In this podcast, we deal with the part of the post-quantum roadmap that no one dwells on and I suspect will be the most important: the migration from old, quantum insecure addresses to the bigger, bulkier addresses that actually can stand up to quantum computation.

I invited a prominent community member in the Ethereum world to discuss this with, Chris Cameron, also known as PaperImpeium on X. Cameron has been around the DeFi space a long time.

My plan had been for us to talk through many facets of Lean Ethereum, the next big upgrade coming for the world’s second-largest blockchain.

Instead, we end up just talking about the problem of migrating everyone to new addresses once the fix is in, how hard that will be, making guesses about what will happen and whether or not there’s a better way to do it (I don’t think there is any option, but who knows? Engineers could surprise us all).

I’ve written about the post-quantum migration problem before, but obviously everyone has not read that piece yet.

I think it was really helpful to have on a super well-informed leader in the blockchain space and inform them on tape of this necessary headache and get their reaction to it in real time.

Everyone working on this issue knows that this logistical hurdle is ahead. No one who’s just casually reading about the debate between Nic Carter and Bitcoin’s illuminati has grokked it yet.

Here’s the thing: Decentralization works differently. You are responsible for your assets. If you are living in a house with a bad lock, you have to change your locks yourself. Just because someone makes a better lock, that won’t automatically install the lock on your house. You’ve still got to put it on.

That’s the same problem here.

Every single person with assets on chain needs to make a decision soon:

• Are you going to move your assets onto a centralized service and let them manage the quantum transition for you?

• Or are you going to watch updates from the blockchain core developers on your chain of choice and be ready to move your assets to a new, self-custody wallet yourself, once the solution is ready?

Because if you do nothing, your wallet will be swept, eventually.

Sources:

Episode 391 - Lean Ethereum Part 1: Introduction with Justin Drake
Zero Knowledge Podcast
Feb 18, 2026

Episode 397 — Lean Etehreum Part 6: Ethereum’s quantum leap with Justin Drake
Zero Knowledge Podcast
Feb 20, 2026

Notes:

Zero Knowledge ran a six-part series on Lean Ethereum, which starts here.

• I listened to all of it. I followed very little. Lean Ethereum is big and it’s going to change many things in ways that the engineers building it feel sure will be much better.

Meet the DeFi Delegate Knocking on the Doors of Congress, by Andrew Thurman, CoinDesk, October 14, 2021

Ingle tokens, by Chris Cameron, LinkedIn

• A good example of how Cameron likes to connect the history of money to crypto.

UPDATE (May 14 2:50 PM ET) — Clarity passed the Senate Banking Committee, by a 15-9 vote (which means that a number of Senators didn’t vote). Cortez-Masto voted against it, saying in a statement, that it wasn’t helpful enough for victims or prosecutors going after the criminals that target them.

Three things that are very useful to criminals almost every day:

• Telephones

• Roads

• Duct tape

Three groups that never get prosecuted when criminals use the products they developed:

• Electrical engineers

• Civil engineers

• Johnson & Johnson, a division of which developed the product we know today as “duck tape”1 or “duct tape.”

But certain Democrats seem to believe that the people who develop certain technologies should be held criminally responsible for how other people use them.

Today, the Senate Banking Committee will hear what could be the final version of the Clarity Act, the big bill meant to finally provide statute under which to regulate the creation, buying and selling of digital assets.

The meeting is underway as I write this:

In the existing bill, there’s a long sought provision (section 604, in the legislation under consideration today) that would protect developers of software if their software ends up being used in criminal activity.

• So if I build a popular decentralized exchange, publish it to a blockchain and throw away the keys to update it, I can’t be punished if someone steals $55 million worth of WOULDJA from some poorly designed Defi protocol and trades it for the vastly more liquid COULDJA.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D—Nevada) offered amendments that strike the section that offers these protections and severely limits them. Her amendment (number 16 on today’s agenda), shrinks the extent of Sec. 604.

To be honest, I can’t tell what it would protect. It’s hard to follow.

• As I write this, I’m told the amendment won’t move forward. Word is that some Democrats are coming around and plan to support the legislation. It’s not yet clear quite what is moving.

The language is prevented early this week, however, would provide that if a developer doesn’t have control over other people’s assets, they are protected from registration requirements as money transmitters.

This has been a core question in crypto for some time. People can create tools that other people can use to move millions or billions of dollars worth of assets, people have wanted to treat those applications as if they were the same as MoneyGram or the VISA network.

• Blockchain advocates argue that it’s different, though, because, with blockchains, it’s possible to create applications that regulate the flow of funds without giving their creators any responsibility for them. Indeed, once these apps get released, often the developer couldn’t change the flows if they wanted to.

• (And if they are running one of the blockchain apps where they could change the flows, then these protections wouldn’t apply to them).

The point here is to make a distinction between coming up with code, with products that people could use, and actually running companies that control customer funds — like Bank of America and Western Union do.

Tornado Cash has been the key case here. Tornado Cash is a privacy service on Ethereum. It’s still running. People still use it. It was never possible for its creators to modify it or take it down. Various governments have put its staff in prison, but Tornado Cash kept chugging. That’s decentralization.

Even the U.S. government couldn’t take it down, because there was no one to ask to do it. The only way to take Tornado Cash down would be to disable the whole Ethereum blockchain, and it doesn’t have an off switch.

Liberties

Coin Center is an organization formed around letting people be free to develop digital products in the blockchain space. Coin Center supports the language submitted for markup today.

Authorities have a way of getting weird about personal liberties with money in the mix.

Like: You have the right to privacy. Well, you have the right to privacy except any privacy at all about how you spend any of your money ever. If you buy a pack of Twizzlers in a gas station outside a Phoenix Costco, the authorities would argue that it’s better that they can know about that.

Just in case they might be terrorist Twizzlers.

Precisely because things get weird when money is involved, Coin Center exists to push back and say that rights are rights.

To some degree, winning a statutory protection saying people can write money code without fear of prosecution would be the organization’s pièce de résistance. The work would never really end, because people would inevitably need to be defended under the statute, if passed.

Still, protections for software developers on chain would be a big win.

And the organization is not eager to see it watered down.

The compromise

There is a compromise in the text under discussion today, versus what was sent over in Clarity from the House, though. New language that was added before this latest version came out.

As Jason Somensatto, Coin Center’s policy director pointed out to me, there’s a new section on “Clarification of treatment” that gives prosecutors some leeway. Basically, if they can show that some code was written with crime in mind, a developer could be prosecuted for it.

So if a criminal syndicate created some kind of cross-chain protocol, for example (so they could move stolen funds between chains without any risk that they would be frozen mid-route). A prosecutor could bring a case over developing that software if they had evidence that this had been the main intent.

• This is much like how fraud cases work. It’s not enough to show that someone committed an act of fraud. Prosecutors have to show evidence that the accused knew it was wrong (a “guilty mind”). This was probably the main topic during the Sam Bankman-Fried case, over how he misused customer funds entrusted to FTX.

What to watch

A bunch of law enforcement agencies have put out letters saying that they don’t like the language protecting developers. Never too many reasons to throw people behind bars, I guess.

If you’ve never been through a markup, it’s going to be an unbelievably long and tedious process, where lots of senators will offer amendments in order to get a few minutes on the mic, in hopes of landing a zinger that they can post on social media. It will probably go till midnight or later. There will be lots of redundancy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren will talk about “cronies” a lot.

My guess is that the Cortez-Masto amendments get voted down. The act of amending legislation is all largely a game of show. The amendments that will be allowed to move and the ones that won’t tend to all be decided ahead of time by the party.2

If a legislator ever changes his or her mind in one of these conversations because someone actually made a really good point in one of these hearings, well, I’d love to see that caught on film.

The big question though is whether or not Cortez-Masto will support the legislation on the floor if her amendment doesn’t pass. (I have written to her press staff twice now, but I haven’t heard back).

• Subsequent to publication, Cortez Masto’s staff let me know that the Senator would have been fine with 604 if the standard for prosecution had been “knowingly” rather than what the bill says now, which is “specific intent.”

• I’ll leave it to others to parse the implications there. I have my guesses for why this standard wouldn’t fly with advocates, but my imprecise non-legal speculation probably isn’t useful in the thick of this discussion — so I’ll leave it.

Cortez-Masto was one of the Democrats who voted for GENIUS on final passage. In the Senate, Democrats are needed to beat the filibuster.

• Sen. Ruben Gallego, of Arizona, says he will support a version of the bill expected to come out today, according to . He seems to have been leading the middle of the road Dems on this topic, so this could be a good sign for this legislation passing the Senate.

• (If that happens, remember, the House will still have to concur with their changes — though I’m guessing Rep. French Hill (R—Ark.) will push his chamber to do that quickly)

But maybe it will turn out that the developer protections do get lost in the end. Or maybe there’s another attempt to kill them on the floor. Or even in the House! We just don’t quite know yet.

So.

Just to note.

As I write this, there’s likely several million dollars worth — maybe tens of millions! — of dangerous illegal drugs, like pot laced with fentanyl, driving over America’s highways. So I hope if law enforcement gets its way with blockchain development it doesn’t stop there.

The next target: All those lawless civil engineers designing roads we can drive on willy-nilly without even registering an itinerary with our local Department of Transportation.

Can you even imagine.

There’s a cute Austrian restaurant in South Brooklyn called Werkstatt. I have only been there once. They had a photo of Bob Dylan up on the wall. It wasn’t an album cover or a concert photo. It was just a snapshot of a young Bob Dylan, leaning against some cool 70s car. It happened to be sitting opposite me the time I went, and, when I saw it, a thought arose unbidden from somewhere far back in my mind.

I thought: “That guy doesn’t have a cell phone and he doesn’t have email. He couldn’t check Twitter if he had all the money in the world.

“He doesn’t even know those things are on the way.

“He’s so lucky.”

There are a lot of things one should think about what made Bob Dylan lucky in the 70s, and I have thought about many of those things at other times. But that night, in that place, my mind went to his pockets and the fact that his held no tiny computer, buzzing away.

The 70s were a better time, not only because everyone then was hotter than anyone now.

Paul Kingsnorth’s bestselling book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, is about what we’ve lost as little masters colonized everyone’s pockets. His book unsettles people, and I think I know why. It’s because it’s not just a polemic against technology, but because it is a diagnosis of what technology replaced.

He opens the book by saying that our society doesn’t have a purpose any longer.

He makes a strong case that we went from being a Christian society to a godless one. But actually it’s not so much that we’re godless. In theory, that might be okay. The trouble is that we used to have a shared theory of purpose — a teleology — but in unshackling ourselves from the church we did not sign on to anything else.

Nothing but ourselves. So collectively we became rudderless. We thought of secularism as philosophical progress. But how do you progress if you’ve no idea where you’re going? We’re lost.

He writes:1

Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. ... There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions ... The dethroning of the sovereign-Christ who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

That’s really the core idea. Most of the book is about resisting the thing that’s colonizing us now that Christ no longer reigns, but it couldn’t have done if the throne weren’t empty.

It’s not so much that a usurper is on the way, but that there’s no one seated on the throne to stop it. What matters is not merely that Christ no longer reigns, but that Nothing reigns.

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them.” (Screwtape to Wormwood, Letter XII), The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.

We were once a Christian people. No longer. Now we go shopping. Even the few of us who go to church go shopping for churches. They go shopping for the church that makes them feel the way they want to feel.

This is a book about a culture that lost the plot, and what fills that void.

In the following I want to give a fair summary of the book. And then I want to reflect on it.

But here’s the quick version. I’ve established the big point. So, from there, Against the Machine argues that technology isn’t even a little bit neutral and that, at this point, we can confidently say that engineers aren’t so much building something as summoning it. If you accept that premise, then you should resist.

This puts me in a bind.

I don’t think he’s wrong about the present moment, but it’s hard for me to see what the point of resisting is. The tide of history has seldom been pushed back effectively. Japan delayed it, but that didn’t last. Kingsnorth even opens one of his chapters with just that moment. That’s chapter X, “Come the Black Ships.”

What sort of resistance is one to do? I could move onto a mountain I suppose, but I’m not quite that antisocial. I could apply for one of those disconnected communities, but I’m not much of a joiner.

Plus, I really like the coming of self-driving cars. I understand they expand the panopticon, but it would be nice to know that I could shoot between Wichita and Tulsa in the dead of night without worrying about falling asleep on the road.

The Machine isn’t all bad.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I don’t much want to fight. But I’m also not very crazy about being eaten.

It’s a dilemma.

The easiest way to get a picture of what Kingsnorth wants to do here is to look at two sets of four concepts that he returns to throughout.

Modernity, he contends, is defined by four atomizing elements: sex, science, the self and the screen.

A more human world, on the other hand, places the emphasis on people, place, prayer and the past.

I’d be interested in hearing what you think about those two pairs of four concepts.

If you want to stop reading now and go ahead and jump into comments and say before you see what I think, that would be great.

Leave a comment

I’ll babble just a little bit more here to keep my reaction further from your eyes while you consider it.

Just a little bit more.

How you been anyway?

OK.

Here we go.

Leave a comment

If you ask me, the big difference between those lists comes down to choice. The first list, the top one, that’s all about giving you lots of choices, lots of discretion.

But it’s easier to see with the second list. The second list constrains choices. If your life is about people and place, then you’re stuck with a lot of obligations, a lot of expectations. If you emphasize place in your life, if you decide that your roots matter, then you’re stuck with an accident of birth. You’re stuck with traditions and ideas that maybe you find grating.

And prayer? Well any tradition of prayer is going to come with corresponding interdictions. And the past tells you that it’s about sticking with what’s known to have worked rather than attempting to chase new ideas willy-nilly.

The second list is about being part of something, and being part of something yields constraints.

It’s hard because I got to the end of every chapter of this book and didn’t particularly disagree with any of them. Not in a big way, anyway. But I also listened to the extended interview between PJ Vogt and Sebastian Thrun (formerly of Waymo) and came away as excited as he is about engineers’ ability to move people further, faster.

But, then again, as a GenX guy who remembers the old ways before cell phones and podcasts, it’s obvious to me a larger vexation. For all our modern mobility, we can’t seem to close the most important gap of all: We can’t meet eye-to-eye.

“Today we are led by want, we are drenched in it, and we are increasingly sick from its infection.”

The first part of the book sets up the concept of the machine. The machine is basically technology, but it’s more than that. It’s a unification of rationalism as opposed to the messy, earthiness of natural life.

Years ago, I was riding from Philadelphia to central Pennsylvania for an organizing conference with this hardcore environmentalist who worked for one of the big local unions. We were comparing our views of the world.

At some point, I made a comment about how efficient nature is. He corrected me, saying that nature is not efficient. Nature is resilient, he told me.

He meant that there’s a lot of redundancy in the wild. The system has backups upon backups. We like to talk about nature as a delicate web, but it’s not really that delicate at the macro level. A species might die if the wrong thing happens, but the whole ecosystem will carry on. Nature has enough processes going that it can adapt.

We could have a multipolar nuclear war and nature would persevere. The planet would bounce back. We probably couldn’t kill everything on this planet if we put our minds to it. We probably couldn’t kill off humanity if we put our mind to it, though God knows we are constantly told that we live forever on the brink of extinction.

I thought of this idea of resilience as the pandemic kicked in and everyone was freaking out about toilet paper. The economy was very efficiently allocating toilet paper largely to commercial spaces and to a lesser extent to consumer outposts. It had a way of getting that sanitary tissue to the places it typically needed to be just as it was needed.

But then the location of demand shifted in a major way and the supply chain wasn’t set up to pivot as needed. That’s an efficient supply chain. No excess. No waste. But also not a lot of flexibility. The price of efficiency is breakdowns in an emergency. The benefit, though: Lotta strong quarters.

Resilience doesn’t deliver rising equity prices and breakout quarters, but it does deliver survival.

Pick your poison.

This section takes the origins of the Machine way, way back. It even goes back to the Protestant Reformation. Kingsnorth basically contends that what Martin Luther thought was a liberation of the masses from a hidebound patrician theology was ultimately the first seed of an anything goes ethic that would eventually deliver us to our blue-and-green-haired, facially-pierced present.

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But his larger point here was to show that technology, the Machine, is not a bunch of little things. It’s one big thing, and it’s hoovering us all into it. There’s a point at which it becomes nearly impossible to say no to the Machine, as Japan learned when it tried simply to shut the rest of the world out.

There came a point at which the world insisted on incorporating Japan’s economy too firmly for it to refuse.

Which brings me back to the point I began with: What’s the point of resisting?

In the Machine age, ideology effectively functions as a replacement for and simulacrum of religion. Liberalism, socialism, communism, fascism, nationalism: all of these post-Enlightenment forms could be said to be the result of what historian John Bossy called ‘the migration of the holy’ from the Church to state.

He calls The Matrix the most symbolically prophetic movie of the 20th Century.

You probably know this, but: It’s a film about a fake world, a computer program designed to distract humans from the hideous reality of their actual lives — that they are comatose batteries living from birth to death inside a tube.

(Have you ever seen a parent take a tablet out of the hands of a toddler?)

The point he’s making in this section is that it just doesn’t mean anything to live in the West any longer. Which might be why we peer into a simulated world so much, rather than living actual lives.

He has chapters about the home, the nation, the body, the land, the church. If you’re an American, like me, you’ve probably lived your whole life believing that kings are gross anachronisms, that Britain should throw its royals into the sea.

I’m not saying that Kingsnorth will bring you around, but if anyone can shake your faith, he can.

We define ourselves by what we are not, and what we are not is everything we used to be.

If you know any Millennials or Gen Whatevers and you ask them about the West, they will probably respond with some sort of disgust. Which, like, fine, but ask them what we should replace it with. They don’t really have an answer. Or, actually, they will all have an answer.

Every single one of them. An individual answer. Plus something about Trump.

Kingsnorth ends the section by meditating on the coming of AI, and reminding us that traditions going back as far as human memory reaches have warnings about calling up unhuman intelligences from elsewhere.

For a book that reveres the past, it takes a surprising turn as it proceeds toward the end.

This is what we do, here in ‘the West’: we break things. We break systems and traditions, cultures and forests. We split atoms and we bust through the upper atmosphere. ... ‘The West’ has become an idol; some kind of static image of the past that maybe once was but is now inhabited by a new force: The Machine.

The West has died.

Kingsnorth lives in Ireland now, but he’s from England. His oldest ancestors are from Kent. He can find their tombstones in graveyards there.

He tells a story of meeting an Irish man who asks him where he’s from. He tells him England, but the Irishman finds that to be a ridiculous answer. It’s as obvious to the Irishman that Kingsnorth is English as it would be to a Frenchman that I’m American.

That’s not where he’s from, the Irish man explains. He presses him until he comes up with Kent.

Most people in the U.S. can’t answer this question in a word or two: Where are you from?

We Western people: we have to learn how to inhabit again. We have to learn how to live sanely in our lands.

Books that diagnose a problem frequently get criticized for failing to offer solutions (as if anyone cares what people who write books think).

But I wouldn’t say this book closes on a prescription for dealing with the problem of the Machine.

Kingsnorth doesn’t precisely advocate a full-on resistance to the Machine. The book is peppered with little stories of traditional peoples who — one way or another — ran for the hills as civilizers came to town. He admires them.

But Kingsnorth hasn’t headed for the hills, though he does tell us that he has a nice camper van. Instead, it ends more on practices one can undertake to remain human as more and more of what’s good about being a human being gets stripmined away.

Let’s come back to the point of the book. The point of the book is that godlessness leads to cultures that have no rudders. And cultures that have no rudders spin out.

Do you think the U.S. is spinning out?

Leave a comment

We might be on the precipice of building the greatest engine of growth in all of human history, but what’s that growth going to do? Is it going to grow inside of us, like one of those aliens in the Sigourney Weaver movies?

I suspect the main takeaway that most people who read this book will come away with is: He thinks technological progress is bad. And he does. But that’s not really the point.

The point is that an intelligence from outside can colonize us as a people if there’s nothing inside us — all of us — standing in its way. We live in a world where the typical person looks at a little silver screen for 10 hours a day. He’s on to something.

You can have your washing machines and your electric cars and your fast fashion and even your nuclear reactors. You can keep them. All Kingsnorth asks in exchange is that you join some collective reason to live. That’s what’s missing.

And, I promise you, that’s not the Democratic Party.

So, I’m going to close this on notes from three different contemporary philosophers who I encountered while reading this book, and then I’m going to go. The first is crazy. The second is divisive. The third is me.

David Chapman

David Chapman is the crazy one. I’ve been casually paying attention to Chapman since I found This Part of Twitter (TPOT) in 2019. He makes it difficult for me to take him seriously at too long of a stretch.

Chapman has not written about Against the Machine, as far as I can tell, but he did publish a post recently on re-enchanting the world. All it takes, he contends, is to just decide to see the sacredness there. The sacredness, he contends, never went anywhere. You just have to look for it.

In a world without Christ, this almost feels like a start. But it’s not. Not really. This perspective is completely complementary with the Machine. Said another way, this is spirituality under capitalism.

If you’re not familiar, Capitalist Realism is a pamphlet by the late Mark Fisher. Its point is simple, that it’s hard to even imagine an alternative to capitalism.

Just going around and seeing sacredness however it comes to you is the same self-directed spirituality that leaves our people directionless. If everyone is going their own way, we aren’t going anywhere.

Joe Rogan

Comedians are in fact our contemporary philosophers, and Rogan isn’t bad as philosophers go. Rogan and I both take the idea of alien life actively engaging with our planet seriously. I doubt this is something Kingsnorth takes seriously, but I do.

If there are intelligent beings on other planets who managed to remain living, embodied, organic beings despite achieving technologies far beyond our present ken, then that offers some kind of hope that our progress-oriented world might not be suicidal.

Maybe this other intelligence we’re in the midst of summoning won’t be so bad?

Not so long ago I was going down a Rogan rabbit hole as I started looking into peptides, because he was way out ahead of most platformed people on the peptide curve. In one of the many episodes I listened to, he went off about how it could be that the only way alien civilizations are able to reach the stars is by eliminating all the crazy differences that makes it fun to be alive.

If they manage to make themselves a lot more the same, they might be able to coordinate well enough to overcome gravity and the vastness of interstellar space. That would make him sad, he said, to think of humanity’s wildness going out like that.

So that’s another way of looking ahead. Maybe the machine doesn’t kill us? Maybe it will make us all the same? Which would be too bad, but it would also mean we’d stop killing each other. Which would be nice. And maybe we’d see Saturn’s rings up close. That would be cool.

Though I’m not sure it would be worth the trip.

I really wish Kingsnorth would go on Rogan to discuss this book. I think Rogan would actually read it if he did. I’d like to hear the two of them compare notes. Kingsnorth pushing to return to the wild. Rogan opining about the inevitable homogenization.

You can’t fight City Hall.

Me

The question of whether or not we’re meant to see Saturn’s rings with our own naked eyes comes back to the question of what you think the point of being alive is.

Is it to do new things in the world or is it to just be?

These are two perfectly reasonable schools of thought. Panda bears exist. Humans build.

The trouble with building is that building requires resources, and seeking resources leads to disputes and sometimes disputes get out of hand. And there are unforeseen consequences. And winners and losers. And The Real Housewives of Cleveland.

Pandas have disputes over resources but they don’t get all that far out of hand.

Do you want to be man or panda?

Here’s what I know: I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to protest. I don’t want to run for the hills. I might be persuaded to run to an alternative community, but I’d need to know it had a track record of working out before I wanted to go.

The new ones have a way of falling to pieces. And the Machine seems to be reaching the longest standing communities now, anyway.

I don’t think technology can be stopped. If a breakthrough isn’t made in one place, it will be made in another. If one engineer quits, another will take his place. And obviously there’s just never any going back. Believe me, if I could have lived in the 70s, rather than today, I would have. But it’s not an option.

No one ever again gets to be Bob Dylan leaning against a cool looking car, with a guitar in the back seat but no phone in his pocket.

But I think maybe I can believe that the former denizens of the West can again unify around a reason to keep living. That seems feasible. In fact the process might have already begun somewhere. At one point in time, Jesus was just some nut in Galilee.

There could be a nut in Schenectady right now making some very good points that won’t really catch on for the next 100 years. But there’s time.

Nature is resilient, and it made us.

I doubt anyone made it this far, so, it’s a good place to admit that I had a hard time writing this essay. Like the West itself, I didn’t know where I was headed as I started it, wasn’t sure where I was going, don’t know if I got anywhere, so, eventually, I just had to admit that I was at...

• The End.

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Y’all are making yourselves crazy about AI writing.

It’s true the internet is filling up with oceans of meritless text, but that’s been the state of the internet since well before AI came along. Folks are making themselves mental out there looking for writing that smells like it had a robot’s help, but is it really worth all the fuss?

has declared himself AI sheriff. As far as I can tell, he does it by gut. Meanwhile, brought in her own robot to sniff out robots.

But it is just very hard for me to care about this latest “threat” to the very important business of writing as a profession. Since the 90s, this body of work has been shot in both hands, both feet, the left arm and the right leg.

If someone has their gun out and taken aim at our left leg can we really be that concerned at this point? Why not just aim it at our head and get it over with?

Writing is no big deal

Before AI, there was a vast ocean of writing produced by hand every day that had nothing special about it. Though completely composed without the aid of LLMs, these compositions still had no notable destiny. They served no purpose beyond their fleeting utility, at best as datapoints in history.

Most writing matters no more than the email you just sent your boss explaining why you have to be late next Friday. It is written quickly, read once, considered briefly and forgotten forever.

Just as the same paint can be used to compose a gloppy mess of a still life in some college junior’s elective art course as might have been used to paint Van Gogh’s Field with irises at Arles.

Though a category of stuff might occasionally be assembled in a special way, that doesn’t mean we need to be precious about the stuff itself.

There will never be an edition of LinkedIn for Dummies that will join the Western canon. No memos about properly filling out time sheets using the new HR software will be preserved for their humane poetry. No account of the victory of the West Ralph girls JV basketball team over Chesterton will be savored by future generations.

So much writing can easily be written by AI, and it probably might as well be.1

Writing does not inherently matter.

Writing is mad. It is stringing together a series of lossy symbols in an attempt to recreate moments from a wildly complex and ever changing universe. Writing never even comes close to achieving its intention. And yet we keep doing it. We love it. Even though it’s almost always mostly wrong, to some of us it feels so right, because our minds are wired to operate using these same inept graphical representations that you are perusing here.

And sometimes there is writing that matters. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was in jail and decided to write a letter, that mattered. That was a piece of writing we couldn’t do without.

But Paul Revere warned his neighbors that the British were coming on the back of a horse, but that doesn’t make all the hundreds of thousands of other horse rides any less pedestrian.

The fact that the rare piece of writing matters very much does not make any old bit of writing any more important.

Support writers

In the age of TikTok, it’s hard for me to care that much if a new ocean of slop comes to the web. The slop was up to my nose before Sam Altman ever got to work, frankly.

Would I like to live in a new era of appreciation for the handmade? Of course. But it’s hard for me to believe that hating things will manifests it. It seems obvious to me that the era of appreciating the work of humans can only be borne of appreciating humans — not from vilifying the inhuman.

And yet writers are out there with long rhetorical knives, gleefully hacking and slashing at anyone who appears to defect from the presumed consensus that we must all be sure to produce every single sentence with our own precious, brilliant, irreplicable fingers.

And what bothers me most is that anyone — human or computer — can be so arrogant2 as to believe that they can actually really know what is or isn’t AI generated, when all AI does is imitate us, and the main thing we do (frankly) is imitate each other.

If you go looking for AI slop, you will surely find it — even if it’s not really there. Slop policing is digital phrenology.

The house of literature has been leaking, its windowpanes have been rotted and the siding has been falling off all around us ever since Craigslist went online. I’m not sure literature actually can be saved, but writers attacking other writers isn’t going to save it.

I know that.

If you care at all about writing, whether as an art form, as a mode of communication or as a business model that’s swirling down the drain of sustainability, let me tell you something you can do about it that will mean 1,000 times more, every time, than any instance of accusing someone else of using the wrong tool:

You can be nice about someone else who is doing a good job.

• No, really. All of them.

Some lost more. Some lost less. But they all lost money.

Late last week, published an interview with former CEO of Binance, CZ.1 CZ is one of the richest people in the world, almost certainly the richest person in crypto, an ex-con, pardoned by Trump and creator of the Giggle Academy — a free online learning platform.

The occasion for the interview was CZ’s new book, his memoir, Freedom of Money.2

Early in the interview, brings up the fact that SBF got a 25 year sentence for his multi-billion fraud conviction. “Do you think the law was fair to Sam Bankman-Fried, or do you think it went too far?” she asks.

CZ dodges, mostly, just pointing out that SBF didn’t tell people he was using customer deposits to make investments, which meant that, in a liquidity crunch, it wouldn’t have everyone’s assets.3

“I think some people wonder about it because my understanding is no one lost money,” she says, “So, was it overreach?”

Again, CZ dodges on judging it, but he does quibble with the notion that no one lost money. He did not, however, go far enough. I will.

Let’s increase the understanding — once again. Let’s clarify how literally every FTX customer really did lose money.

How people lost money

Most people lost money because they sold their claims before the bankruptcy resolved. One estimate puts the sales at 70% of claims.

Final payments at the end of the bankruptcy went to distressed debt investors, not the actual investors. Distressed debt investors take the risk of losing out on a bankruptcy by buying claims from claimants before the process resolved.

So maybe FTX users sold early and got 15¢ on the dollar, or maybe they sold later and got 60¢. Whatever. They lost money.

• And, look, you can say: Well, that was their call but:

  • A. It doesn’t matter. If the question is: Did most people lose money? Yes, they lost money.

  • B. Was it? It was SBF’s call to use their money to make investments without disclosing it. They thought their assets would always be there. They couldn’t afford to wait.

Second, even if they didn’t sell, they lost money two other obvious ways: opportunity cost and inflation. They had to go 2.5 years without money that they thought they had in 2022. Who knows how that money might have been useful to people in that intervening time? But not having it, as any economist would tell you, is a real material loss.

At a bare minimum, they could have tucked it into U.S. Treasuries. Recent years have yielded the most generous payout period on those instruments in most people’s lifetimes. That’s real.

And then obviously the value of a dollar has been taking an especially bad beating over the last couple years. So getting back the 2022 value isn’t really the 2022 value any longer.

Third, they didn’t get their crypto back. They got the 2022 dollar value of their crypto deposits.

In the U.S., bankruptcies pay out in the dollar value of whatever was lost. They pay out in dollar value at the time of the bankruptcy. Mostly this works out well and it’s less of a logistical nightmare. But there was a huge cost because this bankruptcy took place as the crypto market turned around again.

• Bitcoin is worth about 3X what it was in Nov. 2022 today.

• Solana, one of the favorite coins of the FTX crowd, is worth twice what it was in 2022.

• Tron is the world’s second-hottest platform for stablecoins. Its coin, TRX, is up 5X since then.

So that’s a real loss for those users. Many people hold coins longterm because they have conviction in them. FTX users didn’t get the opportunity to make that choice.

SBF was very bad

As I wrote at the end of my book about SBF/FTX, the worst people in history are the ones who do the wrong thing for the right reason.

SBF thought he was smarter, more moral and more discriminating than everyone else. For that reason, he was able to justify taking mad risks with other people’s money, because he believed the empire he would build would do so much good for the world that it would justify any past malfeasance.

Like so many before him, he talked himself into becoming a monster.

So, let me go ahead and answer Siewert’s question about whether or not the law went too far: Yes, SBF deserved his sentence.

He’s one of the worst white collar criminals in history. He robbed people of billions of dollars.

To paraphrase Judge Kaplan at the sentencing: It doesn’t matter if you steal $1,000 from someone, bet it all on Craps at the casino, quadruple your money and go back to split your winnings with the victim. What matters is the fact that you robbed them.

• It was one of history’s all time biggest robberies. It merits a gigantic sentence.

For those of us who watched the trial, every day was a new jaw dropping revelation of just how terribly he behaved.

And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, the flagrant way he’s demonstrated a complete lack of remorse since being sent away should do it.

I don’t think we’ll ever have a full picture of how far SBF’s grand narcissism went or how far it could have gone, but I’m glad the good people of this world will never again be subject to SBF’s attempts to save us all.

Back in the bad old days of crypto trading, when there were hardly enough buyers and sellers out there to repopulate an American ghost town, a once major exchange called Poloniex had a feature called the “troll box.” In the troll box, users could discuss their trades and their perspectives on trading with each other.

As one redditor described it, “It lo…

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It was Earth Day this week. Earth Day is personally important to me, for reasons I might talk about another time.

Once upon a time I used to send out a comic to people I knew every Earth Day. It was a lot of work so I haven’t done it for years, but here’s an excerpt from one of those old comics.

This week I started a new featu…

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I apologize to staff of the White House.

For a while now, I’ve intimated that prediction markets inevitably engender public corruption. I have suggested that members of the White House staff might use insider knowledge to make bets on huge events, thereby earning a profit to make up for their lackluster public salaries.

We have no actual indication that any of them have done this! It’s just — y’know — believable. What with everything.

After all, it has sure looked like people with privileged information have been placing bets.

But it never occurred to me that it might maybe be members of the U.S. military that could be making bets on globally significant events. We expect soldiers to be honorable public servants with enormous discretion, but something in the system that inculcates honor among our warriors might have broken down.

The Department of Justice alleges that a member of Army special forces made bets on Polymarket ahead of the ouster of Nicolás Maduro in Argentina.

Someone made over $400,000 on that latest little enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton1 now thinks he knows who, and he’s not happy about it.

One prediction down

Obviously, the accused is innocent until proven guilty.

But let’s just discuss this as if Clayton did really get the right guy, as the Southern District usually does.

One of my predictions for the year was that we’d all feel weird about prediction markets before we got to the end of the year. Here we are!

If it is really true that a member of the military was placing bets on prediction markets, that’s unsettling. We expect politicians and political employees to be a little corrupt. Political folks tend to be driven by narcissism and hubris.

Public servants are meant to be different, though. They are the ballast on the ship. We may or may not have crazy people captaining from time to time, but they come and go. It’s the career public servants we hope will balance their depredations.

Janus-face

The Greek god Janus didn’t just have two faces. They looked in two different directions.

Prediction markets may surface crucial information that would otherwise stay hidden. They may offer signals to people that would have otherwise stay hidden. This is one face.

But there’s another face. The money. The biggest problem of prediction markets is always their greatest asset: if you’ve got tea, the tea is much more tempting to sell than it is to tell.

And that’s why it’s far too facile to simply say prediction markets must be an unqualified good.

Here’s what’s tricky about this case: I’m not sure I really care about insider trading, as a rule. My personal ethical jury remains out on that question.

But here’s something I am sure about: I am sure I don’t want soldiers trading bets on military operations. That heuristic sits on solid ethical and pragmatic grounds.

Prediction markets might have been beneficial and, ultimately, inevitably, but let’s not put blinders on. Prediction markets also put corruption nothing but a click or two away.

Jeff Bezos has already shown how could bring in more revenue for writers — he’s just gotta take the leap.

Amazon, the online store that started with books but almost seems to have forgotten about them, actually created a massive platform for independent writers that most folks on here would probably disdain to even think about.

But those proletarian scriveners are getting paid, my friends, and Substack could easily follow where Amazon led.

Substack already solved our problem of scaling email and payment management. That was very nice of them. Now let’s see it innovate to grow the pie.

Friends: Let’s talk about Substack Unlimited.

Lies, damn lies and big 5 publishers

Back in 2016 and 2017, writing for the New York Observer, I got a bit obsessed with the Amazon Kindle as a reporting topic. E-readers, cheap publishing and e-ink all looked very good to me.

Yes, there are trade-offs. I get that and I got that then, but Kindles extended the reach of literature, lowered the barrier to entry and kicked-off an indie book subculture.

But back then, mainstream reporters were doing stories every year or so that said, basically, “No one actually buys ebooks.” Which was weird, because Amazon kept putting out new versions of the Kindle and it didn’t seem like that was slowing down — which indicated that it was probably working out.

Something was up!

So, I dug into it, and I figured it out. All those reports were — well — basically lies. At least, they weren’t telling the full story. When the headline read: “People aren’t buying ebooks” what it actually meant was “people aren’t buying ebooks from Big 5 publishers.”

This was a very important distinction!

It wasn’t hard to work out why they weren’t buying those books! Publishers were jacking up the prices on ebooks! Amazon wanted to sell ebooks for $9.99 each but the Big 5 didn’t. After a long court fight, they upped the price, sometimes to the point that an ebook cost more than a paperback.

So the fact that these books weren’t selling that well was just basic economics. Nevermind the fact that — all things being equal — lots of people like a physical object. It was actually even simpler even than that. People Discriminate By Price: News at 11.

Indie in the Amazon

But what those reports didn’t tell you was that there was this buzzing world of independent publishing enabled by Amazon Kindles, through its Kindle Direct Publishing program, that was totally popping off.

Now us smart Substack people have probably never read anything from KDP because we are all much too brilliant for it and we haven’t quite finished Infinite Jest. The kind of writing that moves on there is mostly romance, but also other genre stuff: such as sci-fi, LitRPG, and etc.

Back when I was reporting on it, authors confessed to me off the record that they were making millions of dollars writing on there. I’d ask them if they needed to take jobs teaching writing at Universities like all the New York Times bestselling authors you’ve heard of. They would laugh.

No, the best use of time for them was always going up into the attic, opening the laptop, and banging out the next chapter. Every time.

And what was the secret of all that money being made? It was: Kindle Unlimited.

Unlimit my bags

Now this might sound counter-intuitive, and that’s precisely why I suspect that if Substack tried to follow Amazon’s lead, they’d get rebellion from the big guns on this site. But hear me out.

Kindle Unlimited is a Netflix for books. Readers pay a flat amount each month (right now it is $11.99, in the US) and they get unlimited access to books in the program. Precisely how authors get paid out of this is a bit arcane (because: scammers), but basically it comes out to pages read in their books. It’s not enough for someone to download your tentacle porn urban detective story — they need to actually move through the pages. The more pages they move, the more your share of that $11.99/month is.

Amazon is spreading around more than $60 million per month these days among authors. We don’t really know how much Substack is spreading around, but I’m confident saying it’s significantly smaller.

Here’s the thing: You can still sell your books one-by-one on Amazon Kindle. That’s no problem. That gets you access to the light readers out there, and it works great.

But there’s also hardcore crazy readers out there. These are people who will find one of your books and, if they like it, they will crank through everything else you have written. This has a way of kicking your earnings into gear fast. These folks are all in on Kindle Unlimited.

Have you seen Silo on Apple TV+? That’s based on a self-published novel by Hugh Howey. Howey was one of my sources back when I was working this beat. Back in 2017, Howey told me over repeated conversations that going exclusive with Kindle Unlimited cranked his revenue into very, very high gear.

It seems risky? Why would you go into a shared pool when people are already buying your stuff directly at a pretty nice clip?

Why? Because price-elasticity-of-demand, baby. When it works, it feels so good.

Into the breach, dear friends

There’s a lot of talk about bundling on Substack. That’s fine. I’m all for it, but it seems like amateur hour to me.

Better idea: Mega-bundle. Substack Unlimited.

Substack Unlimited could be an opt-in program that any writer on here could join. You can offer people to subscribe directly to your paid content (like buying one book at a time on an Amazon Kindle) or they can get it if you’re in the Substack Unlimited program.

This could easily work the same way. There’s a big pot of money from all the Unlimited users each month and that gets shared out to everyone via pageviews.

LFG.

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Would this undercut the earnings of the big guns?

We can’t know for sure, but Howey was a big gun on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing already when he decided to join Kindle Unlimited, and it didn’t undercut him.

But, also, they don’t have to join it if they are nervous. They can keep getting paid directly by users.

How can we know it would grow the pie?

We can’t until Substack tries it, but it worked for ebooks already.

Wouldn’t enabling bundles work better because it’s more thematic?

They aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m all for bundles, but, I submit, that the desire for coherent themes is one of those OCD impulses that makes sense in our heads, with their need for structure and order, but actually doesn’t really help that much.

As the great Jane Jacobs showed: Zoning parts of city as “industrial” or “commercial” seems logical, but by and large, letting chaos reign works out better over time.

Wouldn’t all the big shots eschew Substack Unlimited so it would just fill up with all the lesser writers?

That’s exactly what happened on Kindle Unlimited, yes. Stephen King is not in there. But Stephen King was already rich.

Of the hundreds of writers making mad bank on Kindle Unlimited, those of us who aren’t using may hear about one of them every couple of years. There are many more.

Thousands of minnows swimming around the phat lake of Amazon KDP yielded some... whale-like minnows. Sounds pretty good to me.

But, but... if Substack created an Unlimited program, wouldn’t that mean I’d be in the same pool as people I disagree with?

Buy a helmet, kiddo.

Look. A lot of us spend a bunch monthly on here, and, while we are glad to support people, comparing the quantity of content our dollars get us access to compared to, say, one subscription to The Atlantic, it’s no contest.

A lot of people out there are more price sensitive than I was when I got into this site. Basic economics says that if there’s a lower cost overall price entry point, more people will come in.

My means are more limited now than they have been for a while. I’m dying to upgrade my subscription to to paid, but I just can’t justify it at the moment. If we had Substack Unlimited, though and she joined? I’d be all over her archive.

At the end of the day, I think more people want Substack’s core product than they want Kindle’s product. There are more readers of topical blogs than there are of indie genre books.

Substack Unlimited could be even bigger than the half-billion dollar behemoth that is Kindle Unlimited.

Substack Unlimited would grow the pool for everyone.

Jeff Bezos showed the way, and he did all right. Have faith.

Tech platforms wrecked the business model for news. Ironically, though, tech platforms also rely on the news industry to keep their attention-based model chugging.

That’s why tech platforms should open their own independent news desks. By mining the data spit off by platforms, managing editors guide the editorial direction of reporters toward topics that interested platform users. And news would actually have a business model again.

Platforms might not quite be the new nations, but they are the land masses of the internet. It’s time to just deal with it.

• What I’m about to propose here will annoy just about everyone. Just ask yourself please about whether or your irritation compares it to the hypothetical ideal of a long lost era or to the present, extremely bleak and far from perfect reality, please.

How platforms wrecked news

Everyone knows the story about how Craigslist came along and yoinked classifieds from newspapers.

Then Google and Facebook came along with a wildly better way of targeting other kinds of advertising directly to the kind of consumers a given advertiser wants.

The can say: “Our users are broadly 35- to 55-year old, high net-worth coastal professionals” (or whatever they say — they aren’t pitching me), but Facebook could say, “Do you want a 35 to 39 year-old divorced guy in Columbus, Ohio, who loves Anime and no college education? Yeah. We know who every single one of those guys are, and we can show your ad to all of them.”

It wasn’t even close!

Everyone knows that Facebook and Google have become an advertising duopoly, and the only companies cutting into their duopolistic status are other platforms, such as Apple and Amazon. Media sites have no chance.

So you know that story. What’s talked about less, though, is how much the platforms crushed the other advantage news once had. News used to drive a lot of attention. People watched the news on TV. They read the paper. They listened to news radio.

None of that is really true any longer. Now they scroll and they stream. This is how media gets consumed. They don’t watch the 6 o’clock news because that’s what’s on TV. They watch whatever they want. And that’s not usually news.

• There’s some research out there backing this up that I’ll point to in an upcoming essay.

So now in this era when news attempts to pivot to a subscription-based model, it’s coming really, really late. People already very much like the infinite candy of social. The habit of the news is long lost.

If you can’t beat ‘em

But here’s the problem for the platforms: People like to talk about the news.

The News and the Media are often conflated. The Media is just about anything that holds your attention.

But the News is the business of going out and witnessing the world, then coming back and telling an audience what was seen. (It’s also talking to people doing interesting things, like writing laws and building robots, that aren’t conducive to photos).

News is telling the masses about the world, in short. On platforms, people want to talk about the world and what’s going on in it, but they need to know what’s going on.

But there’s fewer and fewer people out there going out and having a look, and those that remain are all going out and looking at the same things, too, because those are the things that are most likely to drive enough attention for them to keep going.

As people get frustrated with the quality of the information available, they also get frustrated with the platforms.

The platforms benefit from high quality information gathering. So the platforms should open news desks and hire reporters who establish beats that are responsive to the interests of platform users.

Substack News

The first concern I can imagine substackers having about Substack News would be that it would compete with them for attention and subscriptions.

But, wait!

Structured correctly, Substack News would drive more subscriptions for everyone.

What does Substack want? More paid subscribers. So here’s my idea: Make Substack News a premium feature that’s offered to anyone who pays to subscribe to literally any existing substack.

I suspect the toughest conversion for every user here is making that first paid subscription. Like, I’m a free user. I’ve never paid to see anyone. But I really really want to get access to every delicious thing that posts, however I’m just on the margin about subbing.

Is it quite worth it? I’m on a budget.

But ‘lo! Then you hear that every subscriber also gets access to this high quality newsroom that’s covering tech updates, foreign policy, climate change, economic development. All the big things.

All you have to do is buy one subscription to get access to all of it. You can have your cake (recipes) and (r)ea(d) (the news), too!

And others

Any platform that’s attempting to launch any sort of paid subscription should do the same thing: open newsrooms responsive to the main interests of its users.

X is the obvious other example of a platform that should open a news desk. It would probably take about 45 minutes before good reporters at X irritated Elon Musk, of course, but it’s a good concept in theory. People on X talk about the news constantly.

More reporting on more topics could drive more interesting engagement there. And obviously you’d only have full access if you bought an X premium account.

Netflix should obviously open a news desk. It’s the world’s new CBS. It should give its viewers an option to watch a new kind of nightly news.

Snapchat should add news to Snapchat+. Reddit has tried doing a publication before, and it failed, but it didn’t try News. Reddit Premium with News, focusing on reporting, not culture or criticism, could do better. It aligns rather than competes.

Some objections

Won’t these news desks be biased on behalf of the platforms?

Probably, but narrowly. The blind spots would be predictable. It wouldn’t take much media savvy to know which reports to give side eye and which ones are probably reliable.

• And it’s not like reporting isn’t crazily biased now.

But, okay, to deal with that skepticism, jobs on platform newsdesks should be contract-based, not at will. The Editor-in-chief should have a contract for multiple years with clear performance indicators and clear editorial independence. All of this can be made public.

To me, the bandwidth of bias here is important but it’s narrow. Reporters in these rooms might be biased on behalf of the platform or even tech. It’s a much bigger world out there, though with much to discuss.

If, for example, Substack realized it had a ton of readers in Chicago and it opened a Chicago desk, would I worry about the Substack-bias corrupting Chicago coverage? Not really.

Objectivity should be a north star, but it is largely a fiction. I’d rather have more truth seeking in the world, even if I have to be a little skeptical about some of the truth-seekers’ coverage, than less.

And if Substack News covers soft, count on X News to make up for it.

Idealism about this dying industry has a way of letting perfect oppose the good. Being biased toward Substack (or X or Reddit or whatever) doesn't matter, it seems to me, when you're covering trade policy or baseball contracts or the conflict in Argentina, but what do I know?

Won’t readers get mad at the reporters covering the platforms they love when their reporting contradicts users’ priors?

Yes. Hopefully! That still gives users something to talk about! And that’s what keeps users on the platforms.

Shouldn’t we want people to get off the platforms?

I’m just trying to deal with the world as it is, friend, not the world as I’d like it to be. If I were writing about the world as I’d like it to be, I’d just describe the 70s all day.

At the end of the day, News doesn’t have a business model any longer. Everything you dislike about “the media” is downstream from that.

• The New York Times business model is being the New York Times (+Wordle). No one else can replicate that.

But platforms have a business model, but it’s one that needs good news gathering to really prosper. And if that news gathering can also help a platform deliver on what it promises its strongest users, revenue, then even better.

There’s a lot of talk about whether news can be decentralized. So far, I see media being decentralized, but I don’t see news decentralizing yet.

People are reading and watching stuff, for sure, but just because it’s on a screen, that doesn’t make it news. Substack has proven it can give writers a way to make money off their expertise, but there’s not much news gathering happening on here.

There’s research. There’s analysis. There’s opinion. God is there ever opinion.

But not many people are going out, having a look and just telling you what they saw. And if they do it sometimes, they aren’t doing it in a particularly structured way, by and large.

Tech platforms wrecked the news gathering business. I don’t fault them for it. Everyone’s gotta eat. But they are going to realize before long that they also depend on a continuous flow of good reporting.

Just as tech destroyed this industry, the platforms may soon realize that it’s also in their interest to build it back up.

Come back to Backstage tomorrow for my take on Substack Unlimited.

Even scumbags should be able to get a checking account.

Let me back up.

When I was at Axios, there was a low grade byline battle between me and the much more famous writer, Felix Salmon, over whether or not the crypto business had any place in the…

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The power of Federalism always has been about different parts of the country experimenting with ways of running their hunk of freedom-loving land.

The FDA recently sent letters1 out to multiple providers of peptides in the U.S. warning them that further action could be taken if they don’t quit offering what they call ““new drugs””2 in every letter. Three things jump out at me about all of these:

1. All the letters focus strictly on peptides that exist in the regulated market (knock-offs of Ozempic and Zepbound) or are on the way (retatrutide).

2. All the letters invoke interstate commerce, as in the interstate commerce clause, the tiny little passage of the Constitution from which nearly all federal domestic power derives.

The peptide business is very big. Based on estimates, it is already around the size that video games reached in 2018 and 2019, when journalists noticed that games had gotten to be bigger than movies.

• Background: Peptides are short chains of amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins and peptides work as chemical signals to other parts of your body. Some folks who want more of one kind of signal or another have been using synthetic peptides with strong results.

• Editorialization: Peptides also generate more demand via lifestyle enhancement rather than curing diagnosed medical conditions — and this seems to make many people uneasy.

OK, but chill out

These letters from the FDA to compounding pharmacies might indicate a limited campaign.

On the surface, it looks reasonable that the FDA has taken these actions at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, which wants to protect its intellectual property.

Getting a pharmaceutical approved for sale in the United States is a lengthy and massively expensive process (the has started making the case for reigning this in, but for now this is real life). It’s understandable that Big Pharma would want to undermine companies popping up that eat into their market share.

Is it weird that the FDA has a side hustle as an IP enforcement agency for the industry? Seems weird to me.

But there is (arguably) a public health justification here. Patients can feel confident that name-brand Ozempic and Zepbound have been made in regulated labs, have the kind of dose they expect and won’t have garbage in the vial.

(but there is always some kind of justification)

But it remains to be seen whether or not the FDA starts going after other peptides. All the signs suggest that they will not, but we’re still waiting for that big announcement about the recategorization of some of podcast-nation’s favorite “peppers.”

BacteriostaticWTF

But the Feds also seem to be cracking down on the peptide scene indirectly, which could indicate that more moves are afoot.

For the uninitiated: Grey market peptides require more work than getting stuff through a pharmacy, and more ways to go wrong. If you played around with a chemistry set as a kid, though, you’re going to be good to go.

The key point here, though, is most of the time people get peptides in a powder form and they need to add bacteriostatic water in order to make it injectable.

• Does this sound daunting to you? Me too! I haven’t done it.

Bacteriostatic water is sterilized water that has an additive that will keep it sterile for longer after the seal has been broken on a bottle.

Bacteriostatic water is the bandwidth of the peptide business. It’s like: No fiber internet = no Netflix, just as no bacteriostatic water = no home peptide business.

Getting this crucial ingredient has been tougher lately. The FDA has been cracking down on it (several of the letters this week mention it), or providers are getting nervous.

And Amazon has also moved to sell a little less of everything. Earlier this year, the company said it needed to see third-party current good manufacturing practices certification for providers of supplements. I don’t know if that’s the cause of the crackdown or not, but it might be.

If folks can’t get bacteriostatic water, they can’t safely use peptides. If the Feds make that difficult or impossible, it’s very much like saying: “You can sell cars but you can’t sell them with tires.”

Pair of dimes

I think I have a unique perspective on this peptide story. I’m confident that I’m the only veteran cryptocurrency reporter who has gotten interested in covering peptides. It’s too early to say for sure, but it looks to me like some very similar forces are in play in peptides.

I have some guesses about how this story is going to play out that might not look obvious to new arrivals or to journalists coming at the story from a purely healthcare oriented framework.

Obviously, peptides are about as analog as it gets, and crypto has always been about hopping on a blockchain Kawasaki, popping the throttle and gunning it straight into Lawnmower Man.

But here’s how it’s similar: There’s just a massive gap between those who get it and don’t get it.

• For those who don’t get it, the ones who “get it” are suckers.

• For the ones that “get it,” the ones who don’t have blinders on.

You can make a strong case for either side, but which one is right, I submit, doesn’t actually matter.

If crypto is peptides’ prologue, then more and more people are going to start putting the weight of their disposable income into this controversial intervention, and entrepreneurs will find ever more creative ways to get them to them and to assure them that what they are getting is safe.

For example, I have one source now who has explained to me how peptide users are already entering into informal testing cooperatives. It’s not at all hard to see how someone turns that into a startup.

If more and more people use them because they feel convinced that they are doing some good, it’s going to be harder for politicians to justify regulatory blockages. Some official will come to power by promising to provide a legal pathway for these products.

• The Amazon Basics peptide collection is just a matter of time.

By then, one or two companies will have arisen that will be de facto unicorns of the peptide space (the Coinbase, Uniswap and Tether of short amino acid chains). And it won’t be bro-science anymore. It will be on NASDAQ.

I might be wrong! (But I’m not wrong.)

Dr. Governator

If I were an ambitious governor of a state, I might give a long look at throwing down with the Feds over peptides, like Wyoming semi-threw down over cryptocurrency.

The peptide gambit could go a lot farther.

Texas is already looking at funding and running clinical trials into the psychedelic, ibogaine, for mental conditions.

• Texas or another state could put its foot down and do something similar on peptides, particularly because pharmaceutical companies are not.

A state could offer its own lab certifications for compounding pharmacies focused on peptides.

It could even go further and try to contend that while it’s a grey area nationally, in its state the legality could be made clear.

• If states can pull this off with marijuana (roughly) why couldn’t they with peptides? It already looks like the peptide industry might already be on par with legal weed, or close enough.

If history comes down on the side of peptide treatment, this could be a win for the state. That’s a big ‘if,’ but the road is made by walking.

Remember, it is no accident that the various parts of the USA are called “states” and not “provinces.” The core idea embedded in the Constitution, much muddled and muddied since as it may have been, was that these regions would be largely self governing, an amalgamation of real-life laboratories in running the nation, with programs and priorities that reflected their populations.

• There’s a reason, after all, that every single state operates its own pharmacy board.

What we know is that clinical trials and regulatory approval under the existing regime will take a very long time, and no one has even started.

A state that might like to make some money might decide it doesn’t want to wait quite so long.

If you look at Google’s Ngram Viewer, the word “bro” took off in 2010.

2010 now feels like about seven different eras of cultural evolution ago, but I’ve been watching this word metastasize into something like a discursive cancer, one that went from a perfectly rea…

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Whenever some big change hits the world, the conversation goes the same way:

• People on the frontier dive in and pat each other on the back for seeing the future (mistakes get made).

• The mainstream rolls its eyes, clutches its pearls, wrings its hands and says “tsk, tsk, tsk” (opportunities get missed).

• Eventually and write very long posts about them. No one reads both.

Diamond Rhino, the inimitable podcast, sits in the middle of all that. It puts the frontier and the mainstream together on one show and asks if there aren’t some good points made on both sides.

So, here we are in week two of our coverage of peptides, the industry that’s already bigger than video games were when everyone got surprised that video games were bigger than Hollywood about a decade ago.

The only people who aren’t behind on this issue are in too deep.

So, this week, I dig into claims focus have made about BPC-157 (mostly) and also TB-500, the two grey market peptides that often get combined into what’s known as “The Wolverine Stack” — because they are each thought to help people heal.

It’s just that they don’t help everyone heal! And when they do help, results vary! And also people keep making themselves sick, but not because of what was put in the vials.

More on all of this on today’s episode. Are you hyped? (we’re against hype about everything except this newsletter).

But here’s the part you’re not going to expect but is actually going to really help ground you through the conversation: We’re going to start with some really modest claims from people you have never heard of.

Anecdotes aren’t data, but they are information.

🖤 To subscribe to Diamond Rhino in a pod player, click on any of these links:

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Pocket Casts

• Overcast

Sources

Joe Rogan Experience #1683 - Andrew Huberman
June 27, 2024

BPC-157: Everything You Need to Know—Benefits, Risks, Dosing, & Delivery Methods
Quinn Stilson MD
June 12, 2025

Why I Stopped BPC-157 and TB-500 Peptides
April 26, 2024
Bill Maeda

I Took The Wolverine Stack & My Thoughts On BPC-157 & TB-500
Dr. Josh Jagoda
October 19, 2025

My Experience with BPC-157 | Peptides That ENHANCE HEALING?
Stephanie Wolff, PA
July 15, 2022

My BPC-157 story
Jake Watkins
Aug 20, 2025

How BPC157 and TB500 Changed My Life A Personal Account (Peptide Therapy)
Gabriel Picado
June 23, 2024

I Analyzed the Wolverine Stack Evidence—Here's What I Found (BPC-157 & TB500 Peptides)
Dr. Chris Raynor | Not Your Everyday Ortho
March 14, 2026

Doctor Admits — I Was WRONG About The Wolverine Stack
Dr. Ashley Froese
Mar 10, 2026

Notes

Jake Watkins follow up video, Jan 6, 2026

14 Peptides Are About to Become Legal Again — What This Means for Your Health, Meto, March 12, 2026

Nevada Regulators Fine Peptide Providers at Anti-Aging Festival Where Two Women Became Critically Ill, Propublica, March 13, 2026

A Las Vegas Festival Promised Ways to Cheat Death. Two Attendees Left Fighting for Their Lives, Propublica, July 29, 2025

Music in the episode:

“Data Breach” by FASSounds

“Fortnite Roblox Minecraft Video Game Music,” by MFCC

“Abstract Glitch Hop” by The Mountain

“Bitcoins going up” by SunoMusicShowYouTube

All from Pixabay Music

The irony of skeptics is that, as much as they like to point out when claims don’t have sufficient evidence, skeptics often don’t have any evidence of their own to counter those claims.

Get ready for wall-to-wall skepticism as the peptide industry takes off over the next year. The sector will move faster than clinical trials ever could. You’re going to hear about the lack of evidence for these treatments ad nauseam.

Because as much as parts of the public love the surprise of a miracle cure, other parts of the public love the comfort of a stable status quo.

Just remember: The only thing a lack of evidence proves is that there is no evidence. It’s a good cautionary note, but that’s all it is.

There are folks who very much want to make a lack of evidence into something more than it is, but it’s as unscientific to use a lack of evidence to say a treatment won’t work as it is to cite flimsy evidence to say it does.

To an extent: This reticence comes from a good place.

• We should all be cautious about jamming stuff inside ourselves with needles. Fair.

• But fostering caution doesn’t justify misleading readers about what can and can’t be known.

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So, as the peptide story takes off, just be wary that you’re going to see lots of supposed “debunking” pieces and podcasts come out from the traditional press, but very few of them will — if you pay attention — actually debunk anything.

Debunking requires evidence.

Because, I submit, the debunking posts you’ll see will all come to this one point: “There is not adequate scientific evidence to make a clinical claim about peptide treatment.”

• This is: A fair point.

• This is not: Debunking.

Case in point

Bluesky user Jonathan Jarry works for McGill’s Office of Science and Society. He appeared on a podcast from Glossy that I linked in yesterday’s post about the reporters tracking the general rise of peptides. Jarry showed up on the show as a “debunker.”

By the heuristic I laid out above, he successfully debunked nothing.

Points he makes in this episode:

• BPC-157 (the peptide for healing) has lots of rodent studies and one very weak one in humans.

• “We are not giant mice,” he says. Contending that lots of drugs that look promising in labs don’t get approved for humans — no further detail.1

• Entrepreneurs are quick to commercialize treatments based on preliminary but inconclusive research.

• He makes a wild claim that if any of these treatments had value, Big Pharma would obviously develop them. I’m going to circle back to this one in a future post.

• He veers off weirdly into this “what can be patented” thing that Martin Shkreli also went off on in his peptide debate on TBPN.

• He points out that Ozempic’s success has driven interest in other peptides, but “there’s nothing magic about peptides,” he argues. I think it was an argument. To be honest I couldn’t really tell you what point he thought he was making.

• People don’t believe the medical establishment when its professionals say they have run out of options, so people will look elsewhere.

Let me sum this up for you: Nothing was debunked. Some reasonable notes of caution were offered, but that’s it.

He’s got nothing but doubts.

Jarry’s work on the topic preceded the podcast. He came to the topic early, in 2023, with a post titled, “The Human Lab Rats Injecting Themselves With Peptides.” (which I also linked yesterday and said I would have more to say about — I’m not done)

The post makes several points, but none of them rise to a successful debunking. Rather than go through all of them, let me just group them into categories:

• People disliked on Bluesky, such as Bryan Johnson and Andrew Huberman, use peptides.

• Peptides have a masculine vibe. Also, peptides are Goop for men.

• Peptides are being used for life enhancement rather than treating clinical ailments.

• Canadian regulators have banned them. Other regulators are skeptical.

The persuasiveness of Jarry’s points will correlate precisely to how readers feel about public media. That’s my own little unsubstantiated claim. Let’s go.

How we know

Geeks love the cliche: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” And it’s not. That is true. But it is information.

Many anecdotes will never be enough information for Medicare to cover a treatment — and it shouldn’t be, but it might be enough information for you.

Let’s say you tried a treatment based on flimsy evidence (friends recommended it), and it worked.

And in that kind of circumstance, Jarry would point out that you can’t really know if the intervention worked. You’ve got motivated reasoning, after all. But you don’t care about how it worked, do you? You care that something did, and that you feel better.

Skeptics love to talk about motivated reasoning, but their reasoning is motivated as well: The skeptical type loves nothing more than telling other people that they are wrong.

They love it so much they don’t wait for proof.

Note: There’s a lot of topics I want to pursue going forward on this subject.

• Who are the big players in which parts of the peptide supply chain? What investors have backed alternative research?

• What’s the history and the holdup for Big Pharma in developing peptides?

  • Is it actually feasible for Big Pharma to develop peptide treatments? What’s the actual story on treatments firms have abandoned?

• How should we think about clinical treatment for ailments versus elective treatments for quality of life?

• How might standards of evidence vary depending on payment by the state, payment by a third party or self-funded treatment?

• How might an individual in the self-funded market assess efficacy versus an executive determining whether or not to cover a particular kind of care?

• Who is willing to or pursuing investigations into pharmaceuticals that provide quality-of-life treatments versus ailment care?

• If and when quality of life treatments are found to be safe and effective, should they be added to group payments? Are startups targeting coverage as a mechanism for growth?

• Have any national health regulators bifurcated regulation of healthcare between entirely elective treatments and collectively covered treatments?

• How do individuals protect their health and their pocketbook in the grey market?

• How safe are at home shots and can they be made safer?

• And, obviously, who is the next hot peptide startup and what’s the next hot peptide treatment?

I’m calling it: Peptide self-experimentation will be the next gigantic story. In fact, it already is.

Ozempic and the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have been the biggest development in health of my lifetime — they are basically the artificial intelligence of medicine. The New York Times reported yesterday that the FDA will lift its ban on 14 popular peptides any day. That lid is bopping and bouncing as the brew boils beneath.

That lid’s going to pop off any day.

Without bans, peptide vials can be prepared in American labs, which will make them safer and more consistent for everyone. And the people are ready to do more at home injections. Fear of needles is not so widespread as it was.1

This story is much bigger than a new category of drugs, though.

All my life, medicine has been about getting back to homeostasis, just returning to baseline, but we’re on the verge of a kind of medicine that lets you have more of what you want out of life.

• More sex?

• More muscle?

• More brain power?

• More sleep?

• More laser beams?

Who knows what might work!

The question you need to ask now is: Where will you put your home health lab? You can be the N=1 mad scientist that 1960s comic books warned us all about.

Zombies

Google Trends, the internet’s barometer, shows that peptides are headed for escape velocity.

Pro-tip for Google Trends: Baseline your checks with something unrelated. I like to use “zombies.” Zombies have been enduringly popular since the early 2000s. So whenever I start checking related search terms on Google Trends, I always throw in “zombies” to see how the topic performs relative to the horror and sci-fi staple. Sure enough: Peptides are bigger than zombies.

Because the trick with Google Trends is that it doesn’t actually show you how much people search for a given topic, it shows you how much they are searching relative to any other topic you might like to throw in the mix.

As you can see by the blue line, “peptides” are moving up and up in interest, even overtaking “semaglutide” (Ozempic), late last year.

That orange line, which represents retatrutide, is also telling. Retatrutide is a peptide from Eli Lilly that’s likely to be the next blockbuster pharmaceutical. The crazy thing, though, as this Indianapolis urologist explains on YouTube, is that you can already get it on the grey market (though not from Eli Lilly, the maker with the patent, of course).

I threw OpenClaw in here as another baseline with current topics. I tried comparing these to “ChatGPT” as well but it blew all these topics away, so that shows you where this all sits relatively. AI remains the biggest topic on earth.

Still, interest in peptides generally is rising, and — unless something stunning and concerning gets discovered — that seems unlikely to change.

Beat reporters

The best way to learn about a new topic is to follow it and blog about it yourself.

The second best way is to read the reporters who are teaching themselves by blogging about it.

So far, I have only found two reporters who really seem to be keeping tabs on peptides as an ongoing and developing story (rather than writing the one-off trend pieces — more on those below).

These two scribes are incorporating peptides into their beats:

Lexy Lebsack, Glossy

You may be surprised to learn that I had never visited the beauty site Glossy before, but I had not until I went looking for peptide journalists. What do you know? Peptides have proven to be a big topic in the beauty world, and it seems like Lebsack intends to keep watching these funny little vials move around.

Lebsack has done several pieces on the topic so far, including keeping an eye on the market for pens that make injections easier to do and flexible to dose, beauty patches for easier delivery and RFK Jr’s promise to open this market up.

I have her overview piece in the link round-up following this section, as well.

Katie Palmer, Stat News

No surprise that the health news site had eyes on this topic early. A few people there have done relevant reports, but Palmer seems to have eyes on it now.

Palmer focuses more on policy than products, making her a good companion to Lebsack’s coverage. She got interested once Kennedy became health secretary, with a good report that got into the weeds of facets like compounding pharmacies and what they can get away with offering.

Lately, she’s been keeping an eye on the publicly traded company, Hims and Hers, which has bought a compounding pharmacy and looks set to use its considerably marketing reach to push peptides as much as they can get away with.

Boston Globe Media-owned Stat News, institutionally, seems skeptical of peptide therapy, but that doesn’t mean its reporters won’t follow it. I can’t help but think that this modality is going to be a blind spot for a lot of reporters just because RFK Jr. is into it. It’s amazing how much political-coding impacts coverage, but — believe me — that is real.

Of course, there probably are other reporters out there who are following this that I didn’t surface. And some I found look like they might be getting set to keep an eye on it, but it’s too soon to say.

• That’s who I found. Sorry if I missed a good reporter’s work! Email me links!

The drive-by explainers

In the early days of a big news topic, reporters have to get up to speed. Reporters get up to speed the way they do everything else: they write stories about them.

So right now it’s easy to find big picture explainers on the topic of peptides, but hard to find nitty gritty coverage of the twists and turns of this developing market.

Coverage of peptides so far basically ranges from “no one should ever touch any pharmaceutical ever that hasn’t been approved by the FDA” to “fuck around and find out.”

Here’s how I would sort the ones I have found on the YOLO-to-pearl-clutching continuum (caveat: none of them are really truly YOLO):

⬇️ YOLO

🧨 Life on Peptides Feels Amazing, Ezra Marcus, New York Mag, Jan. 26, 2026

• Over the course of his reporting, Marcus tries two peptides, NAD+ (not technically a peptide) and retatrutide. He even buys the second with bitcoin from abroad. Based.

• He also pretends to be a giant distributor while talking to a sales rep in China to see how much he could get if he had the money. Answer: so much.

“I was like, ‘What’s going on? Why do you guys all look so jacked and your skin is really tight and nice? You guys party constantly.’ ” Their response: “Oh, we’re all on peptides.”

🤪 Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger. San Francisco startup Superpower is betting that you need to be hotter and smarter to survive., Arielle Pardes, March 22, 2026

• Pardes’ story leans heavily on Max Marchione, the young founder of Superpower, who features heavily in the latest Diamond Rhino podcast.

• Pardes actually goes to his office and tries a sample of retatrutide as part of her reporting.

Simone Vincenzi, a machine learning engineer, tells me that he'd heard about retatrutide from bodybuilders, who posted about it constantly on Reddit. "It's the biggest population of experimenters," he says, "because they're not afraid of dying."

🙃 ‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World, , The New York Times, January 3, 2026

The setting for much of the story is Frontier Tower, which followers of Diamond Rhino will be familiar with. Bonus points for talking to the founder of Vibe Camp, who says injecting peptides takes her back to her bad days with crystal meth.

“We might all be better off if we let the crazy people try the crazy peptides and filter down to the rest of us, instead of the system, which takes 10 years and is meant to protect everyone from everything.”

💁‍♀️ Injectable peptide therapy went mainstream in 2025, priming consumers for the next big wellness wave, Lexy Lebsack, Glossy, Jan 5, 2026

• The previously discussed Lebsack explores how these substances have escaped containment among biohackers and bodybuilders. She even did a companion podcast on peptides.

• This one starts with BPC-157, the one that stimulates rapid healing (but might also encourage tumor growth), and ends on a big question: Could there be an unbelievable number of treatments found among the hundreds of synthetic peptides labs can make?

“We know what they can do. We know that there are millions of people in the world now using them for various reasons. So it’ll be really, really hard for the FDA, or any other government oversight, to regulate them. … 2026 is going to be a very interesting year.”

😐 How Peptides Conquered the Internet, , Search Engine, Feb. 13, 2026

• This one connects peptides to looksmaxxing. So if you haven’t had enough Clavicular content just yet, put this one on your Airpods. I quoted from it a fair amount in my peptides podcast.

🫥 It’s About to Be Hot Peptide Summer, Dean Stattmann, GQ, March 9, 2026

• This is an ambivalent post, one that seems torn between the idea that pharmaceuticals should only be used to treat a diagnosed ailment and the recognition that it might be nice to feel sharper, stronger or better.

Not all peptide users are 45-year-old Huberman Lab stans with an unexamined fear of aging.2

🥱 The Internet Loves Peptide Therapy, David Dodge, The New York Times, Nov. 18, 2025.

• The note I wrote for myself after reading this one was “Everything is about epistemology.” In other words, how does a patient “know” a given therapy works. There’s the Dr. Eric Topol view that the only way you can know anything is if it goes through a giant trial. But a lot of people are happy to take the word of friends at the gym.

• Who’s right? Who’s wrong? The answer: Both are. It’s just a question of your risk tolerance, but a lot of reporters prefer to outsource their risk tolerance to bureaucrats and can’t fathom how or why anyone wouldn’t do the same.

Regardless of the method used to increase H.G.H., it’s not clear how much higher levels actually improve strength and build muscle in healthy adults. Some small trials have found modest increases in lean body mass among older men who took these types of growth hormone-releasing peptides, but this didn’t translate to improved strength or recovery.

🛌 How Unregulated Peptides Became the Hottest Thing on the Fringes of Fitness and Anti-Aging, Ashwin Rodrigues, GQ, Sept 27, 2023

But banning a substance only makes it more attractive to a certain kind of guy.

🙄 The Human Lab Rats Injecting Themselves with Peptides, Jonathan Jarry, McGill — Office for Science and Society, Nov 3, 2023

• I’m going to have more to say on Jarry’s work later this week.

⬆️ Pearl clutching

Meanwhile, there are going to be a lot of developments to follow in this story. Some topics I’m watching:

• Vertical integration of clinics and compounding pharmacies

• Testing labs

• Lyophilization factories in the U.S.

• New uses of promising grey market peptides

• Peptide trials.

• Influencers.

• Lawsuits against distributors of retatrutide.

• Investors ready to get into backing peptide startups.

• Related services, like testing and diagnostics.

• Downsides.

I plan to keep following this topic. Let me know if you have any questions you’d like me to look into or angles that I should pursue.

Peptide entrepreneurship reminds me of the early days of crypto tokens. Officials can fret and worry, but they can’t stop it. People trust themselves more than they trust D.C. now, and the people are ready to feel better.

Note: There’s a fair amount of peptide writing on Substack, but I’m even newer to that. It tends to get pretty technical and a little tough to follow, but I hope to get caught up and I’ll let you know who on BioHackStack interests me the most, once I figure that out myself.

Correction (March 30, 2026, 12:26 PM CST): At one point in the episode, I compare Ozempic to Wegovy. I should have compared it to Zepbound, instead.

If you had a coworker who seemed to transform one month, what would you do?

What if she seemed to have more pep in her step, a glow in her skin, more focus and more charm? Would you ask her what was going on?

You might assume she had found a fresh romance, but what if she reached into her bag, pulled out a little pouch and opened it up to show you a bunch of nasal sprays and said: “I’ve been shooting these on the reg and I feel like I’m 17 again.”

If she swore to you that she knows a dozen other people doing the same thing and that they all report similar results, with no noticeable downsides, what would you do?

Would you order a few bottles?

That’s roughly a conversation that’s taking place on the West coast quite a bit right now. I am willing to bet it’s coming to your backyard sooner than you think. The driver of the conversation: synthetic peptides. Sprays and injections that enter our body and imitate little proteins that have always been good at telling our bodies to do the things we need them to do.

Peptides have been an ambient topic for me over the last three or four years. It all started with Ozempic, of course, but I’ve come across people experimenting with other peptides as well, for things like healthy skin.

It felt like one of those frontier topics that I should have a look into, but once I started poking around YouTube videos and podcasts exploring the topic, I realized how exciting this new kind of hacking really looks to be.

Here’s a heuristic about technology that has never let me down: If lots of smart people and smart money moves into a sector, it can’t lose. Something valuable will come out of it.

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We are in the rebel phase of peptide experimentation and entrepreneurship. It’s a point at which it makes sense to look directly at the rhetoric around peptides in order to see whether or not it sounds similar to (perhaps misguided) rhetoric we have heard about other topics in other times.

This is not a peptides explainer. This is an exploration of the explanations. All I want to convince you of is this: an important conversation about healthcare, health hacking and health sovereignty is underway in this country.

And, of course, there are major vested interests naysaying the whole conversation. Also, Martin Shkreli naysays it.

🖤 To subscribe to Diamond Rhino in a pod player, click on any of these links:

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• Pocket Casts

• Overcast

Sources

Silicon Valley's new miracle drug
March 6, 2026
Good Work

How Peptides Conquered the Internet
Feb 13, 2026
Search Engine

The Booming Business of Chinese Peptides
Dec 19, 2025
Odd Lots

The Great Peptide Debate, Musk Driving on the Moon, AI Coming for Zuck’s Job, Unitree S1
TBPN
March 23, 2026
Martin Shkreli v. Max Marchione

The Truth About Popular Peptides (What Works, What’s Overhyped) | Peptide Tier List pt.1
Dec 22, 2025
Dr. Alex Tatem

Dr. Josh Axe: On Mitochondrial Health, Peptide Therapy and Parasite Infections | TUH #205
The Ultimate Human
Gary Brecka
Sept 30, 2025

Before You Start Peptides: A Doctor Answers Your Biggest Questions
Nov 29, 2025
Dr. Ashley Froese

Joe Rogan Experience #2376 - Brigham Buhler
Sept 9, 2025

Leave a comment

Narrative note

I’m super skeptical of personal stories from founders and influencers. I included one tiny one. The low trustworthiness of personal storytelling at this point obviously complicates this narrative, and something I will work to remain mindful of going forward.

Notes

The Peptide Craze, Ground Truths

Life on Peptides Fees Amazing, NY Mag

People are buying unregulated, injectable peptides from Chinese factories. Are they safe?**

I Talked to 100 People on PEPTIDES - Here’s What They Said, Feb 10, 2026, Dr. Ashley Froese

They Went on Ozempic—and Gave Up on Life, by Evan Gardner, The Free Press, March 26, 2026

The Ozempicization of the Economy, Kyla Scanlon, March 26, 2026

Certain Bulk Drug Substances for Use in Compounding that May Present Significant Safety Risks, FDA

Which 14 of the 19 Peptides Are Becoming Legal Again?, OpenLoop, March 13, 2026

Music in the episode:

“Data Breach” by FASSounds

“Fortnite Roblox Minecraft Video Game Music,” by MFCC

“Abstract Glitch Hop” by The Mountain

“Bitcoins going up” by SunoMusicShowYouTube

All from Pixabay Music

Ladies.

Read more

I feel weird about prediction markets. I think a lot of us do?

Those of us who feel weird about them call it gambling. Those of us who think they are great prefer “gaming.” Our whole country is in the middle of a big conversation about whether or not prediction markets are on balance good or on balance bad.

So, I invited someone who made her beat gaming — the kind of gaming where people try to have fun more than they try to make money (though she was covering crypto gaming, so that line got blurry too, in all fairness), the great Kate Irwin.

You know her from Decrypt, PCMag and Blockworks. Now she’s leading content at the vault company Veda.

• She broke the fall of a major crypto gaming operation, Neon Shrapnel.

• And GameStop bagging on NFTs.

• She made some waves last last year with her big take on the industry, “Extraction Isn’t the Only End Game.”

In this episode, we hear from a number of proponents of prediction markets, from key moments in the history of this sector: before they were legal here, amid the election of 2024 and afterward, as they started to settle in as a clear industry in the United States.

As I edited this episode, I realized that I don’t represent my views on this topic as well as I should. As usual, my general approach is: “Let’s wait and see.”

However. Most use on prediction markets now is sports betting.

Sports betting is bad.1 As a great man once said: “That’s a judgement call and I’m making it.”

You can see it in the fact that we have more and more scandals in sports.

I don’t even care about sports. I don’t watch them. I don’t follow them, but it’s clear to anyone who cares to look that gambling not only corrupts the game but also hurts enough of the bettors to make it not actually worth it societally.

The big idea of prediction markets is that people would bet on things that would help societally. Like, could we set up markets on, for example, which presidential candidate is likely to yield a better overall employment rate? Or a lower national deficit?

As explains in a quote (admittedly, from quite a few years ago) that I clipped from an old episode of Epicenter (linked below), you usually can’t get a lot of liquidity into questions like that. People just don’t find them that interesting.

The tough question that Irwin speaks to a lot in this episode is insiders.

• Is society better off if prediction markets give them a profit motive to reveal privileged information by making a bet on something that they are more informed about than anyone else?

• Or is society worse off, because those insiders hover up all the money from retail traders who are making bets on public information and vibes?

On that one, I’m a little bit sympathetic to the Hanson view that it’s good to get that information out there, albeit indirectly. But there will be weird edge cases. For example, the Israeli reservist charged for placing bets using privileged military information.

has a good post up today about people betting on the war in Iran. We can’t know for sure that insiders were placing bets, but the sudden rush of wagers just before the attack looks suspicious. And that’s not the only event that looks suspicious.

As Racket reports, Democrats have prepared legislation to forbid Federal employees from placing bets, but I would not bet on that legislation going anywhere. At least not in this session.

Even in crypto, some influential folks are starting to raise their eyebrows. I’m a regular listener to Castle Island Ventures’ weekly news roundup podcast. is starting to give the markets side eye. He suspects retail will get out of the game, soon, as they realize how outclassed they are in most markets.

On the other hand, prediction markets offer some good features for bettors. First of all, their odds are just much more legible.

Second, sports books also stack the deck against bettors. If you are any good at placing wagers, sports books will just kick you off. and his producer Lidia Jean Kott broke all this down in season 4 of their podcast, Against the Rules.

Prediction markets won’t do this because you aren’t betting against Polymarket or Kalshi. You’re betting against another user (you don’t know which one, but you are). So they don’t care if you’re good or bad. They just like your liquidity.

So it is fair to say that prediction markets are different in kind from sports books. OK. But are they different in consequence?

If we were getting lots of compelling insights about the fate of companies or the fate of policy in the U.S. out of these things, I might feel differently. But we mainly seem to be getting a new way for corrupt politicians to max extract and for nobodies to lose money.

These are some of the topics Irwin and I explore in today’s pod. In this post, I wrote more of what I actually think about prediction markets, because I don’t think I say it very well in the episode.

• That’s okay though! Kate does a great job making her take clear! So listen for Kate!

One last thing: As I was researching clips to make for this episode, I stumbled on this video about not making rookie mistakes:

I thought I might make a clip from it as something orthogonal for Kate and I to discuss, but, to be honest, I didn’t even understand it. It made me feel like even dumber money. Buy markets on the future at your own risk, friends. Looks pretty rough out there.

Sources

The Folly of Prediction
Steven Levitt
Freakonomics
2011

Robin Hanson: Futarchy, Prediction Markets And The Challenge Of Disruptive Technology
Epicenter
2015

Polymarket CEO says his prediction market is “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now.”
Anderson Cooper and Shayne Coplan
2025

Why the Media Got the 2024 Election Wrong
Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner and Haseeb Qureshi
The Chopping Block
2024

Prediction Markets and the “Suckerifcation” Crisis
Charlie Warzel and
2025

Show notes

Meta layoffs — this was weird. We discussed this as a hypothetical market on the show and then it happened, right after we taped.

Male suckerification crisis

Kalshi beats CFTC ahead of 2024 election

Polymarket comes back to USA

FBI raids Shayne Coplan’s home after 2024 election

Rain Protocol

Variant post on Melee

Disclosure

I have made a few bets on a few markets. I don’t trade. I let ‘em ride.

I threw in about $50 and spread it across several of the Democrats who were favorites to get the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. I don’t actually care about this race, I just noticed that the prices for all of them were so low that if any of the ones I bet on won, it would more than make up for my losses on the other.

Of course a dark horse could easily hit and I’ll lose it all. So it goes.

I also have roughly $20 in on whether or not we will learn aliens exist this year. I bought that more as hopium than because I actually think it will work out. I did it right after Trump announced he was asking Hegseth to reveal what the military really knows (looking at your Air Force — you guys have been so sketch).

As we know, I love this topic.

Kate and I actually discussed this but as I was editing I decided to cut it for time as one of the weaker bits. So the same info is now here in the post.

There was one good part in the tape I was sad to cut. After saying which bets I’d made, Kate basically says, “Congratulations, Brady. You’re exit liquidity.”

Not wrong.

You hardly ever see a movie with a giant robot fighting a gorilla.

When you come across a scene like that in an old sci-fi story, you can imagine how it might have caught on and become a trope. It might have been like the action star turning his back before the explosion.

It could have been a whole thi…

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