🌻 chinese peptide physiognomy
the new language of bio-acceleration
Welcome to the age of bioacceleration: of Chinese peptide raves, longevity for dogs, icing your ballsack in the sauna, and CRISPRing your kids. Of diet pills for men and creatine for women; of the pharma, cosmetics, and biotech industries merging into one. Elizabeth Holmes is on her Twitter redemption arc and at-home blood tests are back in. If 2025 was defined by the San Francisco AI boom, I won’t be surprised to see consumer biotech—from designer babies to peptide pill mills—take off in 2026.
Last September, I wrote about how the tech community is embracing “agency” and “taste” as a hedge against AGI. But it requires nontrivial effort to buy art or read Middlemarch or come up with an idea for a billion-dollar app to Claude Code. And Opus 9.9 (new) is probably just around the corner, ready to come up with better takes than we could dream of ourselves. So—it seems like we won’t be outcompeting the machines on the cognitive frontier. What if we applied all this intelligence to get really, really hot?
Recently, people from right-wing Twitter anons to the hosts of Odd Lots have embraced “looksmaxxing” as the most robust human defense against machines who are smarter and faster workers than we are. Others, like Bryan Johnson, are interested in not-dying as a way to survive the transition to superintelligence. Then there are the normal reasons to care about health: sickness and death are some of the most arbitrary and unfair things that happen to people, and we should try as hard as we can to prevent them.
Whatever the cause, I’ve noticed a spike in body-talk in Silicon Valley. No longer do technologists view themselves as mere brains in jars, but as embodied flesh-and-blood beings with all the pleasures and vulnerabilities that entails. So here’s a quick tour through some of the more mystifying health and bio terms I’ve seen:
Autism
In the last few years, “autistic” went from a very un-PC insult for a socially awkward person to a badge of honor among technologists. Founders talk about feigning autism for VC meetings, being “autistically focused” instead of merely “obsessed.” Like the millennials who called themselves sooo OCD for correcting everyone’s grammar, SF is experiencing an epidemic of tizz inflation and I need Jerome Powell to stop it.1
I assume this shift reflects the particular culture of the AI boom. At Google and Facebook circa 2010, growth PMs ruled the roost—the equivalent of fratty finance guys with their beer kegs and bloviating. But at today’s frontier AI companies, recovering physics PhDs, burned-out quants, and logorrheic LessWrong vets top the status ladder. The labs’ success so far has relied on raw technical talent—on research breakthroughs rather than growth hacks.
Last year, Kevin Roose and I interviewed legions of such researchers for his forthcoming book. They tend to be earnest and delightfully nerdy; they also tend to be god-awful storytellers for narrative journalists like us. At least five times, the question “Can you tell a story to show X?” returned the reply “Sorry, my brain doesn’t index things that way.”
But we might be at peak autism now, and the tech ecosystem knows it. Two macro factors to note: first, LLMs are moving from the research/scaling era to the applications/diffusion era, where productization and sales will make a bigger difference. Second, LLMs themselves are sort of stereotypically autistic, equipped with savant-like memories and little common sense to speak of. Humanity’s edge over machines will come from embracing EQ as much as IQ.
Thus, per my 2026 ins and outs list, I predict that tizz is out and rizz is in.
Related terms: the ‘tizz, rizz, eye contact
“If you’re not maxxing, you’re minning.”
— anonymous AI founder and peptide enthusiast
Chinese peptides
Want to camouflage your autism? Try Chinese peptides.
Props to whoever came up with “Chinese peptides” because it’s one of the most mimetic concepts of 2025.2 It blends Bay Area biohacking and Gen Z looks-maxxing; it’s a way to say “screw the FDA” while hitting your gym KPIs. Chinese peptides were the subject of my first New York Times piece and Odd Lots appearance: a vivid encapsulation of SF’s frontier ethos, a community that prides itself on taking the risks—and reaping the rewards—that most people won’t.3
Peptides are a broad chemical category. They describe any short chain of amino acids, and technically include everything from insulin to GLP-1s to a slew of unapproved “research chemicals” that promise to make you hotter, smarter, buffer, and cooler. But when people say they’re “into peptides” it’s usually less “I have type 1 diabetes” and more “I’m WeChatting Qingdao Sigma Chemical Co. to buy mysterious powders to inject myself with.” One user compared the reconstitution process to a high school chemistry lab.
So why the boom, and why now? It started with GLP-1s, which are both a feat of modern medicine and made needle play way less scary to the masses. Tack on a Silicon Valley worldview that dreams of a quick fix for every ill and China’s low-cost manufacturing prowess: the result is an explosion in gray-market peptides borrowing off Ozempic’s aura.
There’s also a whole guerrilla epistemology that accompanies peptide use, which I have to assume is part of the fun. Rather than doctors, people are getting peptide tips from friends, Reddit, and ChatGPT. There are Telegram groups with channels like “Growth Hormone Secretagogues” (where people share dosing for BPC-157 and TB-500), “Write to Bryan Johnson” (a joking intro message from Bryan: “Here to find blood boys 🩸”), and Ageless Dating (one bio reads “I am 41, but my biological age is 32”). And I’ve observed in real time how talking peptides at a house party has a natural virality—say the word, and you’ll soon find yourself in a flock of intrigued partygoers, all sharing their stacks, dealers, and asking how to get in on the craze.4
Related terms: GLP-3s, peptide rave, ozempic face
“Julius Caesar: natty or not?”
— overheard at a SF house party
T-levels
We’re in a nationwide panic over the fate of young men: goon caves, gambling addictions, 4chan groyper radicalization. Everywhere you look, The Boys Are Not OK, and the same goes for the many men of Silicon Valley.
What is to be done about the so-called masculinity crisis? For the scientifically minded, one approach is to target the biological essence of masculinity itself: testosterone, or T, the hormone linked to aggression, risk-taking, libido, fertility, and energy. We know that sperm counts and T-levels have fallen nationwide. So dig into the causes there—maybe obesity, pollution, the “feminization” of our culture and vibes.
There were a few months when the men in my life became exceptionally concerned about plastic chemicals, which have been linked to lower T-levels due to endocrine disruption. “I’m not touching that receipt,” said a friend after a grocery run, contorting his face into a grimace. “I gotta switch to Spindrift,” mourned a coworker, realizing it was the only seltzer in our fridge with less than 1ppt of PFAS. They weighed the risk-reward of drinking Fairlife (more protein, more phthalates) and religiously referenced Github founder Nat Friedman’s PlasticList. I mean, I get it. Plastic shards in your balls—what could be worse than that?
Historically, trans men were among the first biohackers, self-injecting T to grow beards and deepen voices since the 1930s. Today, T-boosting tactics have hit the cis mainstream too. There are inter-lab lifting competitions, televised sperm races, “detwinkification” challenges where young engineers compete to gain muscle mass. Bryan Johnson tweets regular updates on his testosterone levels. Even high-powered women are experimenting with exogenous T.
Not all these activities have the explicit goal of raising T, but the industry feels more boyish than ever, and high-T is a style as much as a biomarker. In my favorite since-deleted phrase from the hit book Breakneck, Dan Wang declared that the US’s “failure to build enough has hurt working people and makes the country feel like a low-agency, low-T society.” To be a founder, a builder, a pioneer—these are the masculine traits we need to bring America back.
Related terms: sperm counts, fertility crisis
“if you’re so smart why aren’t you hot”
— @creatine_cycle, niche san francisco technology culture podcaster
Physiognomy
“Physiognomy” used to be a word I only saw on Race Science Twitter, but unfortunately, this is all of Twitter now. The term refers to the practice—originated by Aristotle, detailed by 20th century racists, and revived by modern-day X anons—of inferring a person’s character from their appearance.
Physiognomy promises a simple moral cheat code: ugly = bad, hot = good, middle-aged white woman = evil HR Karen. “Fat” is back in vogue as an insult again; the Trump admin loves to deploy it, but the left is guilty too.5
I wonder how much these macrocultural trends have influenced Zuckerberg’s and Bezos’s recent glow-ups. You might think that transitioning into being an elder statesman of Silicon Valley might involve a renewed sense of noblesse oblige, but for those two, it’s more like getting jacked, a wardrobe reset, and taking any opportunity to flex with your wife.
Physiognomy, however, may contain the seeds of its own destruction. It was popularized as a pseudoscientific way to predict individuals’ futures—they thought a prominent browbone suggested criminality, for instance—but in a world where cosmetic enhancement is more advanced and common than ever, how we look increasingly reflects our choices, culture, and wealth more than our genes.
Related terms: phrenology, ethnoguessr, clavicular, looksmaxxing
“I want to live in a world where when people get drunk, instead of getting tattoos, they CRISPR themselves.”
— Josie Zayner, PhD, at the Substack Utopia Debate
Superbabies
Nothing terrifies rich, neurotic parents more than the prospect of birthing a child who isn’t as successful as they are.
Since freshman year of college, my Instagram has been inundated by ads promising anywhere from $30k to $300k to donate my eggs. The posts are filled with stock images of radiantly smiling women and language hinting at how broke you are. The requirements—commonly an elite education (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Tsinghua, Peking), 20-30 years old, over 5’5”, a healthy family history—read somewhere between a job listing and a medical report. Though for the intended parents, I suppose it makes sense: “bio-mother” is the highest-stakes hire they’ll ever make.
But ensuring your eggs are triple-A organic is only step one. Many Silicon Valley parents are additionally opting for embryo-screening services like Orchid Health and Nucleus Genomics to avoid genetic diseases or even maximize height and intelligence. Then there are the things you can do for your kids after birth. Never mind SAT prep and trust funds—some rich parents are giving their teen boys HGH to help them grow taller.
Coming soon are wilder efforts to directly gene-edit embryos (currently illegal in the US). Social norms are the only barrier standing between us and human genetic engineering; given how regulatory entrepreneurship conquered taxi, hotel, and securities laws, you bet some brazen founders think they can beat these too. As startups are wont to do with sci-fi plots, GATTACA has served as more an inspiration than a warning.
Related terms: D1 babies, He Jiankui, surrogacy, GATTACA
“Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies.”
— Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid Health
TFR
All around the world, fertility rates have fallen off a cliff. Try as policymakers might, their constituents just aren’t having more kids. Baby bonuses don’t do much. Propaganda campaigns don’t do much. In South Korea, home to the lowest fertility rates in the world, some have resigned themselves to the idea that in a century or so, the country will simply… go extinct.
The concern makes sense: no children, no future. As such, progress studies organizations—generally more econ nerds than social theorists—have taken up pronatalism as a pet issue. Sure, TFR charts aren’t a very sexy way to talk about the beauty and joy of family-making. (Leave it to the wonks to make getting cuffed an economic mandate.) But perhaps it really is worth considering if there’s a technological salve: Do we need in vitro maturation? Robot nannies? What about artificial wombs? Or Einstein clones?
Meanwhile, a few tech moguls have taken the global fertility crisis into their own hands—and penises. Elon Musk and Telegram founder Pavel Durov are notorious for paying women to have kids using their sperm. What’s remarkable are the existential stakes they use to frame their hobby: a “civic duty” for Durov, a means of preserving Western civilization for Musk. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West, followed closely by migration,” Musk tweeted in September; thus it is the rich white man’s burden to spread his high-IQ seed.6 And being a billionaire playboy the normal way (having sex with lots of women) is apparently still too much effort, so why not speedrun the process via IVF?
This makes for an odd cacophony of reproductive trends. I can’t imagine that the same anxious optimization culture that drives tech leaders toward rigid health regimens and careful embryo selection is especially encouraging of having more kids. And I am suspicious of top-down efforts to facilitate childbearing, which in practice often look like pressuring women to stay in bad marriages, leave the workforce, and assume the vast majority of childcare duty. (I’ve noticed in my own circles a disparity between the number of eager young men who want 4+ kids versus the number of women excited to bear them.)
Of all the metrics to hack, other people’s kids are some of the most consequential. So if Silicon Valley takes on TFR decline, I hope the solutions focus on enabling people to have more of the families they want.
Related terms: pronatalist, Genghis Khan, birth rates
The Bay Area has a deep-rooted interest in nootropics, longevity, genetics, and population science. It was on the same 1990s listserv that the Extropians coined the terms “AGI” and “immortalism”; in the same 2012 book that Nick Bostrom sketched out machine superintelligence and human clones. When I reread a 1994 WIRED profile of the Extropians, I was surprised at how contemporary their aspirations seem:
No longer is biology destiny: with genetic engineering, biology is under human control. And with nanotechnology, smart drugs, and advances in computation and artificial intelligence, so is human psychology. Suddenly technology has given us powers with which we can manipulate not only external reality - the physical world - but also, and much more portentously, ourselves. We can become whatever we want to be: that is the core of the Extropian dream.
If anything, what the Extropians underestimated is how popular their project would be. There’s infinite demand for getting hotter and healthier, and in the wake of a trust crisis in public health—fueled by Covid controversies and exorbitant costs—people everywhere are more eager than ever to try unconventional paths to get there.
Twice last year, I mentioned struggling with focus, only for an acquaintance to disappear and return with loose Adderall to dump in my palm. “You have to try this,” they’d say, before launching into a heap of dosing instructions. (Stimulant prescriptions jumped roughly 20% from 2019 to 2023, largely due to telehealth providers.) I wrote the Chinese peptides story after realizing it wasn’t just a meme—multiple people I knew were on them, mostly to lose weight. (Gray-market peptide and hormone imports from China doubled to over $328 million in 2025.) The genetics stuff seems out-there for now, but I anticipate those barriers too falling with cost and UX.
This is to say nothing of nicotine, creatine, melatonin, modafinil, and psychedelic therapy; of plastic surgery, lip fillers, Botox, red light, and Korean skincare routines. Tabloids scrutinize pop stars to backwards-engineer their cosmetic enhancements; productivity-maxxing YouTubers show viewers how to replicate billionaire morning routines. We all know that rich people are buying wellness with stuff much stronger than what’s at CVS. The only question is: don’t gatekeep, how can I do it too?
Mass adoption will be driven by an arms race dynamic. If you don’t take the pills, you might fall behind. “Nearly one in four American adults is currently modifying their biology or morphology via significant pharmaceutical or surgical intervention,” estimates Ben Goldhaber. “There’s too much latent demand for suprahuman living for the current equilibrium to hold. At some point it becomes common knowledge that no one’s natty anymore.”
misc links & more
The Chinese peptides story was my first for the NYT. Thanks especially to Noreen Malone at the NYT for her patient edits and support.
It’s not often you get a story about biohacking and pharma regulation and China competition and supply chains and SF culture, all at the same time. There are so many rabbit holes to go down, and I’m excited to do more bio/health coverage now.
People are really interested in the peptides. It came out 2 hours before the bombs on Venezuela, but fortunately wasn’t totally buried—it got some nice print real estate and above-average web traffic. In addition to a bunch of podcasts, I even went on cable news!
I’m pretty horrified by ICE’s escalating brutality, from the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis to countless others, U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike. It’s hard to know what to do, but:
I’m donating to organizations that provide direct legal services to immigrants targeted by ICE. You might consider RAICES (Texas/national), Centro Legal de la Raza (Bay Area), or NILC (national/litigation-focused).
For tech workers, I’ve been forwarded this petition you can sign to ask your leadership to keep ICE out of cities and cancel ICE contracts.
Some fun job postings! Knowing who’s involved, I expect these roles to be as entrepreneurial as media roles get. Do mention my name if you end up interviewing for any.
Editor for the think tank IFP, where you’ll help write Substacks and policy memos and work with Santi Ruiz.
Podcast editor for Odd Lots, where you’ll become a true polymath and discoverer of Perfect Guests™.
Stay healthy & hot & safe out there —
Jasmine
I don’t love the casual usage of the term—the autism spectrum includes a wide range of people from 10x engineer types to women who don’t have stereotypical special interests to people who need lifelong disability support to survive—so reducing autism to a ‘trend’ seems quite trivializing and stigmatizing. But it’s real regardless of what I think, so I’m including it to explain (without endorsement).
Not to do deep brainrot etymology but I think Twitter user @allgarbled had the first usage of the term, while it was probably popularized into SF meme canon by @creatine_cycle.
One more fun fact: Peptides aren’t even SF’s first foray into DIY injectables. During the pandemic, some plucky hacker houses tried to make their own vaccines. Did they work? Who knows! But it’s really high-agency!
Naturally, many people have asked if I recommend taking gray-market peptides. I am not a medical expert and you should not take my advice. But two things:
Peptides are a broad category, I would make distinctions between different kinds—just because GLPs like semaglutide, tirzepatide, and probably-soon retatrutide have strong clinical trial results does not mean that other peptides are just as effective. Most have no human trials and only anecdotal evidence; e.g. perhaps BPC-157 works for some people in some contexts, but we don’t know how it interacts with other drugs, health conditions, etc.
A lot of risk results from a sketchy gray-market supply chain, as tests often reveal the vials don’t even contain the drug, and research-grade factories are held to lower quality standards. There’s lots of variance between suppliers.
I’m not opposed to experimental therapies in general, as there are a lot of interventions that will never get FDA approval. I also generally think it’s cool if people do weird experiments on themselves. But know what you’re getting into!
Take it from professional looksmaxxer Clavicular: Gavin Newsom mogs with his presidential physiognomy; JD Vance does not.
I see the looksmaxxing craze (and girls’ obsession with “pretty privilege”) as further evidence of zoomer nihilism—a cultural moment when the pursuit of higher virtues has been abandoned in favor of Hobbesian realism and desperate self-interest.
For Musk in particular, his interest in birth rates rhymes with Great Replacement theories about immigrants replacing white American populations, and his general white supremacist beliefs around race/IQ. I do not think all or most pronatalists share these views, and fertility has collapsed in many nonwhite nations as well, e.g. East Asia—but it’d be irresponsible not to mention the connection here.
Shae Mclaughlin wrote a great blog deconstructing why Richard Lynn’s work on racial IQ differences was methodologically and scientifically bunk, deploying garbage data toward noxious ends. She concludes, eloquently:
Every ideology of human hierarchy has presented itself as an observation, not invention. The architects of rassenhygiene and entnordung were not hatemongers – they were scientists, following the data where it led. The trick works because it recruits people who would never consider themselves participants in anything monstrous. You are not repeating a lie designed to dehumanize; you are citing a study. You are not laying the groundwork for exclusion, displacement, or worse; you are simply noting an uncomfortable fact that others are too cowardly to mention. This is how ordinary people become complicit in extraordinary harm. I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last July. It is easy to weep when you are standing over the remains of a gas chamber, when the path from here to there feels infinite. It is not infinite. Genocides do not begin with bullets. They begin with numbers invented to make the bullets seem rational.
Oh my god... Every time I wonder whether leaving silicon valley was the right choice, another Jasmine Sun piece drops. I don't understand how you stay sane!
Ngl a lot of this feels like “new age alternative medicine, but for STEM nerds”.