Jasmine Sun

You got to be doing long podcasts.

You got to be presenting.

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.