Notes from the SF peptide scene | Hacker News Reader

Notes from the SF peptide scene

12gramsofcarbon.com

141 pointstheahura143 comments

I’ve lived in SF for over a a decade and I have no idea what any of this is. I hope I never meet any of these people.

While I have never personally been invited to a spring gay peptide party at a SoMa warehouse full of twinks, I have not been able to avoid exposure to these sorts of people. It feels like they are making up a larger and larger portion of incoming engineers, but that may have always been true.

Then again, I’m now seeing ads for “leukopaks” on tech websites. It really does feel like the culture has shifted for the worse.

WTF is any of this, is there some ELI5/OOTL explanation?

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

Wegovy/Ozempic (semaglutide), Zepbound/Monjourno (trizepitide), etc are the GPL-1 drugs sold today for diabetes and weight loss. Technically they are peptides. So if people you know have "finally" lost a lot of weight, they are likely on peptides.

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.

There is also the classic network effect of someone saying "Wow you look great, did you lose any weight?" "I lost a lot of weight using this gray market drug that is way cheaper and more effective than the FDA approved stuff."

I'm in western Ohio and had heard about the peptide fervor on podcasts but never IRL. Today, at my daughter's soccer game, I overheard a long conversation between two guys in their mid-40s comparing their peptide regimens (along with just discussing their fitness activities).

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.

> It sounded like both of them are injecting themselves from stuff they're buying on the Internet.

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?

GLP-1s are the gateway drug to this whole world. It's not hard to rationalize that they are safe, and approved, but too expensive. If your insurance stops paying, or will never authorize it in the first place, going gray market may be the only choice to stay on a drug that works for you.

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.

Cycling has a pretty rich history of people injecting themselves with things they bought on the internet- EPO, testosterone, etc.

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.

It's got to be Dunning-Kruger, and I'm convinced chatbots have made it way worse.

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.

Derek Lowe had a good blog post about it, mostly about the problems: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-...

This recent NYer article is a pretty good overview, written by a practicing physician:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...

I work in big tech and several of my older colleagues are ALL IN on peptides. Fountain of youth stuff.

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.

Big tech always lags behind the times

There are tech bros that think that the WADA banned list is a powerful grimoire and a chunk of them are really into section S2 right now. That’s it.

https://www.wada-ama.org/en/prohibited-list

this was formely the fanbase of the dark enlightenment movement. an avantgarde techno-capitalist alt-right underground culture. Musk, Thiel, a16z, Altman, Srinivasan, many in the Trump administration (including Vance) have acknowledged their involvement with it. the ideological underpinnings are mainly given by two philosophers/bloggers: nick land and curits yarvin. the rest of the people at those parties are like a fanbase to this movement, but it includes podcasters, influencers etc. mostly edgy upper middle-class american kids. the characterization is pretty accurate and nothing new.

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)

> this was formely the fanbase of the dark enlightenment movement. an avantgarde techno-capitalist alt-right underground culture.

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...

This pairs well with this recent article by NY Magazine: The AI Kids Take San Francisco: Brilliant, workaholic teenagers are flooding the city — and reshaping our future in their image

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...

Kinda wild to me that people are down with injecting mystery substances received from the other end of the world entirely outside any real medical chain or certainty of contents or recourse.

Like black market steroids except with less track record

It's wild to me in the sense that I wouldn't do it, but not wild in the sense that it's surprising.

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.

The health problems associated with obesity are very real (not to mention that it makes you look worse), GLP-1 agonists really do work for most people to cause significant weight loss, and it's currently difficult to get them prescribed by a legitimate doctor unless your obesity-related health problems are really severe. This will probably change over the next several years, but in the meantime buying them from a grey market Chinese pharmacy works now, and is reasonably safe and effective.

> it's currently difficult to get them prescribed by a legitimate doctor unless your obesity-related health problems are really severe

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.

If you aren't significantly overweight a doc won't want to prescribe a GLP-1. Because if you die while on it for any reason, and your family sues, the expert witness will testify that a GLP-1 wasn't standard of care for a patient with your presentation. Then the doc's insurance loses the case (and he pays way more going forward assuming he can practice at all).

This is an argument that the litigiousness of American society incentivizes suboptimal health outcomes from the legitimate health care system because the employees of that system need to legally protect themselves; therefore a person might be better off if they go outside that health care system and buy grey-market Chinese pharmacy peptides labeled not for human use.

Thing is Bay Area folks usually make good money and these are not that expensive out of pocket.

There’s a good three part radio series from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX about how drugs for pets sourced from grey markets played out with the FDA:

[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...

It is not “reasonably safe”. No reasonable person would inject themselves with drugs they bought from an unregulated pharmacy.

Some people always want the ‘hack’ or easy way out. It’s unsurprising to me.

This is pretty much what the startup culture is about. Why work hard on something over a lifetime? It’s better to take a shortcut, then waste the rest of your life goofing off.

But they never realize that the “shortcut” is gambling.

Not sure what is so surprising. People take health advice from comedian podcasters these days. RFK Jr is HHS Secretary. Maybe 10 years ago this would be wild, but today it is completely and utterly unsurprising.

It’s wild, but unsurprising to me. Coke, “noots”, and psilocybins were big a decade ago and the same argument could be made about their provenance and origin.

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.

On running an AI a startup in NYC vs SF:

> 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.

This is one of those things where someone writes a fun blog post about their lives and everyone concludes it's a story about San Francisco or New York or whatever. I have to say that most of my closest friends are startup executives and we've lived in San Francisco for over a decade and while I've somehow met Curtis Yarvin and Cremieux and all these people I haven't actually been to a peptide party or whatever. I have used retatrutide quite effectively for weight loss[0], so it's not like I'm unfamiliar.

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.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672926

I think this author has a very different conception of what “sincerity” is than I do, but I guess that’s the difference between the east coast and the west coast.

I think that part of the article was really the only thing that resonated with me, as a SF resident.

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.

Yeah lol, it reminded me to this Onion post:

> Claim: My uncle says Mamdani will abolish the entire NYPD.

> Fact: Your uncle does say that.

From TFA:

> 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".

When a New Yorker says “east coast,” they mean “the New York City metro area.” Everywhere else is referred to by name.

The author outlines what they mean quite well. I think the point I would make is, when someone says "a ware house of twinks worshiping claude" you'd go "what in the living fuck are they doing that for?" not "oh that sounds cool"

This article is an anecdote extrapolated to something bigger: A type of lazy writing where the writer has a single social experience with a group of weird people and then writes about it like it’s the common experience in a place.

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 don't think that's the way you're supposed to read it? I think you're supposed to read it as, the trendy extremes tell you something about a place, even if the details are silly and ephemeral. People with no filter, no shame, no interest in correctness or consequences, and no pole star except trends are like a cartoon guide to the trends and the mentality driving them.

I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.

the last decade of journalism has taken two comments on twitter to claim social zeitgeist.

Maybe in a world as culturally-fractured as ours two comments on twitter is as close to a zeitgest as you can get.

Maybe. Personally I'd say it'd take at least 5.

Just not true; while the journalists are doing this tweet thing, they're consistently ignore things like the epstein files.

> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized.

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.

Ahh but intent to harm doesn’t mean thy aren’t doing harm. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

That comment seemed to revolve around consent. Willful, nonconsensual dosing of anyone with any drug is a violation, and yes doing it and bragging about it is reprehensible.

To be clear, as far as I am aware, there was nothing that I heard or saw that would be remotely considered non consensual dosing.

Is malicious intent required? I don't think most people I would consider bad see themselves as such - everyone has their reasons after all. There can certainly be extenuating circumstances but in general I'd take the combination of stupid, arrogant, and unaware as making someone a bad person. More generally I tend to view those who repeatedly display an unwillingness to consider the impact of their actions on others as being bad people.

Your criticism is entirely reasonable despite the pedantry. Yes, these people are bad people, but I think that could be the point here. Not to mention, this is just another chapter in SF's long history of being the vanguard of drug experimentation.

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.

[1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

This is a blog post, not journalism as such. It's someone humorously recounting their own personal experience. They have no responsibility to contextualize anything for you.

Okay? Points still stand: It’s written as an authoritative exploration of a social scene extrapolated from a few days visiting a place and attending one party.

If someone’s writing in journalistic style I think it’s fair to criticize it as journalism, even if it’s on Substack

It is not presented as authoritative anything, except perhaps one person's experience. And we should assume it is embellished.

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.

> It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time.

That’s my point: It captured a specific party with a small group of friends, but the blog goes on to wax philosophically about how it’s indicative of society and tech as a whole

It’s a perfect motte-and-bailey setup where you’re supposed to read it as a big trend indicative of a place and a scene, but the second anyone criticizes the writing it becomes a retreat to arguments that we shouldn’t take it seriously, that’s it’s just a blog, that we should selectively believe it’s embellished however convenient to defuse any criticism.

I think you're on tilt with this argument now. This is a personal essay. You disagree with some of its implications. That's fine. People disagree with each other. You should just write "I disagree with this", rather than try to critique it as formally bad journalism.

I think you’re too stuck on the word “journalism” in my post, as if reclassifying something as not-journalism means it must not be critiqued.

If it helps, s/journalism/writing/g

If we’re not allowed to discuss posts in the comments, what are we even supposed to discuss here?

Your critical review of Hunter S Thompson must be a real banger.

Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist! It's just a category error to apply critiques of his work to someone's personal essay.

I do agree that it was an enjoyable read, but I didn't really like the undertone of "this is what SF is like", regardless of the intent behind it.

I read the entire post and it isn't, at all. It's a personal story with his own reflections on a scene as he experienced it. It's no different than literally any other blog post or journal entry, and at no point does it claim to be a neutral sociological study.

They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected. Additionally this is the party scene which is a subset of the general tech scene. These people have more time and money to spare than those who are busy working but they do form a bit of a nexus that channels information. The blog post seems to go to great lengths not to pretend that it is something that it isn’t.

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.

In what way did SF catch up? I don’t see how people taking all these peptides and transforming into accidental freaks is a step forward for anything but another reason for the state to get involved bc it’s going to be kids using next and it will create an uproar. People with legitimate medical needs will be left up a creek.

The state is already heavily involved, many gray market peptide suppliers were shut down this year, but demand just went to the black market. This would be harder to stop than the illicit drug market that the government has also consistently failed to stop. It’s so cheap that I’ve stockpiled many years supply so there is little worry about lack of availability for whoever needs it.

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.

What are the peptides you're using for hEDS?

BPC157/TB5, IPA/CJC-NoDac, VIP, and Semaglutide (ozempic). Semaglutide was the most effective long term for autoimmune but the others really helped with CCI and other physical ailments. I take a combo of modafinil in the morning and amitryptiline at night as a treatment for dysautonomia and dopamine dysregulation. I started Low Dose Naltrexone and supplemental T3 hormone and this is a good place for most with hEDS to start with.

If you don't mind sharing, which symptoms abated with the use of these peptides? Email in profile if you feel you'd share only in private.

The worst for me was the chronic fatigue with a strong brain fog component, pretty much all of my symptoms have abated, I still have a residual general anxiety disorder and I still get post exertional malaise so I avoid doing anything that'll take my heart rate over 150. I had pretty much all the standard hEDS symptoms though not as much MCAS and I'm very hypermobile.

Thank you for sharing.

> I’ve been doing AI for decades

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. ;)

I started doing deep learning in 2011 after a visit from Andrew Ng, prior to that I was doing old school neural nets (RBMs), random forests, Bayesian nets, information retrieval (search engines), symbolic AI, and expert systems. It’s really only the transformer class (2017) that kept on scaling (didn’t plateau) but I think it took to 2019 before that was really widely known. I got some really good results out of squeeze and excitation in 2017 and knew then attention models were the future. I guess how long I’ve been doing it depends on your definition of AI, I think the future of AI will probably work alongside solvers and ontological reasoners which I worked on at university in 2003 though the tech goes back much further.

> They did point out, with numbers, that the SF scene is a lot smaller than would ordinarily be expected.

‘Assuming no correlation’.

In reality the correlation is probably an epsilon away from 1 in this case.

The whole thing read to me like:

"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)."

Well said. This is better written and more sensible than the article itself.

It's not journalism though is it, it's just someone's blog where they can tell any story they want, as has been the entire history of story telling. With that out of the way the rest of your post is just flanneling.

If the title was “I went to a single party while visiting SF and say some weird things” I might agree, but the article from beginning to end is written as if the party was a lens into society as a whole and indicative of larger trends.

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.

this is likely to be the most interesting argument I will read today: is substack legit editorial journalism?

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.

>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 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.

Given that "peptide" can mean nearly anything, I'm not sure it's safe to say they're harmless.

I said mild not harmless.

JFC, that twink thing is freaking me out. My ex, objectively hot and already too thin due to a gallbladder problem, kept bugging me to get her various GLP-1 drugs and we had screaming arguments about how her drug abuse was going to kill her (recreational ketamine, GHB, cocaine, marijuana, whatever peptide stupidity her friends just read about, probably a few I'm forgetting). Fast forward and she's not my problem anymore. I have no idea what's she's on now, but I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed.

>I fully expect to get a call about her having ODed

Guess she's still your problem then.

Poor people.

If someone wants to take Ozempic for cosmetic reasons, that's their business. I am almost certain you personally indulge in riskier activities than using Ozempic, or... modafinil? You know people still use research chemicals, testosterone, and modafinil, right?

I'm inclined to agree.

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.

Maybe this hits different for me because I have been to a lot of parties just like this, without getting sucked into the culture.

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.

2010 was a magical time

I know you edited your post, but I'm actually taken aback by people trying to argue it's a blog, not "journalism". I see no real difference between this and some of the most celebrated pieces of gonzo journalism.

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.

> The SF Bay Area culture is probably not a thing

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.

San Francisco seems, after only living here two years, to be a city kind of in a cold war with itself. I think the Broligarch Tech crowd is fighting with the progressives and in many ways the progressives are losing and do not realize it. I am not using these terms in their strict political meaning either. Much more extended to cultural aspects. I know it is also much more than just those two subcultures but they are the two most dominate.

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.

You're claiming laziness because a writer gives explicit testimony to what he saw, heard and thought, without sufficient moralizing layered over the top about how "drugs are bad m'kaay?" I wish more writing was this lazy.

My issue with this article is the author writes about them in a frame that says “they are so quirky and this makes them cool / good” when really they are a bunch of degenerates.

I really didn't get that vibe at all. If anything, he seems pretty balanced in his appraisal of SF.

I don't get that at all. He is taking the piss somewhat, but not in some cases he's sympathetic (warehouse twinks) sometimes disapproving (eugenicists )

I’m not really understanding the notion that these people are so sincere. Perhaps we have different definitions of sincerity.

To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.

> If a 14 year old says that they are going to change the world, they are being very sincere even if an ‘adult’ knows that the likelihood is low.

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".

> 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...

Except that the people doing this are like 0.1% of the entire town, so it doesn't really matter.

>No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete

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

I'm a bit confused why we are taking the drunk ramblings of people at some party so seriously. Nothing in these sentences is that weird or shocking, it's just people trying to impress each other, or fit in, or learn stuff. A lot of it is probably just made up. Nothing here is very SF-specific, except it sounds like these people use reddit a lot.

> it sounds like these people use reddit

Is giving "guy who's only seen Boss Baby" vibes.

Yeah, isn't the entire point of SF startup culture (for the last decade++) to build personal wealth through a successful exit rather than build a sustainable business that benefits society? It's a big speculative con game... Opposite of sincere.

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.

A successful exit means you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it. Sure that gets twisted sometimes when borderline frauds (and actual frauds) sell companies through misrepresentation ... but there is similar fraud whenever and wherever money is involved!

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 ;)

> you've built something so useful that someone else will pay lots of money for it

"Useful" is quite the euphemism.

> Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.

This is an extraordinary claim.

I think this is a form of selection bias. We hear about -- and rage about -- the people you describe here because it's news, and it's outrageous.

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.

Sure, this isn't a rigorous study. But it's clear that American society is in decay (specifically: education, science, healthcare, democracy) and meanwhile SV has been busily innovating in adtech/surveillance, miltech, fintech, porn, gambling, recreational drugs, addictive media, disruptive automation... Not that all those are the same type of vice but it's clear where SV priorities lie.

Note that this post isn't just about peptides, it's more an overview of the SF social scene in general and what has changed in just the last year. So it includes things like "Tesla FSD actually works now" and "the right is uncool again and nobody talks about e.g. Curtis Yarvin anymore" (both true, IME).

> it's more an overview of the SF social scene in genera

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.

Actually from the author's description it sounds like he has lived in SF for longer than most of the people he's meeting.

I enjoyed Good Work's recent coverage on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ltbBby9FU

I think those days of "high sincerity" and trying to change the world are long gone and replaced by "high charlatanism" and making a killing.

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.

Good to see the vibe hasn't changed. At least since I lived there in the 1990s, parties with heavy drugs and crazy sex have always been linked with a faction of the tech scene.

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.

In mainstream this is classed as a nomad/org/network house to a trap house. It’s interesting the diversity of people at each socioeconomic level.

Can’t escape human network effects and game theory/schelling point dynamics.

Just funny to really see the reinvention of the wheel.

would love to hear more about your experiences at this time! sounds super interesting compared to how corporate tech has become in even the past 5-10 years alone

I think a lot of folks are taking this more seriously than the author intended. He opens the post by referencing Scott Alexander’s famous satirical pieces “Bay Area House Party”, and places himself within that satirical frame by insisting those are real.

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.

I want to defend my hometown a bit: most people who live in and around SF have nothing to do with any of this crap. SF is a diverse city of many ages, nationalities, and values. It is not a “high school,” not a tech scene, not a glib bunch of online assholes.

Sometimes I have been in situations in life where I think I must be insane, because everyone else sees something I do not. I got a bit of that feeling reading this article.

It only feels that way because the author presents it in a way that makes it sound like these peptide parties are incredibly common.

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.

The part about the warehouse full of twinks got me, I read that like I was witnessing a live standup comedy show.

Injecting unregulated chemicals into your body is something you may regret in the future. If you inject a Chinese peptide to improve your sleep quality score and three years later you're diagnosed with cancer the inscrutable nature of causality in the body may drive you mad.

Bad news, a large portion of the "compounded GLP-1" market are re-sold Chinese peptides.

> Someone once said that SF is a town of extremely high sincerity, and all of its modern and historical weirdness

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.

Unexpected treasure trove of an article. This is journalism at its finest.

I think The Zizians bit was the cherry on top [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians

Strong parallels with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967):

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

Nobody in the SF AI scene seems to want to talk about vector processing optimization and skiplist neuromorphism. So lonely.

The citrus party fervor just sounds like dead internet theory and social media ad targeting doing it’s job. If everything is peptides and ai then a citrus party sticks out. Wow it must be really ego-fulfilling to be rich and just party all the time in SF. And your momentum is that you experiment with drugs.

What the hell did I just read...

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.)

"SF" = science fiction?