People I knew who used to order drugs on the internet. They were ordering fun drugs. Now it’s like these weird. Eat less and focus more. I mean, this goes to something that you wrote about in a piece you did for The Times, which is that these are the first blockbuster drugs to collide with our wellness- obsessed algorithmic age. And yeah, I mean, I must have clicked at some point on retatrutide content on X. And now every time I turn on the system, the platform, I get these videos from people like, tell me how great retatrutide is. And there’s a huge boom and people just getting random peptides from China. I shouldn’t say random, but ordering peptides from places where they can’t really tell what’s in them. The New Yorker tested some of these and found a lot of them have lead or impurities or things you don’t want, or they’re not at the right dose. Like, there’s something wrong. We got these blockbuster drugs, and you might expect everybody to be really excited and be on them. But it seems to have exploded into this biohacking moment in which it’s like if something like Wegovy could exist, well, then who knows what is out there and you should order it from China and inject it into yourself and find out. Like, what do you make of it? I think it’s the perfect drug for this social media algorithmic, algorithmic age that we’re in because it’s visual. It’s not like you have the before and after photos you have I’ve spent way more time than I’d like to admit on different social TikTok and Reddit accounts where you see the videos and the before and after photos and how people’s bodies are transforming. And we’re kind of living in this very appearance-obsessed culture. Now, for the first time, again, we have this drug that does something that humans have quested after for a century or more. And so it’s meeting that moment, I think I was doing a thought experiment when I was working on that piece you mentioned about what would it have been like. So when Prozac came on the market, that was another blockbuster drug. That was another drug where we had a cultural moment around it, but we didn’t have telemedicine. So you still had to go to your doctor to get a prescription. The internet wasn’t in widespread use, so you couldn’t order a research compound from China. There was no social media to compare. Do your person, compare your personal experiences and share them with the world. So yeah, we have all those things now when we have this elixir that we’ve wanted for so long, right? The weight loss elixir, so many people have wanted this. We have it at the same time as we have all these other things that have just helped create, I think, the moment that we’re in.
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