How Peptides Conquered the Internet

Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ Vote. Each week on the show, we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. This week, we are trying to understand the sudden surge in Americans, self-experimenting with peptides, gray market Chinese peptides, injectable compounds that promise to change your body in all sorts of possibly desirable ways. That story plus some help deciding how to feel about it after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI, the global film company that champions great cinema. From iconic directors to emerging authors, there's always something new to discover. If you're looking for something really special, check out Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, the eagerly awaited new film from Jim Jarmish, now streaming on MUBI in the US. It follows adult children navigating their relationships with somewhat distant parents and each other. It starts Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayam Bealeck, Charlotte Rampling, Kate Blanchett, Vicky Crips, India Moore, and Lucas Sabat. MUBI is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe. Perfect for lovers of great cinema and for anyone who hasn't discovered how much they love it yet. To stream the best of cinema, you can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/S Search Engine. That's MUBI.com/S Search Engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. MUBI is a great cinema. This week we are covering peptides, not as a medical story. We're covering it as anthropology, meaning we want to know how so many disparate groups of Americans in such a short time went from not having heard of these drugs, to buying them online from Chinese factories and injecting them into their bodies. This is a story about the internet and how it connected some unlikely communities. And I heard it from two different reporters. The first one you'll meet, she writes a sub-stack I've been reading more and more these days, as I continuously try to make sense of our evolving internet. First things first, can you just introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Jasmine Sun. I am an independent writer covering AI and Silicon Valley culture from San Francisco. AI and Silicon Valley culture. That's how you describe your beat? Yeah. I also describe it with other words I say anthropology of disruption I like, because I'm very interested in the very personal texture of what frontier tech and change feels like. I'm interested in San Francisco as a cultural phenomenon, both the tech industry and the technologies and the companies, but also the weird trends in ideologies and sub-cultures running through this place as a result of tech and its influence. I really enjoy your writing. I know somebody who's on the East Coast and feels like strange ideas are moving through San Francisco very quickly. Sometimes they make it here or sometimes they don't, but it feels like a laboratory for weird shit, not just technology, but just like ways to live. Why are you drawn to that? Why do you like being there for that? I mean, I think you kind of said it. As a writer, as an observer, I want to be where the weird people are. I wondered, is there something geographic to it? Obviously, there's all the tech stuff like biohacking and AI and whatever, but even before that, lots of political ideas were born in the Bay Area, right? The Black Panthers came out of Oakland or the Sierra Club. I feel like there's something about California and the sort of frontier ethic of people going west and getting as far away from the institutions and the Emperor's view as they can. There's a Chinese proverb about basically going to where the mountains are high and the Emperor's far to be able to actually experiment with new ways of living. In China, they used that to refer to Yunnan, which is the Southwestern province, which is their kind of hippie capital. In the US, it's probably San Francisco, is where people go to experiment with new political, cultural, technological beliefs. They're so extreme about it. There's no sense of moderation in San Francisco. There's a lot of cults. People also now have so much money, which means that they can really realize every one of their crazy dreams to its fullest extent. I'm going to construct a brand new city from scratch in California. I'm going to go to space. I'm going to hire a bunch of blood boys to transfer their young blood to mine and see if that makes me live forever. It's not just people with crazy ideas now, but also with the resources to realize them. I just feel like as a writer, that's the most interesting thing in the world. You're running around here talking to all these people far from the Emperor's view. One of the stories that has, I feel like it's been percolating for the past couple of years. I had an awareness of it, but anything that involves science or medicine, I'm always like, how long can I wait before I have to actually understand this? You've been covering it really well. It's peptides. What is just at the generic sort of six grade science class level? What is a peptide? Yeah. A peptide is a short chain of amino acids. You can think of it like a mini protein. They have very simple structures. A lot of peptides are naturally occurring in the body, so insulin, oxytocin, etc. Some peptides are modified by pharmaceutical manufacturers to behave a little bit differently. They're also synthetic peptides. So it's actually a very broad class of drug and class of compound. But when we start talking about peptides as a biohacking or health trend, people are usually referring to particular experimental peptides that are not tested or run through a clinical trial process that people are purchasing from peptide pharmacies sometimes, drug manufacturers in other countries like China and testing on themselves. And so they can do anything from an oxytocin as the love hormone. There's also growth hormone adjacent peptides. There are copper peptides that supposedly help with skin. There's a supposedly help with sleep like epitalan, peptides like melanotan that promise to make your skin better. And I think the term Chinese peptides is a mimetic super weapon. Like you mentioned it at a party and everyone insulates like coming over like what is that? What's your stack? Can I try it? Even when I've brought it up as this is the project I'm working on, this is what I'm reporting about like instantly everyone comes over and is like oh you found a way to like get hotter, get healthier. Like tell me like don't get keep what's your stack. Wait until what when you say it's a mimetic super weapon, you mean that it's like there are certain topics that depending on what community you're in. But if you raise them at a party it's just like everyone just sort of summons to the conversation whether they have opinions or they have questions. And it sounds like it's like the combination of everyone's always looking for a fountain of youth. There's something risky and naughty about Chinese grey market chemicals. Like in a world where you have a culture of people who like risk taking optimization, this is just like catnip in a way that maybe it wouldn't even be in New York. Yeah, I think so basically. I think also frankly like the fact that they are Chinese at this cultural moment is very interesting to people. People are very aware of Chinese maxing like China is maybe winning the tech race, maybe not. And so I think there's like an extra power imbued in the peptides from the perception that they are Chinese. Wait, sorry, I have like three questions about that. What is Chinese maxing? Have you seen the memes that are like I'm at a very Chinese time in my life? Yes, but I don't understand them. Send this video to a friend that you met during a very Chinese time in your life. Like many of you I recently found out that I'm Chinese. Everyone's in a Chinese time in their life. There's like a big social media trend in mostly Gen Z in general around embracing Chinese ness. So I think that I think that I think that I think that I sort of hand in hand with like Nialism, about the US and being really bummed that like America is falling apart and like our government isn't working. And you know, I think to a lot of people, I think that I think that I think that I think that's a lot of people who are in the US. I think that I think that I think that I think that I think that I think that I think that I'm going to be a lot of people who are in the US. I think to a lot of people it looks, I wouldn't say that this is accurate, but it's kind of like a paradise of everything's functional and people are happy and it's so high-tech. China has to be at least 100 year ahead of everybody else. Every city is beautifully designed with thousands of skyscrapers, incredible architecture. But anyway, I think like as folks have warmed up to the idea of China as being potentially more technologically advanced, the fact that the peptides are Chinese probably gives them some extra power. And just from a manufacturing point of view, like at what point does China enter the fray? Like how does China just become the US's sort of peptide supplier? So I was looking into this. I think it's actually quite a similar story to how China dominated manufacturing in so many other industries. The Chinese government gave subsidies in the 80s and 90s to a lot of local governments that were willing to invest in the drug supply chain. And they start at the most basic elements of the supply chain. So very simple compounds and drugs and have slowly been climbing up. up to pharmaceutical manufacturing and then now they're doing a lot of biotech innovation. But a lot of it is low labor costs, a high concentration of chemists and science and medical talent concentrated in the same place. These industry towns where everybody in this one town is some part of a drug supply chain. So China is actually the world's peptide manufacturing hub. And even if you are getting peptides from a lot of American companies, they are getting their raw materials from Chinese factories and then, you know, testing and processing and like putting them into the, say, insulin pens or the syringes or things like that. But people realize basically that if they wanted to cut out the middleman and do their own injection and do their own mixing of the peptides, they could go straight to the Chinese factories and buy them. Let me give you the advice that I wish I had when I first started and that's not to buy from the US sites. They're up charging you like crazy. All they do is buy their peptides from China, slap a label on them, and charge you 10 times the amount. And you don't like, there's like this funny strain of US China relations and this, both that Chinese laboratories are the supplier in many cases and also that the idea that this is like China branded isn't texting to people in like China's texting. Are people taking peptides as far as you know? I don't think so. I mean, it's too be clear. Like I didn't like go to China for the reporting, but I asked some family friends who are in China. I have some other friends in China who have been poking around and they seem to think the Americans are freaking crazy. You guys are insane. I don't know why you're doing this. You know, China manufacturers a lot of fentanyl and they're not doing that. So Chinese peptides are not mostly being taken by Chinese people. They're being taken by Americans. And what I wanted Jasmine to map for me was the path of cultural contagion that peptides followed. The bodybuilders to the Silicon Valley execs, how the maha movement picked peptides up, how teenage looks, Maxors had gotten in on this. I wanted to understand what had motivated these different tribes to experiment with peptides. So it turns out you can find posts about people seeking peptides on the internet as far back as 2005. This when the denizens of the message board, anabolicminds.com, users with names like Morpheus and Balewolf, were trading tips on how to source peptides. So if we really go back to the early early adopters, the earliest adopters are actually like the bodybuilding of fitness community. Oh yeah, it's a good day today. Gentlemen, because today we are discussing my top three peptides for muscle growth. You want to gain some muscle with this is the video for you. And so this is like pretty separate from tech world. It's like guys doing steroids in bodybuilding gyms together. I'm going to show you what I'm doing for my peptide stack right now to grow. I'm using three peptides and using them all post-workout. First one is TV 500, 5 milligrams. So when I was like in the very early stages of my research and I was looking up peptide guides, I should just end up on these like crazy bodybuilding forums and like weird subreddets and discord and you know, one of the guys I talked to Jayden Clark who has popularized sort of the peptides in San Francisco. He also is a bodybuilder and kind of a self-described gym row. 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 spin off of the interest in steroids and in growth hormone and things like that. Yeah, I have like only ducked into bodybuilder forums when people 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 like they were getting the right answers or not to figure out like like they were sharing information about molecules. They understood the risks they were taking. Sometimes it was working, sometimes it wasn't, but it like it existed in this kind of like confined space. How does it start to break containment out of the bodybuilding community? So bodybuilding has this big overlap with the biohacker community broadly where there's a common practice of experimenting on yourself like a lab rat and importing research chemicals, non FDA approved drugs or 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 bodyhacking, can new forms of science like improve my fitness, my productivity, whatever. And I think because Ezempic 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. And so I think the Ezempic boom and the GLP boom is what has precipitated all of this interest in other experimental peptides. So you feel like Ezempic 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 once broke that seal for a lot of people. 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 in Southern California and other places in New York. And I was asking when did you start hearing about peptides from your patients? And then people start coming in and asking about them. And the turning point was Ezempic, it was people starting to think you don't have to be a druggy to be injecting yourself. GLP injection sites ranked by someone who's tried them all. Let's go. This year's Epipathar's Day. 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. If you're new to your GLP1 journey, whether you just started or you're about to start, this is the exact jab, jab, or team 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 GLP1s or it's GLP2s to Ezempathide or increasingly most common in the community's I spoke with was red a true tide, which is a GLP3 is the sort of next generation weight loss drug that's even more effective and is still in phase 3 human clinical trials, but that people expect will get FDA approval. And yeah, basically, 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." 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.' But she ended up getting on red a true tide as well through gray market sources. 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. The next places peptides go though are both a bit cedar and a bit more concerning. After short break, we follow peptides into two internet neighborhoods that I did not realize were at all adjoined. Maha and the Luxemaxers. Welcome back to the show. So this is what we charted before the break. Peptides first peer 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 ozemic changes everything. After ozemic, lots of people go online looking for off-brand gray market ozemic, from compound pharmacies and Chinese labs. Some of these places, in addition to selling generic GLP ones, 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. I think only in the last two or three years, the kind of social media e-commerce meets algorithmic hype cycle starts to take place. So help me see what does that internet look like? Like as a person whose algorithm is not tuned towards persuading me that I could be then our handsomer or younger or whatever, 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 Breka who's a really prominent anti-aging life extension influencer who sells peptides on his website. Peptides might sound like the future of health, but they are already here. 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 in it. 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, I just like millions of followers. And it's just like a big deal in that world. You're a 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. Peptides are the safest wave of the future when done. 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 independence from the regime and the establishment and this down 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. He had RFK on his podcast a year ago. And I'm joined by a very prominent figure in the space. The leader in the head, the maha movement, none other than Mr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. himself. Thank you for coming on the bug. I'm happy to be here with you for having you. And RFK was talking about, you know, we're going to end the war on peptides of 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. You know, we're on stem cells, we're on a key leading drugs, we're on peptides, we're on anything that, you know, it is not going to make the same music to my ears. That's the war on vitamins. Is it 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 and one bottle after another kind of leathery. (laughing) It's like he was a microwave, didn't he 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. 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. So the podcasts, the subsacs, 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 either mechten guys are now becoming peptide guys. All right, I'm 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. I was listening to my very first episode of the Truth Podcast by Vivek Ramaswamy, where he was podcasting with Bolognese Renovassan, 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. Bolognese Renovassan, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here, Vic. So I think this will be the one that's-- Bolognese and Vivek were talking about their frustrations with FDA with the way that COVID was handled, because even if people believed in vaccines, I think there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley around slow approvals or school shutdowns and things like that. And there's this great line that Bolognese said that was like, just like the SEC is trying to keep you from getting wealthy. That's right. And so we can see what the SEC is protecting you from getting wealthy. We will now soon see if the FDA is protecting you from getting healthy. The FDA is trying to keep you from getting healthy. I thought that was 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 crypto guys on podcasts to tell you what to buy, to get rich. You need these podcasters to teach you what peptides to take to get healthy. So I think COVID is a weird time for online information. 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 peptides are being kept from them because the pharmaceutical companies are greedy and they don't-- Oh, absolutely. That's how they view it. Yeah. I mean, I think so. You know, a lot of it comes from this 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. 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 put it is like, I'm spending over $1,000 a month to be on prescription GLPs. And then I find out that you can get literally the same substance for $100 to $200 a month from a great market-trainy source. And then they start to go, wait, that doesn't make any sense. 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 a lot of anger with just health care costs makes people go, there's something bad going on. Or even when you ask, why haven't most peptides been approved? Why haven't they had any clinical trials done? Why are there no clinical trials for BPC157? It's basically because it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to run clinical trials and get something FDA approved. And unless a drug is targeting a disease and it's easily patentable and you're going to have a mo 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 steel man of the place that people are coming from. 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, here's as remark as. You're seeing a lot of videos of young, ripped, at the leisure wearing gym influencers telling you that 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 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 other layer of it that's really gone more viral, more recently, of the looks-maxing type of people. And that's its own discreet niche of, let's say, Blackpill, kind of right-wing, adjacent, in-sale, 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 have a respect to 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. So 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. He goes to 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-- OK, why are we watching? This is a guy named Clificular. And I mean, Clificular looks like an AI cartoon of a handsome person. Yeah, yeah. Like, he's got like rosy cheeks and girly hair and like high cheekbones. He 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. And 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. I know. - You know the amount of money that I'm asking. - And, the clavicular is, I think, the first explicitly looks maxing a lined figure to go kind of properly viral into the mainstream where kids across the country know who this is. - So it's like before that looks maxing is a more fragmented movement of teenage boys giving themselves a horrible body this morphia. He's the first person who becomes, I would say at this point, mainstream famous as a looks maxing influencer. - Yeah, I think that's about right. - This principle falls Wolf's law that a bone is gonna grow back stronger. After you do these localized micro traumas, so you're gonna lay in your bed to brace your head for CTE and you're gonna bone smash. - You're gonna 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. - And that's gonna grow your facial bones. - You smash, like you punch yourself in the face? - Yeah. - Glivicular is a big advocate for bone smashing as 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 clivicular content and I'm just, every time I see another video, I'm like what, crucial fact of world history that I just lose from, 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, shock 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 Maxard Jargon. - What are we talking about by hot? Like good looking, like some people think that like Sydney Swini is extremely attractive. I would say, I don't want to scandalize anybody, married man, I would say Sydney Swini is very attractive. - I would say that she's pretty malformed. Her upper maxillus is extremely recessed, right? She's got the eyes of doom with no and for orbital support. She's really not that much of a looker in her face. - Talking about how this disgusting woman has recessed can't full tilt and her maxilla are sub-optimal. And that's why she's weird. - Frinology speak to describe some woman as not being hot enough. - Yeah, but it comes out of this sort of forechan, shock, shock, racist, insell mode. But then Clivicular 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 job more appealing. - How do you look like that? - With peptides and steroids. (laughing) - Wait, so what peptides do you date? - I think Renner's shoot time, GH, something called Milano X2, which helps you get a little bit more tan without having to go in the sun too crazy. And that's how I need that. - Yeah, that's a really good one. And it also makes you get crazy boners. Like it's fun, fuck. (laughing) - But so like, we're in this phase of internet where most of the internet seems to be run by provocateurs. It's hard to actually set out their attentions. Like, do they actually believe all the edge lord things they're saying? Are they playing up their edge lordiness for attention? 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. - Yeah, 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 its numbers game. And then you go in Clivicular's bio and he's selling a course for Clivicular'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. - So tough. - Try 15. - Oh god. - You know, I had a source at a New York City elite private school telling me that students at these schools are taking peptides and GLP ones. And they're getting mini fridges and buying peptides from TikTok influencers and hiding them from their parents and their mini fridging their room. They're 15, 16 years old. - That's insane. It's so confusing for me because like, I'm both more disconnected from this internet than the last one, 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 kids like ideas about themselves, ideas about race, ideas about women. But then I see the teenage boys at 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 andretate, 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. And obviously just to some extent, that's happening with some kids. But I think for the most part, the kids are seeing this stuff as ridiculous. They might like, on some level, be sort of more sympathetic to edge-lord 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 as Andrew Tates, and there's a lot of this 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 'cause for them it's entertainment. But 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. - 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 who have many fridges with injectables in their bedrooms. - Totally. - After the break, we leave the kingdom of clovicular and head back to Silicon Valley, where our story will resolve on a promise. A less do me note. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Welcome back to the show. 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 is 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 Climan 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." You can say, "Yes, I'm a law breaker. "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 Sun whether she tried peptides. 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 intrigued. because I think that most people, when they're telling you a story about how taking BPC157 or read a true titer at a talent change to 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. 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 one is not a good experiment, just because it worked for somebody else in a particular context. 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 chilling to the person doing the drug, and I think a lot of people are going to make mistakes. 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. 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 you know, with Silicon Valley in particular, one thing I think is if the 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. 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. 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 a legal. 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. I think that's right. Yeah. I think we need some people who are more risk-tolerant that 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 at 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. But I think that sometimes when you have people willing to take crazy risks, including failing like a lot of the time and screwing stuff up, the rest of us can learn from that. And again, maybe we'll get something good out of it. Maybe we won't, but maybe we will. 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 as remarkists at New York magazine, a web link to his peptides reporting in the show notes as well. 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 get? But yes, take it away, Ned. Sir Chention is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by PJ Vote and Sharifi Penimaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarreon. 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 Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Shuff. 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. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. [BLANK_AUDIO]