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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
The Peptide Debate. Welcome to the stream, guys.
Speaker 2:How are
Speaker 3:you
Speaker 4:guys Yes, man.
Speaker 2:Hey, how's it
Speaker 4:Good you, guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much Why for taking the don't you both start with an introduction on yourself and maybe your core thesis around peptides? Martin, why don't
Speaker 2:Max, you go please. Oh, Max. Okay. Sure.
Speaker 1:All right. Let's start with Martin.
Speaker 2:Yes. So I'm the farmer bro. I represent the interests and the
Speaker 1:Of the
Speaker 2:pharmaceutical industry. I guess viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry Sure. Including, but not limited to Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, etcetera. I'm sure those guys love that. And You're
Speaker 3:the face of pharma, whether they like it or not.
Speaker 2:There you go. Sort of a self trained biopharmaceutical expert. I think I can speak at a pretty high level about every inch of the pharmaceutical industry. I've discovered brand new drugs. I've acquired drugs.
Speaker 2:I've commercialized drugs. Just about anything you can do in the drug industry, I've done it. And so I'm very concerned about the peptide craze. I think it comes mostly out of psychological issues, which we'll discuss. The need for identity, control, distrust of institutions, all kinds of things like that are leading to what we're seeing today.
Speaker 3:Great.
Speaker 1:And Max? Hi,
Speaker 4:I'm Max. Former peptide skeptic turned peptide believer. I run a healthcare company called Superpower, and our thesis is that the health system today does a good job when you're sick. It doesn't do a fantastic job at preventing things and actually allowing people to be their best selves. I say a former peptide skeptic because they they seem scary and I say a converted believer because I spoke to dozens of doctors and heard hundreds of clinical vignettes from people who had their lives changed.
Speaker 4:Now I don't believe all peptides are safe. I do believe we need more research. But I think there are a subset of things that have improved people's lives. I also think as a modality, peptides are one that are more interesting than before now that injecting is normal, now that wellness and optimization is normal, not just treating disease, and now that we have AI for things like computational discovery. So we're early.
Speaker 4:We need more research, but I think peptides are exciting.
Speaker 1:Martin, I'll let you just respond. Yes. Seems But like it's something in your it would be useful to at least define the conversation a little bit more because when we say peptides, we could mean Ozempic prescribed by a doctor for someone who has diabetes and is very overweight. It could also mean the Wolverine stack taken by a 15 year old in a gym in Miami, right? And, like, there's a wide gap here.
Speaker 1:So let's maybe narrow it down a little bit to probably off label use. I don't know exactly where where the where things start to get fuzzy for you guys, but defining a little bit more of where the actual point of debate because I imagine that there's agreement with the extremes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, isn't isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever? You know? Isn't this like somebody saying, I'm using GPT instead of using AI or something like that? Sure.
Speaker 2:There's a specific meaning. Like peptide has this very specific meaning and they're not new. They're 80 years old. People have been using peptides forever. And in fact, in pharma, you try to avoid peptides because of their inherent weaknesses.
Speaker 2:You go for small molecules or really large molecules like antibodies. Peptides are sort of the worst of both worlds. So the idea that we've taken this kind of like last place drug class and then turn that into like the the standard bearer for do it yourself medicine is is kind of humorous to anybody who actually understands pharma.
Speaker 4:Except that the last the last drug class has the potentially most impactful drug of all time or set of drugs of all time, the GLP-one receptor agonists. So I'm not saying we only have peptides in the toolkit. I'm saying the genie is out of the bottle and we cannot ignore peptides as a tool in the toolkit. Small molecules, just like guess framing framing it for people who don't kind of understand the difference between these things. Small molecules are made synthetically.
Speaker 4:Peptides tend to be derived from what already is happening in the body. Right? DNA is the building block of the body and encodes for RNA which produces proteins and peptides. So these peptides naturally occur. Now it can sometimes be hard to patent a naturally occurring thing.
Speaker 4:You can, but it's a little bit harder. Small molecules on the other hand are things that humans design to block biology, to block typically block something that is happening in the body. And again, I'm not saying small molecules are bad, but they're kind of the two different modalities we're talking about here. And we've seen one category of peptides. GLP one's already changed the world.
Speaker 4:And my contention is that there are other categories of peptides that are under researched that have really interesting kind of clinical vignettes that might change the world going forward.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Martin?
Speaker 2:We know there's large
Speaker 3:But but but the but but I the think, like, why we're having this conversation is because people are just, you know, injecting a a number of them into themselves now. And you're saying they might change the world, but people are going through the process of self experimentation. And there's a bunch of companies, private companies that are happily facilitating this and and profiting off of it when it seems to be a large number of risks that are still unknown. At least that's my my point of view.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly. Yes, I think that's right.
Speaker 1:So maybe let's start with stuff that's not fully FDA approved. I think the canonical example would be like the Chinese peptides, the rettas, the stuff you buy online and inject. And it's based on some interesting scientific literature, but it hasn't actually been through the full FDA process yet. Where do both of you stand on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, why why do you have a right to pirate somebody's intellectual property? Oh. You know, this this is this is the property of Eli Lilly. They discovered it.
Speaker 2:They spent billions of dollars on it. Mhmm. You wanna steal it? You wanna work with a Chinese company stealing it? I mean, that's not good for America.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. That's not good for the drug industry. And guess where these where do these drugs come from? They come from American r and d labs. And if you keep stealing them and pirating them in this, like, weird Twilight, like, you know, DIY drug system, which is not very large, at least compared to pharma.
Speaker 2:You know, I don't know if you make a big impact, but if if it went very large scale, you would. I mean, you you would stop having drugs the same way pirating music would would, you know, have huge ramifications for the music ecosystem. So you have to respect intellectual property to some extent. And then taking garettigrutide, which is just sort of a GLP plus, if you will, instead of just waiting it for it to be FDA approved or, like, using Ozempic. I think this is, the worst risk reward decision you could possibly make.
Speaker 2:It's it's like some of the decisions I used to make in the past. You know, what is your upside to to taking illegally manufactured resitrutide from some other place and you can't verify it, etcetera, versus just taking Ozempic? The people that are take peptides and have these peptide stacks are mostly people in SF, maybe New York. They're very wealthy people. They don't know what the rest of the world looks like.
Speaker 2:Nobody else in Middle Middle America is excited to do this. It's not normal, Max, to inject yourself with things. You know, this isn't like a thing everyone should be doing. And so to me, the retreutide case is really insane because this is a drug that Eli Lilly is going to get approved eventually. Sure.
Speaker 2:And and the fact that, you know, there are people dying of certain terrible diseases, and they need compassionate use. They need to get on extension programs. But nobody needs retreotide now, right now before
Speaker 4:FDA I
Speaker 1:approval
Speaker 4:of the your things we agree on are that the existing FDA approved GLP-one receptor agonists are an interesting category of drug and they're a peptide and they're impactful. I think we also agree that companies should not do things illegally and infringe on the patent for Reta. Right? I do think the patent system incentivizes innovation. I think the crux of where we disagree is not and just quickly on the this is the NSF thing.
Speaker 4:That is not true. If you speak I know dozens of people who own these research use companies. And if you speak to them, the majority of their audience is Middle America, not not not not SF tech bros despite the tech bros being noisy on Twitter. I think the crux of where we probably disagree is the 14 or so peptides that RFK has said they might move from category one two, meaning they cannot be compounded, back to category one, meaning they can be compounded. And I guess my like general statement here is that people are taking these compounds.
Speaker 4:Right? They're already using them at scale. Right? And the way to minimize risk the main way to minimize risk is to move them from category two to category one, right, to legalize them. Because the risky thing is the dodgy supply chain we have today.
Speaker 4:The risky thing Well, isn't the isn't the
Speaker 3:risk isn't isn't the risky thing just doing like massive sort of unofficial, you know, human trials when we
Speaker 4:don't I don't think so. So I think I think that is true for peptides that we do not have longitudinal clinical experience and patient experience with. Let's take something like b p c one five seven, which is one of the most controversial ones. So let's let's go right to the meat of things. Let's take something like b p c one five seven.
Speaker 4:My contention is that thousands of doctors prescribe this, they do, And have prescribed this for
Speaker 2:10 You can't prescribe this drug.
Speaker 4:Give it to their patients. Right? You can prescribe it to the semantics. It to their patients.
Speaker 2:It's not a drug.
Speaker 4:Thousands No. Do No. My statement is not the semantics of prescribing. My statement is thousands do this. My other statement is that millions of patients have taken this.
Speaker 4:At least hundreds of thousands, I believe millions have taken this. Yeah. That clinical experience, again, is not an RCT, but we cannot ignore it. Yes, you can. Yes, you can.
Speaker 1:Okay. You can absolutely Wait. It sounds like there's some sort of fundamental disagreement here about, like, the way b p c one five seven is being distributed right now because I know people that have told me that they've taken it. I thought that they were getting it prescribed or recommended to them. Like, Martin, what is your
Speaker 3:We can agree that it's being given to them.
Speaker 1:I think I I think they're getting it. They're getting it. But what's actually what's actually happening here?
Speaker 3:It's being
Speaker 1:How is this happening?
Speaker 4:Out out in the back alley. Is that what's happening? Meet in the back alley.
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem like that. It seems like it seems like there are doctors that do have the ability to
Speaker 4:best doctors in the world. So when I was first introduced to peptides, one of the most esteemed doctors in The US said to me, Max, you take so many supplements. Have you explored peptides? Because I think they're a really interesting modality for the few decades of clinical use. Sure.
Speaker 4:Right? And when he said that to me, was like, No way, this is bullshit. I'm not injecting myself with something. That was weird. So what I did is I went around to around 20 different doctors whose opinions
Speaker 2:Should have trusted your gut.
Speaker 4:Whose opinions I respect.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I asked them about peptides. And normally when you ask these doctors about anything, you ask them about red meat, you ask them about spinach, they're all divided. Yeah. They're all like, one view, another view, punches with peptides. Just about all of them except one said these are really interesting.
Speaker 4:I have used these in my patients.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:I believe the endogenous molecules, peptides that exist in our body are going to be the future of medicine. And those doctors have the incentive to not be wrong. If they're wrong, they could go to jail. If they're wrong, they can have their license stripped. If they're wrong, patients don't come back to them.
Speaker 4:So they have the maximum incentive. And for ten to twenty years, they still give this to their patients and their patients say, My life changed. Now, you might say it's placebo. My statement is, The patient says their life changes and the doctor sees that.
Speaker 1:Okay. Martin, I want you but to I also want you to sort of set aside the intellectual property argument. Like that argument, let's focus on the what doctors are doing, how b p c y one five seven is being delivered, that type of thing.
Speaker 2:So so I'm a drug hunter. Right? People like me, Vivek Ramaswamy, we look all around the world for medicine to buy and medicine to put into companies that great firms like a sixteen z and Founders Fund and other more health care maybe focused firms will fund, take it to the IPO, which I've done before and get paid huge amounts of money. That's what I do. That's what I'm good at.
Speaker 2:That's why I'm the farmer bro. BPC one five seven is the biggest scam I've ever seen. It does absolutely nothing. There's no redeemable value to this. Do you know the story about it?
Speaker 2:Do you guys know? No.
Speaker 4:Please tell us.
Speaker 2:This guy in Croatia made it, Sicic, my my hinterland brother. And, you know, the only publications about this drug are by him. Nobody else has published about this drug. It's it's not a drug, in fact. Nobody's even confirmed that it it's a peptide from the gastric juice as he claimed.
Speaker 2:Nobody can find a sequence that matches that, and the gastric juice of human beings has been thoroughly profiled. It's it's a 15 mer peptides, so it's 15 amino acids. Half life is minutes. There's no plausible physiological basis for it to work. And it's it's been in clinical trials.
Speaker 2:Pleva was a local drug company in the Balkans. Very well respected, my ad. Pleva actually licensed BPC and tried to do clinical trials for it. And guess what? They failed.
Speaker 2:So this this, like, weird, like,
Speaker 4:odd one to the effect? Thing is Of course. Placebo effect? Because, yeah, I I talk
Speaker 1:to people that say it's good for recovery, and I can imagine if you're sticking yourself with something, you might feel like, ah, I'm less sore today
Speaker 2:While are recovering, you think that the drug is helping you. Of course, it isn't. It's the recovery process you're going through. And there's an app for this. If you want to make real money, go make BPC in CGMP conditions and go do a clinical trial.
Speaker 4:And you
Speaker 2:could be a trillion dollar company like Eli Lilly. Instead, you can putz around, you know, buying fake Chinese stuff and then injecting yourself and dreaming that you're doing well. I'm a drug here that if I take might also aid my recovery. Should I try this? Should I tell
Speaker 1:you that it works? What you
Speaker 2:It's an N of one. Oh my God, I did so great with this N of one. It healed my recovery. Like this is nonsense. This is not science.
Speaker 2:Science is controlled experiments that are well done, very carefully documented and so forth. Why are we going backwards? Why do we go forwards in civilization and society? What is this urge by the valley and I blame the valley Mhmm. To go back about Martin time and space.
Speaker 4:I I hear of you, and I think other people will have it. And we don't know whether these are placebo or not yet. We can't make a definitive statement. And we don't have the RCTs.
Speaker 3:But but I thought you I thought you said there there was studies done on BBC one five seven.
Speaker 4:No. Aren't human there are no human studies done.
Speaker 2:We There was one done by Pliva and it failed.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Pliva gave the study. There are dozens of studies of drugs that become commercialized that previously fail. Anyway, my my view is we don't know whether it's placebo or not yet. That that is true and some people will say it's placebo, some will say it's not.
Speaker 4:My statement is really simple, which is you can have Martin's view or you can have the view of thousands of doctors who have used this for ten to twenty years and have their license on the line. The view of millions of patients who talk about their lives changing. You can have that view. My dad's visiting from Australia and he's been taking painkillers for the past four months and can't walk upstairs because his back is bad. He took BBC one hundred fifty seven for three days and he said to me, Max, this is the first time in four months I haven't taken a pain killer.
Speaker 4:Again, I'm not saying this isn't placebo, I'm saying we don't know. What I'm saying is I am God. I'm really happy my dad's not in a pain killer. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 4:My co founder, he lost three organs in hospital. He had an autoimmune disease. They put him in biologics. He took BPC one five seven. He's off biologics, he doesn't have an autoimmune disease anymore.
Speaker 4:Again So I your name in the study. Will put our money office in and fund the studies.
Speaker 2:Put your money where your mouth is. Exactly. But
Speaker 4:we can't ignore the real world evidence.
Speaker 1:Again Well,
Speaker 2:you are ignoring it if you're not putting your money where your mouth is. If you believe that's true No. We are. No. No.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 4:We
Speaker 2:are. Do a do a clinical trial. We are. Tell me about it.
Speaker 4:We're we're we're we're in the process of chatting with the people required to set up a clinical trial for this because we will put our money where our mouth is because I've seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients, and even the FDA, right, who have said they're gonna start legal license, even the FDA.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But Max
Speaker 4:But you can have your view and I don't that's okay. People will have that view. I will have an opposite view and I'll put my money where my mouth
Speaker 2:Max, you've never done a clinical trial before. Right? You've never invested in drug companies before, but you want to do your first clinical trial on this drug, which you did in an event. You've heard anecdotal evidence about. Why?
Speaker 4:Because I have seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients, over one to two decades. Go say to my friend, go back on biologics. Go back to hospital, lose another organ. Go say go say to my dad, go back on painkillers every single day. I don't want my dad on painkillers every single day.
Speaker 4:Now you might say that's placebo, I say I don't know. But I say with the evidence that we currently have, I believe there is more
Speaker 2:to You should see what this galaxy gas does
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 2:me.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Okay. Martin It's
Speaker 3:really good. No. But what's your question is your question, Martin, more that, like, okay, you
Speaker 2:No pharma guy in their right mind would do this.
Speaker 1:Well, hold on. Hold on. So no pharma guy would do it. Max clearly believes in this. And and what is the intersection of these two things?
Speaker 1:Is it possible to do the type of study that you're talking about with Silicon Valley backing? A Is $30,000,000 series a enough to get started or do you
Speaker 4:need to
Speaker 1:go to Wall Street, IPO, do the biotech thing?
Speaker 2:No. You can I mean, plenty of private plenty of private companies do this?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's hundreds, if not actually, would say there's thousands of private biotechs. Okay. Generally, they would pass on something like this.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. Yeah. So why so so there's this body of body of anecdotal evidence. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Unpublished evidence. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So certainly a a drug hunt certainly a drug hunter would have looked at this already. Right?
Speaker 4:Martin, as you're saying, the only admissible evidence is an RCT. Yes. And what about all of all of the examples of when something works? Before anything works with an RCT, there's a time when it works pre RCT. Do you know Yes.
Speaker 2:In animals.
Speaker 4:No. In humans, there are times
Speaker 2:In animals.
Speaker 4:When before there's an RCT,
Speaker 2:will It does happen sometimes. Yes.
Speaker 4:Yes. Look look They're
Speaker 2:intelligently because they're intelligently designed drugs that were designed to do a specific thing and they do the specific thing and then they work. Mhmm. Yep. This is not that.
Speaker 4:And you think your statement, your singular statement of placebo outweighs the again, we don't know, but I'm saying on the facts we have today, there is more to support the fact this is more likely than not placebo than the alternative.
Speaker 2:No. I would I would bet anything. I would I would bet anything. No trial of BPC would work.
Speaker 4:Okay. I guess we'll see.
Speaker 3:What else? So so, Max, are you is superpower facilitating people getting BPC 157 today?
Speaker 4:No. We won't sell anything that is not legal to compound. But I I believe the FDA will make it legal to compound soon.
Speaker 2:And then you can
Speaker 4:sell it. And I believe the FDA should make it legal to compound because the genie's out of the bottle. People have seen their lives changed and they're getting it anyway.
Speaker 3:Else what else are you excited about? Because when people say when people people say peptides with an acid, BPN one five seven
Speaker 4:Thimosin The Alpha-one is fascinating. Approved in 35 countries. I take it and I never get sick. I used to get sick four or five times a year. I had the most elaborate immune stacks.
Speaker 4:None of those elaborate immune stacks, the 100 things placeboed me. Dymosin alpha one, everyone around me had COVID a few months back and I didn't get it. A bunch of people around me had influenza, I didn't get it. Every time I get a sore throat, I take b b c one five seven, Dymosin alpha one and the sore throat disappears. This is a drug that is approved in 35 countries, right?
Speaker 4:Has some human data. Now, pharma in The US hasn't brought it through trials because they can't patent something that had existed for several years. So I think Thymosin Alpha-one is a really interesting one as well.
Speaker 1:Okay. Martin, your reaction?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, drug drug companies can and do patent things that that have existed before. There's lot
Speaker 4:ways to do I did not say that. Said Thymosin Alpha-one in the form that is approved in other countries, they cannot patent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you don't even have to patent a drug. Right? You can get seven years orphan exclusivity, five years of NCE exclusivity. There's a lot of ways to make money in pharma.
Speaker 2:And pharma, if you haven't I noticed
Speaker 4:agree with that. I agree that they could find some rare disease indication and use thymosin alpha one against them and get a patent. My statement is that they could not get a composition of matter patent for thymosin alpha one in the way that doctors and patients are using it today.
Speaker 2:Sure. I mean, you you can change molecules too. I mean, there's a lot of ways.
Speaker 4:I know. Why would they
Speaker 2:Do medicine.
Speaker 4:And so we're saying the machinery of the FDA required something works. We see in 35 countries. The only way to get a patent is we're going change the molecule and spend $300,000,000 to $3,000,000,000. What is that? What is that for a system?
Speaker 4:That's regulatory captured by pharma to me.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say that necessarily. I think that there are benefits to making drugs stronger. Like I said earlier, drugs peptides are the weakest form of drug. They're not the
Speaker 4:Except the the best but maybe the best drug of all time is a peptide.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's very it's it's one of very few. I would say 5% of drugs by revenue. Today
Speaker 4:today, right? Five years ago, we didn't even have GLP-1s. Ten years ago, we didn't we didn't Yeah. Really have GLP-1s. Peptides were
Speaker 2:were and probably always will be a backwater just because they're they're very weak. They have no pharmacological properties that are beneficial like like a good half life. And in fact, the naked peptide GLPs don't work either. They have to be heavily modified by pharmaceutical chemistry.
Speaker 4:We know this is not true. An FDA approved peptide with a very short half life, Semorelin. Dymosin Alpha-one has a very short half life. Are long half life to have an effect. We know this.
Speaker 4:We know this. The FDA and 35% of the countries know this.
Speaker 2:There are some drugs that can work with short half life, but almost every drug guy will tell you that you want a long half life so you don't have to keep taking the drug. Are some drugs
Speaker 4:that And that is fine. And we have methods now with science to extend the half life of these compounds, and that's part of where the research is going. This is called pharmaceuticals. That's that's Correct. Correct.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's what the
Speaker 2:industry is. We have an FDA for it. We have all these rules for it. And I don't think we should change that. I mean, are the the things that have made American pharmaceuticals one of the greatest industries ever.
Speaker 2:To to start to move away from evidence based medicine is is a, you know, is potentially very risky and scary thing.
Speaker 4:I think the riskier thing is there being a gray market. Because the genie's out of the bottle and people are getting these regardless. I think it's far safer to get them through GMP certified compounding pharmacies in the way that the FDA has oversight over rather than the state we're in today, which is the grey market. And this isn't a debate between no peptide and legal. It's a debate between grey market or white market.
Speaker 4:And I contend white market is net less harm, net higher benefit for The US people.
Speaker 2:I think we should treat them like we treat controlled substances. Right? I mean, why that there's a very specific set of laws that states what you're allowed to traffic on interstate commerce or not. And you need a BLA or an NDA or a five zero five(two) to traffic a drug across interstate commerce in The United States Of America. And that changing that, I I don't think is useful or or helpful.
Speaker 2:No matter how many people on Reddit think that they wanna play doctor House today, that's not something that, you know, they should be engaged in. So this is why I think
Speaker 4:they need to be legalized. Because I don't think what we have today is safe. I don't think people go to gray market pharmacies and injecting anything into their body is safe. What I do think is far safer and net lower harm and high benefit to the American people is these things being regulated in category one and produced in GMP certified facilities and prescribed by doctors. That is safer.
Speaker 4:So the net harm reducing case is making these category one illegal to be prescribed by doctors. Not all of them, but the ones where we have a sufficient safety signal and a sufficient effectiveness signal.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. There there is an arbitrator for that already. It's called the FDA. I mean, why you want a second, I guess, like, special ed version of the FDA for drugs that didn't quite make it so clearly efficacious?
Speaker 4:What I'm saying is many of these things the FDA might not ever want to research because the patent is hard, because they target wellness and prevention and human optimization rather than disease. The FDA loves their cancer therapeutics. And my statement is if we have sufficient safety and efficacy signals, we reduce net harm by making them legal today. We reduce net harm. And try saying to the person who used to be in biologics autoimmune disease, you have to wait twenty years for something that might never be researched by by by big pharma.
Speaker 4:Right? Try saying to my daddy who was on painkillers the past four months every single day that you know what? This compound you took for three days that has been used for two decades, go back to your painkillers. Try saying that to them. And maybe maybe one day, pharma, maybe in ten, fifteen years, research this.
Speaker 4:We don't even know. Say that to them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Martin, it sounds like there's a there's a sort of a a mischaracterization of your argument that I'll let you push back on that you're arguing that that the FDA has no problems, that the FDA is perfectly efficient. And that seems crazy. I feel like everyone's upset with every aspect of the government all the time. Is it are are you saying that the FDA is anywhere near approving anywhere near to the speed required to approve new drugs, new research as quickly as they could?
Speaker 2:I'd say they're pretty good. Really?
Speaker 4:You know, I I hate almost every part of the US government.
Speaker 2:Okay. But that's that that's, that's one I do like. And I advise the US government, and and I feel like this is something that, you know, could not be further from our our collective benefit. Company companies love making money.
Speaker 4:It's capitalism. You prefer the gray market? You think the gray market?
Speaker 2:I prefer no market.
Speaker 4:You have one way choice of no market. It's the genie is out of
Speaker 1:the bottle.
Speaker 2:What does that mean?
Speaker 4:It's out of the bottle. What does that What means?
Speaker 2:We can arrest the genie. We can give the genie
Speaker 4:cocaine. Cocaine in the eighties. Doctors have prescribed these compounds and they're doing everything they possibly can to get their hands on them. And that can be very risky. And what I'm saying is we have safety and efficacy signals in millions of patients with that.
Speaker 4:So twenty years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so Max is arguing that like a war on drugs will not work. It hasn't worked in the past. It is impossible
Speaker 2:to peptides.
Speaker 4:Wait. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 1:Because because if these are if it's gray market, that means illegal. Like, Martin is arguing that we can arrest the genie. But can we, Martin? Can we actually arrest the genie? Because it seems like there's a lot of genies, and you had a product behind you that I think might be not legal either, and that was probably available in the corner store.
Speaker 1:And I know that there are dozens of illegal flavored, ecigarettes and vaporizers that come over, and they make their way into bodegas all over The United States and like this just
Speaker 4:provably harmful. And they still think provably harmful things to it. I'm saying these things, doctors have their license on the line. I don't think doctors
Speaker 2:want to recommend Peptide. I I don't think doctors like recommending non FDA approved drugs. I I've never met one that did.
Speaker 4:Well, I know thousands of doctors who do, and I'm saying
Speaker 2:Thousands of doctors? Don't know thousands of doctors. I spent my whole Thousands is such a big number. So many doctors. And
Speaker 4:and what I'm saying is I agree they shouldn't recommend things gray market. What I'm saying is let's legalize because that is net safer for the American people.
Speaker 1:Yes. And, Mark, you're saying that you're saying that you can win. You're saying you're saying that that if we hang out in the gray market, you think it's actually possible to shut down gray market activity. Is that true?
Speaker 2:I think you can shut it down. And then I also think that we have a perfectly great system, which is the normal regulatory body we've had for sixty years. Yes. And creating, like I said, a new special ed version of it for drugs that couldn't quite get on the school bus. Yes.
Speaker 2:You know, is not something that we should do because we have a rigorous way to determine if drugs work or not. Okay.
Speaker 4:Let's get rid of all gray market, and my friend can go back on biologics. And that can go back in pain killers. You should. Or the farmer can continue making hundreds of thousands of dollars from these biologics. Let's do that.
Speaker 4:Sure. And you know what? We're not gonna shut that. You get what I'm saying?
Speaker 3:Closing arguments. One more thing. So so Martin, your stance is generally that these drugs just haven't proven to be that good. They've been around for long enough that a bunch of smart pharma bros and sisters would have, like, you know, taken them through trials already if they we we
Speaker 2:take a lot of bad stuff through
Speaker 3:trials. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, BPC isn't even doesn't even come close to the muster of of a farmer bro.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so so it's it's it's weak. You're saying there's a placebo that you think is probably real, but then what is the what is the risk?
Speaker 3:Right? Because if somebody is saying like, okay, it's a weak drug. I maybe get a placebo effect. Maybe maybe maybe But it just why should somebody Avoid these avoid it entirely regardless of if they're available on the gray market or on this, like, you
Speaker 1:know
Speaker 3:Mhmm. New version
Speaker 2:of we shouldn't normalize making drugs in your bathtub. I think that, you know, there's there's no evidence that any of these things are well made. I think we should leave medicine to the experts. I think that's something SV is very reluctant to do. Many people want to feel in a world where maybe they feel like they're losing control.
Speaker 2:They want to control this thing. In a world where we're losing confidence in government, we want to take this into our own hands. And it's just not the way to do things. Medicine has progressed dramatically, thanks to the capitalist system and the biopharmaceutical system in league with the FDA, which doesn't always get it right, but is quite good. And, you know, thanks to that, we have drugs for cystic fibrosis.
Speaker 2:We have a cure for cystic fibrosis. We have drugs for SMA. We have these terrible diseases. And one last thing is that a lot of these people in SV, you're perfectly healthy. You know, you're you're talking about two sick people there a second ago, but most of the people I know on these peptides, they're taking a modafinil, they're taking drugs for diseases they don't have.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And this is not, you know, the the a great use of people's time or or or or great for their health. And in some some to some extent, the government does exist to help protect people from them themselves and their own stupidity.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then, Max, you're planning, to take b p c one five seven through clinical trials. You planning to take any of these other peptides through? Yeah. So What what is the where where does that ultimately where does that ultimately go?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we're we're working with a handful of different biotech companies that are taking these through clinical trials. We're in the early days of of of setting that up. And my my statement is not anti FDA or anti the machinery we have. I think it solves a lot of purposes.
Speaker 4:I just think it doesn't solve all purposes. And my statement is not that the current system is always perfectly right. I think when new data comes along, when new science comes along, when there's a dangerous gray market, we need to accept that the times have changed and adapt the regulation. It has solves a lot of purposes. There are many parts of it that are exceptional, but it is not complete.
Speaker 4:And I'm saying that we should do what the FDA has said they're doing, which is legalise several of the category two peptides that have the strongest safety and efficacy signals because that reduces net harm for patients and increases net benefit even if pharma doesn't necessarily like it because they're not making money from their $100,000 biologic drug anymore.
Speaker 1:Sure. Martin, any closing statements? It's been great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just want to say pharma did try to develop VPC and failed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Okay. We went through that. It's a good point. Well, thank you so much for joining today.
Speaker 1:Thank you to you both. Everyone had a great time.
Speaker 3:Good job keeping it civil, boys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very civil.
Speaker 3:This is very civil. Professional.
Speaker 1:Again again. And next time a a new peptide goes viral, we'd love to have you both on the show Let's go. Independently or together. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week, and we will talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great stuff. Bye. Cheers. Bye, guys. TBPN's daily newsletter has op eds that are written by Jordy and I in addition to top tech headlines and the timeline's best posts.
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