I apologize in advance for invoking Voltaire in the article about peptides, but in Chapter 22 Candid there’s this part where Candide comes to Paris, and, since that’s where Voltaire lives—surrounded by annoying Parisians who inspire his work—he suddenly encounters stupid cretins who put his life in danger. They saw the large diamond in Candide’s ring and his expensive luggage, and noticed that he was feeling a little unwell, so they stepped up and tried to sell him some medicine that nearly killed him.
As Candide passes away, his wisest friend Martin says, “I remember again that I was sick in Paris on my first journey; I was very poor, and thus had no friends, devotees, or doctors, and I recovered.”
This is how it is in Silicon Valley right now (not for the first time I’m sure). The rich and their hangers-on are in a position of indirect danger caused by the miasma of money that permeates their region.
A New York Times article from this weekend is about techies who buy vials of powdered amino acids made in China, make syringes with them, and inject them into their bodies, all because they heard vague promises from podcasters and chatbots that, Finally, you can needle hack your blood vibes and achieve high efficiency in your physical codebase. Health claims about peptides run the gamut from the logical, like weight loss, to the fantastical, like they cure autism.
All you really need to see to process what’s going on is one image from Jason Henry’s article. A photo taken at a “peptide rave” in San Francisco shows a young man in a white lab coat and black boots, with a standard orange and white syringe in his hand, going down the process, familiar to all heroin addicts, of turning the powder into an injectable liquid. His audience is a small crowd of dim people with cans of White Claw in their hands. There is a piece of printing paper on the table at his demo station with a QR code and the word “WAIVER.”
If anyone has died from doing this recently it’s off topic, but the fad is clearly still growing. “According to US customs data,” notes Jasmine Sun, the author of this piece, “imports of hormones and peptide compounds from China nearly doubled to $328 million in the first quarter of 2025, from $164 million in the same period of 2024.”
Peptides are not that expensive on their own. The piece points to an off-brand Ozempic, which is an example of a peptide, that costs about $200 a month. But the kind of peptide practice that tech innovators and promoters Sun describes isn’t just a matter of finding a powder, reassembling it, and shooting it.
For example, one founder of an obscure-sounding B2B AI startup started his peptide practice with “microdosing semaglutide,” then added five more peptides: “MOTS-c, epitalon, GHK-Cu, Ipamorelin and Kisspeptin-10.” He then pays another $250 per peptide to send the powders to a purity testing facility in the Czech Republic.
One who appears to be a business leader—the CEO of a kind of rational version of Burning Man called “Vibecamp”—takes BPC-157, TB-500, and retatrutide, but at one point he accidentally took too much of the latter and experienced a racing heart and his hair began to fall out. He uses an app, monitors his vitals while he sleeps, and gets regular blood tests.
Can you guess that Bryan Johnson- the guy who is famous for openly saying that he, like everyone else, doesn’t want to die, but has responded to what is happening around the world by turning himself into a one-man news circus, and posting a lot of scary pictures of himself on social media where his discolored skin looks wet and thin, like blowing on him in a tank of peptides would hurt him?
You’d be right, but I think it speaks volumes that he preached caution when asked about them, saying he likes his hair and skin, but there are “limited research on many peptides, so it’s hard to make a definitive statement about them without doing your own research, measuring and using a reputable supplier.”
Of course, you could argue that he’s saying this because he doesn’t want to be sued (more than he already has). But, again, he doesn’t want to fafolks.
