Jasmine Sun

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

And so this is like pretty separate from tech world.

It's like guys doing steroids and bodybuilding gyms together.

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 subreddits and discords.

And, you know, one of the guys I talked to, Jaden Clark, who has popularized sort of the peptides and

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.

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.

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

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 a Zempik.

It was people starting to think, you don't have to be a druggie to be injecting yourself.

GLP-1 injection sites ranked by someone who's tried them all.

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This here's Epitaph Thursday.