PJ Vogt

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.

Yeah, I have only ducked into bodybuilder forums when people there are getting dunked on.

It's not a part of the internet that I have so much time on, but that's my understanding.

There was an earlier version of reality in which this idea of medical self-experimentation was kind of cordoned off.

And it was cordoned off among people where they were self-researching and doing a lot of work, whether they were getting to the right answers or not, to figure out what

Like they were sharing information about molecules.

They understood the risks they were taking.

Sometimes it was working, sometimes it wasn't.

But like it existed in this kind of like confined space.

How does it start to break containment out of the bodybuilding community?

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 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-1s broke that seal for a lot of people.

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 seedier and a bit more concerning.

After a short break, we follow Peptides into two internet neighborhoods that I did not realize were at all adjoined, Maha and the Luxe Maxxers.

Welcome back to the show.

So this is what we'd charted before the break.

Peptides first appear online in the early 2000s on bodybuilding forums, one more obscure chemical that the bench pressers are trying.