Welcome To The Chinese Peptide Underground - EP 52 Jasmine Sun

**Jasmine Sun** (0:00)
I realized that my friends were on Chinese peptides, and that was the real thing. I'm like, oh wait, no, no, no, no. It's not just a few crazy people. I know people who are buying gray market peptides, DIY, mixing themselves in their basement, a little high school chemistry lab, and they love them, and it's working. 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 national virality to the phrase.

**Kylie Robison** (0:23)
What stacks have you heard? What's their stack?

**Jasmine Sun** (0:27)
Oh my gosh. I feel like because I'm mostly talking to women, it's a lot of the GLPs, but I have talked to guys who are into the Wolverine stack.

**Kylie Robison** (0:36)
Yeah, the Wolverine stack.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:37)
Wait, I've heard about the, what is the Wolverine? What does that mean? High energy or muscle?

**Jasmine Sun** (0:43)
It's BBC 157 and TB 500 I think it was pioneered by bodybuilders on who have forever been importing research chemicals from China and steroids and all sorts of that stuff. It helps your muscles recover faster after a really hard workout or supposedly helps with sports injuries and things like that. So I think they probably came up with the Wolverine stack name and now other people use it to recover from workout.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:06)
Like Kylie, like Wolverine, right, okay.

**Jasmine Sun** (1:07)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:08)
Okay, that 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. Kylie Robison is here. Hello. She has joined Core Memory, and will be potting with me, potting solo. Yeah, man. Potting. And we have a guest today, Jasmine Sun. Hello. Hello. 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 welcome to any new listeners. And thank you to our sponsors, Brex and E1 Ventures, for helping make all this possible. 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.

**Jasmine Sun** (2:36)
So exciting.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:37)
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 about this happening, especially in San Francisco, and I think kind of New York, LA sort of thing. We're going to, 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 two or three weeks ago about a peptide rave that took place in San Francisco.
We've kind of like hinted at it here and there on the Substack. And then you wrote this great piece for the Sunday Times, I think. It was nice and long.

**Jasmine Sun** (3:20)
Right, Sunday Business. They did photos, which were awesome. I didn't know we were going to have such good photos because we didn't know the rave was happening at first. I'd finished reporting everything. We were putting on the final touches. And then it was like, oh, peptide rave, we got to get the photos.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:34)
Kylie went, she was like, there was a New York Times photographer at the...

**Kylie Robison** (3:39)
It was the gossip. We were like, there's a Times photographer here. And I was like, holy shit. And then in the story, in front of the whiteboard, you can see my boots.

**Jasmine Sun** (3:46)
Those are your boots?

**Kylie Robison** (3:47)
Those are my boots.

**Jasmine Sun** (3:48)
They're amazing boots.

**Kylie Robison** (3:49)
Thank you, Steve Madden, not sponsored. My friend in my group chat, she's like, I would never not recognize those boots. Must be you. So yeah, it was a really good story.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:59)
When your story appeared, I was like, aha, that's what's happening.

**Jasmine Sun** (4:03)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:04)
It's always fun to write for the, when I worked at the Times, the Sunday business, this is like the most fun section.