, a brain running on ketones instead of glucose, and — after years completely off coffee because it got me too jacked up — a return to caffeine.
That combination has produced some of the most irrational, dramatic decisions of my professional life. And I mean that. These weren't measured, spreadsheet-backed choices. These were vibe-based, gut-driven, burn-the-boats moves made by a man whose emotional thermostat was broken.
Some of the doozies:
Quitting a COO position at a startup I'd been involved with since day one. A project I invested in as an investor, that I walked away from — hundreds of thousands of shares and likely an exit that would have set me up for life. Poof, gone. Because the vibe was off.
Starting this build in public project. Three hundred and sixty-five days of posting about revenues I may or may not be making, decisions I may or may not be getting right, and a business that didn't exist three weeks ago.
Going full-time on the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund and this fractional AI ops business. Two things that pay nothing right now but feel like the first real work I've done since Finn died.
And building a charity payment gateway and B2A platform that I'm spending way too much time on for a Foundation grant application I have maybe a 10% chance of winning. At most.
But here's the thing. The vibe is on for all of these. My energy level is on fire. And after being a rudderless ship in my professional life since April 8, 2023 — the day Finn passed — it feels good to have energy for work again. It feels good to care about something enough to wake up early and build it.
Maybe the hormones made me reckless. Maybe the keto made me sharp. Maybe the caffeine made me bold. Maybe losing a son makes you incapable of being afraid of anything as small as a failed business. Probably all of it.
Today
I'll get the blood drawn this morning. Results in a few days. Whatever the number says, I'll deal with it the way I've dealt with everything else in the last three years — one day at a time, with a gratitude journal and a meditation practice that's now past 2,900 consecutive days.
On the business side, today I'm finishing the client intake form I wrote about yesterday and hoping to onboard my first paying customer. I also need to clear a payment with my other client. Small steps, but real ones.
Revenue: $0. Clients: 1. Prospects: 6.
Day 17 of 365.