My Take On What Happened To Victor Pride From Bold&Determined.com

| by Truth Seeker |

Victor Pride, the beginning

I discovered the website [boldanddetermined.com] of Victor Pride (real name Nick Kelly) in 2016 when a reader sent me a link to an article justifying the use of anabolic steroids.

The idea was simple. You already aren’t natural due to all the chemicals in modern food, supplements..etc. Therefore, injecting isn’t a big issue because your hormonal profile and overall homeostasis are already….altered. [I disagree, but that’s a different story.]

Like many others, I started following boldanddetermined.com and Victor’s journey. I even posted comments underneath his articles that were a bit critical. He would let them sit for a day and then delete them.

Nonetheless, I liked the guy. I saw a bit of myself in him even though we were quite different overall.

Then when COVID hit, Kelly became a Christian. At first, he was making podcasts and live calls on the topic, but eventually, he ended those too and deleted his site.

Here’s my take on boldanddeermined.com as well as Kelly’s disappearance:

Victor Pride Burned Out [ The Reality of “Blogging”]

Pride boasted about his life all the time. He was free while the rest of us were “slaves”.

Reality is a little different.

I’ve never been a full-time blogger. I never made enough from my site to sustain myself and always worked additional jobs. But I’ve done this long enough and can imagine how it feels to do it full-time.

It’s a lonely experience.

Victor Pride presented himself as some “insane warrior”, but the lifestyle of all full-time bloggers falls within the following guidelines:

  • Wake-up
  • Gym
  • Stay in front of the PC all day (maybe go to Starbucks for a couple of hours).
  • Repeat

The routine gets old quickly.

You are in a self-created cubicle.

No coworkers to talk to. Forums, social media, e-mails, and chats can compensate but only to a point.

People weren’t created to live in such profound isolation for so long. Sure, he was collaborating from time to time, but more often than not, he was alone with his laptop.

Pride also had many girlfriends from Thailand, but his relationships weren’t serious. His girls were temporary companions at best.

Do that for 10 years and you get a recipe for alienation and non-diagnosed depression.

The reality is that content creation is a brutal and lonely adventure even though it may look easy to the outside world.

The isolation made Pride explore all kinds of topics and swing from one end of the spectrum to another all the time. One day, he would talk about lifting weights; the next, he would delve into numerology.

When he published New World Ronin, he was burned out to hell and back. He was posting nonsensical things on Twitter all the time. Eventually, he got saner… but it was temporary.

He Was Always All In

Pride had an “all in” attitude in every aspect of life.

When he converted to Christianity, he showed that again by presenting his entire work as the evilest thing in the world.

And while it’s true that he had created an altar of worship, he was too hard on himself and ignored that many of his teachings weren’t against Christianity.

For example:

  • He was anti-porn.
  • He tried to push men to love themselves more. (It’s not against Christianity to have self-esteem.)
  • He was encouraging men to get out of the loser spiral (e.g., fapping in front of the PC all day and playing video games while hoping that a miracle will fix your life)

…etc.

His site wasn’t as anti-Christian as he made it out to be in the end. He could’ve removed the problematic materials.

This is what RooshV did when he converted to Christianity. (Eventually, RooshV deleted his sites too, but that’s for another post.)

If you think about it, Pride could have used his online fame to spread his new message, but he chose to burn it all.


He Was Too Hard On Himself

In one of his final podcasts, Pride admitted that he was watching hours of porn while being on Adderall.

Many people were shocked and disappointed, but I wasn’t. Why?

I am old enough to know that people aren’t perfect and that we often teach the very things that we have to learn ourselves.

But many of Pride’s followers are young kids who thought their idol could do no wrong.

I also think Pride himself was extremely ashamed that he was spreading a message that he wasn’t following 100%.

But as I already told you – no one is perfect.

People sin from birth to death. What one should respect is the fight against sin. A fight that never ends.

Pride’s inability to recognize one’s inherent flaws made him hate himself even more and pushed him to the extreme.

Pride Was Too Self-Focused

Pride had no wife or kids to take care of and was extremely self-focused. His family was far away too. Having too much time to obsess over your life can lead to mental destruction.

One of the joys that come with having children is that you gain the opportunity to live for other people and free yourself from the pain of extreme self-focus.

On a superficial, selfish level, this may seem bad, but in practice, it’s not, especially as you get older.

It may seem surprising,  but life often feels better when you start living for others. You gain strength, courage, and the ability to overcome impossible obstacles.

When you are on your own, you often choose the easy way out and remain in your head 24/7.

A Need For a High Purpose

Pride was very rich, although not as rich as some of his followers thought. Some naive kids were saying that he was a billionaire.

This wasn’t the case.

Back in the day, he uploaded a bank account balance of 1 million. When you add the amount of money that he was spending on his lifestyle, it’s safe to say that he’d earned 1.5-2 million from his blog. At one point,  he was living next to the ocean and paying 4k just for rent.

THAT’S A LOT OF MONEY. Most people won’t earn it in their lifetime. Pride doesn’t come from a rich family. When you can live with little that amount of money feels like a billion dollars.

Eventually, he stopped seeing money as a way out of his internal misery.

Once you’re secure financially, you become more philosophical. Your ability to buy whatever you want from Amazon is no longer interesting.

The toys get old. The branded clothing is nice,  but it just feels empty.

At first, Pride was filling that hunger with esoterical and masonic teachings, but those weren’t suited for his soul.

He didn’t see them as pure and wanted more. Christianity and Jesus provided that for him and he followed through.

Victor Pride > Andrew Tate

I prefer Pride over Tate any day of the week. He is just more relatable to me. Tate is too high in the air and feels foreign.

Pride was one of the common people. Meanwhile, Tate is an alleged billionaire who has multiple cars that cost more money than Pride’s savings account.

Did Victor Pride Make The Correct Decision to Quit? 

From a monetary perspective, probably not. He’d already built a money printer and deleted it in a couple of months. He didn’t have any highly specialized skills (e.g., coding) that he could leverage in the future to generate the same or a higher income.

Also, he was nearing 40 when that happened and we all know that the older you are, the fewer job offers you receive.

However, money isn’t everything.

Kelly followed his heart and dedicated his life to Christianity. This is what his soul called for and he respected the wish. Another decision may have devastated his psyche even more given his intense self-centered character.

I don’t know what he is doing now, but if he feels better (not necessarily happier), the decision was correct.

A lot of people don’t understand him because:

a. They’ve never earned so much money and the idea of letting it all burn feels alienated.

b. Some individuals are not interested in spirituality or religion.

c. Kelly’s followers felt a bit cheated. A guy that they’d idolized and followed for years abandoned them out of the blue.

Life Goes On

Time kills everything, doesn’t it? It feels like 2015 was both yesterday and a century ago.

The Destiny of Pride shows that on a long enough scale we all disappear even though we leave traces behind. But sooner or later, those traces are gone too.

In the end, life is bigger than all of us and there’s nothing you can do about it. We fight until the end and there’s that.

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36 comments

  1. Eduardo

    Excellent. Thank you very much

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      Thanks, bro 🙂

      1. pierre farine

        Can you make an article to what happen to Rooshv? Thanks.

  2. Benjamin

    Hi TruthSeeker! thanks for keepeing your site alive! And thakyou so much for jumping to other platforms as yt. Already suscribed. Keep it up man!

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      I know. I wrote you there.

  3. Aoi

    Victor Pride, commited “Ego seppuku”

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      His ego tortured him to the max.

  4. Andrei

    I remember that back in the days I wrote a comment on his blog naming him Nick (it was before he told his readers what his real name was). He didn’t delete the comment but right away replaced Nick with Victor :)))

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      How did you know his real name? Around New World Ronin he “killed” Victor Pride and decided to go by his real name.

      1. Andrei

        I searched his website with way back machine and saw that at the beginning he was actually using his real name

        1. Brither

          Does any one have the link to the post where he admitted he was fapping to pr0n? It’s hard to believe.

          Thanks for your article- I wish I was into this stuff back then but at least I know of it now!

          Thanks for the article my friend.

          1. Truth Seeker Post author

            It was in a podcast.

    2. Truth Seeker Post author

      He had a big ego.

  5. Edward

    Sometimes you do not need a billion dollars to be happy……..it’s all meaningless anyway all the sports cars and mansions and women…..at the end of the day we know deep down our lives would have been so much different if it were the 1980’s! All our wealth seeking problems would be solved with so little money………today you need to be top tier to simply get a woman and that shows you what insane levels the modern world has reached!

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      The world is built in such a way that no matter what happens you always go back to a baseline of unhappiness that never goes away.

  6. TC

    He was a phoney and a marketer, just like all the other false prophets. He could write quite well, I’ll give him that. The way that he swung from one extreme (king of the Mano sphere) to another (extreme Christianity) – exactly like a couple of those other manosphere guys, incidentally – simply shows that he was a bombastic lost soul looking for meaning, and everything he wrote should be disregarded. There is nothing wrong with being a lost soul looking for meaning of course, but when you are a lost soul convincing other lost souls to drop out of college and pursue blogging for a career, you become dangerous. I also believe he didn’t make anywhere near as much money as he claimed. He was running a business that generated a million dollars in revenue over four years. So what. My local delicatessen turns over more than that. Blow hard.

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      I agree that he needed to spread a certain message to generate more sales. And part of the message was exactly that – jobs are slavery; get rich doing blogging; here’s a one click WordPress install affiliate link.

      Since I am a blogger myself, I know the reality of this game. Very few people actually make meaningful money. And it takes a lot of work and time. More than working an actual job in fact.

      Part of my criticism towards him was exactly that – many people in the comment section had nicknames with links to their sites. After a while, those sites were abandoned because they weren’t profitable. It’s not his fault exactly, but he sure as hell forgot to mention that part of the game.

      But as I said in the post, the older you get, the less you expect people to be perfect. If his audience saw him more as an entertainer/actor/writer, they wouldn’t have been nearly as disappointed.

  7. TC

    “One of the joys that comes with having children is that you gain the opportunity to live for other people and free yourself from the pain of extreme self-focus.

    On a superficial, selfish level, this may seem bad, but in practice, it’s not, especially as you get older.”

    I am the single father of a 16 yo daughter and this is spot on. I am a similarly self obsessed and vain person like Pride. Without her, I would have descended into a similar madness just like he did. If you don’t have children you must do something that gives you similar purpose and keeps you grounded and most importantly IS ENTIRELY FOR THE BENEFIT OF OTHER PEOPLE – volunteering for a charity for a few hours a week is ideal.

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      True. As they say: “We suffer more in our heads than in reality.” And one of the ways to get out of your head is to live for someone or something outside of you.

    2. SamS

      Same with me. I wasn’t really planning on reading this article in the first place because I didn’t have any idea who Victor is. Only seen the name here in Natty or Not I think. Luckily we now have the NoN YouTube-channel so I listened this article there and found some great points once again. Especially that thing about children and purpose.

      After my kid was born I had to do what a friend of mine once described as “putting the big boy pants on”. I had to drop a ton of selfish and stupid shit from my life, but I have no regrets. Nice to see other people here talking about parenthood too.

      1. TC

        Yes, further to my comment above, there is no question that becoming a parent made me a better person. I was ready for the responsibility, and I can still be quite emotionally selfish and vain, but it has made me more patient, more tolerant, more selfless (I now consider what I put into relationships, not just what I get out of them), a higher frustration tolerance, an understanding that there are some of life’s problems that cannot be solved by just working harder or charging through them, and very importantly (for me) an acceptance that people are who they are, and cannot be controlled in ways that are convenient to me (in fact will often do quite the opposite, and that’s ok).

        I am now single parenting a 16 yo daughter since mother is out of the picture. I’m not really sure what I’d do without her around. I have a very good job but it’s just…work at the end of the day.

        Anyway this is just my journey, some of these things may have just come with maturity and perhaps others don’t need children to grow as individuals, but I sure did.

        1. Truth Seeker Post author

          Thank you for the comment !

        2. SamS

          That’s very nicely put, I have very much the similar emotions and experiences but I can’t put them into words that well. I must admit that I’ve only had two things in my life where I’ve put absolutely everything I have or had. First thing was sports. I really tried to be an athlete, I did all I could but that probably ended because of the fact that I was doing too much. Less would’ve been more and I wouldn’t have gotten injured.

          But the second and more important thing is my daughter. I was very afraid that I wasn’t good enough to be a dad. I never felt ready no matter how I prepared. Luckily, I grew up along with my daughter. It’s crazy how much I learned from her even when she was just a baby. In my country we have a pretty long paternity leave. I remember that during it, my patience (not to mention all the other things that got better) probably grew tenfold 😀 Even though she was just a baby. Now years later I can say that I’ve never learned as much from anyone else as I have learned from my daughter, and I never will.

          1. TC

            You’ve told your story very nicely!

            When I said I was ready for the responsibility I meant I was ready to try, not ready to actually be a parent. Nobody is actually ready! It’s the most important job in the world and there isn’t even an instruction manual! You need a license to drive a car but don’t need one to raise a child.

            Thanks for sharing.

  8. Fanofthesite

    Similiar boat to TC above me. Im a naturally selfish person and having my 2 sons ripped me out of my own delusion and placed me square into reality. Its difficult snd stressful but without that i would have ended up a completely self absorbed vanity case as well.

    Its no surprise that the birthrate is plummeting in thr western world. Our entire cultre has become entirely based around self. For someone who lives through social media thrre is no space for children. This trend will grt worse for a long time before it gets better.

  9. Andrei

    To be honest I kinda miss his website. He had an outstanding writing style and sense of humor. Do you guys remember that article “how to choose a wife” :)))
    But yeah, I agree with you, he was consistent with his views. At some point he was advocating the merit of “McDonald’s diet” and after a while he went full carnivore, ditching all carbs.

    1. Truth Seeker Post author

      Same. I also miss other bloggers that I used to follow. Sometimes I go to webarchive to read their past work.

    2. Sachin

      One of my friend introduced victors website in 2013. I followed him and in 2015 I wrote an email to him when I was very sad n in a big problem. I was jobless and in my last job I was making $292 per month. He just wrote 6 words In reply and gave me right website to contact. I worked on those contacts. And within one year I made $100k in one year which completely changed my life.

      I informed him later regarding this

      He didn’t even remember my name but he was very happy.

      If we leave his meat eating thing

      He is a very very good person and very honest to the world and to his readers who were 97% male.

      I invited him to india but he didn’t come.

      Even now I search about him and this is how I came to this article

      1. Truth Seeker Post author

        What was that miracle website

    1. Daniel

      Gran análisis del creador de B&D. A mí ese blog me ayudó mucho en su tiempo y le tomé mucho aprecio a V. Pride. Incluso había una versión en español supuestamente autorizada por él, con sus artículos traducidos, pero no tenía mucho material.

      Hace unos días volví a leer sus libros. Todos: New World Ronin, Monk Mode, The Blog Artist y 30 Days of Discipline. Buenos, pero sus doctrinas son impracticables a menos que tengas la disciplina de un soldado, algo que ninguno de sus seguidores, yo incluido, tiene.

      También eché una revisión a Body Of Spartan, que no es más que un programa de ejercicios 5×5. ¿Lo conoces? ¿Qué opinas? Supongo que lo mismo que del 5×5 en general.

      Para finalizar, creo que él simplemente llegó a la conclusión natural a la que llega todo hombre que emprende el tipo de búsqueda que siempre enseñó: el final de todo (y su principio) es Dios. No hay nada más antes ni después, y creo que esa es la enseñanza más importante que nos dejó.

      Aún hay muchos de sus artículos en la Wayback Machine, por si a alguien le interesa volverlos a leer. Gracias y saludos desde México.

  10. TC

    He would also actively promote in his articles the use of drugs, not only anabolic steroids but stimulant drugs and others, many of which were not adequately understood or tested. I think he even sold some of them through his affiliates. Effectively he was a drug pusher too. Using drugs is one thing. Encouraging other, naive, people to use them is another. Let’s not forget that.

  11. Erik

    I followed his website from around 2012 til its end. Victor was good at being interesting even if you disagreed with him. Ultimately his main grift of you can be an entrepreneur failed, for all the reasons you stated. I was never rich but I did come to a point of no billls and no needs and yes that causes you to look deeper. The journey isn’t smooth.

    1. TC

      Interesting that you use the word grift. I agree. If I had to describe him in one word it would be: grifter. I think his integrity is highly questionable and I don’t think he really gave a shit about the people he professed to be trying to help. Hopefully he’s realised this as part of his epiphany and has stopped. For some reason I’m having trouble believing it though. I suspect he’s out there grifting away, just using Christianity as his tool rather blogging. Hopefully I’m wrong.

  12. Ismet

    I think one decisive factor in Victor Pride’s quitting blogging is that Google stopped promoting blogs in 2016 after Trump’s election into office.

    The MSM decided to monopolize information traffic because they blamed the internet for Clinton’s loss. Since Big Tech is left-leaning, they obliged and promoted MSM sites such as CNN instead of blogs. Lots of blogs died after that. Blogging is dead.

  13. Dexon

    Victor/Nick was the first one who got me to think about my life. My life was going in a standard trajectory before finding B&D. I did not think for myself. I was a NPC.

    Ironically not much has changed in my life because I got very sick after finding his blog for years. It was a long term illness. Not sure if my life would of been better with his advice. But he seemed like a good guy.

    I found it interesting he dropped it all and felt bad for emotionally manipulating his audience for monetary gain. I respect that because most salesmen do not care at all and have little conscience and think the audience deserves to be scammed for being “suckers”. Shows you he had a decent character underneath.

    Him going to christianity was abrupt but made sense. A lot of people think he did that to ride the next wave. I doubt it. He seemed genuine about it and even after he quit the blog he was still into christianity. How can that be “for money”? Lol.

    It’s funny how people always think everything is for tactical purposes but you could tell he was broken and needed to find what really made him tick. I hope to hear from him one day to see where he ended up.

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