Someone in your life is using performance-enhancing drugs. I feel comfortable making that bet because I recently discovered how many people in my life are using performance-enhancing drugs. Maybe your dad scored human growth hormone at an “anti-aging” clinic. Maybe the woman you met on Hinge just ordered her first “peptide stack.” It’s definitely the middle-aged white dude at work who calls you brother, who takes beta blockers before presentations—the same guy who texted you about T, testosterone, a.k.a. test, because he copped a vial off a friend and bro, things were wild, he felt crazy, like he could reply to a thousand emails while running through a wall. Brother, you need to check this shit out asap.
My curiosity about this sudden ubiquity helps explain how I came to meet Nick, 33, a handsome white guy, comprehensively tattooed, dressed in a workwear jacket and nice jeans. Nick looks like somebody you’d meet in an expensive coffee shop. It’s a look that doesn’t suggest, to most eyes, somebody who at times injected himself daily with steroids. Somebody who used to deal them and even “cooked” them in his kitchen. Somebody who once injected himself, Pulp Fiction–style, straight in the chest.
A decade ago, Nick lived with his parents in Southern California and had a day job doing manual labor; going to the gym was his escape. “Training was the only thing I could really do,” he said. “I was kind of a vegetable other than when I was in the gym.”
At the time, he struggled with erections, on account, he thinks, of antidepressants. A doctor tested his blood and found he had low testosterone. He tried adjusting his diet to boost his levels: fermented cod-liver oil, Brazil nuts, butter from grass-fed cows. Then the doctor prescribed testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). Before long, Nick was giving himself intramuscular injections, which seemed to do the trick: He felt more energized, more motivated, and he enjoyed how his body changed. The appeal of getting bigger had rattled around in his head for years. “I remember one of my first girlfriends mentioned I looked skinny,” he recalled. “Out of high school, I was 120, 130 pounds at five-ten. It stuck in my head, she mentioned I’d look crazy at 160.” Crazy, meaning hot. Then, through a gym buddy, Nick heard about SARMs—selective androgen receptor modulators. At the time, they were a relatively new class of experimental drugs, alleged to foster the benefits of anabolic steroids, like muscle building, but with fewer potential negative side effects. So he ordered some online.
Soon, with training and dieting, using testosterone and SARMs, Nick acquired a 28-inch waist and a 40-inch chest. He felt athletic, he felt strong. In the gym, he could squat 400 pounds for multiple repetitions, he said, and he could bench-press close to the same amount. Plus, he loved how he looked.
We were sitting outside a coffee shop in eastern Los Angeles. I asked Nick—who requested that I not use his real name; other anonymous subjects will be referred to by initials—if he could show me a picture from that period. He frowned and stared across the street. He said he’d deleted all the photos, he couldn’t look at them; looking at them made him depressed. Because, regretfully, he didn’t stop there. “I think in finance, they say one of the hardest things to master is ‘the art of enough,’ ” he said. “Steroid use, it’s the same.”
The use of performance-enhancing drugs, a.k.a. PEDs, remains something of a shadow world—but it may not remain so for long. Consider the shifting landscape of what’s now edging toward the mainstream in health care. Cannabis as a cancer therapy. Psychiatrists testing out psychedelics. MDMA being studied for use in treating PTSD. The gap between our society’s embrace of once-taboo ideas and its faith in institutional medicine is widening—and personally, I laugh anytime I catch a drug commercial telling me to consult my doctor, because who the hell has a doctor anymore? For many, medicine is no longer a visit to the physician’s office but a dip into YouTube, a scroll through TikTok, maybe a quick Zoom with a tele-med nurse practitioner, or a visit to the nearest urgent care.
And in that aperture, the use and abuse of PEDs appears to be flourishing. Potential upsides in some cases: muscle growth, quicker recovery, more energy. Potential downsides in some cases: cardiovascular disease, liver damage, fertility collapse. Also, for men, maybe a dash of testicular atrophy—it became a meme in my reporting notebook, after a number of men who had used steroids said their balls had miniaturized to the size of peas, of Raisinets, tinkling around in their un-shrunk sacks.
But maybe it’s worth it. This is an age, we are told, when anyone can have any body they want. Take a pill, stab a shot, try a “cycle.” It’s the age of Ozempic. The age of ordering a latte with a splash of collagen. Body optimization, body modification, whatever you want to call it, is no longer something that other people are doing, but rather something maybe you should be doing. Have you spent any time on social media lately? Have you felt: I’m getting left behind?
I asked around my own friend circle this spring and discovered a gamut of boosting, occurring out of sight. Chris, 41, spends about a thousand dollars a month on a prescribed regimen of supplements—including dehydroepiandrosterone, an endogenous steroid hormone precursor—that requires him to pack syringes when he travels. “I don’t want to live forever,” he said. “I’m just trying to feel as good as possible.” Another friend, Jane, 33, got a prescription for peptides after she heard about them on a podcast—her stack includes sermorelin, a growth-hormone-releasing factor—and she also has begun traveling with needles. “I’m always scared TSA is going to be like, What the fuck is all this?, so I carry a doctor’s letter.” M.D., 37, got into lifting weights two years ago, and in only his second session at a gym the trainer suggested that if he was willing to get on “gear,” i.e., steroids, he could meet his goals much faster. The overture was casual, nonchalant—unnervingly so. “It was really scary!” M.D. said.
Fear, however, isn’t always the response this crazed moment inspires. Curiosity, feverishness, impatience, confusion, are also common feelings. Both online and off, drug use that once was a secret sneak for rule-breaking pro athletes—things like growth hormone, SARMs, anabolic-androgenic steroids—is being reframed and introduced to a wider set of users, whose motivations aren’t linked to sports. We’re talking about day traders and data managers. People who don’t intend to enter a bodybuilding competition but who want to feel more in control of how they look—who are eager to become the human lab–slash–gym rat of their dreams.
This age of bodily actualization is not without hazards. Nick said that one time, a day after injecting, a golf-ball-size lump appeared under his skin. He’d tried a new spot on his left quad, using inch-long needles. He took a hot shower and mashed the glob with his knuckles. Soon, he felt faint. Racing heartbeat, shortness of breath. Minutes later, in the kitchen, his legs locked up and he couldn’t walk. He lay on the floor, wrapped himself in a blanket, and stayed there for hours—freezing cold, sweating like crazy, panicking. An EMT friend later told him he’d likely been suffering from septic shock. Still, the next day he was spiking himself in the chest.
Seemingly every day a new compound, a new stack of dietary supplements, a new performance trend hits the internet. So, yes, someone in your life is using performance-enhancing drugs—I would bet on it. And what’s also possible, perhaps more foreboding, depending on what they’re taking, is that the individual doesn’t know exactly what it’ll mean for them in the long run. Victoria Felkar, who studies the industry as a researcher in women’s health and steroid hormones, told me something I heard a lot while interviewing users and experts: “This world is like the Wild West.”
Multiple forums exist online for PED fans to offer tips and query dangers. The jargon can be intimidating for a newbie but quickly absorbed. PEDs can be taken in “cycles” and potentially “blasted”; and multiple PEDs used together form a “stack.” To make one’s own “gear,” or steroids, means to “cook” them, and to inject oneself with the finished product is to “pin.” “Freak,” endearingly, is a label worn with pride.
The forums—which are loaded with young and middle-aged men uploading anonymous pictures from the gym—are full of stories about gains and losses but also problems at the office, or struggles with hair loss. Often, should a young member contemplate their first cycle, more seasoned dudes will offer advice, exhort them to self-educate, maybe read the book Anabolics, by William Llewellyn, currently in its 11th edition. Generally speaking, the conversations are candid and detailed. Discussion doesn’t shy away from the risks, whether acne or liver disease—as the bodybuilder slogan goes: Live large, die large, leave a giant coffin—which seems to inspire a striving for harm-reduction. Learning about PEDs used to mean a locker-room conversation between a couple of powerlifters. Today, and possibly for better, considering the amount of information shared online, it’s an all-night protein-shake klatch about the good, bad, and ugly in getting jacked.
One problem, though: Anabolic steroids and testosterone are Schedule III controlled substances. The possession of, say, a single vial of testosterone without a prescription is a criminal act. Also, what’s often not understood is the potential side effects that some of these compounds, particularly newer compounds being sold online, have on human users—sometimes in the short term and especially in the long term. A generation ago, before Congress criminalized steroids in 1990, anabolic users could score drugs that had been diverted from facilities monitored by the FDA. Unlike today, when newer, less studied compounds hit social media from who knows where, with nothing but flushed enthusiasm.
In the course of many conversations with people who’ve ventured into this vast community, I was surprised by the variety of motivations. A.B., a 23-year-old who lives in California, told me that he did his first cycle at 19 with testosterone and “loved every second of it.” (Arnold Schwarzenegger fashioned his routine around testosterone and the steroid Dianabol, he admitted last year.) At the time, A.B. didn’t like his job and had endured a bad breakup. “The gym was the only thing keeping me going,” he said. Today, he’s no longer using, partly because he found a new job he loves. “If things were worse, I’d probably hop back on to cope, if I felt like I was at rock bottom,” he admitted.
Performance-enhancing drugs as a way to pick yourself up when you’re feeling low—for some people, it’s a thing.
T.B., 49, who also lives in California, said that for him, “used correctly, [testosterone] makes everything better.” He took testosterone under a doctor’s supervision, and reported improved sleep, increased metabolism, less soreness. As for downsides, he noticed his moods and emotions could shift unpredictably—and during periods when he stopped using, he felt fatigued and gained weight. Also, “your balls will shrink up,” he said, echoing a number of other conversations. “Not crazy, but you’ll notice a change.”
There really was a lot of talk about testicles.
D.C., a 23-year-old who lives in rural West Virginia, said he didn’t have any difficulty scoring drugs. He started using when he was 18 or 19 and had done about half a dozen cycles since then, only with testosterone. “If you walk into Planet Fitness [you’re] probably going to have a tough time. If you walk into the old-school, powerlifting gym that’s half run-down, just about any dude you ask will have some.”
I asked if he’d consulted with a medical professional. He said he’d discussed it with a nurse practitioner. “Their answer is always not to use,” he said. “Not exactly helpful when I’m ignoring that.”
One of the users I spoke to was a physician himself—M.B., a 41-year-old from Missouri, who told me he started using at 32. He had since tried many compounds including human growth hormone and insulin (the latter he acquired over the counter in a chain retailer where it’s commonly sold in most states. Nick said he obtained insulin similarly: “It’s probably the most dangerous anabolic you can take, and it’s the easiest anabolic you can get. It’s ridiculous.”)
“As a medical professional, I understand the risk-reward balance of almost all modern pharmaceuticals,” M.B. said. “Biologically speaking, there is no free lunch.” I asked if he was out about his PED use to colleagues. Only his wife, coaches, and a few training partners knew, M.B. said. “At this point, unless my health markers change entirely, I’m unlikely to stop. I live a clean lifestyle—no tobacco, alcohol, excessive caffeine, or fast food. This is my single vice.”
Multiple guys said they were bothered by the persistent stereotypes of PED users as meatheads, as aggro dudes prone to so-called roid rage—it just didn’t square with the people they had befriended. “There are doctors, engineers, government officials, nurses, software engineers, attorneys, small-business owners, accountants,” a 32-year-old named J.R. told me. He lives in North Carolina and serves as an administrator in one of the forums. “There are devoted husbands and committed fathers. There are men more well-versed in organic chemistry and scientific literature than most of the people I went to college with.”
Another assumption or cliché that proved unfounded: that PED users, particularly steroid users, are homophobic straight dudes. Plenty of LGBTQ+ people use PEDs, and there’s a lot of sympathy for the trans community; after all, one way to support trans people is to defend an individual’s right to alter their body with hormones. Alex Tilinca is a 23-year-old trans man from Long Island. He trains mostly trans men, including trans men interested in competitive bodybuilding. “It’s a sport where hormones are involved—it’s a natural equalizer,” he said. “And people are really receptive to trans guys in the competitive bodybuilding world.” For his own journey, Tilinca had found the gym to be an accepting place to hang out. “All the big guys, they were the ones that supported me. They knew I was trans. They helped me learn how to train properly. They’re sincerely gentle giants, honestly.”
If you’re wondering, But why now?, ask yourself when you last visited the gym and didn’t spot at least one smartphone poised on a machine, filming a workout. Rick Collins, an attorney who specializes in laws around steroids and supplements, put it succinctly: “Social media put steroids on steroids.”
On Instagram, well-known steroid users like the Liver King flex their pecs for millions of followers. On TikTok, professed testosterone user and 70-year-old presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does pull-ups. The platforms are super apps for performance enhancement: places where the curious can be inspired by (edited) photos, introduced to (sketchy) regimes, and directed where to (illegally) purchase them, before finally sharing topless mirror selfies, to display their boost-gotten gains.
Perhaps performance-enhancing drugs, as a term, is itself outdated—and the reason why some experts have already begun to adopt the phrase performance-and-image enhancing.
Of course, given stigmas that still exist, not to mention the risk of jail time, plenty of people who use PEDs don’t admit to using them—especially if they have tons of followers and their income increases by acquiring more. Kenneth Boulet, known as Kenny KO, has built a following based in part on attending fitness exhibitions and asking influencers, on camera, whether their physiques are artificially enhanced—that is, whether they are, in the parlance, “natty or not.” (In May, TikTok had over 20,000 videos posted with the hashtag “natty or not.”) Boulet used steroids in his 20s while training to be a firefighter. Now he’s trying to discourage use by fostering honesty about which influencers are juicing. “They’re taking crazy cycles, saying they’re natural,” Boulet said with exasperation, though he admitted to understanding the appeal. “The feeling when you’re on a cycle is amazing. That’s the addictive part,” he told me, “but it’s not maintainable.”
He said he hoped to spread awareness and help young people realize they shouldn’t compare themselves to what they see online. “There’s nothing more I dislike than a message from a 16-year-old wanting to hop on their first cycle because they saw their favorite influencer, and they’re thinking of hopping on tren,” Boulet said, referring to trenbolone, an anabolic that’s used to enlarge beef cattle.
His message, he admitted, could be misunderstood. “The amount of pro athletes and actors that have slid into my DMs, asking for input on cycles they’re on—it would be a mind-blowing thing for people to see.”
Hollywood has long been loaded with chiseled male bodies—and with actors who were quietly supplementing—but it’s never been easier for actors to get ripped. In the 2023 book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, a professor of physical therapy at the University of Southern California estimated that 50 percent to 75 percent of Marvel stars use some form of PED. A television actor told me—we spoke in March before watching Love Lies Bleeding, the recent Kristen Stewart film that, like 2022’s Bros, uses roid rage for a storyline—that he took creatine to prepare for shirtless scenes, and he’d heard that some castmates used T. “There’s no drug testing in movies,” Lars Wallin, a West Hollywood trainer who works with stars, told me. “The simplest thing to do, to stop this whole trend, is to enforce drug testing on movie shoots, and have actors be fired if they’re found positive.” Then again, who in the industry would be incentivized to do such a thing?
Last December, Reacher’s Alan Ritchson broke the code of silence. “For me, it’s a long game. I want to do Reacher for 15 years,” he told Men’s Health UK. Apparently, the work to get big and cut for the show’s first season had “ravaged” his body, resulting in a shoulder injury. “I don’t want to have to have surgery after every season, and testosterone helps.”
V.S. is in his 30s but was 19 when he first got curious. “College is a time where you’re comparing yourself to everyone else,” he told me. “I was always a tiny guy. I thought it would be cool if I could reverse that for once.” He ordered several compounds online, and soon he was bigger, more cut, receiving compliments from strangers. He compared it to playing Grand Theft Auto with cheat codes—once you’d experienced the game with codes, why would you go back? V.S.’s PED career lasted eight years. Today he lives in Florida, is on TRT, and may be for life—a notion he struggles to accept. “It’s like, how much of a loser am I going to feel, when I have a wife and kids, and we’re trying to go to Puerto Rico, and Daddy has to pack his needles?”
In the world of PEDs, young users often think their dabbling will be temporary, with short-term consequences; unfortunately, the drugs don’t always work that way. For instance, men who use steroids frequently suppress their body’s own production of testosterone—sometimes persistently. A strength-and-conditioning coach in Ohio told me, “Once you make that leap, odds are good that it’s gonna be for life.”
“The first time you do steroids, you’re kind of finished,” V.S. said. “There’s no turning back from that point.”
These days, V.S. works with a doctor named Thomas O’Connor, who specializes in helping patients who use or previously used PEDs, and shares information online as the Anabolic Doc. His choice of specialty was informed by his own experience. “I’m a 60-year-old dude,” he said. “I did steroids in my 20s. By the time I was in my 30s, I was shut down, and I’ve been on testosterone ever since. I do not give a blessing on steroids.”
O’Connor said he’d had more than 500 patients on dialysis, and had seen dozens of patients commit suicide. He ticked through potential health outcomes for steroid users, like coronary disease and depression. “And it’s not just steroids. You have SARMs, peptides, growth factors, secretagogues, IGF-1, insulin, clenbuterol—I can go on and on.” In terms of a typical patient, more and more, he said, he saw young men, including teenagers. “They’re regular dudes who have a desire to get ripped. The drugs work, and now they’re widely accessible with the internet. It’s been normalized because of accessibility.”
Many of O’Connor’s clients got into PEDs long before they became more commonplace. E.O., 42, is a client who works in finance in New England and is on TRT. When he was in his late 20s, he felt burned out by obligations: raising a family, stress at work. He started supplementing with testosterone and eventually fell into what he described as the “more-is-better trap”—experimenting with anabolics, on top of T, to get huge. Odd things started to happen; not necessarily bad things. Women approached him in the grocery store and squeezed his arm. At investor conferences, he was mistaken for security. Today, still quite big, he saw insecurity in a lot of users’ motivations. “I think it’s a personality thing,” he said. “I think a lot of men are attracted to trying to fix a hole in their ego.”
Others were chasing a long-lost feeling, said Jessica Cho, a doctor who runs an integrative medicine practice in Los Angeles. She told me the question she hears from new patients is often the same: Can you make me feel like I’m 18 again? “One of the biggest fights I have with patients is men wanting more testosterone,” she said. “They abuse it and then they give it to their friends. I cannot tame them. I make them sign a waiver saying if you abuse this outside my office, you’re taken off. This is the one area in my whole practice where everything is about compliance.”
What patients sometimes fail to grasp, she says, is that testosterone doesn’t operate in isolation; the endocrine system is similar to an orchestra, where hormones work together for balance, not cacophony. She mentioned she also saw a lot of renal issues in men from consuming too much protein and too many supplements. “They’re taking crazy amounts of supplements and their kidneys are getting knocked out.”
Researchers in the Netherlands have linked steroid use to left ventricular hypertrophy and impaired systolic and diastolic function. Steroid use has been connected to mood and anxiety disorders. In 2022, The Washington Post documented more than two dozen bodybuilders who died young. Meanwhile, multiple experts told me there’s a general lack of education around PEDs in the medical establishment. On top of that, there simply isn’t enough good empirical data, extensive medical trials, for a typical physician to consult. Which perhaps leaves the average user—especially a new, optimization-focused user, roaming around this nouveau Wild West—more open to “bro science” and harm.
Reporting this story, I heard gnarly anecdotes of people getting conned, guys pinning themselves with bunk gear. And I heard from people with no complaints, who loved their peptides, loved their T. And I ran into anecdote after anecdote filled with dysmorphia and pain. What can we expect with normalization? Ideally, more education, more accurate information, and, in a utopian world, an adult could make an informed decision about using PEDs with medical oversight. But right now, unless the laws change, that’s not the case. One night, after a series of interviews, I turned to my wife and said, “I think this may be the saddest story I’ve ever done.”
Despite the warnings from doctors, the embrace of PEDs is a party that appears to be only growing. Next year, if organizers prevail in their plans, one of the wilder experiments in normalization will get underway: the Enhanced Games. The inaugural event is being planned with support from, among others, the billionaire biohacker Peter Thiel. Its model is an Olympics-style competition—including swimming, weightlifting, track and field—wherein contestants will be permitted to supplement, provided they juice under medical supervision. Basically: a celebration of transparency around augmentation.
“The Olympics inspires hope and competence in the world, but it’s broken and dysfunctional on so many levels,” Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza told me. He cited a 2017 study commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency that surveyed more than 2,000 athletes at a pair of international sporting events and estimated past-year doping in 43.6 percent of participants at one of them, 57.1 percent at the other. In a statement to GQ, the International Olympic Committee noted that it has a “zero-tolerance policy to combat cheating and hold accountable anyone responsible for using or providing doping products.”
Nonetheless, to the extent that PED use does occur in competitive sports, the Enhanced Games want to pull it out of the shadows. “Any normalization helps,” Christian Angermayer, D’Souza’s cofounder, said. He pointed to society’s acceptance of certain substances over others, despite health outcomes for users and potential harm to others—the risks of drinking alcohol, say, compared to using things like anabolic steroids. (Booze has been associated with significantly worse effects.)
Borrowing their term, I asked if they themselves enhanced, and if so, how? Angermayer said he used a personalized stack of PEDs under strict medical guidance and supervision. D’Souza said he was considering starting but planned to wait until the Enhanced Games’ medical safety protocols were finalized.
Nick’s experiences, as a former user, demonstrated how much medical oversight might have helped.
His initial DIY use of SARMs had been an egress into rougher stuff. At first it was Masteron and Equipoise, purchased from a creepy gym bro. But something was wrong with the drugs; postinjection, he developed large lumps under his skin. “I couldn’t go over speed bumps in my car without wincing.” Homemade steroids are a combination of a hormone powder, alcohol, and a carrier oil, where the powder gets dissolved and heated into a solution. Nick suspected the drugs he’d bought weren’t prepared properly. “If you don’t cook steroids long enough, they don’t transition from powder into liquid,” he explained. “It means your gear is ‘crashed.’ ”
Still, Nick stuck with them and gradually added other compounds. He rattled off some of the drugs he tried during his career with such familiarity, they sounded like underground hardcore bands. Anavar, D-Bol, NPP. At times, depending on the compound, he was shooting every day, a thousand-plus milligrams per week. And he grew muscle, lots of it—and he also grew paranoid, and felt extremely lethargic outside the gym. And yet: “The second you touch a weight, you’re a god. I was gaining 20, 40 pounds on my bench press every two to three weeks. It was madness.”
Meanwhile, one of the drugs turned his sweat yellow (also his semen). His hairline receded and he switched to a mohawk. “This is the progression of bodybuilders: full hair, mohawk, bald.” Plus, he experienced such bad acne, he started going to a tanning salon multiple times a week, mainly to roast his back.
Eventually, Nick started making his own gear—partly to save money but also to make money. A single bottle of steroids cost him about six dollars to produce, and he could sell it for $50 to $90. Unfortunately, cooking wasn’t easy—the first batch bubbled over in the kitchen. By that point, in his mid-to-late 20s, he’d moved to Los Angeles, and a friend told him about a guy in Hollywood who’d cook on order, if you supplied the raw hormone powders. Nick met him, paid him, handed over the goods. A week later, “the dude rolled up to Starbucks with close to a thousand bottles of gear in a trash bag. So I’m going down Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight, bottles rolling around, clank, clank, clank. I’m walking to my car with a life sentence on my back, probably.”
Nick said he discovered he didn’t have the temperament to be a dealer. He gave away gear for free, plus he was using his own supply. And soon he hit his lowest point, when he was lying on the kitchen floor. “I had probably $20,000 to $30,000 worth of steroids cooked, ready for distribution. I had raw powders in the home from China. I had 911 dialed, but I kept thinking about the consequences of what might happen, just the shame for my family.”
Today, Nick takes a variety of peptides. He’s on TRT and believes he will be for life—mainly because when he’s gone off T before, “you have zero will to live. You don’t want to eat, you don’t want to fuck. You don’t want to do anything.” He enjoyed exploring new ways of being active: dance, rock climbing, jujitsu. “I still think being buff is cool, but a lot of those guys can’t do shit. Also, you can’t wear cool clothes,” he said, laughing. “It’s a rule. The bigger you get, the dumber the clothes.”
I asked what his advice would be for young people contemplating PEDs. His response was immediate: “Get into therapy.” I thought he was talking about hormone therapy, but no: psychological therapy. “Get into therapy, and take it as a challenge to learn to love the body you have. Get into therapy, be in therapy once a week for a good year, and work hard. It’s just like the gym: You get out what you put in,” he said. “It sounds so cliché and corny. I used to spit when I would hear shit like that. I thought there was something honorable in hating yourself enough to change your body.”
Nick’s voice was clear, steady, and despondent. “I had to find a way to love myself through almost dying,” he said. “I just hope that one young person [reading this] will stop early and coast forever.”
Rosecrans Baldwin is a frequent contributor to GQ and the bestselling author of ‘Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Why is Everyone on Steroids Now?”
