This Saturday:

In 1923, a doctor in rural Kansas built one of the most powerful radio stations in America. He used it to sell a surgery: goat gland transplants, promised to restore youth and virility in aging men. He performed hundreds of them. At his peak, he was earning something like $12 million a year doing it. Nobody had ever proven the surgery worked.

That's not a story from this week. That's John R. Brinkley, and he's been dead since 1942.

He came to mind because two real news items landed within days of each other this week, and both of them are running some version of his exact playbook: sell the treatment first, let the science, and the regulators, catch up later. Or never.

Sit back. This one has a hundred year old villain in it.

This week, a startup called System raised $20 million to grow its peptide platform. NAD+, sermorelin, glutathione, MIC+B12, all delivered through licensed clinicians and compounding pharmacies, none of it requiring FDA approval to sell. Investors include Patron Fund, Will Ventures, and SV Angel. Founder Adam Steinle told press his goal is to become "the solution Americans use and trust for their long-term health."

Here's what makes the timing worth noticing. About a month before that round closed, the FDA's own Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee spent two days reviewing seven similar peptides, including TB-500 and BPC-157, the same broad category of longevity and recovery compounds driving this entire market. FDA career scientists recommended against letting compounding pharmacies keep producing them. Their reasoning: essentially no human trials for some of these peptides, and preclinical data suggesting they could promote cancer growth or trigger dangerous immune reactions if dosed incorrectly. One panelist, stem cell biologist Paul Knoepfler, said it plainly: "These are drugs and they haven't been scientifically proven."

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been pushing the opposite direction, publicly advocating to loosen peptide restrictions as part of his "Make America Healthy Again" platform. In June, the FDA restructured that same advisory committee to add members with peptide industry ties.

So: a $20 million bet on a product category the FDA's own scientists just said isn't proven safe, backed by political pressure to approve it anyway. Nobody involved is breaking a single law. Or at least, that's what everyone involved is counting on you to believe, which is easier to believe once the people who said "not yet" have already been recast as obstacles instead of scientists.

Neither of these numbers is about the same product. Both are about the same country.

Dyson just launched a toothbrush called the CameraJet for $499. It has a camera capturing 28 images per second inside your mouth, an AI trained on 470,000 dental images to spot gaps between your teeth, and a jet that fires mouthrinse at the exact spot within 100 milliseconds of finding one. It connects to an app. It is, by any honest measure, genuinely impressive engineering.

Meanwhile, 21% of American adults delay or skip dental care because of cost, more than any other category of healthcare: more than medical visits, more than prescriptions, more than mental health care. Dental is the one Americans forgo most, by a wide margin.

Nobody's claiming the toothbrush caused that gap. It didn't.

But at what cost do the 21% who can't afford a checkup, let alone $500 for a toothbrush, usually go without? Rarely a dollar amount up front. Usually a filling that becomes a root canal, or a root canal that becomes an extraction, because catching something early costs money nobody had set aside for it, and catching it late costs a lot more, on a payment plan, later.

The $500 toothbrush solves a problem dentistry mostly already solved: getting people to brush correctly. The 21% number is a different problem entirely, and it doesn't have an app.

John R. Brinkley started performing goat gland transplants in Milford, Kansas, around 1918.The pitch: transplant goat testicle tissue into aging men, and restore their youth and virility. In April 1922, the Los Angeles Times ran a favorable article on his work, and the operation went national.

He didn't wait for medical journals to catch up. He built his own radio station, KFKB, "Kansas' First, Kansas' Best," and used it to diagnose patients live on air, prescribing his own numbered remedies to listeners who'd never met him. At his peak, he performed hundreds of surgeries a year and earned roughly $12 million annually. His medical credentials traced back to a diploma mill, a fact that came out publicly in 1923 and changed nothing about his business for the next seven years.

In 1930, the Kansas Medical Board finally revoked his license, after a hearing turned up that he had signed 42 death certificates for his own patients. Six months later, the Federal Radio Commission declined to renew his broadcasting license. Brinkley's response was to move his transmitter across the border to Mexico, where U.S. regulators had no jurisdiction, and keep broadcasting into American living rooms anyway.

What actually stopped him wasn't a regulator. It was a doctor named Morris Fishbein, editor of the AMA's journal, who published a piece in 1938 calling Brinkley a "modern medical charlatan." Brinkley sued for $250,000 in libel damages. He lost. The judge ruled that Fishbein's description was simply accurate. From there it unraveled fast: over $3 million in new lawsuits, a mail fraud conviction, bankruptcy in 1941, a leg amputated after a blood clot. He died broke in San Antonio on May 26, 1942, twenty years after that first flattering headline.

Twelve years passed between the surgery going national and the license getting pulled. Another eight passed before a lawsuit, not a regulator, actually ended him.

None of this week's three stories are illegal. None of them are even necessarily wrong. That's what makes the pattern worth naming out loud.

Brinkley, System, and Dyson aren't the same kind of company, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise; Brinkley signed 42 death certificates and lied about his medical degree, and nothing this week's stories describe comes close to that. But the underlying playbook he perfected a hundred years ago is still the one running: sell the treatment to the public first, and let proof, if it ever fully arrives, show up after the money already has.

It took twelve years and a libel trial to make Brinkley's version of that bet stop paying off. The compounding peptide industry has had, generously, a decade of real mainstream growth, and it's already facing its own advisory committee's scientists head on. Whether $20 million buys enough runway to reach mainstream trust before the FDA settles the underlying safety question is, genuinely, the bet System's investors just made. NAD+ and sermorelin might turn out to be exactly as safe and useful as their marketing claims. But "might turn out to be" is the precise phrase FDA scientists flagged this summer, and it's worth remembering that phrase covered goat glands for twelve straight years too.

There's a lazy version of skepticism that dismisses anything new just for sounding strange, and medicine has an embarrassing history of being wrong that way; plenty of treatments that sounded exotic turned out to be real. But that cuts both directions. Some methods get dismissed for sounding too exotic. Others get sold on the exact same excitement, and actually do need to be questioned, studied, and taken seriously before they reach the market, not celebrated after the fact once something goes wrong. The instinct that matters isn't "new equals bad" or "new equals visionary." It's trusting the people who spent years studying the specific thing, instead of assuming something is safe just because someone built a confident brand and a funding round around it.

The toothbrush, for what it's worth, is just a toothbrush.

👉 Forward this to someone who thinks "FDA advisory panel" and "FDA approved" mean the same thing.

See you next Saturday.