Jasmine Sun

And that made her a little bit more self-conscious and wanting to lose weight in order to compete within this extremely frothy, competitive world of startups.

And so I think everyone I spoke to was really looking for an edge.

And that's the kind of founder attitude that you see.

And rather than dyeing his hair, I suppose, he went for melanotan.

But then he said he also had a friend who accidentally took too much melanotan and people started reading him as being a different race than he was.

Thanks for having us on.

Right.

So I recently wrote a piece for the New York Times on the rise of, quote unquote, Chinese peptides in Silicon Valley.

which is a biohacking trend that's exploded throughout 2025.

I think I first saw it as a meme and people talking about it on Twitter, on Axe.

And then I mentioned it in real life and started meeting real life people in San Francisco who said, oh yeah, I am buying off-label injectables from Chinese manufacturers off the internet, mixing them myself with vials of bacteriostatic water in my home and injecting them into my body.

And I was like,

Oh my gosh, I had no idea this was something that people are actually doing.

And so what's happened is that first, I think it did start with the explosion of GLP-1s, of a Zempik, where folks became interested in these weight loss drugs, started looking for cheaper ways to get them.

For example, through these off-market suppliers who are selling semaglutide as research chemicals rather than for human use purposes.

Right.

And once people started realizing you could get cheap peptides.

peptides, azempic is a type of peptide, from the research chemical market, biohackers started exploring what other sorts of magic pills might there be out there.

If we can do one shot for weight loss, maybe we can do another shot for sleep, another shot for happiness, another shot for getting smarter and more productive.

And so people have started experimenting with all sorts of injectable peptides.