Tech's New Addiction

Hello world,

I’ve been down a rabbit hole this week (and honestly, the past few weeks) on this one: Peptides. If you’ve heard of Ozempic or any other GLP-1s, those are peptides. But the ones drowning my Twitter feed are part of a sprawling underground ecosystem. GLP-1s normalized giving ourselves at-home injections in the name of health, and they paved the way for “Chinese peptides.” We’re talking injectables for muscle gain, clearer skin, energy, focus, injury recovery, even “cognitive maxxing.” And nowhere has this trend caught on quite like Silicon Valley.

According to the New York Times, imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China roughly doubled to $328M in the first three quarters of 2025, up from $164M in the same period of 2024. Tech workers, founders, and AI researchers are buying peptides from gray-market US sellers or directly from Chinese manufacturers and injecting them at home. They treat it like a startup experiment.

The information pipeline is all over the place (except for in the doctor’s office): podcasts, Reddit, TikTok, and ChatGPT. Most of these peptides are unapproved by the FDA and testing has found mislabeling, contamination, and dosing errors. Some users have ended up in the hospital and some users have gotten really, really hot.

Here’s why tech, specifically, is so into peptides:

1. Move-fast mindset: Tech workers are used to uncertain bets. Startups, crypto, emerging tech. Experimental health stuff feels familiar. Many believe they can iterate faster than the FDA through self-testing and rapid adjustment. It mirrors how software gets built and shipped. No point waiting for approval when you can run your own trials.

2. Optimization culture: Productivity, focus, sleep, energy, appearance. All variables to optimize. Peptides get framed as shortcuts compared to slower lifestyle changes. A hack, not a habit.

3. Distrust of institutions: Skepticism toward regulators and doctors pushes people toward peer networks, influencers, and Reddit threads instead. If you don’t trust the FDA, you’re not following their rules.

4. Social contagion inside tech networks: It usually starts with a founder or senior engineer. Then it spreads through teams, hacker houses, startup offices, etc.

5. Comfort with gray markets: Tech workers understand price gaps and access gaps. Sourcing cheaper peptides directly from China feels like just another form of arbitrage. New York Magazine reports a vial of tirzepatide that costs $480 through regulated channels can be had for around $20 from Chinese warehouses.

6. Founder image pressure: Some founders feel pressure to look good on camera, on stage, in launch videos. One anonymous founder told the New York Times: “I’ve been watching a ton of launch videos. I definitely notice now that founders aren’t overweight.”

Three people, three peptide journeys

I wanted to understand what this actually looks like in practice. Here are three very different experiences.

1. Emily Lai, a tech founder who documented her experience on social media: Lai has been documenting her peptide experiments on X for over a year. Her motivation: “Curiosity on how much better I could feel in this flesh vessel.” She’s cycled through tirzepatide, BPC-157, CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, retatrutide, NAD+, and GHK-Cu. Lost 15 lbs. Went down a pant size. Tested 11 years younger by blood panel.

   “Honestly, tirzepatide was the gateway peptide lol.”

   
   She sources from US vendors, tracks everything in Google Sheets, and treats her body like a product she’s iterating on. Her takeaway: “What’s going to actually matter isn’t how you look, but how you feel, and make others feel.”

2. Ezra Marcus, wrote about his experience in New York Magazine: Marcus went from wellness skeptic to self-injector after watching friends show up at parties “newly tan, ripped, skinny, with good skin.” He visited Atlas Men’s Health in midtown Manhattan (motto: DOMINATE THE DAY), told the nurse he gets “a little sleepy in the afternoon,” and walked out with a $250 NAD+ prescription.
   
   He described the first injection as “a warm glow spread through my limbs, sort of like a milder version of the rush produced by Adderall.” Then he went further. Connected with a Chinese supplier named Jasmine on WhatsApp. Ordered 10 vials of retatrutide for $135 in bitcoin. Had it tested. Injected it thinking “Couldn’t hurt to lose a few pounds after the holidays.”
   
   His compared it to betting on dogecoin. “For many young people, the feeling seems to be that they may be foolish not to make high-leverage bets with another extremely volatile asset: their own bodies.”

3. Brooke Bowman, 38, CEO of Vibecamp, featured in the New York Times: This one’s wild. Bowman is a self-described transhumanist with an RFID chip implanted in her hand. (It was installed too deep at a “human augmentation dance party” and doesn’t work.) She got clean from crystal meth in 2020. Never thought she’d use syringes again. Peptides changed that. She started BPC-157 and TB-500 for chronic fatigue, then added retatrutide for “cognitive benefits” and to quit vaping. Then she accidentally doubled her dose.
   
   “My hair started falling out after a month because I was malnourished. It made my heart rate go up 10 beats per minute at night.”

   
   She’s not stopping. Another shipment of Chinese peptides was on the way.
   
   “I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and I’m not getting that from crystal meth anymore, so it’s fun to have a new thing I’m experimenting with that isn’t horrible.”

The regulatory twilight zone, according to Martin Shkreli

Martin Shkreli, in a recent TBPN appearance, explained why most peptides will likely never get clinical trials: “There’s this edge case where you have a cosmeceutical, or something that doesn’t quite fit the description of a disease to the FDA.”

So now you’re “taking an unapproved, technically illegal substance and buying it off some shady third-party market.”

His proposed solution mirrors how prediction markets work outside traditional stock exchanges: “Eventually, I think we need to find a way... you have these third markets where you can bet on what Trump’s going to say in a speech. It’s not a registered stock exchange, but it’s also more than just you and me making a side bet.”

I’m not sure prediction-market-style drug testing is the answer, but he’s right about the twilight zone. These compounds exist in a weird regulatory purgatory and are definitely being injected by thousands of people who learned how on TikTok.

What I’m thinking

I’m not here to tell you peptides are good or bad, but I do think this is one of those moments where a subculture behavior is about to go mainstream in the same way dating apps used to be cringe or online therapy used to be frowned upon.

Whether that’s exciting or terrifying probably depends on your risk tolerance.

Let me know what you think.

Tech News

Fashion

• Vogue Business’s funding tracker is showing us where fashion money is actually flowing in 2026. (Vogue Business)

• Phia, founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates, raised $35M Series A at a $185M valuation, led by Notable Capital with participation from Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. In 10 months Phia reached 1M users, partnered with 6.2K brands, drove millions in monthly sales, and more. I see their ads all over social media, but only used it a while ago. It’s probably come a long way but at the time, it was pretty buggy. (Yahoo! Finance)

College

• Google added SAT practice tests and coaching to its Gemini chatbot, enabling users to generate full practice exams with clickable buttons, graphs, scoring, and an “Explain answer” feature. Google worked with The Princeton Review to align the AI-generated tests to real SAT formats and said it will expand the feature to other tests. (Ars Technica)

• Nerd Apply raised a $3.2M seed round to build a privacy-first data platform for college admissions counseling. The platform aggregates 100K de-identified applications from counselors across 500+ organizations, letting counselors to benchmark students using essays, activities, scores, and outcomes. (AlleyWatch)

Minnesota

• People in the comments of this Tweet point out that TBPN fans just don’t care if the hosts cover ICE or Minnesota:

• More than 450 tech workers from Google, Salesforce, Meta, OpenAI and Amazon urged CEOs to contact the White House, demand ICE leave cities and cancel company contracts. (Axios)

• Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois defended Border Patrol’s actions after a federal agent shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, posting on X that Pretti committed a “felony” and that “he unequivocally attempted to draw his weapon.” Partners Ethan Choi and Vinod Khosla publicly disavowed Rabois’ statements. (TechCrunch)

• Sam Altman told OpenAI employees “What’s happening with ICE is going too far” in an internal Slack message and said he had spoken with White House officials about the response. (The New York Times)

• Tim Cook is facing backlast for attending a private White House screening of the documentary Melania hours after the death of Alex Pretti. (Spyglass)

Claude

• Clawdbot renamed to Moltbot following a trademark-related request by Anthropic. The open-source agent runs locally, connects to messaging apps, uses models like Claude and Gemini, accesses the filesystem and shell, controls devices and services via user-installed skills, and auto-generates and updates user memory and integrations. (MacStories)

TikTok

• Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is reviewing whether TikTok violated California law by censoring content critical of President Trump after his office confirmed instances of suppressed posts. TikTok attributed recent engagement failures to a power outage at a US data center that caused a cascading systems failure. (POLITICO)

• TikTok said it investigated reports that users could not send the word “Epstein” in direct messages after some messages returned a community-guidelines warning. (NPR)

• TikTok updated its privacy policy to collect precise GPS-derived location data, log AI prompts and outputs, and expand its ad network. (WIRED)

• The Tonight Show generated 16B social video views in 2025, up 30%, and now counts 114M followers; a Fallon–Malala TikTok clip reached 109M views. The show’s producers said they adapted by designing short-form segments for TikTok and posting extended interviews on YouTube. (The Hollywood Reporter)

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