The peptide debate. Welcome to the stream, guys. How are you guys doing?
Hey, how's it going? You guys, thank you so much for taking the time.
Why don't you both start with an introduction on yourself and maybe your core thesis around peptides?
Martin, why don't you go first?
Yeah. So, I'm the pharma bro. I represent the interests of the pharmaceutical industry, I guess the viewpoint of the pharmaceutical industry, including but not limited to Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, etc. I'm sure those guys love that. And uh...
You're the face of pharma, whether they like it or not.
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. I've commercialized drugs. I've done just about anything you can do in the drug industry. 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.
Hi, 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 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. 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. We need more research. But I think peptides are exciting.
Martin, I'll let you just respond. Seems like you have something on your mind. But 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. So let's maybe narrow it down a little bit to probably off-label use. I don't know exactly where things start to get fuzzy for you guys, but defining a little bit more of where the actual point of debate is, because I imagine that there's agreement with the extremes.
Yeah. I mean, isn't there a problem when we have to redefine semantics that have been defined forever? You know, isn't this like somebody saying, you know, I'm using GPT instead of using AI or something like that? Like 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. 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 turned that into the standard bearer for do-it-yourself medicine is kind of humorous to anybody who actually understands pharma.
Except that the last drug class has the potentially most impactful drug of all time, or set of drugs of all time, the GLP-1 receptor agonists. So I'm not saying we only have peptides in the toolkit. I'm saying the genie's out of the bottle and we cannot ignore peptides as a tool in the toolkit. Small molecules, just like I guess framing it for people who don't kind of understand the difference between these things. Small molecules are made synthetically. 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. You can, but it's a little bit harder. Small molecules on the other hand are things that humans design to block biology, to 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-1s, already change the world, and my contention is that there are other categories of peptides that are under-researched, but have really interesting kind of clinical vignettes that might change the world going forward.
Martin's large, but I think like why we're having this conversation is because people are just, you know, injecting 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 private companies that are happily facilitating this and profiting off of it when it seems to be a large number of risks that are still unknown. At least that's my point of view.
Yeah, I think that's right. 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 retatrutides, 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?
Yeah. I mean, why do you have a right to pirate somebody's intellectual property? This is the property of Eli Lilly. They discovered it. They spent billions of dollars on it. You want to steal it? You want to work with a Chinese company stealing it? I mean, that's not good for America. That's not good for the drug industry. And guess where do these drugs come from? They come from American R&D labs. And if you keep stealing them and pirating them in this like weird twilight DIY drug system, which is not very large, at least compared to pharma, I don't know if you make a big impact, but if it went very large scale, you would. I mean, you'd stop having drugs the same way pirating music would have huge ramifications for the music ecosystem. So you have to respect intellectual property to some extent. And then taking a Reddit retatrutide, which is just sort of a GLP plus if you will, instead of just waiting for it to be FDA approved or like using Ozempic, I think this is like the worst risk-reward decision you could possibly make. It's like some of the decisions I used to make in the past. You know, what is your upside to taking illegally manufactured retatrutide from some other place and you can't verify it, etc., versus just taking Ozempic? The people that 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. Nobody else in middle America is excited to do this. It's not normal, Max, to inject yourself with things. You know, this isn't a thing everyone should be doing. And so to me, the retatrutide case is really insane because this is a drug that Eli Lilly is going to get approved eventually. And the fact that there are people dying of certain terrible diseases and they need compassionate use, they need to get on extension programs, but nobody needs retatrutide right now.
So I think the things we agree on are that the existing FDA-approved GLP-1 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. I do think the patent system incentivizes innovation. I think the crux of where we disagree is not... and just quickly on the SF thing, 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 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 two, meaning they cannot be compounded, back to category one, meaning they can be compounded. And I guess my general statement here is that people are taking these compounds, right? They're already using them at scale, right? And the 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. The risky thing...
Well, isn't the risky thing just doing like massive sort of unofficial, you know, human trials when we don't...
I don't think so. So I think that is true for peptides that we do not have longitudinal clinical experience and patient experience with. But let's take something like BPC-157, which is one of the most controversial ones. So let's go right to the meat of things. Let's take something like BPC-157. My contention is that thousands of doctors prescribe this. They do and have prescribed this for 10...
You can't prescribe this drug.
They give it to their patients, right? You can prescribe... semantics. Give it to their patients.
Thousands do that. 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. At least hundreds of thousands, I believe millions have taken this.
And that clinical experience, again, is not an RCT. But we cannot ignore it.
Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You can absolutely.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. It sounds like there's some sort of fundamental disagreement here about like the way BPC-157 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...
We can agree that it's being given to them.
I think they're getting it. But what's actually happening here? How is this happening?
Out in the back alley. They meet in the back alley.
It doesn't seem like that. It seems like there are doctors that do have the ability.
The 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 with a few decades of clinical use.'
Right. And when he said that to me, I was like, 'No way. This is... I'm not injecting myself with something that was weird.' So what I did is I went around to around 20 different doctors whose...
Whose opinions I respect. 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, right? They're all like one view, another view, punches. With peptides, just about all of them except one said, 'These are really interesting. I have used these in my patients. I believe the endogenous molecules, the 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. So they have the maximum incentive. And for 10 to 20 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.
Okay, Martin, I want you to react, but I also want you to sort of set aside the intellectual property argument. I like that argument, but let's focus on what doctors are doing, how BPC-157 is being delivered, that type of thing.
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 A16Z and Founders Fund and other more healthcare-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. That's why I'm the pharma bro. BPC-157 is the biggest scam I've ever seen. It does absolutely nothing. There is no redeemable value to this. Do you know the story about it? Do you guys know? No.
This guy in Croatia made it. Sich, my hinterland brother. And you know, the only publications about this drug are by him. Nobody else has published about this drug. It's not a drug. In fact, nobody has even confirmed that it's a peptide from the gastric juice as he claimed. Nobody can find a sequence that matches that. And the gastric juice of human beings has been thoroughly profiled. It's a 15-peptide. So it's 15 amino acids. Half-life is minutes. There's no plausible physiological basis for it to work. And it's been in clinical trials. Pliva was a local drug company in the Balkans. Very well respected. Pliva licensed BPC and tried to do clinical trials for it. And guess what? They failed. So this like weird 'I do think it's effective' thing is placebo effect because...
Yeah. I've talked 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 because it just...
While you 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 GMP conditions and go do a clinical trial and you can be a trillion-dollar company like Eli Lilly. Instead, you can putts around, you know, buying fake Chinese stuff and then injecting yourself and dreaming that you're doing well. I have a drug here that if I take might also aid my recovery. No, should I try this? Should I tell you that it worked for me? Is it N of one? Oh my god, I did so great with this N of one. You know, it healed my recovery. Like, this is nonsense. This is not science. Science is controlled experiments that are well done, very, 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, to go backwards in time and space?
I hear of you and I think other people 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.
Wait, but I thought you said there were studies done on BPC-157.
No, there are no human studies done. We...
There was one done by Pliva and it failed.
One study. There are dozens of studies of drugs that become commercialized that previously failed. Anyway, my view is we don't know whether it's placebo or not yet. That is true, and some people will say it's placebo. Some will say it's not. 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 10 to 20 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 BPC-157 for three days and he said to me, 'Max, this is the first time in four months I haven't taken a painkiller.' Again, I'm not saying this isn't placebo. I'm saying we don't know. What I'm saying is, I'm really happy my dad's not on a painkiller, right? My co-founder, he lost three organs in hospital. He had an autoimmune disease. They put him on biologics. He took BPC-157. He's off biologics and he doesn't have an autoimmune disease anymore. Again, put your money... We will put our money where our mouth is and fund the studies. We can't ignore the real-world evidence. Again...
Put your money where your mouth is.
Well, you are ignoring it if you're not putting your money where your mouth is. If you believe that's true...
No, no, no. Do a clinical trial.
We are. Tell me about it. 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 going to start legalizing. You can have your view and I don't... that's okay. People will have that view. I will have mine and I'll put my money where my mouth is.
Even the FDA? Okay. But 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 didn't invent. You know, you've heard anecdotal evidence about why...
Because I have seen thousands of doctors, millions of patients over one to two decades, right? Go say to my friend, 'Go back on biologics, go back to hospital, lose another organ.' Go say to my dad, 'Go back on painkillers every single day.' I don't want my dad on painkillers every single day. 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's more to...
You should see what this Galaxy Gas does for me. It's amazing.
Galaxy. Okay. It's really good. No, but what's your question? Is your question, Martin, more that like, okay, you...
No pharma guy in their right mind would do this.
Well, hold on. Hold on. So no pharma guy would do it. Max clearly believes in this. And what is the intersection of these two things? Is it possible to do the type of study that you're talking about with Silicon Valley backing? Is a $30 million Series A enough to get started or do you need to go to Wall Street, IPO, do the biotech thing?
No, you can. I mean, plenty of private companies do this. There's hundreds, if not actually I would say there's thousands of private biotechs.
Okay. Generally, they would pass on something like this.
So there's this body of anecdotal evidence.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So certainly a drug hunter would have looked at this already, right?
Martin, you're saying the only admissible evidence is an RCT.
