this episode of Search Engine, starring Substack’s own Jasmine Sun is a must-listen, and I don’t say this lightly. It’s about peptides but also about how:

• the decline of the US is absolutely creating space for Chinese cultural dominance for young people particularly

• young men are now very much as susceptible to body dysmorphia as young women, I think whatever gap there was there is on its way out, this is very disappointing. When I was a young woman we wanted beauty standards to be equal for men and women, but we wanted this to be equal by making beauty standards LESS AWFUL FOR WOMEN, not MORE AWFUL FOR MEN.

• the undoubted abuses of the pharmaceutical industry over decades (price gouging, deliberately suppressing cheaper competitors) combined with how easy it is to buy stuff online from wherever has led to a lot of people feeling - not unreasonably - that it is better for them to buy pharmaceuticals for themselves and try them out/record results.

I think we’re no longer in a world where people go to the doctor and do whatever the doctor tells them. And… I can’t feel entirely bad about that? I feel bad about the vaccine denialism. But I’ve experienced a lot of medical prejudice in my life and it is a genuine benefit to me to just be able to buy well-certified pharma and try it out for myself.