PJ Vogt

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.

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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?

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.