Then again, I’m now seeing ads for “leukopaks” on tech websites. It really does feel like the culture has shifted for the worse.
I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York)
all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs
Peptide manufacture is not as difficult as other drugs because they are injected.
Because the brand names cost a lot, and their manufacture is not too difficult, obviously lots of people got in on the action. Compounding pharmacies, gray market providers, and lots of cheap chinese copies. For one month cost of the name brand you could get many years worth of chinese copies. That is a pretty good hook.
Now that you are injecting one chinese peptide, and it works amazingly well, it is pretty common to check out some of the others. And it is hard to avoid since by the time you find the gray market / chinese suppliers, it is only one of the things they sell.
I'd never actually heard anybody talk about it before. At first it was the generic CrossFit talk I'm used to hearing, then to diet and recovery / injury stuff, but then it too the peptide turn. It sounded like both of them are injecting themselves from stuff they're buying on the Internet. They both talked about it like it was just the most natural thing.
lol, wtf. I mean, I am a moderately serious cyclist, I guess (~250 miles/week) and also climb, hike, other outdoors sports etc. So I do care about performance and diet and such. But there is zero chance I am sticking a needle full of something I bought on the internet into myself—what on earth?
Of course, once you are placing an order, it's only one more add-to-cart click to add something completely untested to your order.
The bodybuilding subculture has been injecting testosterone, about 50 different testosterone-like drugs (Tren, Clen, Deca, etc) for the past 50 years, HGH for the past 30 years and IGF for the past 15 years.
The psychonaut subculture has been buying research chemical derivatives of serotonin and dopamine for decades for their psychedelic effects, and the nootropic community doing similar things for compounds that increased attention, memory or mood.
In prior decades, the transgender community often relied on buying & injecting drugs on the internet for gender affirming care they were unable to get from their healthcare systems.
There are risks, but also, if tens, hundreds or thousands of other customers have purchased and used something from the vendor, that's probably as reliable of a signal as most regulatory regimes are.
A lot of tech bros seem to be of the opinion that, given their superior intellect (as evidenced by their successful careers), they can master any domain. As great as semaglutide is, surely more is possible for people willing to move fast and break things, right?
All they need to do is apply their superior methodology to "biohacking!"
Of course they run it all by SuperGrok to be sure, and when it tells them yes, they are indeed absolutely right, it's off to the races - to discover that fountain of youth by injecting some sketchy grey market snake oil.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
Frankly as I am aging myself and noticing a lot of changes to recovery time and overall physically feeling good, I can totally understand getting on testosterone, for example, but random peptides that show up in white bags from random Chinese labs? no.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/sunset-on-the-dark-enlighten... (brief article on another SF party attended by land, yarvin, altman and Sillicon Valley influencers)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-... (last year profile on yarvin. exceptional reporting)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/silicon-valleys-f... (recent profile on land. only skimmed it)
but apparently after the catastrophic failure of the MAGA movement they're shifting gears:
> A year ago, when I last wrote about the Bay, I was surprised and dismayed to find that edgy right wing black pilled nonsense was considered ‘cool’. ...... Sometime in the last 6 months, everyone collectively decided that being super right wing is actually really cringe. ...... But regardless of the reason, everyone agreed: “wow, it’s kinda really embarrassing that we spent so much of last year partying with real life eugenicists.”
Edit: New York had pretty much the same thing, called the Dimes Square movement. it was linked to the controversial remilia/milady NFT collection
https://www.fastcompany.com/90756392/inside-remilia-corporat... (very long as it seems to tell the tale of the entire remilia drama. i've only skimmed the section “A LOT OF US ARE ART SCHOOL GRADUATES OR DROPOUTS” which seems the most relevant part)
https://giphy.com/gifs/no-ji6zzUZwNIuLS
> Edit: New York had pretty much the same thing, called the Dimes Square movement. it was linked to the controversial remilia/milady NFT collection
https://giphy.com/gifs/no-ji6zzUZwNIuLS
thanks for the articles...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...
Like black market steroids except with less track record
This isn't anything new. Certainly it's easier nowadays to get stuff from overseas than it was 15+ years ago. But those black market steroids you mention probably weren't much (or any?) safer, honestly, regardless of track record.
People have been experimenting with drugs for longer than I've been alive, and will continue doing so long after I've turned to dust. San Francisco, in particular, has a long and storied history with the sort of experimentation described in this article. The author seems to have made the mistake of thinking that this sort of thing is incredibly common and "everyone is doing it" here, but I have no doubt that it does exist and people do it.
I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s difficult to get them covered by insurance unless your obesity-related health problems are really severe. In my experience, doctors have no problem prescribing GLP-1 drugs for weight management.
[index] https://revealnews.org/podcast/cat-drug-feline-infectious-pe...
[1] https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/listen/hyperfixed/the-cat-drug...
[2] https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/listen/hyperfixed/the-cat-drug...
[3] https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/listen/hyperfixed/the-cat-drug...
But they never realize that the “shortcut” is gambling.
I was close to a name brand pre-workout company and the FDA would play whack-a-mole with their formulas and they were on store shelves in every US city.
> Every single person that I met in SF was dangerously opinionated about AI best practices. It is impossible not to be! When everyone is constantly jumping from idea to idea, trying to stay on top of the Twitter firehose, you need some kind of opinion just to stay relevant and sane.
SF-specific assumptions aside, this the most useful takeaway. Seems they're calibration and signaling costs to being in the center of everything.
I read the whole thing. Good, easy writing style.
People live so many parallel lives, even in a small town like San Francisco, that you can take so many paths through the scene without even going through the same points.
Note that "sincerity" in this case doesn't necessarily mean positive things. There are lots of people here with a sincere belief that their startup will change the world, but for some (many?), either their mission is actually a pretty bad one, or the path they take in service of their mission ends up being -- at best -- borderline unethical.
That doesn't make them insincere, though.
> Claim: My uncle says Mamdani will abolish the entire NYPD.
> Fact: Your uncle does say that.
> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness — the AI doomerism, the cults, the hippies, the drug use, the polycules — is downstream of people saying things and other people taking them extremely seriously.
This is a perfectly reasonable usage - perhaps not the Hallmark greeting card one but it's certainly valid.
> the difference between the east coast and the west coast.
Having lived in and visited places on both sides of the US I can safely say that there is no single "difference" between them and that treating both as culturally monolithic (or their constituent places as broadly similar) is a massive category error. Boston is not Miami is not Atlanta just as San Francisco is not San Diego no matter how many people confuse them because they both start with "San".
The writer went to SF for a few days and went to one party where a group of friends were into peptides. From the article, they were also particularly terrible people. Just read this quote:
> “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”
I can’t believe I have to say this, but if someone is bragging to you about injecting weight loss drugs into another person who shouldn’t be taking weight loss drugs, your response shouldn’t be “lol how quirky”. You should recognize that they are a bad person. In my experience the drug enthusiasts who brag about getting other people started on their drugs are bad news, but the ones who brag about introducing to their drugs to people who clearly should not be taking those drugs are the worst variety.
These people always exist. Go back a few years and they might be talking about nootropics or “research chemical” drugs that are analogs of methamphetamine or MDMA. Go back further and they might be bragging about doing steroids and importing testosterone from gray market sources. Go back before that and they’d be bragging about all the Modafinil they’re taking.
The thing about drug user bubbles like this is that when you’re talking to them you’d be convinced that everyone is doing what they’re doing: Taking the latest on-trend drugs in large amounts and one-upping each other on dose, stories, or drug-fueled adventures.
What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized. The party doesn’t last forever and the mindset of being able to endlessly adjust your body and/or your mood with drugs starts to turn dark after the early years where hubris makes users feel like they’ve found the secret to better living through chemistry.
If you’ve encountered groups like this you’ve also seen how the “everyone is doing it” mentality becomes embedded in their minds. That doesn’t mean everyone is importing various Chinese peptides and injecting them for “looksmaxxing” and whatever these people were on about about the “peptide party”. These are just garden variety young drug users riding the latest trend
EDIT: I replaced one instance of the word ‘journalism’ with ‘writing’ because it was becoming a pedantic distraction in the comments.
I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.
Maybe. Personally I'd say it'd take at least 5.
Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.
To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.
> You should recognize that they are a bad person
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.
You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.
If someone’s writing in journalistic style I think it’s fair to criticize it as journalism, even if it’s on Substack
You are taking this far too seriously. It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time. And it is delightfully written.
I think it’s important to understand that AI, even at its current level, is revolutionary as are cheap Chinese peptides. This isn’t a crypto bubble, both of these will be world changing. I’ve been doing AI for decades and peptides for 5 years (treating an actual medical condition) so I was in this space before it was cool, happy SF finally caught up.
I turned to peptides because of how slow research has been, my medical condition (hEDS) has been known about since Hippocrates yet still no official treatments, so it’s not reasonable to expect one any time soon. Gray/black was my only option and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.
A lot of what we know about peptides comes from athletes cheating in sports and they’ve been doing it, some of them abusing it, for decades so the long term effects are not completely unknown. And this includes the GLP1As and the various combo stacks. Some people naturally have excesses of signaling peptides through genetic variation so they’re another good source of long term effects.
Of the things gay people inject into each other, ozempic is probably one of the safer options.
Considering that "AI" before 2016 or so was, in terms of results, a whole different category, this may not be the flex you intend it to be. ;)
‘Assuming no correlation’.
In reality the correlation is probably an epsilon away from 1 in this case.
"Let me tell you about the weird people in my social circle I've chosen to write about ... aren't they weird? Now I'm going to draw massive conclusions about everyone in the Bay Area based on the extremely weird group (that I self-selected)."
There’s a motte and bailey thing going on with this type of rationalist writing where someone writes authoritatively on broad subjects and then when anyone starts responding to it they immediately repeats to “it’s just a blog” to forgive all of the problems with it.
certainly there is no organized journalistic outfit behind it, but also, a lot of legit journalists want their substacks to be taken as facts of record.
The peptides and nootropics are the mildest things on the list, and yet here being compared to illegal stimulants and steroids? Those are not the same crowds at all.
Guess she's still your problem then.
Poor people.
But...
I'm also inclined to believe we are not the cool people being invited to these circles :)
Looking at what has happened with wegovy etc, it doesn't seem impossible.
Thats why I wrote that if you go back several years you’d find similar small social scenes around different trends: Steroids, Modafinil (when it was new and rare), RCs like 2-FA and MXE, or psychedelics depending on the era. Each time the social scenes that emerge around these have the same beliefs that everyone is doing excessive experimentation and that it’s only improving their lives. The later outcomes are not so rosy.
However, this cuts both ways. This format is how we get some of the most interesting pieces of reporting about culture and counterculture. It's someone who went to some parties or worked for some companies. What you refer to as laziness is what makes it valuable: it recounts specific experiences instead of trying to speak in generalities. And it's descriptive rather than moralizing.
In the same vein, some of the most powerful exposes about neo-Nazi movements are just raw accounts of what's going on inside, without the author constantly repeating "and by the way, Nazism is bad, these people are all bad, and here are some statistics".
The SF Bay Area culture is probably not a thing, but there are some pretty awful subcultures within it, and many of them revolve around performance-enhancing drugs and rationalism-as-a-justification-for-bad-things (Zizians, longtermism, etc). I think we should own it.
Exactly. Even if we restrict it down to the million or so people who live and/or work in SF, there are so many different cultures and subcultures that it's impossible to generalize down to any specific culture. This is true of any medium- or large-sized city.
> but there are some pretty awful subcultures within it [...] I think we should own it.
Sure, but again, the same can be said of any medium- or large-sized city. I don't say that to minimize the shitty subcultures you mention, or to suggest we shouldn't own it. But this is just... how society works, for better and for worse.
Makes me wish I could've experienced the 1960s San Francisco or even the 90s SF. Tech and tech money just rots the soul of an area.
To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.
No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete—adopted in pursuit of the strategy of Twain's amateur:
> The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.
— 1889, Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
Hence why the "disruptors" so frequently, so irritatingly blast through Chesterton's Fence and/or market regulations.
Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
The rest can live out the rest of their short degenerate lives as the failed experiments that they are. This does however have the side effect of turning the entire town into a society of failed degenerates...
The willful part turns the sincerity into nihilism, people who utter sentences like:
"I could fill a notebook of quotes from this conversation. “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”"
pretty obviously don't sincerely believe what they say, quite the opposite, it's just a giant joke they're consciously in that would go away they moment they ran out of venture money or whatever finances these parties and lifestyles. These people all sound like William Gibson characters which they are aware of because they're the type of people to register that, it's like the Great Gatsby but with cringy nerds
Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author's argument.
Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
But ... it's also true that founders who exit successfully are like 0.001% of the Bay Area's population, but we talk about them like they're 10% ... so we should all stop talking about them so much ;)
"Useful" is quite the euphemism.
> Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
This is an extraordinary claim.
But there are lots of people with a sincere mission who we don't hear about, because they're quietly working toward their goals.
That doesn't say that their goals are worthwhile or that what they're doing is actually good for the world, but they can still sincerely believe it is.
Most of them fail, and we hear about precious few of them. That doesn't make them any less sincere either.
It tries to be, but the person writing it isn’t an SF person. They said they visited SF and went to a party and now they’re lecturing us on SF social scenes from that experience.
I don't blame them - the collective optimism about AI has been replaced by paranoia.
So everyone is trying to make a fast buck before the music dies.
I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after graduation to work a corporate job in the valley but quit shortly after meeting a group of eccentrics that ran a small business setting up networks for commercial clients and joined their gig. I was making startup money before the word "startup" had any significant meaning. The skillset wasn't AI any kind of coding, but pure network admin. Companies paid obscene amounts of money for us to jumpstart their IT.
I moved into an 8 bedroom mcmansion (location omitted) with a rotating occupancy of about 10-20 people at any one time. We didn't do peptides, we did X and crystal, but it was near constant. The jargon was similar. And there were several houses like this from Oakland to Novato (to LA). It was just constant drugs, sex, partying and a little bit of work to cash a huge check. People moved through houses like they owned them, showing up and crashing, then going to another house, then flying down to LA and doing the same.
I burned out after 5 years of the lifestyle but kept in touch with the rolling scene that still had the same vibe through the startup madness of the late 90's (which unfortunately I missed out on due to years-long medical issues), but I've visited every few decades and it seems nothing has changed except we're greyer and fatter, and the houses are still monstrous, but cleaner and people wear clothing more often.
So when I hear stories like this, I'm glad to hear the culture hasn't changed and the torch has been passed.
Can’t escape human network effects and game theory/schelling point dynamics.
Just funny to really see the reinvention of the wheel.
By analogy with “Bay Area House Party” stories, this piece intends to pick up on some of the wackiest new ideas in SV and extrapolate them to the point of ridiculousness. Go read Scott Alexander’s versions for context. One example is a conservative man moves to Oakland, observes that statistically most kids grow up transgender, decides to raise his daughter as a boy, so when they hit their teenage years they will “transition” gender into their birth gender. Another example is when the visitor to the Bay Area house party is talking to several people, each of which has an increasingly insane startup idea, always funded by Peter Thiel. Another is a house party organized by Claude Code, which everything is superficially sensible but totally insane LLM hallucinations when you look more closely.
But the author does throw around some numbers, with the high water mark being 34,000 people. That's still only around 4% of SF's residents. Not even remotely close to "everyone".
I've never been a part of SF's drug subcultures, so I was never likely to run into these kinds of parties in my time here. I never felt like I was somehow oblivious to everything going on around me.
Not directly related to the piece but this explains so much. I’ve always seen it as high credulity. That is to say all lots of people are lying but lots of other people trust them. The missing part has been why would you take some of these people at face value. If there’s also a lot of sincere people it would then make sense that many would end up overly credulous.
I think The Zizians bit was the cherry on top [1].
The author seems to have taken their experience of a single trip, which, yes, was filled with some pretty weird and fantastical experiences, but has assumed "that's what SF is like". I do believe that there are people like that in SF, and it actually was an enjoyable read, if for no other reason to learn more about social groups in my city that I'm not a part of. But the conclusions drawn by the author about the city itself... holy non-representative sample, batman.
It is interesting to read about the extremes sometimes. But these people that the author met were definitely extreme outliers. The "peptide party" just sounds like the latest wave of drug experimentation, something that SF has been known for since well before I was born. Unfortunately a lot of that experimentation ends in chronic health problems, but I'm not surprised to see young, ignorant, arrogant people getting on that train, in any decade or any generation.
One thing, though: I do agree that SF, at least when compared to NYC, has something of a "sincerity culture". Yes, there are con artists and slick marketers here, just like everywhere else, but there are also a lot of people who are on a mission, who do actually deeply believe in that mission. Their mission may actually be counter-productive, or their plan for achieving their goals may be foolish or even destructive, but I do think many people here genuinely believe in what they are doing. I'm not saying that no one in NYC is like that (certainly not true; I know several who live there and are like that), but as a non-resident, the vibe of NYC generally feels more grounded and realistic, which can sometimes feel like pessimism.
Even then, I'm sure what I wrote above can't be generalized to all of SF or all of NYC.
(Source: lived in the bay area for 22 years, SF itself for the past 16 of that. My days of several-times-a-week house parties are over, but I've been to my fair share. My experiences are of course only my own, and reflect the bubbles and subcultures I've been a part of. But I feel pretty safe in saying that the kinds of people the author met during their trip are not really the norm here.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
Is it, really? Ok, it's probably hard to say what exactly (and if you ask people, they might give you different reasons), but if you look at everything the Trump administration did since it came into power, it's not really surprising?
Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.
This is from someone who has a dozen peptides in his freezer, gives them to friends, and is on them as well. You’d think I would be interested in reading an article that is supposed about “me”. I am not in the rationalist peptide space though. Find these guys to be the most “uhm, akshually” freaks that have the worst behavior of all: wrong all the time.
What surprises me most is that this even has any upvotes or comments. Astroturfing is my only guess.
