PJ Vogt

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

And do you know, like, there's like this funny strain of U.S.-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?

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 looks maxers 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.

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.