Silicon Valley Is Flirting with a Very Silly New Method to Die

I apologize upfront for invoking Voltaire in an article about peptides, however in Chapter 22 of Candide there’s this half the place Candide involves Paris, and, since that’s the place Voltaire lived—surrounded by the annoying Parisians who impressed his work—immediately encounters cretins who’re so silly it’s actively life-threatening. They see the massive diamond on Candide’s ring and his costly baggage, and spot that he’s feeling barely unwell, in order that they spring into motion making an attempt to promote him cures that, after all, nearly kill him.

Whereas Candide is getting over his brush with loss of life, his smarter pal Martin says, “I keep in mind additionally to have been sick at Paris in my first voyage; I used to be very poor, thus I had neither buddies, devotees, nor medical doctors, and I recovered.”

It’s like this in Silicon Valley proper now (not for the primary time I’m positive). The wealthy and their hangers-on are in a type of peril not directly attributable to the miasma of cash permeating their area.

A New York Occasions’ article from this weekend is about tech individuals shopping for vials of powdered amino acids which might be made in China, fixing syringes with them, and taking pictures them into their our bodies, all as a result of they’ve heard imprecise guarantees from podcasters and chatbots that, lastly, you possibly can needle hack your blood vibes and obtain optimum effectivity in your bodily codebase. Well being claims about peptides run the gamut from the affordable, resembling weight reduction, to the fantastical, like that they fix autism. 

All you really want to see to course of what’s taking place is one photo from the article by Jason Henry. It’s an image taken at a “peptide rave” in San Francisco that includes a man in a white lab coat and black boots, with a well-known orange and white syringe in his hand, demoing the method, acquainted to all heroin addicts, of turning a powder into an injectable liquid. His viewers is a small crowd of blurry individuals with White Claw cans of their palms. There’s a chunk of printer paper on a desk at his demo station with a QR code on it and the phrase “WAIVER.”

If anybody has died from doing this just lately it’s not within the article, however the fad is seemingly nonetheless on the rise. “In accordance with U.S. customs information,” Jasmine Solar, the piece’s creator, notes, “imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328 million within the first three quarters of 2025, from $164 million in the identical interval of 2024.”

Peptides aren’t all that costly on their very own. The piece factors to a type of off-brand Ozempic, which is an instance of a peptide, going for about $200 monthly. However the type of peptide behavior the tech founders and influencers Solar describes isn’t only a matter of acquiring the powder, reconstituting it, and taking pictures it.

As an example, one co-founder of a bleak-sounding B2B AI startup began her peptide behavior by “microdosing semaglutide,” after which added an extra 5 peptides: “MOTS-c, epitalon, GHK-Cu, Ipamorelin and Kisspeptin-10.” She then pays an extra $250 per peptide to ship her powders to a purity testing lab within the Czech Republic.

One other obvious enterprise chief—the CEO of a type of rationalist model of Burning Man known as “Vibecamp”—takes BPC-157, TB-500, and retatrutide, however at one level she unintentionally took an excessive amount of of that final one and skilled a racing heartbeat and her hair began falling out. She makes use of an app, screens her vitals whereas she sleeps, and topics herself to common blood checks.

Would you guess that Bryan Johnson—that man who is known for being very open about the truth that he, like everybody, doesn’t wish to die, however has responded to that common expertise by turning himself right into a one-man media circus, and posting plenty of eerie photographs of himself on social media the place his translucent wanting pores and skin appears moist and skinny, like blowing on him from throughout a room would trigger him ache—is within the tank for peptides?

You’d be type of proper, however I feel it speaks volumes that he has preached caution when asked about them, saying he likes them for his hair and pores and skin, however that there’s “restricted analysis for a lot of peptides, so it’s laborious to make a blanket assertion about them apart from do your analysis, measure and use a good provider.”

Positive, you might argue that he’s saying this as a result of he doesn’t wish to be sued (more than he already has). However, once more, he doesn’t wish to die, of us.