How Peptides Conquered the Internet

14:09Ezra Marcus:So when I was like in the very earliest stages of my research and I was looking up peptide guides, I would just end up on these like crazy bodybuilding forums and like weird subreddits and discords. And, you know, one of the guys I talked to, Jaden Clark, who has popularized sort of the peptides in San Francisco, he also is a bodybuilder and kind of a self-described gym bro. And so he said that like back in Australia where he's from, all of the gym guys are constantly recommending each other peptides because it's sort of a spinoff of the interest in steroids and in growth hormone and things like that.

14:40Jasmine Sun:Yeah, I have like only ducked into bodybuilder forums when people there are getting dunked on. Like it's not a part of the internet that I have so much time on. But that's my understanding is like there was an earlier version of reality in which this idea of medical self-experimentation was kind of like cordoned off. And it was cordoned off among people where they were self-researching and doing a lot of work, whether they were getting to the right answers or not, to figure out, like, they were sharing information about molecules. They understood the risks they were taking. Sometimes it was working, sometimes it wasn't.

15:11Jasmine Sun:But it existed in this kind of confined space. How does it start to break containment out of the bodybuilding community?

15:18Ezra Marcus:So bodybuilding has this big overlap with the biohacker community broadly, where there is a common practice of experimenting on yourself like Labra and importing research chemicals. Non-FDA approved drugs are under the banner of research chemicals to then self-inject and just frankly see what happens, share with your buddies at the gym, tell them what works. And so biohacking is sort of the way that that crosses into the tech mainstream, since a lot of tech folks are also very interested in body hacking. Can new forms of science, like improve my fitness, my productivity, whatever? And I think because Zempic was such a craze and has worked really well to help a lot of people lose a lot of weight, people think, oh, if there's this magic shot I can take for weight loss, maybe there's a magic shot for everything else.

16:02Ezra Marcus:And so I think the Zempic boom and the GLP boom is what has precipitated all of this interest in other experimental peptides.

16:09Jasmine Sun:So you feel like Ozembit kind of like opened the door because it introduced more people to the idea of peptides. Like the idea that at home you would just put a needle into your skin is just like up until very recently for most people, something they won't do. Still something a lot of people won't do. But GLP-1s broke that seal for a lot of people.

16:26Ezra Marcus:Yeah, I mean, that's basically what a lot of the doctors I spoke to said. Because I was speaking to doctors in San Francisco and Southern California and other places, New York. And I was asking, when did you start hearing about peptides from your patients? When do people start coming in and asking about them? And the turning point was the Zempic. It was people starting to think, you don't have to be a druggie to be injecting yourself. GLP-1 injection sites ranked by someone who's tried them all. Let's go. This here is Epitaph Thursday. I haven't done a step-by-step in a while. So we are going to go ahead and do that for you guys today.

16:59Ezra Marcus:If you're new to your GLP-1 journey, whether you just started or you're about to start, This is the exact jab day routine you need to follow to mitigate side effects. Even among the gray market peptides, like the most popular peptides are in the GLP category. So it's either GLP-1s or it's GLP-2s terzepatide, or increasingly most common in the communities I spoke with was retitrutide, which is a GLP-3. It's the sort of next generation weight loss drug that's even more effective and is still in phase three human clinical trials, but that people expect will get FDA approval. And yeah, basically, like, I remember I saw this tweet that was like, oh, it's so funny how Chinese peptides hit San Francisco and then everyone developed self-control at the same time.

17:41Ezra Marcus:Or another woman was telling me she's on one of the GLPs and she is a startup founder. And she said, I noticed all of a sudden that in all of these launch videos I'm watching, none of the founders are overweight anymore. And I started to feel self-conscious about my own weight. And so she ended up getting on Reddit True Tide as well through Gray Market. sources.

18:05Jasmine Sun:So in Silicon Valley, it seems a bunch of research-minded nerds have spread these drugs, largely through word of mouth, after having been inspired by peptides' earlier adopters, the online bodybuilding community.

18:20Jasmine Sun:The next places peptides go, though, are both a bit seedier and a bit more concerning. After a short break, we follow peptides into two internet neighborhoods that I did not realize were at all adjoined. Maha and the Lux Maxxers.

19:04Jasmine Sun:Transcription by CastingWords Grammarly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work, where you already write. It's loaded with agents that help you sound natural and engaging. AI is everywhere, but most tools either take over or flatten your voice. Grammarly works differently. Use AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. 90 % of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing. It adjusts phrasing, clarity, and style, so your writing sounds like you, not generic AI. And it works seamlessly across more than 500 ,000 apps and websites.

19:38Jasmine Sun:So your support is always there when you need it. This is AI that works with you, not over you. In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com.

19:56Jasmine Sun:This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone. There's nothing about spring that just gives me fresh energy. The days are longer, everything feels lighter. Makes me want to actually follow through on the things I've been putting off, like learning a new language. If you start now, by summer, you could already feel so much more confident speaking and understanding. That's why Rosetta Stone is such a smart place to begin. They've been a trusted leader in language learning for over 30 years, with millions of users and 25 languages to choose from. Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and more.

20:25Jasmine Sun:Their immersive method helps you learn naturally. There's no relying on English translations. Instead, you connect words, visuals, and meeting in context. So you're building real understanding from the start. I am on a mission to learn Spanish. I will update you in these ads as it goes. Ready to start learning a new language this spring? Visit rosettastone.com slash search engine today to explore Rosetta Stone and choose the language that's right for you. Go to rosettastone.com slash search engine now and begin your language learning journey.

21:06Jasmine Sun:Welcome back to the show.

21:11Jasmine Sun:So this is what we charted before the break. Peptides first appeared online in the early 2000s on bodybuilding forums, one more obscure chemical that the bench pressers are trying. They stay there more than a decade. But in the late 2010s, biohackers, Bay Area tech geeks who wanted to experiment on their bodies, they'd started getting into this too. At this point, peptides have left message boards. They're now being discussed also on self-optimization podcasts. Podcasts, famously, a gateway drug. But peptides remained essentially niche until just a few years ago. 2023 is when Ozempic changes everything.

21:49Jasmine Sun:After Ozempic, lots of people go online looking for off-brand, gray market Ozempic from compound pharmacies and Chinese labs. Some of these places, in addition to selling generic GLP-1s, also sell other peptides. And these other peptides are now being advertised by a rising class of influencers who will spread them to new communities. I talked to a second writer about this phase of the peptide spread, reporter Ezra Marcus. Ezra spends a lot of time on the internet's margins. What he helped me see was how an unregulated algorithmic marketing machine was spun up for these peptides, made up of a patchwork of influencers on TikTok and Reels.

22:28Jasmine Sun:I think only in the last two or three years did the kind of social media e-commerce meets algorithmic hype cycle start to take place. So help me see, like, what does that internet look like? Like, as a person whose algorithm is not tuned towards persuading me that I could be thinner, handsomer, younger, whatever, like, what are people who are seeing that seeing? You're seeing a lot of really prominent influencers, you'd call them, kind of in the Maha space. Alternative wellness, people that are in RFK's orbit. Like there's a guy named Gary Brecka, who's a really prominent anti-aging life extension influencer who sells peptides on his website.

23:14Jasmine Sun:Peptides might sound like the future of health, but they are already here. Here's how they work to heal your body. Peptides are sequences of amino acids. And why is that important? because your body recognizes these. It can break them down. They're called metabolites and it can get rid of the waste. When we put chemicals - He's just like a jacked 50-something guy who sells supplements and peptides and all this stuff on his website. He's quite prominent. You know, he's like millions of followers and it's just like a big deal in that world. Talk to your doctor about peptides and how a peptide might help you improve your gut health, improve the tone, texture of your skin, reduce fine lines and wrinkles, possibly restore your hair, raise your natural growth hormone levels, balance your hormones, and even reduce anxiety.

23:57Jasmine Sun:Peptides are the safest wave of the future. So I think there was also this sort of like larger phenomenon over the last few years of people rejecting the traditional medical establishment in a perhaps politically coded way, where it was about, you know, independence from the regime and the establishment and this, that, and the other. Peptides were a way of taking your health into your own hands with this sort of maha valence to it. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.

24:32Jasmine Sun:He had RFK on his podcast a year ago. And I'm joined by a very prominent figure in the space, the leader and head of the Maha movement, none other than Mr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. himself. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Gary, I'm happy to be here with you finally. I'm like, I'm happy to have you. And RFK was talking about, you know, we're going to end the war on peptides at the FDA. And, you know, I thank you for what you're doing, and we're going to end the war at FDA against alternative medicine. Thank you. The war on stem cells, the war on chelating drugs, the war on peptides, the war on anything that, you know, is not going to make a big part of it.

25:11Jasmine Sun:Music to my ears. The war on vitamins. It's funny. I look at RFK, and I think, like, I don't want whatever he's taking. Yeah. I mean, he has that like Sean Penn in one bottle after another kind of leathery. It's like he was microwaved in a youth machine. Yeah. But other people see it differently. I mean, clearly, if you look at the news of the last few years. Obviously, we've all been living on the same internet, so I don't have to explain to you that COVID caused many people to have a permanent loss of faith in the medical establishment. Or that one of those people somehow now leads health and human services.

25:45Jasmine Sun:But the anti-medical establishment internet has continued to grow bigger and stranger since 2021. Reporter Jasmine Sun has also been paying attention to the evolution of that world.

25:56Ezra Marcus:So the podcasts, the subsects, the blogs, the forums, a lot of these exploded in popularity during a time when people were really scared about their health, where they felt like they were getting inconsistent information or what they perceived to be misinformation from official sources. And so it led to this like flourishing of an all-medicine ecosystem. So like some of the same people who are ivermectin guys are now becoming peptide guys. All right. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. This is a conversation with a guy who I first heard of when he was rumored to be in the running for head of the FDA under Trump in his first term.

26:35Ezra Marcus:I was listening to my very first episode of the Truth Podcast by Vivek Ramaswamy, where he was podcasting with Balaji Srinivasan, who was the Coinbase CTO and a very influential investor and executive in Silicon Valley, who at one point was being considered for FDA commissioner. Balaji Srinivasan, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here, Vic. And Balaji and Vivek were, you know, talking about their frustrations with the FDA, with the way that COVID was handled, because even if people believed in vaccines, I think there was a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley around slow approvals or school shutdowns and things like that.

27:11Ezra Marcus:And there's this great line that Apology said that was like, just like the SEC is trying to keep you from getting wealthy.

27:18Jasmine Sun:That's right. And so we can see where the SEC is protecting you from getting wealthy. We will now soon see that the FDA is protecting you from getting healthy.

27:26Ezra Marcus:The FDA is trying to keep you from getting healthy. I thought that was like hilarious because there is this mindset that sort of developed that our regulatory institutions are actually trying to keep the little guys down. And that's why you need these like crypto guys on podcasts to tell you what to buy to get rich. You need these like podcasters to teach you what peptides to take to get healthy. So I think COVID is a weird time for online information.

27:53Jasmine Sun:What do you make of that quote, though? Because like, do you think that there's just a wide swath of people who really have become paranoid enough about institutions that they think, like, for instance, that But peptides are being gatekept from them because, like, the pharmaceutical companies are greedy and they don't—

28:09Ezra Marcus:Oh, absolutely.

28:11Jasmine Sun:That's how they view it.

28:11Ezra Marcus:Yeah, I mean, I think so. You know, like, a lot of it comes from this sort of idea that people should do their own research. And rather than having the paternalistic institutions decide what the boundaries of your action are, as an individual, you should be empowered to research your own shit coins and to research your own peptides. and they shouldn't be making these risk trade-offs for you, you know? And so, yeah, the big pharma stuff was a big complaint that I heard from a lot of peptide users, was like, especially with the people who started off with the GLPs, the way they'd put it is like, I'm spending over$1 ,000 a month to be on prescription GLPs.

28:53Ezra Marcus:And then I find out that you can get literally the same substance for$100 to$200 a month from a gray market Chinese source. And then they start to go, wait, like that doesn't make any sense. Like why is Eli Lilly making me pay 10 times what I could be paying for the exact same thing? And so first of all, I think like a lot of anger with just like healthcare costs makes people go like there's something bad going on. Or even when you ask, like, why haven't most peptides been approved? Why haven't they had any clinical trials done, right? Like, why are there no clinical trials for BPC-157? It's basically because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to run clinical trials and get something FDA approved.

29:33Ezra Marcus:And unless a drug is targeting a disease and it's easily patentable and you're going to have a moat as a pharma company, most pharma companies are not going to invest in extremely, extremely expensive clinical trials. And that is, like, a reality of the incentive. So when people hear that, they sort of feel like it is rigged and the FDA, by requiring this$100 million process, is not going to allow me to take the things that I want. So I think that's probably my best, like, steel man of the place that people are coming from.

30:05Jasmine Sun:So that's what peptides have meant for Maha. Not just exciting drugs making exciting promises, but a way to boycott big pharma. to spend your dollars in an anti-establishment, do-your-own-research kind of marketplace. If the government says it might not be safe, order two before they ban it. 2024 is when peptides online became unavoidable. Unavoidable because their newest, most fervent converts had begun making testimonials about these drugs. Testimonials that were everywhere on social media. In 2024, members of one of the scariest online communities get on board. People who are hot and young.

30:43Jasmine Sun:Here's Ezra Marquez. You're seeing a lot of videos of young, ripped, athleisure-wearing gym influencers telling you that, like, you know, a better living through chemistry is possible, and all you need to do is take the shot, and they're happy to give you the information if you, you know, go to the link in their bio and buy a course or buy from the vendor affiliate link in their bio. It's just, like, straightforward e-com marketing, Only in this case, it's an injectable of maybe dubious provenance. Then there's a kind of other layer of it that's really gone more viral more recently of the kind of look-smaxing type of people.

31:20Jasmine Sun:And that's its own sort of discrete niche of, let's say, black-pilled, kind of right-wing, adjacent incel, adjacent culture of mostly young men talking about how the only way you can achieve success in life is to rise to the top of the heap physically. because otherwise nobody will ever respect you. And so these are people who are willing to try out pretty extreme interventions, whether it's leg lengthening surgery, jaw surgery, steroids, you name it. These people kind of adopted peptides and I think became some of the most visible figures driving engagement on it. And it stopped just being like 20 and 30-something gym influencers and became just like 18-year-old high schoolers being like, here's my peptide stack so that I can mog at school, which I think is a pretty new and shocking development.

32:09Jasmine Sun:So wait, I want to watch, can we watch, like, I kind of just want to see the internet that, like, a 15-year-old boy could land on. Like, I just want to watch one of those videos because I feel like they feel pretty different. Yeah, let's do it. Today's guest has redefined the meaning of self-improvement. I maximize all metrics of my life. I've just come to the conclusion, based on anecdotes, based on numbers, that looks are the most important metric, and it would be insane to not prioritize them. I use... Okay, what are we watching? This is a guy named Clavicular. And I mean, Clavicular looks like an AI cartoon of a handsome person.

32:45Jasmine Sun:Yeah, yeah. Like he's got like rosy cheeks and curly hair and like high cheekbones. They began injecting testosterone at just 14 years old, claiming that natural puberty wasn't optimized for the modern world. I started with 300 milligrams of testosterone and I did that for a while Up until I was 16, I'm 100 % confident that I made the right decision in my life. I'm so glad that I look a little bit more mature. Today at 19, he's garnered a massive audience online, where he says that everything in life is determined by one thing. So it's$35 ,000 for a double jaw surgery with full facial implants.

33:18Jasmine Sun:I know the amount of money that I'm investing. And clavicular is, I think, the first explicitly, like, looks-maxing aligned figure to go kind of properly viral into the mainstream where, like, kids across the country know who this is. So it's like before that, Luxmaxing is like a more fragmented movement of, like, teenage boys giving themselves horrible body dysmorphia. He's, like, the first person who becomes, I would say at this point, mainstream famous as a Luxmaxing influencer. Yeah, I think that's about right. This principle follows Wolf's law that a bone is going to grow back stronger. after you do these localized micro traumas.

33:58Jasmine Sun:So you're going to lay in your bed to brace your head for CTE, and you're going to bone smash. You're going to lay in your bed and brace your head for... CTE, isn't that like brain damage? Well, no, so that's why you lay in your bed. Okay. And that's going to grow your facial bones. You smash, like you punch yourself in the face? Yeah. Clavicular is a big advocate for bone smashing. Clavicular is a big advocate for bone smashing is a sentence I could have happily died without ever knowing. I mean, that's how I feel about a lot of this. Like, I've just seen, I've seen so much clavicular content, and I'm just, every time I see another video, I'm like, what crucial fact of world history did I just lose?

34:41Jasmine Sun:Like, there goes the capital of Poland or something. But yeah, I mean, I think it's all just part of this kind of, like, Patrick Bateman persona he has adopted for himself, where he just is doing sort of like shock jock kind of stuff in this very flat, affectless way. He's always saying the N-word. He hangs out with Nick Fuentes. He says all this sort of completely over-the-top misogynistic stuff. You know, he's using sort of looks-max or jargon. What are we talking about by hot? Like, good-looking? Like, some people think that, like, Sidney Sweeney is extremely attractive. Um, I would say, I don't want to scandalize anybody, a married man, I would say Sydney Sweeney is very attractive.

35:25Jasmine Sun:I would say that she's pretty malformed. Her upper maxilla is extremely recessed, right? She's got the eyes of doom with no infraorbital support. She's really not that much of a looker in her face. Talking about how this disgusting woman has recessed, canceled tilt, and her maxilla are suboptimal, and that's why she's— So it's like weird phrenology speak to describe some woman as not being hot enough. Yeah, but it comes out of this like sort of 4chan, shock jock, racist, incel mode. But then Clavicular has sort of taken that as the sort of baseline posture, but then added this entire other layer of like, to be fair, really deeply researched, like looks maxing ideas on top of it, where he knows like he can talk about what peptides do what, he can talk about steroids, he can talk about what surgeries can make your jaw more appealing.

36:19Jasmine Sun:How do you look like that? with peptides and steroids. Wait, so what peptides do you take? I think redish, you can't, GH, something called melanotan tube, which helps you get a little bit more tan without having to go in the sun too crazy. I might need that. Yeah, that's a really good one. It also makes you get crazy boners. Like, it's fun as fuck. But so, like, we're in this phase of the internet where most of the internet seems to be run by provocateurs. it's hard to actually suss out their attentions. Like, do they actually believe all the edgelord things they're saying? Are they playing up their edgelordiness for attention?

36:59Jasmine Sun:Do they actually know the difference? Whatever. But if you just look at it as a business model, it's basically like you have this guy, he behaves in provocative ways to get attention, which works. You're a teenage boy, you're scrolling TikTok, you're scrolling reels, you see this guy like saying the N-word, you're like, oh my God, what an asshole. and then the second thought you have is his face looks better than mine. And so it's like he's bringing you to the car crash of his behavior but then the thing you get curious about is his advice about how to be a giga chat. Yeah, I think that's exactly it and this guy is just like extremely good at playing the internet in a way to get attention by being provocative and being around other provocative online people And, you know, for this new generation of streamers, it's just purely about it's a numbers game.

37:51Jasmine Sun:And then you go in Clavicular's bio, and he's selling a course for Clavicular's Guide to Looks Maxing, or you can pay for one-on-one coaching with him. They're, like, convincing a person who's 18 to have the anxieties of a person who's middle-aged. Absolutely. It's so dark. Try 15. Oh, God. I had a source at a New York City elite private school telling me that students at these schools are taking peptides and GLP-1s. And they're getting mini fridges and buying peptides from TikTok influencers and hiding them from their parents in their mini fridge in their room. And they're 15, 16 years old. That's insane.

38:33It's so confusing for me because I'm both more disconnected from this internet than the last one.

38:39Jasmine Sun:But also, the main way that I experience teenage boys is, like, I have stepkids and they have friends. I'm constantly, like, driving them places or they're, like, doing sleepovers or whatever. And it's weird. I look at this stuff and I'm like, oh, my God. That seems horrible for, like, an average 15-year-old kid's, like, ideas about themselves, ideas about race, ideas about women. But then I see the teenage boys in my life and, like, they seem self-conscious. They don't seem, like, hateful. Yeah. I mean, I think that with something like Clavicular and even Andrew Tate, there's the adult way of assuming that kids are taking all this stuff at face value and being like, oh, my God, our young men are being radicalized.

39:21Jasmine Sun:And obviously, just to some extent, that's happening with some kids. But I think for the most part, like, the kids are seeing this stuff as ridiculous. they might like on some level be sort of more sympathetic to edgelord ideas than adults are as all teenagers are but i think that for many of them clavicular is like just another kind of meme basically and the same same as andrew tate same as a lot of the stuff like they get that it's inherently ridiculous even if maybe they might to a certain extent buy into the like looks maxing stuff they're also just like watching this stuff because for them it's entertainment But I, you know, my sense is that there's a sort of adult way of freaking out about it that like doesn't give teenage boys enough credit for their ability to laugh at stuff that is inherently ridiculous.

40:11Jasmine Sun:I think that's right. The other thing I'm curious about is just, do you feel like with peptide marketing, do you feel that it is aimed just in your experience of the internet? Are you seeing it more aimed at men? Are you just seeing that it is equal opportunity in a way that cosmetics wouldn't have been in the past? I think it's more equal opportunity. I think that a certain sector of, like, looks-maxing, gym-focused peptides marketing is more for men, but I do think there are all sorts of people selling this to women as well. It's weird to draw a line from somebody figuring out finally how to make video for social media work to teenagers that have mini fridges with injectables in their bedrooms.

40:51Jasmine Sun:Totally.

40:57Jasmine Sun:After the break, we leave the kingdom of Clavicular and head back to Silicon Valley, where our story will resolve on, I promise, a less doomy note.

41:43Jasmine Sun:This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vistaprint. Lately, I keep coming up with ideas for stickers that I want to make. I work in the podcast industry, but I sometimes wish that I worked in the relatively funny sticker industry. which is why I was so excited to find Vistaprint, which makes printing all sorts of things, including stickers, very easy. When you're building something from the ground up, every detail matters. And Vistaprint makes it easy to think bigger, whether that's merch for listeners, branded apparel for your team, or signage for a live event. What I really appreciate is that they meet you right where you are.

42:17Jasmine Sun:If you need help picking the right product, tweaking a design, or even rethinking your whole look, Vistaprint has tools and real human support ready to go. There's a reason over a million people trust Vistaprint for their small business print needs. It just works. And it helps you show up confidently. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20 % off with code NEW20 at vistaprint.com.

42:44Jasmine Sun:This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas. You're probably trying to figure out your 2026 goals. Here's a suggestion. Why don't you try prioritizing comfort? Comfort in how you move, what you wear, and how you show up every day. Bombas makes that goal incredibly easy. Their new Bombas sports socks are engineered for specific activities, running, hiking, snowboarding, even all sport wear. And for the non-sporty moments, Bombas has that covered too. I am a longtime wearer of Bombas socks. I find them very cozy and comfortable, particularly in the winter. Add in Bombas underwear and t-shirts, which are buttery smooth and breathable, and suddenly your whole outfit feels better.

43:26Jasmine Sun:and every item you buy helps someone else too. One purchased, one donated. With over 150 million donations and counting, head over to bombast.com slash engine and use code engine for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash engine, code engine at checkout.

43:48Jasmine Sun:This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Chime. Chime is changing the way people bank and it feels like banking finally caught up to real life. This is smarter, fee-free banking built for you. Not like old school banks that still charge overdraft fees and monthly fees just for existing. Chime is built for everyday people, not the 1%. With MyPay, you can access up to$500 of your pay when you want. And with direct deposit, you can get paid up to two days early. That kind of flexibility makes a real difference. You can forget overdraft fees, minimum balance requirements, and monthly fees.

44:18Jasmine Sun:Chime isn't just smarter banking, it's the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to chime.com slash search engine. That is chime.com slash search engine.

45:03Jasmine Sun:Welcome back to the show.

45:08Jasmine Sun:I have to say, as a person trying to come to my own internal verdict on peptides, I notice my view of them changes based on where I encounter them. A tech CEO trying some compound I've never heard of? Fine. Some Adonis young man with a syringe convincing teenagers online to buy his stack? Obviously not fine. It's the issue so often with any drug. That it's not just the inherent riskiness or safety of the substance, it's the context around it. As a general rule when it comes to drug reporting, I try not to ask reporters whether or not they've taken the drugs. The late, brilliant Mark Kleiman, who wrote a lot about drug policy, once said, quote, If you do drug policy and you're asked whether you use drugs, you've got two choices.

45:54Jasmine Sun:You can say, yes, I'm a lawbreaker. Please come arrest me and ignore everything I say because I'm a bad person. Or, no, actually, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. End quote. So I try not to ask reporters about their drug use on air. But, in this case, I broke my rule. And I'm glad I did because it led to some answers that helped me settle my thinking on these drugs. At least for the moment. I asked Jasmine Sutton whether she tried peptides.

46:22Ezra Marcus:I've been tempted, but I haven't done it. So that's the short answer is I haven't tried any gray market peptides, though I am interested because I think that most people, when they're telling you a story about how taking BPC-157 or Reticutide or Epitale and changed their life, they're not actually trying to sell you something most of the time. They're telling what is a real experience that they believe that they had, and it did something for them. You know, now the doctor part of my brain says, I mean, I'm not a doctor, but the doctors I've talked to says N of 1 is not a good experiment just because it worked for somebody else in a particular context.

46:57Ezra Marcus:Maybe it's a placebo. Maybe it only worked for them. Maybe if you have different health conditions, you're going to experience something very different. And so as this stuff goes mainstream, that's something that does concern me just because there's a lot of young girls with eating disorders, young men trying to look better. And I don't know that everyone has the ability or will do their research. And so there is this sort of like the thing about do your own research is that offloads responsibility from the person shilling to the person doing the drug. And I think a lot of people are going to make mistakes.

47:29Ezra Marcus:But I think one of the things that this reporting experience did was it did make me more sympathetic to actually the existence of a gray market. or it made me think about why gray markets exist, i.e. things that are not illegal, but things that are not being endorsed, right? I am a little sympathetic to the idea that people, adults who are aware of the risks, can run experiments on themselves, not telling everyone else to do it, just like doing what they do and writing up a blog post about how that went or even just in some cases solving a health problem that they had struggled with for many years.

48:05Ezra Marcus:And if that's what solves your health problem, like power to you. So I think overall, I understood why you might want spaces of freedom or spaces of experimentation that shouldn't hit the mainstream. I frankly don't want to hit the mainstream, should not be legitimized, should not be advertised or marketed, but that allow people to start poking around the edges. And with Silicon Valley in particular, one thing I think is, if this stuff really works, then someone is going to invest a lot of money and then taking it through the rest of the process and figuring out the legal barriers and figuring out the clinical testing.

48:40Ezra Marcus:And if like one guy in his basement with some syringes is like the thing that, you know, makes someone realize maybe there's a there there and we're going to actually run the test now, then I am happy for that to happen.

48:52Jasmine Sun:It's funny. It's like your view is basically like, the nice thing about a gray market is because it's like, it exists somewhere in between legal and illegal. You don't have like a massive marketing push behind it. You have something that for the people who are willing to tolerate a little bit more risk, it's kind of like putting something on a high shelf, ideally. And that while you yourself don't want to be in like a single person research study with the only body that you'll ever have in life, what is good about it happening in the culture that you're documenting is that some of those people might find something useful and then they might put it through the normal testing and regulatory hurdles where everybody else can benefit from it.

49:32Ezra Marcus:I think that's right. Yeah. And I think we need some people who are more risk-tolerant than the rest of us who are on the frontier. I mean, this kind of goes back to your earlier question about why cover San Francisco. Like, I like living in San Francisco. Sometimes people are like, I can't believe you have to deal with these people and talk to these, like, crazy tech people all the time. And I'm like, I love it because I am not as risk-tolerant as a lot of these people are. I am not injecting the peptides. I am not pouring all my money into crypto, etc. etc. But I think that sometimes when you have people willing to take crazy risks, including failing a lot of the time and screwing stuff up, the rest of us can learn from that.

50:11Ezra Marcus:And again, maybe we'll get something good out of it. Maybe we won't, but maybe we will.

50:24Jasmine Sun:Jasmine Sun. You can find her work at her sub stack. We'll have a link to that sub stack and to her peptides piece in the show notes. And you can usually find Ezra Marcus at New York Magazine. We'll have a link to his peptides reporting in the show notes as well.

50:57Jasmine Sun:This week, for the credits, something a little different. One of our listeners, Ned Wilson, wrote in and asked if he could read them for us. Ned works in film and television. He's a long-time listener to this show. He's also a finder, one of our listeners who financially supports our show at the highest possible level. When someone who is paying for your work asks if they can do your work for you, what answer could you give but yes? Take it away, Ned.

51:28Jasmine Sun:Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by PJ Vogt and Sharifi Penimanaini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarian. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Shepf. If you'd like to support the show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode at searchengine.show.

52:13Jasmine Sun:Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

52:36Jasmine Sun:is putting on your favorite podcast. With Progressive, it is. Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate, then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like. Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.