So Anthony Roberts gave me the honor of asking him a few questions, and I appreciate his time and effort he gives to the steroid community. You may like him you may not, the one thing you have to do is respect him for the work he puts into bringing steroids mainstream, and I respect him emensely. So I thank him and I give you his answers, enjoy.
1. What made you originally want to get involved in the steroid field? Who were your first influences?
AR-I think anyone my age who writes about anabolic steroids for a living would have to say they were initially influenced by Dan Duchaine.
Testosterone Nation called me the next Dan Duchaine, but that was really over ambitious of them.
Ultimately I?ve worked with many of the same people he did, and that’s no coincidence, so I’d really have to say he was my greatest steroid-world influence.
Back in the day, I liked T.C.’s writing in Muscle Media, and I thought Bill Phillips wrote a pretty readable steroid book too.
2. How did you get your start as a writer (meaning what were your first opportunities to get your start on a successful career)?
AR-You’d be surprised at how this all went down:
I was a moderator on a small bodybuilding website, and one of the members sent me a private message, and told me that steroid.com was looking for members to write profiles.
And they were getting paid! Imagine that, being paid to write profiles for a steroid site! I went over, and signed up…and at this point something interesting happened , about 36 people originally signed up, and while I was banging out 3-4 profiles per week, nobody else had even finished one!
Finally , people started finishing them , and they were just horrible.
I mean they were horrible in every way possible: the writing was abysmal and they were completely inaccurate.
The terrible writing wasn’t that bad, because most of the writing in the steroid field isn’t going to be very good anyway.
That’s why you never see a guy who writes about steroids getting a publishing deal with a company that isn’t in the field already.
It’s just bad writing , which as I said isn’t a problem.
But the fact that people were turning in very off-base steroid profiles became obvious very quickly.
See, this is because people on message boards typically know about testosterone or whatever, but they don?t know 4 pages worth of information about it, and honestly, to write 4 pages about testosterone, you need to read about 40 pages on it.
Some people were directly plagiarizing Llewellyn (author of the Anabolics series) and L.Rea (who wrote Chemical Muscle Enhancement) or Pete Van Mol (who wroteonline steroid profiles for bodybuilding.com). It was complete anarchy, and at that point, I had taken over as the primary writer of the book as well as the editor.
I’m reasonably sure some people must have slipped some plagiarism past me to be completely honest, because I had a chat with Llewellyn a few months ago, and he told me he saw some phrases that reminded him of his own book.
You have to keep in mind that there were probably 5-10 people working on the book , so around 10-15 profiles (30 pages worth, perhaps) in there were edited by me , but not written by me, at the time , I’d never professionally edited anything ,and it showed.
There were so many scientific names and chemistry terms that spell check was totally useless.
But since I wrote the other 300 pages, and did all of the first-draft editing, it’s my name on the cover of the book.
I know some people didn’t get paid for their efforts (the publisher never paid them), and there was no professional editing done for it , it was a wonderful mess, but it got my name out there.
Strangely , the owner of steroid.com also saw fit to include his own name on the cover , which was odd because he didn’t actually write anything in the book.
His contribution was (unfortunately) stealing a bunch of charts (from BillyLlewellyn) and putting them at the end of the book.
I actually told Bill that I was sorry for that move when I spoke to him a few weeks ago.
These are the profiles you see on the main page of steroid.com today, and my name isn’t on any of the , anywhere on the site , so frankly, I’m in the same boat as Bill on this one. The profiles they replaced (which were previously on the site) were taken verbatim from the World Anabolic Review, and that author is not given credit either.
That’s how I got my start , it was like the American Idol of steroid writing , each week another person would be dropped from the projec , and I got the record deal at the end.
After that , I could just go to anyone I wanted (EliteFitness, MuscleDrivethru, etc) and tell them I wanted to write a book for them; it was easy to get published at that point, but only in the niche market of how-to-use-steroids types of books.
My new publisher (who is actually not an American publishing house) was a totally different story. I’m sure having written three other books helped , but this was really an uphill battle to get that contract.
They’ve got 3k titles right now, and this is their first one about steroids, so it’s as new to them as it has been to me, but they’ve all been really great to work with.
3. How much time and effort did it take to get to where you are now, a successful and well respected author and spokesman of the steroid world?
AR-I started writing about steroids right when I got out of prison, so I was 26, and I just turned 31. I’m not totally sure if that answers the question, but I’ve written 4 books for 4 different publishers , so I must have gotten somewhere in this time?
Honestly , it’s really more important to be well respected outside of the steroid world , to be honest.
It soundscounter intuitive , but there really isn’t much respect in the steroid world.
50% of the people on any message board hate me, or L. Rea, or Pete Van Mol, or Dave Palumbo or basically any author you can name.
It’s the internet , and it’s the subculture I guess, but it’s pretty much universal.
It’s not the greatest situation , but if I were to be honest with myself, I’d rather get my respect from Sports Illustrated or ESPN , that’s really what credibility is to me.
4. What are you most proud of out of all yourprofessional accomplishments? Why?
AR-I actually have two proudest moments:
(1) The first is the fact that a single blog post that I made resulted in the loss of literally millions of dollars to a company that I singled out as a scam.
Initially , the figure was around $7 million dollars, according to the company itself.
That’s amazing when you really consider the fact that I used a free blog to cause that kind of damage.
And of course, it’s humbling , because it really shows that when you are doing the right thing, you get rewarded , and in some small way, it shows that people probably tend to believe what I say.
(2) Having people discuss the fact that sometimes I smoke.
That sounds kind of stupid, but I saw people discussing me on the Muscular Development forums, and a good deal of their posts mentioned whether or not I smoke (answer: sometimes I smoke) . I realized that this is as famous as it gets for the steroid world , people are actually discussing something that has little to nothing to do with my work or my personality or my products, but rather are discussing irrelevant matters of my private life.
5. If there was one thing you could say to every newcomer to steroids, what would it be?
AR-Do your research.
Know what you’re getting into.
Consider the fact that there’s less than 50 people in the world who have written decent books on steroids, and there’s hundreds of thousands of people giving out advice on the internet.
Weigh those odds, and do some decent research on your own before anything else.
6. How do you feel about legalizing steroids? What do you see in the near future are far as that goes ?
AR-Steroids are a really great soft target for lawmakers to attack.
They got big television numbers when they held the baseball hearings in Congress, and they are getting a lot of positive face time for themselves in the media.
So that’s not going to stop, as long as politicians can get on TV for something , whether they?re wrong or right.
I know guys who have been arrested for steroid use and had the cops tell them that they think it should be legal anyway.
It’s sad, but up in ther arified air of the United States Congress, nothing resembling an intelligent approach to steroid legislature appears to be on the horizon.
7. You are known for being ahead of the curve, so what is the next “Big Thing” that will change steroids as we know it?
AR-Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs) are getting a lot of press lately , although they’re not widely available yet. I think that technology will develop into something that becomes really hot on the black market.
I also think there’s more untapped potential with IGF, and more potential off shoots like MGF that we haven’t seen explored and developed.
I have high hopes that my upcoming book (Generation S) will cause a lot of waves , although it isn’t about how to use steroids , it’s more about the culture involved in their use, and the stories of a generation of steroid users.
If the book is a success, then I think it’ll get the truth out there, for better or for worse (probably for worse). I think it’ll help bridge the gap between the steroid culture and culture at large.
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Once again I would like to thank Anthony for his honest answers, and I wouls also like to take a second to advise all to take a look at what AR was talking about, S.A.R.M. ’s. The idea behind them is unbelievable, a steroid with higher abilities, without the following side effects. It would change the way we use steroids or good. If all works out we are staring at the future of Anabolics and the future looks bright my brothers and sisters.
