How Peptides Conquered the Internet
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Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Each week on the show, we answer a question we have about the world. No question too big, no question too small. 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. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI, the global film company that champions great cinema. From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there's always something new to discover.
What is the surge in popularity of peptides among Americans?
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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. First things first, can you just introduce yourself?
Yeah. My name is Jasmine Sun. I am an independent writer covering AI and Silicon Valley culture from San Francisco.
AI and Silicon Valley culture. That's how you describe your beat?
Yeah, I mean, I also describe it with other words. I say anthropology of disruption, I like, because I'm very interested in sort of the very personal texture of like what frontier tech and change feels like. I'm really interested in like San Francisco as a cultural phenomenon, both like, yes, the tech industry and the technologies and the companies, but also like the weird trends and ideologies and subcultures running through this place as a result of tech and its influence.
I really enjoy your writing. As somebody who's on the East Coast and feels like strange ideas are moving through San Francisco very quickly, sometimes they make it here, sometimes they don't, but it feels like a laboratory for weird shit. Like not just technology, but just like ways to live. Why are you drawn to that? Like why do you like being there for that?
I mean, I think you kind of said it, like as a writer, as an observer, I want to be where the weird people are. And like, I've wondered, like, is there something geographic to it? Because obviously there's all the tech stuff, like biohacking and AI and whatever. But even before that, like lots of political ideas were born in the Bay Area, right? Like the Black Panthers came out of Oakland or the Sierra Club. And so I feel like there's something about California and this sort of frontier ethic of people going West and getting as far away from the institutions and the emperor's view as they can. There's a Chinese proverb about basically like going to where the mountains are high and the emperor is far to be able to actually experiment with new ways of living.
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