A Very Stupid New Way to Die in Silicon Valley

I apologize in advance for invoking Voltaire in an article about peptides, but in Chapter 22 of Candide there’s this part where Candide comes to Paris, and, since that’s where Voltaire lived—surrounded by the annoying Parisians who inspired his work—instantly encounters cretins who are so stupid it’s actively life-threatening. They see the huge diamond on Candide’s ring and his expensive luggage, and notice that he’s feeling slightly unwell, so they spring into action trying to sell him cures that, of course, almost kill him.

While Candide is getting over his brush with death, his smarter friend Martin says, “I remember also to have been sick at Paris in my first voyage; I was very poor, thus I had neither friends, devotees, nor doctors, and I recovered.”

It’s like this in Silicon Valley right now (not for the first time I’m sure). The rich and their hangers-on are in a form of peril indirectly caused by the miasma of money permeating their region.

A New York Times article from this weekend is about tech people buying vials of powdered amino acids that are made in China, fixing syringes with them, and shooting them into their bodies, all because they’ve heard vague promises from podcasters and chatbots that, finally, you can needle hack your blood vibes and achieve optimum efficiency in your bodily codebase.Health claims about peptides run the gamut from the reasonable, such as weight loss, to the fantastical, like that they fix autism.

All you really need to see to process what’s happening is one photo from the article by Jason Henry. It’s a picture taken at a “peptide rave” in San Francisco featuring a guy in a white lab coat and black boots, with a familiar orange and white syringe in his hand, demoing the process, familiar to all heroin addicts, of turning a powder into an injectable liquid. His audience is a small crowd of blurry people with White Claw cans in their hands. There’s a piece of printer paper on a table at his demo station with a QR code on it and the word “WAIVER.”

If anyone has died from doing this recently it’s not in the article, but the fad is apparently still on the rise. “According to U.S. customs data,” Jasmine Sun, the piece’s author, notes, “imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025, from $164 million in the same period of 2024.”

Peptides aren’t all that expensive on their own. The piece points to a form of off-brand Ozempic, which is an example of a peptide, going for about $200 per month. But the kind of peptide habit the tech founders and influencers Sun describes isn’t just a matter of obtaining the powder, reconstituting it, and shooting it.

For instance, one co-founder of a bleak-sounding B2B AI startup started her peptide habit by “microdosing semaglutide,” and then added an additional five peptides: “MOTS-c, epitalon, GHK-Cu, Ipamorelin and Kisspeptin-10.” She then pays an additional $250 per peptide to send her powders to a purity testing lab in the Czech Republic.

Another apparent business leader—the CEO of a sort of rationalist version of Burning Man called “Vibecamp”—takes BPC-157, TB-500, and retatrutide, but at one point she accidentally took too much of that last one and experienced a racing heartbeat and her hair started falling out. She uses an app, monitors her vitals while she sleeps, and subjects herself to regular blood tests.

Would you guess that Bryan Johnson—that guy who is famous for being very open about the fact that he, like everyone, doesn’t want to die, but has responded to that universal experience by turning himself into a one-man media circus, and posting a lot of eerie photos of himself on social media where his translucent looking skin seems wet and thin, like blowing on him from across a room would cause him pain—is in the tank for peptides?

You would be sort of right, but I think it speaks volumes that he has preached caution when asked about them, saying he likes them for his hair and skin, but that there’s “limited research for many peptides, so it is hard to make a blanket statement about them other than do your research, measure and use a reputable supplier.”

Sure, 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 die, folks.