How Peptides Conquered the Internet

Two decades ago, bodybuilders on niche internet forums started injecting peptides. Now they're in the secret mini-fridges of some teenage boys. How did they get there? We track their crooked path from Silicon Valley to jaw-smashing influencers. Check out Jasmine Sun's work https://jasmi.news/?utm_campaign=profile_chips (and her piece on peptides https://jasmi.news/p/bio-acc-dictionary) Check out Ezra Marcus' work https://nymag.com/author/ezra-marcus/ (and his piece on peptides https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/peptides-from-instagram-china-wellness-cure.html) Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. 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.

• 0:29PJ Vogt?

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• 1:14PJ Vogt?

  Learn more at xero.com. That's X E R O.

• 1:21PJ Vogt?

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• 2:51PJ Vogt?

  This week, we are covering peptides, not as a medical story. This is not about whether you, dear listener, should take peptides. Who do you think I am, Andrew Huberman?

• 3:01PJ Vogt?

  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 Substack 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?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, my name is Jasmine Sun. I am an independent writer covering AI and Silicon Valley culture from San Francisco.

• 3:43PJ Vogt?

  AI and Silicon Valley culture. That's how you describe your beat?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I also describe it with other words. I say anthropology of disruption I like because I'm very interested in sort of the very personal texture of like what frontier tech and change feels like. I'm really interested in like San Francisco as a cultural phenomenon, both like, yes, the tech industry and the technologies and the companies, but also like the weird trends and ideologies and subcultures running through this place as a result of tech and its influence.

• 4:13PJ Vogt?

  I really enjoy your writing. As somebody who's on the East Coast and feels like strange ideas are moving through San Francisco very quickly. Sometimes they make it here, sometimes they don't, but it feels like. A laboratory for weird shit, like not just technology, but just ways to live. Why are you drawn to that? Like, why do you like being there for that?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I mean, I think you kind of said it, like, as a writer, as an observer, I want to be where the weird people are. And like, I wondered, like, is there something geographic to it? Because obviously, there's all the tech stuff, like biohacking and AI and whatever. But even before that, like, lots of political ideas were born in the Bay Area, right? Like, the Black Panthers came out of Oakland or the Sierra Club. And so I feel like there's something about California and this 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 like going to where the mountains are high and the emperor is far to be able to actually experiment with new ways of living. And in China, they use that to refer to Yunnan, which is the southwestern province,

• 5:18Speaker 01

  which is their kind of hippie capital. But in the US, it's probably San Francisco is where people go to experiment with new political, cultural, technological beliefs. And 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. Like, 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 like, transfer their young blood to mine and see if that makes me live forever, right? Like, it's not just people with crazy ideas now, but also with the resources to realize them. And I just feel like, as a writer, that's like the most interesting thing in the world.

• 6:02PJ Vogt?

  So 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. Like, what is just at the generic sort of sixth grade science class level? Like, what is a peptide?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, a peptide is a short chain of amino acids. So you can think of it like a mini protein. So they have very simple structures. A lot of peptides are naturally occurring in the body. So insulin, oxytocin, et cetera. Some peptides are modified by pharmaceutical manufacturers to behave a little bit differently. There are also synthetic peptides. So it's actually a very broad class of drug and class of compound. But when we start talking about like peptides as a biohacking or a 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,

• 7:10Speaker 01

  sometimes drug manufacturers in other countries like China and testing on themselves. And so they can do anything from oxytocin is the love hormone. There is also growth hormone adjacent peptides. There are copper peptides that supposedly help with skin. Peptides that supposedly help with sleep like epitalon. Peptides like melanotan that promise to make your skin better. And like, I think the term Chinese peptides is a memetic super weapon. Like you mention it at a party and everyone instantly is like coming over like, what is that? What's your stack? Can I try it? Even when I 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,

• 7:54Speaker 01

  get healthier? Like, tell me, like, don't gatekeep. What's your stack?

• 7:57PJ Vogt?

  Wait, and so when you say it's a memetic 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, whether they have questions. And it sounds like it's like the combination of everyone's always looking for the fountain of youth. There's something risky and naughty about

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:23PJ Vogt?

  like Chinese gray market chemicals. But like in a world where you have a culture of people who like risk taking and optimization, this is just like catnip in a way that maybe it wouldn't even be in New York.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:53PJ Vogt?

  Wait, sorry, I have like three questions about that. One, what is Chinese maxing?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Have you seen the memes that are like, "I'm at a very Chinese time in my life"?

• 9:01PJ Vogt?

  Yes, but I don't understand them.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Send this video to a friend that you met during a very Chinese time in your life.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  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, and mostly Gen Z in general, around embracing Chineseness.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  I'm an American currently traveling in Shanghai, China, and let me tell you, more Americans need to come to China. This place is crazy.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  If you go on TikTok, there's a lot of China-inspired travel content, like, "Look at this cyberpunk city, look at this flying car, look at these robots."

• 9:37PJ Vogt?

  It's the idea that there is a country where things will work that is far away from here.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I think so. I think that it's sort of hand in hand with nihilism about the US and being really bummed that like, America's falling apart and like, our government isn't working. And, you know, 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.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  China has to be at least 100 years ahead of everybody else. Every city is beautifully designed with thousands of skyscrapers, incredible architecture.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:21PJ Vogt?

  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 peptides supplier?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  The Chinese government gave subsidies in like 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 like very simple compounds and drugs and have slowly been climbing up to like 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 like chemists and science and medical talent concentrated in the same place. These industry towns where like 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

• 11:25Speaker 01

  and like putting them into the, say, the 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.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  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 upcharging you like crazy. All they do is buy their peptides from China, slap a label on them and charge you 10 times the amount.

• 11:51PJ Vogt?

  And do you know like, there's like this funny strain of US-China relations in this, both that Chinese laboratories are the supplier in many cases, and also that the idea that this is like China branded is enticing to people. In like China's tech scene, are people taking peptides as far as you know?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I mean, to 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.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  You guys are insane. I don't know why you're doing this, but you know, China manufactures a lot of fentanyl and they're not doing that either.

• 12:34PJ Vogt?

  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 look smackers 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. That's when the denizens of the message board anabolicminds.com, users with names like Morpheus and Beowulf, were trading tips on how to source peptides.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  So if we really go back to the early, early adopters, the earliest adopters are actually like the bodybuilding and fitness community.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  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? Well, this is the video for you.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And so this is like pretty separate from tech world. It's like guys doing steroids in bodybuilding gyms together.

• 13:40Speaker 07

  I'm going to show you what I'm doing for my peptide stock right now to grow. I'm using three peptides and using them all post-workout. First one is TB500, five milligrams.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  So when I was like in the very early 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 subreddit 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.

• 14:23PJ Vogt?

  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 like they were getting to 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?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  So bodybuilding has this big overlap with the biohacker community broadly, where there is a common practice of experimenting on yourself like a lab rat 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 Ozempic 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.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  And so I think the Ozempic boom and the GLP boom is what has precipitated all of this interest in other experimental peptides.

• 15:51PJ Vogt?

  So you feel like Ozempic 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. It's 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-1's broke that seal for a lot of people.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  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 did people start coming in and asking about them? And the turning point was Ozempic. It was people starting to think, you don't have to be a druggie to be injecting yourself.

• 16:30Speaker 08

  GLP-1 injection sites ranked by someone who's tried them all. Let's go. This here's 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. 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.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  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, tirzepotide, or increasingly most common in the communities I spoke with was retitrutide, which is a GLP-3. It's a 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 develops 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,

• 17:37Speaker 01

  and I started to feel self-conscious about my own weight." And so she ended up getting on retitrutide as well, through gray market sources.

• 17:48PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 18:03PJ Vogt?

  The next places peptides go, though, are both a bit seedier and a bit more concerning.

• 18:09PJ Vogt?

  After a short break, we follow peptides into two internet neighborhoods that I did not realize were at all adjoined:

• 18:16PJ Vogt?

  Maha and the Luxmaxers.

• 18:35PJ Vogt?

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• 19:20PJ Vogt?

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• 19:49PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 19:54PJ Vogt?

  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 stayed 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. After Ozempic, lots of people go online looking for off-brand gray market Ozempic

• 20:36PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 21:11Speaker 09

  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.

• 21:22PJ Vogt?

  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, or handsomer, or younger, or whatever, like, what are people who are seeing that seeing?

• 21:38Speaker 09

  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 Brekka, who's a really prominent anti-aging, life extension influencer who sells peptides on his website.

• 21:56Speaker 10

  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-

• 22:13Speaker 09

  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 has like millions of followers, and it's just like a big deal in that world.

• 22:24Speaker 10

  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. Peptides are the safest wave of the future when done-

• 22:42Speaker 09

  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.

• 23:04Speaker 10

  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.

• 23:14Speaker 09

  He had RFK on his podcast a year ago.

• 23:17Speaker 10

  And I'm joined by a very prominent figure in the space, the leader and the head of the Maha movement, none other than Mr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. himself. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

• 23:29Speaker 11

  Gary, I'm happy to be here with you, finally. Happy to have you.

• 23:32Speaker 09

  And RFK was talking about, you know, we're going to end the war on peptides at the FDA.

• 23:37Speaker 11

  And, you know, I thank you for what you're doing, and we're going to end the war at FDA against alternative medicine.

• 23:43Speaker 10

  Thank you.

• 23:44Speaker 11

  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-

• 23:53Speaker 10

  Music to my ears.

• 23:54Speaker 11

  The war on vitamins.

• 23:56PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, I look at RFK, and I think like, I don't want whatever he's taking.

• 24:00Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, he has that like Sean Penn in One Battle After Another kind of leathery.

• 24:07PJ Vogt?

  It's like it was microwaved in a youth machine.

• 24:09Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 24:09PJ Vogt?

  But other people see it differently.

• 24:11Speaker 09

  I mean, clearly, if you look at the news of the last few years.

• 24:15PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  So the podcasts, the Substacks, 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 flourishing of an all-medicine ecosystem. So like, some of the same people who were ivermectin guys are now becoming peptide guys.

• 25:04Speaker 12

  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.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  I was listening to my very first episode of the Truth Podcast by Vivek Ramaswamy, where he was podcasting with Balaji Srinivasan, who is the Coinbase CTO and a very influential investor and executive in Silicon Valley, who at one point was being considered for FDA commissioner.

• 25:33Speaker 12

  Balaji Srinivasan, welcome to the podcast.

• 25:36Speaker 13

  Good to be here, Vic.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  And Balaji and Vivek were talking about their frustrations with the 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 Balaji said that was like, "Just like the SEC is trying to keep you from getting wealthy."

• 26:01Speaker 13

  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.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  The FDA is trying to keep you from getting healthy.

• 26:11PJ Vogt?

  Huh.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:35PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 26:53PJ Vogt?

  That's how they view it?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think so.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  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 shitcoins 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. And then I find out that you can get literally the same substance

• 27:39Speaker 01

  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 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. And unless a drug is targeting a disease and it's easily patentable and you're going

• 28:21Speaker 01

  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, like, steel man of the place that people are coming from.

• 28:48PJ Vogt?

  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 Ezra Marcus.

• 29:27Speaker 09

  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 econ 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 looks-maxing type of people. And that's its own sort of discreet niche of, let's say, black-pilled, kind of right-wing

• 30:08Speaker 09

  adjacent incel adjacent culture of mostly young men talking about how the only, you know, 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.

• 30:52PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 31:02Speaker 09

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:18PJ Vogt?

  Okay, what are we watching?

• 31:19Speaker 09

  This is a guy named Clavicular and I mean, Clavicular looks like an AI cartoon of a handsome person.

• 31:27PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, yeah, like he's got like rosy cheeks and curly hair and like high cheekbones.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  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 the amount of money that I'm investing.

• 32:03Speaker 09

  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.

• 32:15PJ Vogt?

  Like, so it's like before that looks maxing 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 looks maxing influencer.

• 32:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that's about right.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  This principle follows Wolff's law that a bone is gonna grow back stronger, you know, 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.

• 32:46Speaker 14

  You're gonna lay in your bed and brace your head for CTE? Isn't that like brain damage?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Well, no, so that's why you lay in your bed. And that's gonna grow your facial bones.

• 32:55Speaker 14

  You smash, like you punch yourself in the face?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 09

  Clavicular is a big advocate for bone smashing.

• 33:02PJ Vogt?

  "Clavicular is a big advocate for bone smashing" is a sentence I could have happily died without ever knowing.

• 33:09Speaker 09

  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?"

• 33:24Speaker 09

  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 chalk-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.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  What are we talking about by hot? Like, good-looking? Like, some people think that, like, Sydney Sweeney is extremely attractive.

• 34:01Speaker 14

  I would say, I don't wanna scandalize anybody, married man, I would say Sydney Sweeney is very attractive.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  I would say that she's pretty malformed. Her upper maxilla is extremely recessed, right? She's got the Eyes of Doom with no infrarybital support. She's really not that much of a looker in her face.

• 34:20Speaker 09

  Talking about how this disgusting woman has recessed, cancelled tilt and, you know, her maxilla are suboptimal and that's why she's...

• 34:29PJ Vogt?

  Weird phrenology speak to describe some woman as not being hot enough.

• 34:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, but it comes out of this like, sort of 4chan chalk-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.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  How do you look like that? Uh, with peptides and steroids. Wait, so what peptides do you take? I take Redefiant, um, GH, uh, something called Melanotan 2, which helps me get a little bit more tan without having to go in the sun too crazy. And that's I might need that. Yeah, that's, that's a really good one. It also makes you get crazy boners. Like it's fun as fuck.

• 35:27PJ Vogt?

  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 suss out their attentions. Like, do they actually believe all the edgelord things they're saying? Are they playing up their edgelordiness 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.

• 35:52Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 35:52PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 36:13Speaker 09

  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, with this new generation of streamers, it's just purely about it's a numbers game. And then you go in Clivikular's bio and he's selling a course for Clivikular's Guide to Looks Maxing, or you can pay for one-on-one coaching with him.

• 36:42PJ Vogt?

  They're like convincing a person who's 18 to have the anxieties of a person who's middle aged.

• 36:47Speaker 09

  Absolutely.

• 36:47PJ Vogt?

  It's so dark.

• 36:49Speaker 09

  Try, try 15.

• 36:50PJ Vogt?

  Oh God.

• 36:51Speaker 09

  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-1s and they're getting mini fridges and, you know, 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.

• 37:13PJ Vogt?

  That's insane.

• 37:16PJ Vogt?

  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 in my life and like, they seem self-conscious. They don't seem like hateful.

• 37:52Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, I think that with something like Clivicular 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. 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, Clivicular is like, just another kind of meme, basically. And the same as Andrew Tate, same as a lot of the stuff. Like, they get that it's inherently ridiculous.

• 38:34Speaker 09

  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.

• 38:53PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 39:08Speaker 09

  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.

• 39:20PJ Vogt?

  It's weird to draw a line from somebody figuring out finally how to make video for social media work, to teenagers have mini fridges with injectables in their bedrooms.

• 39:33Speaker 09

  Totally.

• 39:40PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 40:25PJ Vogt?

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• 41:33PJ Vogt?

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• 42:18PJ Vogt?

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• 42:39Speaker 15

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• 43:19PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 43:24PJ Vogt?

  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,

• 44:05PJ Vogt?

  "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 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 Sun whether she'd tried peptides.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  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 BPC157 or a trutide or a pital 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, 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."

• 45:19Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And you know, with Silicon Valley in particular, one thing I think is, if this stuff really works, then someone is gonna invest a lot of money in 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 gonna actually run the test now, then I am happy for that to happen.

• 47:08PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  I think that's right, yeah. 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, et cetera. 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.

• 48:40PJ Vogt?

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

• 49:13PJ Vogt?

  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 longtime 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.

• 49:44Speaker 16

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by PJ Vogt and Sharifat Pinnamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Malteer is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. 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 Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuf. 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.

• 50:29Speaker 16

  Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.

• 50:46Speaker 17

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