‘my peptide guy’ is the new tech bro flex

0:11Speaker 1:What's pretty common is you will get a package from China. They come sort of unlabeled. You get these kind of little glass vials with sort of interesting looking powder inside them.

0:22Speaker 2:Zara Stone is a culture reporter at the San Francisco Standard, and recently she's been reporting on a new trend in Silicon Valley injecting non FDA approved drugs called peptides into your body.

0:33Speaker 1:Then you have to go and buy bacterio static water. You get a needle, you take out some of water, you inject it into the bottle, You swizzle it around. Then you get your like alcohol swab and you like swab and ope your butt or your stomach or a piece of fie. Inject the bowl again, pull out a plunge, inject your body. There's a bunch of different steps and people are having to do all of these steps to do it successfully.

1:00Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you lost me at the bacteriostatic water. I don't even know what that is or where you have to buy this, So we just talking boil water and you're good or what. These days, there's peptides for just about everything. There's peptides that allegedly improve your focus. Peptides a help you lose weight, peptides that help you sleep, peptides and make your muscles will cover faster after you work out. But in Silicon Valley people have taken this thing to a new level. One of your recent articles starts out with the line, I'm going to quote it here to the new school tech row, dying should be optional.

1:34Speaker 2:That's a wild opener. I mean, are there people who actually think this, the dying should be optional?

1:39Speaker 1:Yes, I think my definitely trying to build a world where either they can replace their body pot so they can live forever injecting yourself with stuff. They can freeze themselves so they can be reanimated when the technology evolves, or they can export the consciousness into the Internet and live forever in that way.

2:00Speaker 2:The concept of living forever is a constant theme in literature, not to mention specifically science fiction, but I'm not sure that we've ever seen such a strong subculture of influential people who truly believe that it's attainable in their lifetime.

2:14Speaker 1:Part of the belief with this comes from sort of AI accelerationism, seeing things that are possible in a shorter timeframe than they used to be, and also from some of the new technologies.

2:27Speaker 2:Welcome to the culture of what Zara calls tech bro two point zero. Whether we like it or not, the tech bros are dragging us along in their pursuit of ever increasing optimization. So what exactly are they up to and what's going to trickle down for the rest of us.

2:48Speaker 3:I'm afraid.

2:51Speaker 2:Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is kill switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.

3:00Speaker 3:I'm I'm sorry.

3:28Speaker 2:It used to be when somebody used the word hacking, they specifically meant hacking computer and now life hacks, which is just things that make your life a little bit more convenient or whatever. But then there's also biohacking or body hacking that seems to have a lot more play in Silicon Valley right now. How do people talk about that?

3:49Speaker 1:I feel like it is so part of a culture that people often aren't using the word biohack. Things that used to be biohacks have now sort of transformed into the broader wellness culture. Like cold plunges. Everyone is doing that red light therapy good for your skit. I think everyone from I don't know moms to seventy year olds to Silicon valley is already integrating, and then you have the next level, and I think that's where things start to get really interesting.

4:20Speaker 2:So what is that next level.

4:22Speaker 1:One part of that next level is injectibles. Injectibles are mostly pet tides, all these different things that you inject into your body, the idea being to have better longevity, better sleep, mental health, physical performance, like this whole range of like really good benefits that people are hoping for.

4:42Speaker 2:Okay, before we get too far into this, let me just do the disclaimer here. Nothing in this episode should be construed as medical advice. You should be talking to your doctor about this. But that's kind of the catch twenty two here, because at least in the US, most of this stuff is not approved by the government, so your family physician probably isn't just going to hand you a syringe full of peptides. And anyway, even for a professional, it's pretty hard to keep up with this stuff because there are a lot of peptides. For example, you can inject yourself with something called GHK copper, which is supposed to help your skin repair itself so you could look younger, or you could stab yourself in the hip with some silanc to reduce anxiety. Allegedly, there's also thimosin for your immune system. I could keep going on and on about this, but I'm not even sure that I'm pronouncing this stuff right.

5:30Speaker 1:Some kind of say that some of the peptides help with the depression. Some say that it really helps them gain muscle. There are some parallels with a body building world as well, so we'll be these like different subculture sort of feed into peptides.

5:46Speaker 2:People who take peptides often claim that they're effective and that they're safe to use because these peptides are naturally occurring in our bodies. What is a peptide and why is everybody talking about this all of a sudden.

5:57Speaker 1:So a peptide is a short amino acid, which it's like a smaller protein, if that's a helpful way to think about it. And these are not new things. These have existed in our body forever, but they haven't always been synthesized or been able to be replicated outside the body. Oxytocin is a pet tide. Insulin is a pet tide, and I would say pet tide got to kind of mainstream consciousness with ozepic, the GLP skinny shot drug.

6:30Speaker 2:Okay, now we're talking about something that everybody's heard of. So Ozembic technically was approved for treating diabetes, and we Govey is the one that's actually FDA approved for treating obesity. Same molecule, just higher dose in different branding. They're both part of a peptide drug class called GLP one receptor agonist without getting two in the weeds. That basically means that they can mimic a hormone that we already have in our bodies called GLP one, which regulates blood sugar levels.

6:57Speaker 2:Hence the application for diabetes. Also tells your brain that you're already full and you don't need to eat anymore, hence the application for obesity. But then there's the off label use of just injecting yourself to lose a few pounds, which allegedly a lot of Hollywood is doing, and apparently so is Silicon Valley.

7:16Speaker 1:A lot of Bay Area people were taking ozempic like two years before the rest of the world was like, hey, get me some of that now, Like, there are benefits to azempic beyond being skinny. There's gluecose control. There's some study showing potential benefits on like memory and longevity, and people are microdosing them, often in order to get specific benefits they're hoping for.

7:40Speaker 2:But like we said earlier, ozembic is one of the few consumer facing, government approved peptides that are on the market in the US.

7:48Speaker 1:Apart from glps, the majority of peptides people are using, there's no way to access that in any legal way unless you're buying buru material. Most of these pettie, even when the pharmouth companies are you know, legally giving you, are manufactured in China.

8:06Speaker 2:Chinese dealers have managed to find ways to get off market peptides into the US. One way is to sell the peptides is quote unquote research grade. Sometimes they'll even put a not for human use label on it. So if you happen to use it on a human, like say yourself, that's your responsibility. So how does one find out about these? I mean you just do. You just google how to buy peptides, and all of a sudden you're on peptides dot com.

8:32Speaker 1:You order them from a website, I mean very sketchy websites. They're a better website. You might have a doctor in the US who has kind of done very due diligent, or you might have a doctor who hasn't. I think the real thing is nobody knows what they're buying, who they're buying from. There's a lot of concern about I'm okay potentially, you know, taking experimental peptides. I'm not okay with injecting stuff that isn't the experimental pep tides. So this is when you start getting this sort of network of telegram groups, of what's app channels where people all kind of pull their resources. The idea is a sort of crowdsourced wisdom can at least advance and further than just advice from somebody on a podcast.

9:16Speaker 2:What is it that makes it so difficult to obtain this stuff from a doctor or a pharmacy.

9:22Speaker 1:So some of the peptides, like, for instance, a very popular one EPC one five seven, which stands for Body Protection Compound, is known to be pretty good helping muscle recovery, kind of helping after the GIN. This used to be something you could legally get in the US till around twenty twenty three. You would need a prescription or a compounding pharmacy or functional medicine or whatever. In twenty twenty three, there was a bunch of pepdites that had been previously distributed that was sort of placed on a watch list where they were like, we think there may be some side effects, we're not sure, we still want people to doing this. And suddenly they were no longer available, which is reasonable, but you also had a massive amount of people who had legally taken this, kept taking them because they'd seen good effects, and then suddenly couldn't access them.

10:14Speaker 2:That meant that consumers, including newcomers from the tech world, suddenly had to source their peptides from somewhere else, and because they were no longer FDA approved, there was no straightforward process to in shure the quality or even the quantity of what you're putting in that syringe.

10:29Speaker 1:So with a lot of people, especially the larger groups who are you know, book buying peptides, they're sending it to a bunch of different labs. The kind of the main things they're testing is like, one the quality, are you getting what you think you're getting? Two the volume, Because if you think you I don't have a ten milligram vile, but they've just thrown in twenty milligrams, you're going to give yourself way too high a dose, and you can't test it yourself at home. I mean unless you literally have a lab and are a scientist. You have to mail away to somebody.

11:00Speaker 2:So this stuff is not that easy to get. But not only are we seeing these gray market workarounds, some people are using injectables as office perks. More on that after the break, tell me about peptide Friday.

11:27Speaker 1:So Superpower is a sort of longevity AI concierge company. The idea is that wealthy people have access to concierge doctors who look at all the science kind of do this whole personalized medicine and suggest things based on my body type. They do a lot of blood tests, they do the on demand MRIs. A lot of this stuff really isn't accessible to most people, you know, even if you're considered comfortable. This is on another level. So this company is trying to sort of democratize access to all the longevity knowledge through kind of an AI concierge doctor.

12:05Speaker 1:The company which very strongly believes in longevity and kind of talks about how they think they might never have to die. And then you go to the office and like with Fridge is like, you know, on this shelf is like this guy's stack. He has like five thousands dollars worth of injections a month. And another shelf is like a different dude stack. He takes two thousand dollars worth. Among the employees don't have to take stuff, many of them do and in one of a really interesting, you know, kind of encourage people to work from the office back to work kind of things. They have pettipe Fridays where if you come in on Friday, you get your bagel and you get your optional peptide shot.

12:44Speaker 2:Okay, I had a lot of friends who were working in the startup space in like the twenty tens. I remember the ping pong tables, I remember the Nintendo sixty four's, I remember the arcade machines. Those are the things that they used to use to get people to come into work. Peptime Fridays. Wild, that is a wild perk.

13:03Speaker 1:Hey, I mean, you want your pet tide shot, you got to be in office.

13:07Speaker 2:So you you mentioned the price, So hold up two thousand dollars a month on peptides five thousand dollars a month. I mean that is double a lot of people's house note double, a lot of people's rent. That's a lot of money.

13:22Speaker 1:Oh yeah. But I would also say that these guys who are doing pet tight stacks, so they're not just doing one or two, They're doing a whole bunch of different pet tides combined and very regularly. There's the Wolverine stack, which is like a couple of different pet tides together that is, you know, based on Wolverine. You know, it's recovers very quickly. Nothing can hurt him.

13:43Speaker 2:The Wolverine stack. Okay, all right.

13:45Speaker 1:But also I would say that a lot of people I spoke to who do pet tides regularly maybe one hundred two hundred a month, which you know is not nothing, but again is like much more reasonable than the pet tight bros who are taking that volume.

14:01Speaker 2:Hold on, have you had any of this stuff? Have you tried anyth the peptides I have tried.

14:06Speaker 1:Some the ones I've tried have been ones given to me by a docta or by somebody who was being overseen by adulta. I tried GHKCU. It's a copper peptide that's meant to be really good for the skin. It did nothing but give me a really big bruise that actually it would never have done anything because you were meant to do it regularly, So doing it once off was you know, really just to the gram.

14:31Speaker 2:Have you talked to anybody in your reporting who has had a bad side effect from this stuff?

14:37Speaker 1:I spoke to one person who kind of overestimated, who gave themselves two large a dose and they had like a really bad stomach ache for like a day or so. But I haven't actually found anyone who really has had worse side effects than that. I would say the biggest concern is sepsis, and sepsis again would be from poor application, not so much from lif poor quality of the drug.

15:03Speaker 2:What happens if you overdose? What happens if you use too much?

15:06Speaker 1:I think like you get atomic ache, you might get very dehydrated, You might need to go on like a sort of ivy drip to replace fluids. And this is generally unless you have any pre existing conditions. Kind of the worst case scenario.

15:22Speaker 2:But keep in mind here that the crowd that Czar is reporting on, the people in Silicon Valley who are taking peptides, have a lot of resources at their disposal to at least reduce the risk of using these off market peptides that they're taking. Not everyone has that.

15:37Speaker 1:I think with some of the kind of the Bay Area techies who are doing peptides and other experimental things, many of them are also doing very frequent blood panels. They are doing dexas scans. They might not have adopt checking in on them, but they are doing all these different things to monitor how the new substances they're taken are affecting their physiology. And you know, somebody who's like, oh, peptides, I live in Nebraska might not be doing the same thing.

16:08Speaker 1:And I think they may be missing something there, because you know, the blood test doesn't make it safe, but it does give you like a measured way to track things that are difficult to track. So I think there's an element of that that might not be obvious just.

16:24Speaker 2:Listening to you talk about this. And I wonder how people listening to this will feel. I'm kind of getting the feeling like, oh man, maybe I should be trying some of these things. Is that a common response.

16:36Speaker 1:I think it's challenging to talk about it without being people being intrigued by some of it. I urge people to be cautious and not just by random shit and stick needles into themselves.

16:50Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fruital. Yeah, whether or not they actually deliver on the promise, peptides are just one part of a larger trend in Silicon Valley. So why is biohacking getting so popular and what does that mean for the rest of us? That's after the break. Silicon Valley for a while was very stereotyped as being, you know, a bunch of skinny nerds who wore hoodies, and there was this other kind of parallel maybe track of things that men did online, which is, here's how to get big and huge and go to the gym, and we're gonna watch MMA and all that sort of thing, and we're gonna watch sports. And those two didn't really job together. You know, the skinny computer nerds didn't really like sports, and that was almost kind of like a badge of honor, like, oh, I don't like sports. That's for those meatheads, you know, that's for the jocks. That seems to be kind of dovetailing.

17:48Speaker 1:Now it has sort of gone. I don't know even if it's full circle, but it's just kind of muched. I think it's maybe the dude equivalent of like I can have it all, you know, I can have the the computer science degree, I can have the l LN, I can have the muscles. In a way where perhaps you were like, you know, the tropes of nerds versus jokes or whatever has sort of like faded in a way because people are like, I can have all of these different things and still kind of be a complete person.

18:18Speaker 3:Yeah.

18:18Speaker 2:I mean, I think probably the obvious version of that would be Mark Zuckerberg saying he was training MMA. I don't think that was a tipping point, but I think that was sort of an obvious sign that, Okay, the nerds are going to the gym. Something has changed.

18:32Speaker 1:I think there's you know a portion of people who are also just doing this to be hotter, optimizing for attractiveness as well. So if they can get skinnier, if them muscles can't be bigger. It kind of feeds into the same train of like optimization. If they optimize their looks, they optimize the work, they optimize or sleep and these are all very kind of interrelated, sort of a Zuckerberg blow up, you know, as maybe the driver for some of.

18:58Speaker 2:This, this obsession with optimization might have some deep roots in Silicon Valley, but it's starting to spread out into mainstream culture, and I think there's a pattern here. I mean, think about it. Wearable devices that track your sleep used to be weird. Now they're pretty normal. And think back to our Google Glass episode. Having an always on computer camera strapped to your face was bizarre, but society starting to warm up to that idea. Now you've got people running around in Minnesota wearing the new meta ray bands.

19:30Speaker 2:It used to be that the most influential people in America were musicians or actors in Hollywood, but Silicon Valley is starting to be another cultural place that people look up to and want a copy. If a lot of people in Silicon Valley are into peptides, now, is it just a matter of time before the rest of us are injecting stuff? Also?

19:53Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so. Really it's not something I would have said yes too before Zembek, but Ozembic, this global phenomenon a really normalized injecting yourself with stuff, And that's not a Silicon Valley thing. That driver of a weight loss industry, the abess teeth epidemic that has taken the a deear of injecting yourself from something weird and scary to something that people are embracing. So yeah, that tracks with the fact that pep tides are going to spread.

20:20Speaker 1:I think going forwards there is going to be a lot more flexibility. And we have RFK on record saying, you know, he wants kind of the FDA to stop being so anti pet tides and stuff like that.

20:32Speaker 4:We're going to end the war at FDA against alternative medicine. Thank you for on stem cells, warm keylating drugs. We're on if you want to take an experimental drug, you can do that.

20:45Speaker 2:That's the US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior on The Ultimate Human podcast with Gary Breca. And this is kind of RFK Junior's thing. Back before the election last year, he made a tweet accusing the FDA of suppressing everything from pet tides to raw milk to ivermectin. Remember that was that horse deworming pace that people were trying to take to cure COVID. And he started that tweet with the sentence quote, FDA's war on public health is about to end.

21:14Speaker 1:So these are all kind of adding up for something a bigger picture and a bigger sort of rollout or acceptance. It's going to be a couple of years, and then I think it will be like, oh, it's you know, here's my waita beck, here's my pep tie shot.

21:28Speaker 2:As you're telling me about peptides, it sounds nuts that somebody would just inject themselves on the off chance that maybe their focus will get a little bit better for the afternoon. But maybe not. Maybe it isn't so weird.

21:45Speaker 1:We're at the start of something that I think is really going to change, and we have an administration which is maybe being friendlier than ever before to this kind of experimental stuff. So maybe at some point people will be getting this through woolgreens. It might cost more, but at least, you know, the supply chain part of it will be fixed in terms of you know what you're doing. When I think we're just at the beginning of this, Really.

22:14Speaker 2:If peptides really do hit the mainstream and live up to the potential that people say is there, the next question is what the existence of this superhuman drug does to us as a society. Are we now getting into yet another permutation of kind of haves and have nots? And what I mean by that is people who have access to the money to buy these things, can get all these benefits where people who don't can't have those benefits to some extent.

22:46Speaker 1:But I would also sort of caveat that with that prescription drugs are expensive if you don't have insurance. There's a lot of access and income disparity for a whole bunch of people.

22:57Speaker 2:Right now, in America, the richest come in the world, millions of people are still struggling to get access to decent quality food. It's hard to imagine that we're going to figure out equal access when it comes to peptides. Just for example. One of the co founders of that longevity concierge service, Superpower said in Zara's article, and I'm quoting here that good health is becoming a status symbol. And to be clear here I'm not criticizing him. I think that he's correct. I'd say that being healthy has been a status symbol, not in the sense of a liu, a tom bag or a labouobuo. I mean in the sense that a lot of modern history is us dealing with the fact that good health is something that only people with a certain level of status could even afford.

23:38Speaker 2:So maybe we're just repeating ourselves here.

23:43Speaker 1:I mean, we haven't even told you about pediatric peptides. This is a kind of a small but growing kind of area of people who are seeing the benefits of giving peptides to children. The parents generally have to do the injecting because I think the youngest child I've heard of, I think was maybe eight years old. I think this is wild and I am kind of struggling to kind of come to terms with some of this. When you're reporting, you're like, Okay, yeah, adults are doing whatever, but when you hear children, it sort of takes it to a very different place.

24:16Speaker 2:Wow. I hesitate to even ask what are the benefits that it gives to a child?

24:21Speaker 1:Supposedly, Supposedly the ones that are being used more frequently on children are for the athletes, you know, the ten year old runner or swimmer, so they're getting a lot of a muscle recovery ones.

24:35Speaker 2:So who knows. Maybe the next step in peptides is a world where some kids can run faster and swim further and get more athletic scholarships, or they can focus more on homework and get better sleep, or even look more conventionally attractive by being thinner. Meanwhile, other kids don't get that stuff. So one of my side hustles in college was tutoring, and at first I started out with homework tutoring, but I figured out pretty quick that the best money is an sat tutoring because rich kids' parents will pay a lot of money to get their kids into a good school, and a lot of the time that's why I was teaching rich kids. Sometimes I'd get to teach on the poor side of town. I think the school district had some vouchers or something like that to bring us in, and the idea was that it would help level the playing field. But it always worked out the same way. Those voucher contracts would end halfway through the year. The company didn't have enough tutors for those specific schools, And meanwhile, the rich kids always got the best environment, the most motivated tutors, and the most supportant They got set up for success. Let's say that

25:36Speaker 2:these peptides really work. Let's say they're one hundred percent safe. Let's say that this is genuinely something that can improve humans' lives. Okay, does everyone get access to that or do we wait for it to trickle down to the rest of us, while people with status get a head start on their superpowers. Thank you so much for checking out another episode of kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC, or we're on Instagram at kill Switch pod. And while you're on your phone, you know, think about leaving us a review. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. And also kill Switch is on YouTube, so if you ever wanted to see for yourself how Pokemon go cheating tactics were applied to ice block, now you can get the visual of it and the link for that and everything else is in the show notes. Kill Switch is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas.

26:31Speaker 2:It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, dar Luck Potts and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixes the show from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswa Lashin, Mangesh Hatikadur, and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E. Tour. And by the way, there is another weird trend happening among the tech bros. That Zara told me about sperm racing.

27:00Speaker 1:First way you're looking at it is like guys are jacking off putting the sperm into a racecourse, and people through like microscopic cameras, et cetera, like you know, watching sperm race on a screen as a kind of sport.

27:15Speaker 2:Sorry, I'm just of Jenner process this. So is this like were we talking a live event?

27:21Speaker 3:Here?

27:21Speaker 2:We are we talking here?

27:23Speaker 1:They sort of broadcast this as a live event, which was a little disingenuous because the way they did it is they filmed it. They like took the sperm, they put it in this sort of racecourse. I think they died its slightly different colors so it would show up a certain way in the cinematography. But then they actually, like at a light event, they showed the video like people weren't all standing around like a pool table watching sperm weave around it.

27:48Speaker 4:We are live in Los Angeles for the world's very first sperm race run by four three.

28:01Speaker 3:W and here we go.

28:08Speaker 2:Oh shack, they're going.

28:10Speaker 3:They're going.

28:13Speaker 1:Is the aser the chamber?

28:14Speaker 3:We are Oh my god, oh ho.

28:21Speaker 2:And look before anybody asks, I'm just gonna make this clear now we are not going to do an episode about sperm racing, so please do not ask. I like weird subcultures just as much as everybody else, but we got to draw the line somewhere anyway. That's from us. Catch on the next one.