Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun

I realized that my friends were on Chinese peptides, and that was like the real thing of like, oh wait, no, no, no, it's not just like a few crazy people. Like, I know people who are buying gray market peptides, DIY, like mixing them themselves in their basement like a little high school chemistry lab, and they love them and it's working. And you start talking about them at a party, people just start floating over being like, what's your peptide stack? Should I be on them? It has this like natural virality to the phrase.

What stacks have you heard? Like, what is everyone— what's their stack?

Oh my gosh, okay, I feel like because I'm mostly talking to women, it's a lot of the GLPs, but I have talked to, you know, guys who are into, you know, the Wolverine stack. Like, yeah, the Wolverine stack.

Wait, I've heard about the— what is the Wolverine? What is— what does that mean? Like high energy or muscle or—

um, it's BPC-157 and TB-500. I think it was pioneered by bodybuilders, um, on like— who have forever been importing research chemicals from China and steroids and all sorts of that stuff. It helps your muscles recover faster after like a really hard workout, or supposedly helps with like sports injuries and things like that. And so I think they probably came up with the Wolverine stack name and now other people use it.

Oh, it's healing like Wolverine, right? Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's, that's should have been obvious. Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast. It is 2026 and this is our first podcast of the year, and we're doing something a little bit different. Kelly Robison is here. Hello. She has joined Core Memory and will be potting with me, potting solo. Yeah, man, potting. Um, and we have a guest today, Jasmine Sun.

Hello.

Hello. And, and well, anyway, just really quick before we jump in, we're going to talk to Jasmine and ask her about peptides, Chinese peptides, and many other things. She just wrote a great story for The New York Times. I just want to say thank you to everyone. This is like a year since we started the company, almost to the day, probably when this thing runs. And so obviously, thank you to everyone who's listened to the show over this first year and, and welcome to any new listeners and Thank you to our sponsors Braxton Ewell Ventures for helping make all this possible. Um, and yeah, anyway, no, seriously, thanks to everybody for getting our back over this first year. And here we go. Yeah. In the year two.

Um, so exciting.

So we'll jump in. I mean, the context here a bit is that you just wrote a story for the New York Times about Chinese peptides. I feel like our audience, probably at least a good chunk of them have heard heard about this happening, especially in San Francisco, and I think kind of New York, LA sort of thing. Uh, we're gonna— if you haven't heard about the Chinese peptides, you're about to. We're going to explain everything that's going on, but this has been like a phenomenon. Kylie wrote a story for us 2 or 3 weeks ago about a peptide rave that took place in San Francisco. We've done— we've kind of like hinted at it here and there on the Substack. And then, and then you wrote this great piece for the Sunday Times, I think. It was nice, right?

Sunday Business. They did photos, which are awesome. Um, I, I didn't know we were gonna have such good photos because we didn't know the rave was happening at first. Yeah, I'd finished reporting everything, we were putting on the final touches, and then it was like, oh, Peptide Rave, we gotta get the photos.

Yeah, Kylie went, she's like, there was a New York Times photographer.

Yes, it was the gossip. They're like, there's a Times photographer here, and I was like, holy shit. And then in this story, um, in front of the whiteboard, you can see my boots.

Those are your boots?

Those are my boots.

Oh my God, they're amazing boots.

Thank you, Steve Madden, not sponsored. My friend in my group chat, she's like, I would never like not recognize those people. Oh my God. Must be you. So yeah, it was a really good story.

So funny.

When your story appeared, I was like, aha, that's what's happening.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's always fun, right? For the, when I worked at the Times, the Sunday business, that's like the most fun section.

Oh, is it?

Well, 'cause you just get so much more space and I feel like they take a lot of care with the stories. And was that your first Sunday piece?

It was my first New York Times piece. Yeah. And it was my—

You didn't fuck around. That's pretty good.

Yeah.

I mean, it was super fun. It was very different 'cause I'm, you know, I used to Substacking. First of all, I was a product manager a year and a half ago. So at, uh, at Substack, right? Yeah. So it's the other side of the media ecosystem. Um, I've always loved writing, obviously love following tech more broadly. Um, but I only started doing proper reporting work like about a year ago. Um, but yeah, this piece was super fun and it was literally just like, you know, we all hear about the stuff in our circles. We hear about it at house parties, on Twitter, whatever. And I'm, I started mentioning it to friends on the East Coast and they were like, I have no idea what you're talking about. You have to write about this.

And so, yeah, that's how it happened. I was going to ask you a couple of questions about that, but okay, why don't we explain Chinese peptides to people who don't know? Obviously, Silicon Valley, I think it's fair to say, biohacking capital of the world for at least, I don't know, 20-something years. And, and, and this feels in many ways like an extension or the next, next era of that. I know that peptides are proteins and people are probably familiar with this word and probably familiar with things like GLP-1s now. But yeah, what are, what are, what are Chinese peptides?

Yeah, I mean, you're right. So peptides are like mini proteins. They're chains of amino acids that are bioactive in the body. A lot of them are naturally occurring. So insulin is a peptide. Oxytocin, the love hormone, is a peptide. GLP-1 is a peptide that is naturally occurring, but then obviously has gotten modified into Ozempic so that people can use it for longer and it stays in the body longer. And I think the GLP-1 boom was probably one of the things that prompted the mainstreaming of all sorts of other experimental peptides. Because it got people comfortable with injecting themselves as a way to access a drug or a bioactive compound in a way that's much more effective and much more powerful. And so once people started going gray market for GLP-1s, realizing that they could buy Chinese-manufactured GLP-1s for much cheaper on the gray market, they started thinking, what other stuff am I not allowed to access yet in the US that I can be buying straight from these Chinese factories for like $50 a pop and just injecting myself with, seeing what happens, taking notes, sharing with my friends. And so that sort of incited like, I think, a whole other peptides boom that's taken off over the past couple of years. Yeah.

All right. What do we do at Core Memory? We cover innovative, fast-moving, forward-thinking companies, which is why Core Memory is sponsored by Brex, because Brex is the intelligent finance platform for many of these companies, 30,000 companies from startups to the world's largest corporations. Rely on Brex's technology for their finances. They've got smart corporate cards, high-yield business banking, and expense automation tools that are fantastic. I hate doing my expenses, and Brex's AIs and software run right through those expenses, figure out where we're spending money, and take care of so much stuff for you so you don't have to waste your time on it yourself. Go to brex.com/corememory to learn more and just, you know, get with the program. Let's get going. Let's get out of this archaic finance software and move toward the future. Core memory and Brex. When did you first start hearing about Chinese peptides?

Oh my gosh, it's kind of funny because you interviewed Jayden in the article, and I feel like we're just like, I don't know, I was thinking as you were talking of like sort of breaking out the things we hear at parties into stories. And then you talk to people on the East Coast, they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? And it's like, oh, everyone's talking about this.

It's like, you know, yeah, I didn't know knows the story.

Yes, exactly, exactly. So, uh, when did I first hear? Just around the same time Jaden did, because I swear that Fourth of July party— yeah, I'm pretty sure I was at the same one and we were talking about it, but I just thought it was a gimmick. It was at the time like, yeah, it was sort of a meme, and it's really become something quite more. When did you hear about it?

I think probably, yeah, roughly the same time. I was not at the party. I saw the tweet and then—

party was last, last—

it was a Fourth of July party, just like an internet friend's house. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think it was just because the meme was going around. I mean, it's such a great phrase. You say Chinese peptides and everyone wants to know what you're talking about. Um, but the big thing was a few months ago when I brought it up in real life, I realized that my friends were on Chinese peptides, and that was like the real thing of like, oh wait, no, no, no, no, it's not just like a few crazy people. Like, I know people who are buying gray market peptides, DIY, like mixing them themselves in their basement, like a little high school chemistry lab, and they love them and it's working. And you start talking about them at a party, people just start floating over being like, what's your peptide stack? Should I be on them? It has this like natural virality to the phrase.

What stacks have you heard? Like, what, what is everyone— what's their stack?

Oh my gosh. Okay, I feel like because I'm mostly talking to women, it's a lot of the GLPs, but I have talked to, you know, guys who are into, you know, the Wolverine stack. Like, yeah, the Wolverine stack.

Wait, I've heard about the— what is the Wolverine? What is— what does that mean? Like high energy or muscle or—

um, it's BPC-157 and TB-500. I think it was pioneered by bodybuilders, um, on like who have forever been importing research chemicals from China and steroids and all sorts of that stuff. It helps your muscles recover faster after like a really hard workout or supposedly helps with like sports injuries and things like that. And so I think they probably came up with the Wolverine stack name and now other people use it.

Oh, it's healing like Wolverine, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay. That's— that should have been obvious. It's terrible. Okay. Well, I feel just really quick before we get too far in Joker. I should note, I have tons of friends in biotech land, doctors. They're not thrilled. Many of them are not thrilled about this. They think it's generally a bad idea. So, I mean, we kind of— Core Memory, we push the edge of science. We're quite pro all this stuff. Just, just if there's children listening.

Yes.

We're not, we're not fully, or I'm not fully advocating that we should be trying Chinese peptides just yet. I called a doctor friend like right before this started, Erne Morogi. He's kind of like a correspondent for us, and he's quite horrified. He noted, like, on the Wolverine stack— now I realize this is part of it— he said those same peptides have a tendency to upregulate the same pathway that makes your tumors spread.

Yeah. TB and Parkinson's.

Yeah. So anyway, note of caution.

Wait, do you have more information?

That's crazy.

I didn't know that.

I think because your body is— you're stimulating growth and everything.

Oh my God.

So if you don't have a tumor, it's probably okay because you're— You don't know if you do if you're injecting Black market. And it helps you, it, you know, it starts to, to spread it. Yeah.

And I would say like Melanotan, the one that increases melanin, makes you tanner, also has been linked in case studies to skin cancer growth if you take too much. None of these are FDA approved except the GLPs basically. And of course, like insulin and stuff like that.

So yeah, you know, I just, just doing our part just to make sure people know. And to that point, I mean, if you go to, there are these websites you can go to that are US-based and I think Chinese-based. The US-based ones, it's like this. And you mentioned this, where this got its start. I mean, these are research— they're meant to be research products going to— oh yeah, labs. And that's really like why they're being, right, manufactured originally, is this is going to a lab for some mouse study or some, some kind of study. And, and so on all these websites, it's like, not for human use.

Yeah. Which has become this hilarious fig leaf because people just look right past it. The suppliers look right past it. Um, but yeah, like, if you— in the— for manufacturers, there are different quality standards that you have to meet if you are manufacturing APIs, active pharmaceutical ingredients, for human use. It has to meet FDA protocols. CGMP is, I think, what it's called. Then there's another standard for research use, and then there's obviously the, like, random chemical production standard. I think the problem with the gray market is you just don't know where it's coming from and what standard it's meeting. And some of these manufacturers might be lying to you, there might be contamination issues. And so I do think, like, the thing that freaks me out the most is just, like, supplier pipelines are really hard to trust when you're getting stuff from overseas and you just don't really know who you're dealing with.

And I feel like you touched on this in the article, but— and this was also at the rave— it was like you can go to a third-party testing. And, uh, I, I don't know, I, I can't imagine doing that, but they tried to like sort of test their, their black market drugs.

Yeah, I mean, the supplier that sponsored the rave, they always brag about how when they test their drugs and they find a bad batch, they'll like pour them all out but like take a video for Twitter of themselves dumping out all poorer quality peptides to try to build credibility with their audience.

Wow.

Uh, but I don't know if it worked. How did you feel at the event? I didn't get to go to that part of it.

Oh, you didn't?

Okay. I went to the second part, but not the—

the work— so not that— oh my gosh, I went there super early. So my story was like, there was— I'm gonna call it what I write— is a eugenics debate. It's, um, in a church.

Yes, I went to the previous one on Christianity.

Yes, exactly. So I was like, I gotta go to this, but I couldn't stay very long, so I was like, I have to see the demos. That's like what I'm so interested in.

I get there, uh, the demos so cool.

You guys got a good picture of the woman taking her own blood.

Can you guys set the scene? Yeah, yeah, like where it was?

Yeah, so it's on Market Street, sort of in like a gritty part of town, and it's in Frontier Tower, and I think it has 14, 16 floors, and this was on the 8th floor, the biotech floor, and it's set up like— did you ever go upstairs at all?

I went upstairs and I've been there for a previous thing.

Nice. Yeah, so it was like all like the LEDs all purple and, you know, and then there was this table with crystals and little peptide vials and discount codes. And then the demo area, it was supposed to be pretty, you know, straightforward. Someone walks you through, but that fell apart pretty quickly. It was like, you know, only a couple of people at a time and then that person left. I don't know. And then people just kept walking in and they would explain the first one of like what a peptide is. And I learned a lot because I'm not, you know, this is not my world. So she explains what a peptide is and then someone mixes the peptide And I got to catch him actually injecting it. I think it was BP-157. They were talking about that a bit. And then the woman taking her own blood because my understanding is you want to like sort of test what kind of peptide you might need. But I could only watch for like a couple seconds because I was like, oh my God.

Actually, one funny conversation I had when I went upstairs after that part was over, but there were still a couple people just lingering around the lab. And one of the guys there, he was a med student and then he moved to SF, and he was telling me that because San Francisco has places on Market Street that you can go to get drugs tested for free— they are doing it for recreational drugs, um, because there's a lot of recreational drug problems in San Francisco. And so you're supposed to be bringing in, you know, your fentanyl to get it tested. But he was telling me, he was like, you can go get your peptides tested for free, sponsored by the city of San Francisco on Market Street. He told me the address. I don't remember what it was, but I was like, this is the most San Francisco moment I've had.

Crazy.

There you go, kids.

If you are doing Yeah, thank you, Daniel Larry.

Thank you, Mayor.

So basically, okay, and for people who don't know, Frontier Tower is kind of this like very tech-forward, um, it's like people might have heard of these like libertarian sort of cities people are trying to build around the world. This is like a building, vertical village, yeah, vertical village version of this where each floor is themed biotech, robotics, etc. The robot fights that we've been publishing videos and stories on all take place in the basement. And so, so there's a rave. So there was, there's a rave. And but then right before that, it's just, it was a little bit of a demo. Yeah, the demo.

Exactly. I don't think the demos lasted super long. One, because there was a person taking their own blood for a while and they're like, I can only do this so long. And yeah, you know, it was almost like going through a Disneyland ride. You know, it's just like each character does their bit over and over again, but it didn't last super long. And then the rave was a floor below and you went to the rave part, you said. How was that?

Yeah. I just stopped by. I mean, it wasn't— I wasn't there for super long. Chatted with a few friends who had also gone to the gene editing debate right beforehand, asked a few people what their peptide stacks were. I mean, it was just like, you know, loud techno, some O-chem structures projected in the background, cooler of Diet Cokes.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah.

Okay. GLP-1s are massive and super widespread. How in terms of peptide— I mean, this is, this is like a a San Francisco thing? This is an LA thing? You were talking about the East Coast. I mean, is this a New York thing or is it—

there are definitely— I mean, I think it's hard to estimate the size of a gray market because, you know, people don't— aren't super public about it. I do sense that, um, a lot of it in California. So in LA, I think it's more for people who are really focused on fitness and appearance. Um, so when I was talking to Dr. Eric Topol, he is based in Southern California, and he says he's seen a boom there because a lot of wellness influencers—

he's in San Diego.

Yeah, who are based in like the broader Southern California area are, um, shilling peptides, which he's also not so much a fan of. And he was telling me about that. Um, I think with SF it's much more of a biohacking thing. Um, and then in New York, I think also there's like some fragments of like the New York biohacking scene. When I was talking to David Peterson, who's one of the co-founders of Flexport, um, he was telling me a little bit about their communities. But also like the media people I talked to in New York had no idea what I was talking about. So I think it is like as the supplier told me, he was like, our median customer today is a Starbucks barista. But the techies were the first because of the willingness to take ridiculous risks. People just like love learning about the stuff or really down to try all sorts of weird stuff.

And I remember this barista from the story. Where does the barista live?

Oh, he was just saying that like our median customer today is more like a barista who wants cheaper Zempik.

Okay.

But like, but the techies—

San Franciscan barista?

No, no, no. People all over. Because you— if you search peptides on TikTok, and this is the part that freaks me out more, it's like there there are a lot of people, like young women, young men, advertising gray market peptides to basically young people on TikTok, whether as cheap Ozempic or whether as like you can look smax, like, because, you know, there's a big like teenage boy look smaxing thing going on. That's honestly where I start to get a bit wary, is like, I don't want the kids.

Like, I do have two friends— what's that guy's name?

Oh, Crimeu.

Yeah, yeah.

And he, he wrote like a Substack post of to do GLPs on the cheap where you basically, you get your own peptide and you kind of mix it up and dilute it. And so I have two friends who took that Substack post and they do make their own.

Yeah.

GLP. And well, again, I don't want to push people anyway. I kind of think that might be relatively safe because it's GLPs or you still, I guess you would still want to trust that the original peptide is okay. Yeah. You guys are crazy.

I don't think I'm going to be making ibuprofen in my apartment.

Okay.

Just like start on the bottom, you know, man.

I think it— yeah, I mean, so I, I talked to Cremieux. I also talked to some folks who had taken his guide and that was what gave them the inspiration. And I also went to someone's house and they did it. They showed me the whole process top to bottom.

Is it complicated? No, it's not really, is it?

I mean, she literally described it to me. She was like, I have a computer science degree from an Ivy League university. This is basically high school chemistry. It's like, okay. Um, it looked complicated to me, but chemistry was not my best subject. So maybe that's on me. Um, I think for me, again, the big concern that I would have with the GLP GLPs is not so much whether GLPs are tested. Of course they are. There have been lots of trials, but more just like, are you getting your supply from a place that you trust, from a place that's not contaminated, where it actually contains the substance that it says it contains? And then even when you're doing the DIY process, like, you got to be really careful. Like, Brooke Bowman, one of the folks I talked to, I mean, she's great, but she did mention at one point she was like, yeah, one day I was just like super confused. I accidentally doubled my dose and then I couldn't eat for 2 weeks and my hair started falling out. Um, you just gotta be very careful.

But she was like, but I'm still gonna keep going. That was the funniest part.

I know, it was amazing. Brooke's really funny. I think she just like is down to try stuff, and that's the attitude a lot of people have.

Yeah, totally.

Um, okay, I'm gonna read just a couple parts just to give people a sense of what, what's going on. So people are trying BPC-157 and TB-500 for healing injuries by stimulating new blood vessel growth. Oxytocin for improving eye contact. One OpenAI researcher called it Ozempic for autism. Um, epitalon for sleep, and red—

red— a true tide—

red— a true tide.

They call it Redda.

Redda.

Okay, a next-generation weight loss drug still in clinical trials for everything from appetite suppression to increased focus. This is from later in the piece. While weight loss is still the most popular driver of peptide use, patients are microdosing, taking very small amounts of GLPs with the hope that it will help combat other vices, including alcoholism, excessive video game playing, or online shopping. There are no clinical trials supporting microdosing, though anecdotal accounts are enticing to some. So in the, like, when you go on these websites, because you're talking about the stack, there's just like so much stuff going on. I mean, it's like up to you to do your own research for what is going to come. And when we talk about like doing, I would only be doing one of these. Yeah, it's like the worst possible idea to like combine multiple things you don't know.

Oh man. I mean, that was the thing that, like, one of the doctors I spoke with, Dr. Paul Abramson, he's a concierge doctor in SF and he works with a lot of, you know, high up tech people. And he told me, he was like, yeah, so many people have been coming in and asking me about peptides this year. And for him, he's like, that's one of my biggest concerns is like, like part of the things you do in clinical trials is not just like, did it work for one person, but like, are there long-term effects? What happens when you take it at the same time as you're taking all of this other stuff? Like, what if you're on other medications? What if you have other health conditions? Like, there's just like a million confounding factors that you're testing for during that clinical trial process. And when people do their own research, it's like n 1, and they're also mixing stuff, and there's no control variables. And again, like, I am like relatively like live and let live, but But like, I do think people should be aware that like this, this is the clinical trial process and the testing process that is being forgone. And if you wanna stack 'em all up, like power to you, but there's definitely risks associated with that.

And like Kylie, you, I mean, you know, this is prevalent. I mean, you, you know a lot of people who, oh yeah. And they're all like in their 20s.

Yeah. Yeah. The person who does it for her knee that I wrote about, she's 23. Yeah, I mean, ooh, I don't know. I, I thought about doing it as a bit for the story. I thought, you know, just like, what's the worst that could happen? They explain it so simply. They're like, kind of hard to fuck up and do too much, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, all right, you know, whatever. But I have my aunt and uncle are geneticists and they were like, don't fucking inject anything. And the doctor we were just speaking to was like, probably not a good idea. So yeah, I have, I have worries, but my friends aren't worried at all. They're like, like they're deep in it. There's the Reddit threads, you know, like, I don't know, they're really into it.

I mean, I think it's a cultural thing. So, because like every person I asked who did it, I would tell them, I'd be like, hey, like, just like, I feel like the idea to me of importing like powders and vials from Chinese factories and then mixing them and injecting them himself, that feels scary to me. Um, were you scared? Do you feel like it's risky? You know, they're not approved. And what people would say was basically like, I know it's risky and I'm down for that because I'm a really risk-tolerant person. Like, I'm the kind of person who would start a company, so I'm just like willing to try a lot of stuff that might have huge upsides and also big downsides. But like, that's the sort of person I am. And I do feel like there's just this attitude, especially in San Francisco right now, that's like, we are living in the future. Like, the rest of the world is so slow and bureaucratic and like whatever, but like we're going to charge ahead. And so people take pride in it even though they know it's risky.

Yeah, well, and to follow on to that you mentioned this in your story and Aaron did when we talked to him just before this, um, is, is this idea of anti-establishment healthcare that, that— and I don't know if this is COVID-related or not, or, you know, Aaron was saying it's even just like, oh, we're constantly battling the health insurance companies, we're so tired of waiting for our doctor, the system stacked against us, I'm just going to take matters into my own hands.

Yeah, I was listening to, um, a podcast, uh, It was my first time listening to Vivek Ramaswamy's Truth podcast with Balaji Srinivasan, the ex-Coinbase CTO who also at one point was being considered for FDA commissioner. And I was listening because he talks a lot about the FDA in it and his critique, and I wanted to understand that anti-establishment perspective. And he had this very catchy line, credit to him, of the SEC is trying to stop you from being wealthy, talking about crypto. The FDA is trying to stop you from being healthy. Wow. What a line.

It is catchy and I can feel parts of it. It's just, yeah, anytime you get into health things get much trickier faster than money.

The Maha movement right now, which you touch on, like RFK Jr. being like, dude, let the people have peptides. And I'm wondering how that's going to develop because I saw today that the FDA has sort of rolled back its restrictions or its guidance on alcohol. I'm not sure if you saw that.

Yeah.

So you can drink again.

Was it part of the weird, like, food pyramid thing? Like alcohol at the top.

You know, it was an aggregate account that, you know, was taking a headline. But I'm like, oh, when are the peptides coming? And you sort of touched on that a bit.

Yeah, I was trying to figure it out because multiple people gave me like on background, like tips that people in the admin are on, on a bunch of peptides. I did not go and try to get this verified, but if anyone wants to, like, I just drop it in the comments. Yeah, I asked people straight up, I was like, is JD Vance on peptides? Peptides? And I got a no comment multiple times.

Great question.

But where did RFK leave it? Because, because in your story, I mean, like you were saying, I mean, he's kind of pro, but they haven't actually— they haven't done anything.

Yeah, so I was trying to look into this because I think at the beginning, um, because in 2024 in the fall RFK was saying like, we're gonna end the war on peptides, the Biden admin had been basically sending, um, warning letters to a bunch of these peptide suppliers that were doing mislabeling. I.e., like, if you were a research chemical supplier but you are marketing it for humans in, in using language that is very clearly directed at humans, like, that's not allowed. And so the FDA was like shutting some of this down, as far as I can tell, because they log all this on the FDA website. Um, the Trump FDA has not done any of that. So basically, one is they've just stopped enforcing some of the current regulations against peptide sellers. Um, they did, uh, expedite approvals for oral GLP-1. So we saw in December the Wegovy pill got approved. And so there's clearly a lot of interest in that. They negotiated Ozempic prices down to like $300 a month or something instead of $1,200. So there's little bits of action around the edges. And when I reached out to the HHS for comment, they did say that they were actively reviewing the list of compounds— sorry, the list of chemicals banned from compounding, but we cannot comment on future policy action. So there's nothing fast that's happening, but like I would say there are little hints that they are at least taking a more a more laissez-faire approach to peptides rather than cracking down.

It just seems hard because you would have to have clinical, some kind of trial around these things, right? I mean, I'm sure they work fine in mice, but—

Oh yeah.

I mean, BPC has only ever been tested in rats. Yeah.

And like, you know, 95% of therapies fail after you move out of mice. So yeah. Are we— I ask this with all due respect. Are we sure this is not like some Chinese psyop to get The United States excited by peptides and so they will kind of evaporate humans?

Okay, I'm very interested in— I don't know. So I mean, okay, I don't think that—

not a psyop.

I don't think it's a psyop, but I was like reading this article about, um, about how pharmaceuticals might basically be the next frontier of the trade war because China is basically producing a huge amount of not just peptides but like active pharmaceutical ingredients in general.

Like all the underlying everything. It's a very similar story hardware.

Also, like, same, same thing, basically industrial policies, subsidies, like they have way more chemists, like stuff like that. Just like the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem goes crazy. We are falling so far behind. And like when there are shortages, like during the Shanghai COVID lockdowns, like the US feels that because our hospitals aren't able to get some of the stuff we need. And so like it is kind of concerning that all the peptides are being manufactured in China just for like dependencies reasons. And so though. I really want to learn more.

Yeah, again, I mean, I'm not trying to go too far, but you know, it's always like, oh, the fentanyl comes from China, all this stuff. And then we're like, yeah, you know, peptides. Like, Lord knows.

Well, you can go down the street and get them tested here, so it's fine.

That's true, that's true.

Fine. But I, I don't think— I don't— I, again, I think probably a lot of people listening to this know, but yeah, I mean, like, if you're trying to sequence DNA, all the, the just the basics of the chemicals and the reagents and everything that you use to do these kinds of things, all kinds of experiments, I mean, they're all made in China. When I— when DNA sequencing was like first kind of like coming around for the, you know, 20 years ago, and then we were making synthetic DNA, all those companies used to be in Silicon Valley, like just down the road from here. And then now almost every startup I go to, they order their DNA, their, their synthesized DNA snippets from China. Um, it's, it's, it's like, it's exactly like you said, it's like the supply chain of the biotech industry. Yeah. It's kind of crazy.

Yeah. It's super interesting. I really want someone to actually like go to like the peptide factories, like in China and do some research. I feel like I'd love to read that story.

Would they let anyone in?

When I was in China last summer, I was surprised by some of the factories that let us just show up.

Yes.

Since day one, the Core Memory Podcast has been supported by the fine people at E1 Ventures. They are a young and ambitious VC firm in Silicon Valley investing in young and ambitious companies and people. Thank you so much to Ewan Ventures for all your support. So like, where's all this— where's this going? It's the— the— Aaron, when we were talking to him, he said 20 years ago there was like an antibody phase because he mentioned Perceptin and a couple other things had been sort of pretty effective. And then it was like, oh, we're gonna have antibodies for everything. And then that turned out not to be true. I mean, GLP-1s have been so effective, so I feel like that's a really strong signal. It's not— I don't know enough about all these other things and like how, you know, if it's anecdotal that somebody's knee is feeling better, like, is this— is this— are we just in some San Francisco moment, TikTok moment, or is this— does this have legs?

Yeah, I mean, I do feel like I kind of want to separate out the GLPs from the other peptides, right? Because like we do have tons of evidence for GLP-1s, GLP-2s, which are tirzepatide, also approved, ZEPP-bound. Uh, Reda True Tide, the GLP-3, is in phase 3s and people are pretty sure it's going to get approved. So like, I would say the GLPs probably will come into the mainstream and people will keep using them and the prices will keep dropping, getting negotiated, etc. As for all the other peptides, I think it's hard to say whether peptides themselves will stick around or just be a fad, because like, it's kind of annoying to inject yourself. Like, it's an involved process. If it doesn't work, people will probably stop. Um, what I do think will continue is just like this idea that you don't have to, you know, absent a big tragedy or something, like, I think people will basically continue feeling like, I don't want to deal with the medical establishment. The FDA is too slow. I want to take my health into my own hands. Like, even, you know, like, you've spent a bunch of time with Bryan Johnson, and he sort of pioneers similar ideas around, like, you can test experimental treatments on yourself even before they reach sort of the mainstream. And I think that's going to stick out.

He's got a peptide boy who he gets tested first. You know, if you can have your peptide surrogate.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's the way you want to do it.

Um, will you be my surrogate?

I've done a bunch of weird shit, but I, I, uh, yeah, I don't know.

I think you guys are not into the peptides. Like, you guys are not doing any peptides.

Well, I mean, we had the same thought. I was like, oh, maybe I should do it for the bit, but then when I heard all the experts, I was like, oh my God, this might kill me.

But my friend does it and she really, really swears by Like, to your point, I mean, GLP-1 is like sort of miraculous in a lot of ways, especially relatively few side effects, sort of for what's going on in terms of like overall health. I mean, clearly multi, multi, multi-billion dollar thing that's like, especially in a country like the United States, could have incredible impact on overall health. Yeah, but I get the— be really hard for me to randomly inject something where, yeah, you get some runaway effect. I don't know. Yeah, that one, that, that this would be hard for me. And I, I do a lot of stupid things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I said I'm not a huge needles person.

That's for sure.

I don't, I've never injected myself in my life. So starting now with a black market chemical, a tough choice.

Yeah. Yeah. But I, I mean, you raise a good point. I mean, I am pretty, you know, it's like we write about the edge of biotech all the time. And like when I was following Brian around, um, and like we had a couple of times we'd go to clinics and I would like join in with him on some of the stuff he was doing. And then it's mostly like you said, I just don't like needles. Yeah, I don't like pain. I remember, you know, Brian would be like, we were in Colorado and he's just like getting his blood drawn. He's like, draw it faster, you know? He's like, he has like immense pain tolerance. He just wants to do everything. He was snorting stem cells that were like, yeah, he kind of drew out his own blood. Blood. Um, they put in a centrifuge, then this guy went into a back room. He's like, you can't see this part of the process. This is where they become— they go from plasma to stem cells, and, and there's some Spanish technology. And, and I was like, okay. And then, and then Brian went, um, on like one of those hospital, you know, those hospital tables except the, the head end tipped like way back, so that his, his head was back. And then he got this plastic syringe. I mean, it wasn't a needle, but it was like a long— like a proboscis. I was really long and thin. They sucked up his stem cells and then he snorted it. They put it way up his nose.

Oh my God, I can feel it.

Yeah, but like before that we were doing lasers in our veins and doing, um, I mean, there was one other— I think it's like more of a cut. What's that? NAD? Is that a peptide?

Yeah, it's not a peptide, but it's similar scenes.

Okay. Yeah, it was just like a health cocktail sort of thing. So, so did some of that, but then yeah, other, other times I would draw the So are you into them?

Are you— got a stack?

No, I, I don't. Um, I, I think I'm— I feel similarly where I think because again, I don't have a pressing health need where I feel like I really need to try something, but like I feel like I can empathize it with the idea of like, let's say that you, uh, you, you're overweight, you really wanna get at a more comfortable weight and on, on label Ozempic is over $1,000 a month. Yeah. The other one's $200 or maybe you have a persistent constant knee injury, you feel like you've tried everything else and you're like, what will, what will work? Let me go try this other thing. And you know, when I talk to people who share stories like that, like, I've tried everything else and I can't figure it out, so why not do this thing a Redditor told me to? I at least, you know, I empathize with it. And maybe the reason that I'm not desperate to try peptide right now is like, I don't feel like I have a problem like that. But I think the main thing that it made me feel was I was like, it is interesting that the gray market appears because you have this gap where like pharmaceutical companies don't want to invest in the very expensive clinical trials for certain substances because they are hard to patent, because there's no moat, because they don't target a really big disease and it's just about like sports injuries and that's not interesting enough to them. And then, so if you are experiencing one of these problems and you wanna do something about it, there literally is no on-market option. And so I kind of understand why people people go these alternative routes. And I'm like, oh man, like, we do need clinical trial abundance. We need to figure out ways to make all this stuff cheaper to run.

I mean, there's a massive conflict coming, which you're talking about, which is, is you have the US— we remain like the biotech capital, so we're pushing the edge of everything. You've got San Francisco and the whole culture of biohacking. I mean, in this particular moment is like a very exciting biotech moment. So there's, there's a lot of things going on, and they are there at the edge. I mean, so many— so it used to be you have to like work at Merck, Pfizer, you have to have this resume, and then you got to start a biotech startup because people like took biotech, it was so serious. You couldn't just be the, the 20-year-old. And now, you know, I'm running into tons of 20-year-olds who have biotech companies. They're, um, testing stuff on mice. They're like trying to go as fast as they can. It's just like a different culture. And then, you know, you've got China going incredibly fast trying to catch up on like the biotech science. And then there's countries like almost every US biotech company I know, they run their clinical trials in Australia now because it's like faster and cheaper. So like the US has this thing where we're like pushing the edge of the science, but we're kind of holding ourselves back on the regulation. And all this feels like a spillover to some degree. Or even if you're not doing the peptides, you're the athlete who's going to Mexico or Germany to get like platelets in your money. So I mean, I'm not the biggest Balaji fan and all that stuff, but I think it's a valid point that there, yeah, something has to kind of change. Otherwise you're just gonna, it's gonna be more underground and people are gonna push the sketch side of things.

Because like that, that is, that's totally how I feel. Like I feel like when I, when I've been to Spain and I realized you can get antibiotics over the counter, you don't have to go through insurance and a prescription just to get very simple antibiotics to treat the flu or something like that. It's just like, it makes sense why people are frustrated with American healthcare. And it makes sense why people are frustrated with requiring $100 million clinical trials that take a decade to get anything across the line and why companies aren't going to invest in a bunch of stuff just because that's too expensive. And so I think that, yeah, I physically just feel more urgency around like trying to reform this system because like I see why people are doing the gray market peptides.

Yeah. RFK is pretty jacked. I mean, he's on the Wolverine staff.

Oh, and a lot of other stuff. Have you read the latest, um, Crime Cremio post about HGH and babies?

I haven't—

no, no, I was like 100% thought you were doing like an Olivia Newton-John.

Yeah, I know, I was ready for it.

We have media brain. Oh my God. Oh man, no, I—

whole other podcast.

Yes. No, but, uh, Cremio, he just did a new post about how, um, rich tech people are giving HGH to their babies to make them taller or something. So there's all this weird, like, um, you know, babies, gene editing, embryo selection, eugenics-adjacent stuff that's going on. I'm sure you're following this.

Yeah, yeah, all the IVF stuff. Yeah. Okay. Can we change gears for a second?

Yeah, let's do it.

Should we peptide more? No. Okay. Okay. I mean, we should have done a better intro for you. I just got excited because we were all like, we're all peptide bonding. But yeah, I mean, you brought it up a little bit. You have like a slightly unusual career for somebody who just published like a multi-thousand word, you know, Sunday Business story. So you were— I think it was like at Substack for like 4 years, right before this. And then you'd gone to Stanford. For undergrad. What did you study at Stanford?

Sociology. So you can tell I get a lot of respect around here.

Yeah, I could tell you have like a science— you're, you're, you seem quite sciencey.

I mean, I like technology. Like, I like, I like tech. I like Silicon Valley. I liked working at Substack. It was fun.

So, well, and I took a peek. It's just not as fresh in my head. I mean, like, after Stanford, you were doing a couple startups and then, and then end up at Substack, or were those like internships?

Yeah, I mean, so I, I, when I was in college, I did, uh, some startup internships. Uh, I worked at like a climate science, climate tech company. Um, then I worked in AI policy for a little bit at Schmidt Futures on like US-China chip supply chain, like all sorts of this stuff in 2020. Uh, but I really wanted to work at Substack because I had always wanted to be a journalist, but, uh, I made the career decision that becoming a journalist in 2020 was not possible. Um, I, I guess maybe you guys figured it, figured it out, but I could not.

It's possible, it's just probably a really bad idea.

2021 is when I became one. That COVID money was hitting.

Oh man. Yeah, I just like looked at the market. I talked to some journalist friends. They were like, do not do it. I mean, I literally, I met Kevin, Kevin Roose, when I was in undergrad, maybe freshman or sophomore year or something. And he told me, learn to code. I remember that very distinctly. He was like, do not become a journalist, Jasmine. Go learn to code. I was like, okay, okay, okay. I like enrolled in CS106A. Um, but, uh, I had always like been really passionate about journalism and media and just like communication about this stuff because it was just crazy to me coming to Stanford, coming to Silicon Valley, seeing sort of what was being built here, finding parts of it amazing, parts of it terrifying. And then, you know, you leave the Bay Area and people just have no idea what you're talking about, or they feel this sort of lack of control over the technologies that are, you know, entering their lives. And that was really interesting to me, was I felt like I want to share like what is happening here in a way that feels understandable and not scary and analytical. Critical to like the broader public. So I'd always been very interested in writing about tech and in tech journalism, but it wasn't— I also was really interested in product and consumer product and things like that. So I really liked being a PM. And then after I did my 4 years and I felt like SubSec had grown so much, you know, it went from like small baby company to, uh, you know, social media platform with video and podcasting and all this other stuff. And I was one of 2 PMs, so got to see a lot of that growth. And, uh, yeah, it was like, okay, time to take a the risk. And so I've been doing tech reporting for the past year, uh, Substacking, jasmine.substack.com, and then also doing some freelance work.

No one else is allowed to advertise their stuff. Yeah, so like, you can cut it out, right? In on Substack. And then, yeah, I mean, you'd freelanced for The Times, you'd freelanced for Business Insider, for, uh, the SF Standard, and then Wall Street Journal. Okay, and doing just like a mix. I mean, you're writing for your Substack and then, yeah, doing like the occasional free freelance?

Yeah, I mean, I just want to try everything because I was very curious. I mean, I'm sure you spend a lot of time thinking about like, what does media look like in 2025, 2026, and beyond? Um, like, is the written word dead? Like, is legacy media dead? Like, I just like didn't know, and I didn't have like a training training. So I was like, 2025 was my education year. So I was like, I'm going to work with Kevin on this like big book because I want to see how a book comes together, and I want to be an apprentice to a reporter who I really respect.

Does he make you do all the work?

Kevin does a lot of this.

Kevin's a much better writer than I am.

And then subseccing, I tried video podcasting. I recorded a bunch of podcasts. I did some freelancing. Just like, I was like, I want to try everything because I just like don't really know and I need to figure out what I'm good at. And it's been really fun. I really love it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like super impressive what you've done. We— on the— for the Sunday piece, did you— did Kevin kind of like help you pitch it? What were the mechanics? Because that's hard to do, to get a piece in there.

Yeah.

I mean, so in this particular case, I work with Noreen Malone at Sunday Business, and she was, uh, someone who I got introduced through to through Kevin because she was interested in covering a different piece. And then we were just brainstorming. But I was— I know a couple other editors at the Times. Honestly, at this point, basically editors find my subs. I can just reach out that way. Um, and I'm working on a piece for The Atlantic that's coming up. So actually, this is one of the few editor relationships that came in through, um, someone I knew. Almost all of them were just like random people cold emailing from Substack. So when, you know, younger journalists reach out, I'm always just like, have a blog, have a Substack, like people will just find you.

And you probably get that a lot, like, how do I become— yeah, what you've created? And like, what's your advice? How do you approach that? Because I feel so trepidatious. Like, just how Kevin told you, like, learn to code. It's just like, dude, I don't know if you want to get into all this.

Oh man. I mean, okay, I think that one part for me was that like I felt like I de-risked journalism doing product first, because I was like, what I told myself was like, if I'm like super broke at the end of the year and I hate this, like, I can go be a product manager again. Like, it's okay. Um, and so I think one thing is like, have some other idea of a backup plan, because journalism is really hard and it's really precarious, and I didn't want to bet everything on it. Um, I think the other one is just basically like, have a blog. Um, yeah, like write a lot online. I think that like, when people see what you can do, if you're self-motivated, what you're interested in, um, how you write when you don't have an editor, then it's just much easier for them to bet on you. Like, I was really surprised at how many editors, uh, reach out just because they are on your blog or something like that. Um, and then I guess what else?

Like, I mean, what did you learn in the, in the learning era? Like, what is your take on legacy media? Are we screwed?

Oh my gosh. I mean, not we anymore. You're not. I know.

I know. I'm, uh, Jaden said he just tweeted that I'm unemployed plus because I'm podcasting again. Um, yeah. I mean, I don't know, legacy media, you said it's precarious getting into it. So I'm wondering what it's like your first year down.

I mean, money-wise, it's harder than having a tech job. That's for sure.

That's true.

Um, but I think that it's, you know, I'm, I think that independent media, I'm still a big believer in it. I'm probably going to be doing more Substack next year and more text also. I actually think that for me right now, I'm probably going to focus on text over podcasting and video. Legacy media, I think I have a complicated, I mean, I'm curious what you think, Ashlee. You've been in, you know, the game so long. Like, I feel like right now, sorry, complimentary, like parentheses. Oh my God. I literally took an Instagram story of myself with a print copy of the Sunday Business and this crack 19-year-old DMs me, "Uncle," and nothing else. And I'm just like, come on. Um, but yeah, I basically feel like I still read all of the legacy publications. I pay for subscriptions. I'm so happy there are people doing investigative work, doing day-to-day USA News, whatever. But I do feel like it really sucks that for the most part, stories in the legacy press do not drive conversations in tech, right? Like, just like the level of depth I can get by reading like weird AI Substacks or by being on Twitter just like vastly surpasses what I can get by reading these great other publications. And so I write for— I want to keep writing for them because I like the reporting rigor that it enforces. I like learning how to like fact-check and how to be really rigorous. And I also think it just really matters is to like have your stories reach a really broad audience, right? Like a lot of people read the New York Times. I think, yeah, I think, I think, I don't know the exact numbers, but like it wouldn't surprise me if at this point a million people have read that peptide story. But, but I think that it does concern me. I think that it is not driving a conversation within the industry because then you don't have this like sort of feedback loop between sources in the tech industry and the journalists and sort of both sides holding each other accountable and feeling really collaborative and trusting. And instead like it feels like they're just two totally different ecosystems.

Like in tech specifically?

Yeah, in tech journalism. But I don't know, how do you see it?

I mean, I don't know if I've ever fully thought about exactly like that, but as you're going through it, yeah. I mean, it's, it's funny because, you know, like when tech first started, it was being covered by the trade press. Um, it was such like a new thing, you know, this is going about like 20, 30, 40 years, and, and, and you were just kind of like trying to explain how these things work to people. And so, you know, it was much more trady kind of stuff and it was, it was like that for a long time. And then, you know, and so you always had, it had this more pro sort of optimistic kind of thing to it just because I think it was just like, oh, this is like new stuff we need to learn about. And, and then obviously, you know, like in the 2010s especially, I think around like the Facebook kind of Cambridge Analytica moment, once it was really hitting the public that tech is now like affecting elections and things like that, then all of a sudden it flips, right? Where now it's getting covered like sports and politics. And then I think we kind of like went too far. Yeah. It's like anything, anyone tech does, anything is evil. And then just as you were talking, I mean, I really was thinking it through and I'm just wondering like, is there something different about tech than sports and politics? Because sometimes if I read most of the time— like, your story honestly was great— if I read the Times or the Journal, kind of mainstream press, like, it gets dumbed down so far that you're almost like not even talking about the thing, which you can kind of do in sports because like everybody knows what a basketball game is, you know what I mean? And like everybody knows who the politicians are. But the second, like, you're talking about like proteins and, and, you know, it's, it's like, it's— I think it's just a little bit harder on some level. And so, so I kind of feel like the mainstream has done itself a real disservice because it's just done things down to the point that, like, it's not relevant to the tech world because, yeah, you're just reading this like Cliff Notes.

And if they don't read it, then they don't trust you, right? So it hurts journalists' ability to, I think, like, form source relationships. And so then they're getting worse intel, and I just feel like it becomes like a little bit of a doom loop sometimes. But I mean, I think that was one of the interesting things about writing for the Times in particular is I'm used to writing for my subsect. I have no idea, like, I just use whatever words I want to use. And then it's like, people don't know what a biohacker is. How do you explain Vibe Camp to people?

Yeah, did you get an edit note? It's just like, you have to explain this, you have to explain it. Totally.

Yeah, so many of them. Yeah, I was like, oh my gosh, I just like never considered it.

But the Times is the worst. I worked there. People do know what a biohacker is, you know. And it's like, it's like, they— this is why I wanted to start what we're doing. Yeah, I want to talk to people. You can go deep and like, you're not You know, I would rather assume the audience can keep up than assume you have to dumb stuff down. And if the audience can't always keep up, that's okay. They'll like go figure it out, you know? And there's a whole internet and chatbot which you can ask questions about things that you might not be sure about. But yeah, I was so curious about your experience with the Times because when I had my march through media, I was like, you're just kind of being ground down over time because—

Oh my God.

Start out a little— well, I started out doing really like wire service stuff, which was like pretty controlled. Then I got to write for The Register, which was like this online, very tabloidy, sarcastic blog, which was run by the writers. We had total freedom. And then I went to The Times after that, and it was like, oh, when I walked in the door, they're like, what? One of the top editors, he's like, oh, one of my friends reads you all the time, and he said you're really funny. And, and like, we just— you just have to keep that, you know? You have to. Oh no, we need that here. All I want All you do is just be funny, and like, we need that. And then, you know, it was like, last words, never got a joke in the paper ever, you know.

Oh my gosh, one of my— the details I was so sad that didn't make it in through the Times edit process was— I said it on Odd Lots— but, um, David Peterson, he initially started taking melanotan because he hated being a ginger, um, and he wanted to take it to not be a ginger anymore, which is an amazing detail. Oh no, but I, um, lost that battle in the comments section. I mean, Noreen was great, and I think also this this was a health piece and had a word limit and all of that stuff, just layers on layers, because it wasn't just business. They wanted the health editors to look at it. They wanted the standards editors to take a very close read to avoid giving medical misinformation, for obvious reasons. Yeah, um, they wanted the tech editors to take a look. So this one got like a really hard edit, is my sense.

Um, but they didn't let you mention anywhere you could actually buy peptides.

I did not try to get that one through. I don't think I want to be doing free advertising for the peptides either.

Okay, I was just, I was just like, oh, I want to see what these what the websites look like.

Oh yeah, yeah, you can Google.

It's so funny, I don't think I included it either, just kind of by like, I don't need to send people here.

Yeah, I mean, I, I ended up on these like American, like we were talking about, these American peptide websites that are like 99% pure, you know. And yeah, we test these, but they're probably importing from China too.

They're just testing, which is what I said.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Um, okay, let's talk real quick. I mean, just about some of the other things things you have done. The— you did this piece for The Standard, I think it was the SF Standard, on— it was basically— I wrote in my notes, defense tech is cool again. I mean, it was kind of about, um, young kids coming out of college and, and actually going to defense tech companies. Um, I was curious about this. It was like not that long ago that we had this like Project Maven and people—

yeah, it was when I was an undergrad.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was— people hated defense tech, tech. You were— I wrote the first ever magazine feature on Palantir. It was like incredibly controversial, still is. But you had, you had kids coming out of school who were happily going to, to Palantir. And yeah, and clearly we're in this moment where there's like a lot of money going into defense tech. Um, I was trying to get to the heart of this because like at the, at the billionaire executive level of Silicon Valley, there's been this right turn and this patriotic. We're gonna do it, we're gonna bring manufacturing— it's all bundled in. Yeah, reindustrialized, bundled into a lot of this stuff. It was like not at all clear to me that like a 22-year-old really might care about that. Are they— do they actually— did you get a sense this is like a, um, small group of people, big group of people, that they're just kind of like chasing the jobs because defense tech is sort of hot right now, or is this like some weird patriotic thing even among the young?

I think it's both. Yeah, I mean, it was so interesting to me because this story was— because I went to Stanford 2017 to 2020, and so we saw the No Tech for ICE protests. We saw in front of Palantir headquarters in Palo Alto, and then they eventually moved their headquarters. Um, someone set off a stink bomb when the Salesforce chief scientist did a talk because Salesforce was contracting with ICE. Project Maven, um, I think was happening at the same time. So it was, yeah, super interesting because I was then catching up with my younger sister who was at Stanford this past year, and she's the one who took me off. She was like, hey, did you know, um, like everyone wants to work— not everyone, but a lot of people are really excited about these companies now. Um, and I think it is two things. I think part of it is just like young people in the Valley, at Stanford in particular, do kind of follow where the VC money is, right? Like they are on the same Twitter feeds that all of us are. There are these career fairs, um, VCs, CEOs always visiting campus and giving talks. And so if they are saying American dynamism is a hot thing right now, I do I think that just like affects what young people are interested in. And also like you had these like huge, like Anduril, SpaceX, Palantir just were not as big of businesses like 5 or 10 years ago, right? And so just like the proof points that you can build a really successful defense tech business, I think did just motivate a lot of folks to do it. But I do think there was also these sort of missiony patriotic orientation that was also definitely present. Like I think a lot of folks brought up the Russia-Ukraine war, because, uh, drones played a huge role in the defense there. A lot of folks mentioned sort of the race against China. That was very salient. And I do think that like the younger, younger Gen Z men are a little more right-wing. They're a little bit more patriotic, and there is this sort of like macho dynamic. I think so, yeah. I, I heard this from people.

Yeah, like, um, at Stanford or, or, or countrywide.

I guess I'm thinking of like the, the college breakdown because I don't know if you I remember there was like this Twitter brouhaha about the Palantir— sorry, the Partyfolk co-founders. They used to— yeah. Oh my gosh. And that like, they escaped the ecosystem and just like they were getting canceled. Yeah, it's, it's so different. I feel like— I don't know, I don't know if it's college-based or, or what, but there's still some, some anger about it.

I mean, it's definitely polarized. So like the thing that happened was like when I was reporting out that piece for The Standard, I interviewed professors, I interviewed a bunch of students who were working at these startups, and they all said like, oh, everyone's chill about it. Like I don't that I'm working for these companies. We haven't seen any protests at like Hacking for Defense or anything. And then the article comes out and it goes viral and reignites the entire campus controversy that I thought had disappeared for the last 7 years. Um, and I think that like people are posting constantly on the Anonymous forum. They bullied one of the sources until she didn't like go to school anymore. It was actually horrible. They still talk about it. I've heard that the article is still going around Palantir happy hours and campus and all sorts of things. So I do think it's still polarized. I think also in particular, like the conflict in Gaza is polarizing that because people are seeing it as like, are you motivated by like, we're defending the little guy because of Ukraine? Are you motivated by, no, this is like supporting companies that are, you know, occupying another country or something like that? And so it has inflamed a lot of, a lot of like campus politics. But in general, I think the amount of like positive energy around defense tech and the sort of proud patriotism from at least one significant segment of the student population is something that I at least certainly didn't see 7 years ago.

It's funny. I mean, if you go back far enough, these things are so cyclical. It's really funny. I mean, Stanford kind of started on the back of defense money and depends where you want to draw the line, but kind of going like '40s, '50s, '60s, still keeps going. And then, and then obviously during the '60s you got massive protests at Berkeley and Stanford, you know, against like all these, these ties. And then there's sort of this muted period period where the tech industry is just growing on the back of Defense Department money, but it's just, it's just building Silicon Valley out. And people, you know, we're not like in a kind of Vietnam, and we're not like in a blatantly obvious act of war as much. And so it's just kind of business. And then, yeah, I don't know, I found all this, um, during the Project Maven stuff, I have to say, I, yeah, I found it like a little bit naive, sort of, on, on sort of the tech, some of the younger tech world's part, because I don't even know if it's fair to say younger, just on the tech world's part, because these things have been interlinked for so long. Yeah, I don't know. I think that story is surprising. I'm curious about it all.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I think one of the fun parts, to your point, was like talking to some of the professors who have lived through multiple cycles of this. Like one of the professors I talked to, Terry Winograd, like he was part of the anti-Vietnam protests representing doing the sort of, uh, like ethical computer scientist stuff during that period, or Steve Blank, who's obviously tracked, like, defense and Silicon Valley history forever.

Yeah, people should check out his video on the secret history.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, he knows everything about this stuff. But I do— I don't know, I think we're just— it might just be true that we're currently in a cycle where, because of whether Trump or the tech right or whatever else, we're just into it again.

Yeah. Um, and then definitely did not get this right, also in my notes, Spy Mania. I think this is a Business Insider story. And then I have to admit, they paywalled me, and so I could only get a snippet. But I mean, it looked like it was kind of about like China, China's influence in Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

And who's the spy? We see these memes. Oh my gosh, guys talking about these beautiful Chinese.

Yeah, I mean, this is literally what prompted the piece. Unfortunately, all of my scoops are tweets. Um, it's like, like I see someone call someone a spy, I'm I'm like, that's crazy. Peptides? That's weird. Um, but it ended up being a really fun story about talent flows between China and the US and the AI industry. I think that's what ended up being the most fun part for me was basically on one hand you do have a lot of concerns about espionage, which certainly sometimes happens. It's a real phenomenon. Like we should be concerned about espionage, but that is manifesting as basically racially and ethnically profiling mostly Chinese women in all sorts of nutty ways. That, like, you know, I talked to plenty of people who, um, very much not spies, but like wouldn't go to AI happy hours just because like they would be treated poorly. And I've seen it happen to people. It's really bad. Um, and then can I ask you about—

yeah, I want to talk to both of you about this. I mean, the— and I'm trying to do this respectfully as possible. Um, I, I will preface this by saying I love all people, and I've been to China many times, and I, I really do love it there. And then I I'm not like a crazy nationalist patriotic sort of person by nature, but America's been good to me. So I feel like it's cool if we don't just steal all of the stuff. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from. But you know, like when you, um, when you go to AI companies today, clearly like there's, there's like these camps of talent and lots of them are Eastern European coders and then some very smart American kids and then a lot of Chinese kids, you know, and, and then sometimes I go to the parties, and it's like everybody's kind of divided off a little bit into their camps and stuff. Yeah, you know, and I just feel like, I feel like this is kind of like tense, or, or I don't know. And then, yeah, I did stories, it was like about a decade ago, there was a string of, of robberies all through Silicon Valley, and I got really into it because they were clearly, they were not like petty thefts. People were breaking into offices and, and going straight to specific workstations and like taking them out the door, and then to get the source code of these, these really key, um, startup technology. And, and so I started going to the tech companies and they're like, oh well. And I was talking to the chief security officers and like, we just run like a calculus and it's like, if we have 10,000 employees, the number is like about whatever, like 0.5%. We just assume we'll be kind of co-opted by the Chinese government at some point and like try to steal our source code. Yeah, it was just like this, it was like part of doing business, you know what I mean? And, and AI just feels a little different if you believe everything that's going on. The stakes feel as high as they possibly could be because it's like, okay, it's okay if you steal Facebook's source code, I guess. And it's like you're gonna mimic some social networking site, but it's different if you're getting like the crown jewels to, to the final product, you know? And so, yeah, I don't know. And I feel like the two of you are deeper in this than I am and, and just like in and people hanging out. And yeah, I don't know, is this tense? Is it not? Is it like—

well, the— what you were mentioning about the psyop meme, when that was really big, I don't know, it was— it's always funny for like half a second, and then it's just like blatant sexism and grossness, like so quickly. I feel like I, I muted psyop at the time. But, um, in terms of it being an actual issue, I mean, I have— I have no idea. There's this joke about like, in the military, have you heard this, that if you're, uh, 4 and she's 9, then she, she's not actually that into you. Um, like, that's an actual thing they say in the military, I suppose. So that was a big thing during that time. Uh, I'm not so certain that it's a huge thing, but you, I mean, you covered it. Did you see anything?

Um, I think, I think there's certainly a lot of, you know, like, I, I think Asian women in the industry definitely get microaggressed a lot. Yeah. Um, I've heard stories, I've seen it happen, I've had it happen to me. Like, it's just like people are gross in a sort of generic way. It's obviously not everyone, and for the most part everyone's still friends and gets along. It's not like the parties are super racially segregated or anything like that, um, but I do think that happens. The thing that really started to concern me was actually I ended up hearing a lot of crazy visa stories because the concerns about espionage, um, when magnified and turned into national security policy basically have much wider implications that mean that, like, especially given the broader admin's politics around high-skilled immigration, it is just like incredibly hard now to, uh, be a Chinese national who is— may have lived in the US for like a decade. But if you go to China, then you need to get your passport re-stamped with a visa. You need to go to the US consulate. And if you work in anything AI-ish or robotics-ish or whatever, they will send your passport back to the US for extra processing. And I heard so many stories of people getting stranded in like Beijing for months while their visas were getting bonus processing to check if they were spies. And so, because like basically the consular officer they don't know what AI is. So like, you might not even be working on anything very high security. I think the Trump admin is just also like much more aggressive on this stuff, and they're painting with a very, very broad brush. And so basically what's happened is like, I talked to people who, uh, decided they're not going to take any job in AI because they just don't want to not be able to see their families. Um, I talked to people who, like I mentioned, got stranded in China trying to go home for the holidays just because, and couldn't go to grad school or couldn't go to their jobs for 6 months because they got stuck in the US visa processing system. Over this, the past winter holidays, there was another H-1B scare for, I think, Chinese visa holders. And a lot of the big tech companies advised their employees not to go back to China at all because it was very likely that they would be stuck there. I know a lot of people who didn't go home for the holidays for that reason. So I think the point that I ended up feeling was like the US, the US's AI leadership depends very much on immigrant talent. I think we all know that. Immigrant talent is a huge part of the workforce. And most people who are AI researchers in Europe or China or wherever, they want to be in the US. Like, they like working in Silicon Valley. It is the best place to do cutting-edge research. But we are kind of foot-gunning ourselves. Like, we are handicapping ourselves when we are so freaked out about the spies that, like, past the normal amount of security risk, we are basically shutting out all of the talent that we could have. And so that was, like, sort of the big takeaway from doing that story.

Beautiful. Said.

Yeah, it is. It's really hard though. I mean, I remember I did a story on a company that developed windmills, and this Chinese competitor to them, they, you know, they basically—

oh yeah, I bet.

And that company was like the world's leader in windmills and then was bankrupted, you know. Like, yeah, sometimes the stakes are quite—

like, one thing we'll say is that the Chinese government is less AGI-filled than the US government is. So if they're gonna be sending over spies, it might be more to like the windmills and the biotechs and whatever, not so much the LLM labs. Like, do We need Sora. I don't know.

Yeah, seriously, which leads me to my, my wrap-up question. I mean, so you've been, you've been working on the book with Kevin, so you're, you're in, in AI land a lot. I feel like this is nice. Usually I'm interviewing like an AI researcher and they kind of tend to have very similar opinions on some things. Yeah, yeah. Just this morning I was talking to an exec in a foundational foundation lab, you know, one the, the top, top 3 or 4 labs and, and was like, this is the year, you know, 100%. We are sure that—

oh my gosh—

smarter than humans across all things, you know. And, and I'm just kind of like, okay, I feel like I had this exact same conversation last January, but, but let's do it. Um, yeah, I'm gonna put you on the screen.

Oh no, are we doing timeline? Yeah.

Uh-oh.

What's, what's happening in 2026? Where is this? It is Is this the year?

We're not getting AGI this year. AI will keep getting better. I, I too am Claude Code hot take. Yeah, unfortunately I don't have a fun take, but no, I agree.

I think we can expect it to get better, and I don't think it's going to be AGI this year, surprisingly.

So like, when you guys— I'm sure you two have clearly had the same conversations I have, so— and it seems to come from a genuine place with, with these people who are at the edge of working on this stuff, you know what I mean? Like, some people are might be. But like, yeah, I think we all talked to enough where it's like, oh, you're a very smart, rational human being. And they clearly believe this, and I believe that.

Yeah, you know, for 3, 3, their whole life. Just like we thought she was talking about newsie earlier and we got media brain. Like, this is their entire life. Like, I don't know, I was telling Ashlee Vance this earlier, and you're writing the book, so I think this is gonna be a different experience, but I hear less about timelines than I did a year ago, which is interesting. Like, I don't know, I don't think people have given up by any means, but it was so much more buzzy to talk about timelines a year ago than now because it's played out different, right?

Because I think like ChatGPT came, it was like, seemed like such a shock to the system for a second, and then you're like, oh well, the next rev of this is—

yeah.

And then it's turned out to be so much more gradual.

Yeah.

And like, yeah, just keep getting better and better. But yeah, you're, you're like, you're used to it and edging along with it.

I mean, what's funny is, so actually the peptide story for The Times was supposed to be a timeline story, but she had pitched it to Kevin. Noreen had pitched it to Kevin a year ago, and I was trying to explain on the phone. I was like, um, would love to work together. Timelines, not a thing that much anymore. The story that we were going to work on, I actually can't be writing it in November 2025. Yeah, so let's talk about something else. Peptides, that's the thing.

That's so interesting. So why do you think timelines aren't a thing anymore? Like, what's that feeling for you?

I mean, I think probably similar to you guys, I'm not hearing it as much. My My personal sort of perspective on this is, because I did a mini project of myself when I was trying to get up to speed for the book and everything at the beginning of the year, where I was just trying to review the AGI literature, like what is every historical definition of AGI that there ever was, and let me try to figure out what I think AGI means. And when I did this project in March, April, a couple of things became clear. One was that nobody agrees with each other. Every single person's definition of AGI is different. There are many points in time where arguably we would've hit AGI and then we got there and then everyone was like, nope, not really AGI. And so I sort of figured that it was not possible or worthwhile to define AGI because it isn't going to be a concrete milestone. And even if one person sort of declares AGI or their lab declares AGI, everyone's just going to argue about it on Twitter. And it's just not really something like nuclear weapons where you think you either have nuclear weapons or you don't, right? Because I think a lot of the AI safety literature has sort of developed around comparing AI to something like nuclear weapons. But like, AI is like way more complicated than nuclear weapons. It's not a you have it or you don't. There's a lot of like steps along the way. There are many instantiations and form factors for AI. Like, it's much more dual-use, multi-use than nuclear is. And so there are a bunch of ways in which I think like the original metaphors for thinking about AGI and superintelligence just like didn't play out once we actually saw what progress looked like. And so like, I wrote an essay about this, Sayashree Arvind at AI and Normal Technology wrote an essay, AGI is Not a Milestone. I think people just looking at the way that LLMs were progressing, at how fierce model competition was, looking at LLMs and what they could do amazing at and still couldn't do, just got a lot clearer. I think one of the lines in my essay that I sort of crystallized it for myself when I was thinking through it is like, we have, AI could fold proteins before it could count the number of Rs in strawberry, which means that it's neither vaporware nor a demigod, but like a secret third thing, right? Like it is so jagged and it's It can do so many things, but it is so jagged. And what that means is like, I don't think that there is some point where we have it, you know?

Yeah. Okay. So I heard Jasmine's setting down for 2027. Is that what you got? Yeah.

Yeah. No, I heard through the grapevine. 2027 confirmed.

All right.

I think we're— I mean, kicking off the new year with peptides and dodging AGI timelines. That seems appropriate.

Yeah, absolutely. And defense tech and all the wonderful things. Yeah. Okay.

Wait.

Do the Substack one more time.

Uh, yeah, jasmine.substack.com. Um, I write essays there mostly covering AI and Silicon Valley culture.

And you're not— no, no video anymore?

Uh, less video.

Less video.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Well, please check out Jasmine's Substack and, and of course check out our Substack. Um, and, and, um, this is great. Thank you so much for coming in. Yeah, thank you.

This is so fun.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. This is super fun and great to meet you both.

It was great to— yeah. Yeah, this is usually like hanging out with someone I know for a while. This is really cool. I was like fascinated to see how you came to this. Thank you so much. Highly wish I'll be back again.

Of course.

Amazing.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. It is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thanks as always to Brex, NE1 Ventures for making this possible. Please visit our Substack, YouTube, and podcast channels to get more of what Core Memory makes. Thanks y'all.