Ezra Klein

And at one point that was understood as a preference for naturalism, that there was a primitivist impulse here.

And yet some of these same people who were so skeptical about what was a very well-studied class of drugs were

are now ordering completely unknown forms of peptides, some of which are about weight loss, but some of which are just to increase energy use or to cure your tennis elbow or to try to improve cell regeneration.

And they're stacking them in different formulations.

It's like a mistrust of the authorities.

but a belief in unproven technologies in a way that I find culturally very interesting.

And I'm curious as somebody who's been around the space for a long time, what you've made of it.

Well, I think it reflects this way in which you have to trust something.

The world is simply too complex for anybody to have firsthand knowledge of very much of it at all.

So you can trust established authorities like the FDA and the CDC, but if you lose trust in them, you have to still find some way of deciding what to believe and what not to believe.

And a lot of people choose individual voices, you know, Andrew Huberman or Joe Rogan or Peter Attia or people further into the Maha world.

And I'm not even saying they're necessarily corrupt.

But if you're in media, for instance, and you run a podcast on health and wellness week after week, you have to find new things to say.

Just getting on the mic every week and saying, here's another week when you should eat whole foods and try to reduce your stress and sleep well, it doesn't last.

Even putting aside the fact that some of them are getting a cut of either supplement companies or advertising for it, they have this huge bias towards the next new thing.

I will say before I make this next point that I think injecting yourself or taking poorly studied peptides is a stupid idea and people shouldn't do it.

So I really want to say this very clearly.

But in preparing this episode and reading what some of the peptide booster types are saying, their argument is, look, people have a right to do this.

It is their body.

They are doing it.