14 ms·

Notes from the SF peptide scene

141 points by theahura 6mo ago

Analemma_ 6mo ago
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).
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - rconti 6mo ago
    Actually from the author's description it sounds like he has lived in SF for longer than most of the people he's meeting.
deleted 6mo ago
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ambicapter 6mo ago
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.
- perching_aix 6mo ago
  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.
- alexjplant 6mo ago
  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".
  - dcrazy 6mo ago
    When a New Yorker says “east coast,” they mean “the New York City metro area.” Everywhere else is referred to by name.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  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.
- KaiserPro 6mo ago
  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"
halper 6mo ago
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.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  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.
Aurornis 6mo ago
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.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  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.
uxp100 6mo ago
20% work in tech? I think that’s gone up quite a bit since I last spent a lot of time there in 2015. I would see these articles from time to time and think, people are getting the wrong idea if they haven’t been there, when I think of SF I think of middle aged Chinese people and alleycat bike races and music venues and book stores and drug dealing and gays, though tech bros are also present (and overlapping). But damn, 20%, that’s a lot bigger than finance bros, maybe tech really is ruining the city. Shoot.
- blululu 6mo ago
  I think that’s 20% of the workforce not the population overall. That’s still a large number but its not the whole city. Also nobody is ruining the city, SF is doing just fine these days.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  I mean, the author just pulled that 20% number out of his ass. Not saying it's wrong or right, but... c'mon. Let's take all of this with a big helping of salt.
righthand 6mo ago
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.
balamatom 6mo ago
One word: Omelas.
richard___ 6mo ago
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.
- keiferski 6mo ago
  I really didn't get that vibe at all. If anything, he seems pretty balanced in his appraisal of SF.
- KaiserPro 6mo ago
  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 )
xrd 6mo ago
Can I claim I invented the term "partydes" for these events? Is there anyone else out there that can make that claim?
roxolotl 6mo ago
> 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.
keiferski 6mo ago
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-boom-artificial-intelligence-tech-industry-kids.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...
adregan 6mo ago
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.
- pphysch 6mo ago
  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.
  - hungryhobbit 6mo ago
    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 ;)
    - pphysch 6mo ago
      > 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.
  - kelnos 6mo ago
    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.
Invictus0 6mo ago
https://x.com/Kaz_Khadem/status/2045600370617995600?s=20 https://x.com/Kaz_Khadem/status/2045600370617995600?s=20
lucaslazarus 6mo ago
Strong parallels with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967): https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/
xrd 6mo ago
See also this recent article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people-injecting-themselves-with-peptides https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
mbgerring 6mo ago
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.
- dcrazy 6mo ago
  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.
burnto 6mo ago
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.
apsurd 6mo ago
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.
mh2266 6mo ago
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
- sroussey 6mo ago
  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.
  - hx8 6mo ago
    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."
- cryzinger 6mo ago
  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-injecting-themselves-with-peptides https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
- trashface 6mo ago
  Derek Lowe had a good blog post about it, mostly about the problems: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-begin https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-...
disposablehn 6mo ago
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.
- rootsudo 6mo ago
  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.
- ausbah 6mo ago
  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
arjie 6mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47672926
Havoc 6mo ago
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
- 650REDHAIR 6mo ago
  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.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  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.
- almost_usual 6mo ago
  Some people always want the ‘hack’ or easy way out. It’s unsurprising to me.
  - hackerfoo 6mo ago
    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.
- 6mo ago
z0r 6mo ago
I enjoyed Good Work's recent coverage on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ltbBby9FU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ltbBby9FU
oceanplexian 6mo ago
Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much. 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.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  Here comes another comment reminding me that people for some reason think that the experience of a small group of people somehow generalizes to some sort of dominant "culture" in a particular place.
hmokiguess 6mo ago
The part about the warehouse full of twinks got me, I read that like I was witnessing a live standup comedy show.
sharadov 6mo ago
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.
dw_arthur 6mo ago
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.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  Bad news, a large portion of the "compounded GLP-1" market are re-sold Chinese peptides.
Ifkaluva 6mo ago
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.
iammjm 6mo ago
what the fuck did I just read. the dude used the word "peptide" 30 times without even coming close to explaining what they are, although he kinda tried. absolute incoherent rambling mess
kelnos 6mo ago
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.)
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redlewel 6mo ago
I quickly skimmed the article and decided it wasn't worth my time, peptides are interesting but this story/blogpost is not.
legerdemain 6mo ago
"SF" = science fiction?
JojoFatsani 6mo ago
I wonder what the Venn diagram is of peptide bro and anti-vaxxer.
rglover 6mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
laiison 6mo ago
Is this at all representative of SF? It sounds ridiculous. Everyone in this story, including the author, comes across as completely insufferable.
bradlys 6mo ago
Sincerely hope this guy keeps his day job. I couldn’t be bothered to do more than skim a few paragraphs. 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.
- apsurd 6mo ago
  it's not really about peptides.
  - bradlys 6mo ago
    Yes, pretty aware. Title and subject matter have little overlap. It jumps subjects every 2-3 paragraphs as well and just rambles with spoken thought. Would be best to curate and think than ramble.
rob74 6mo ago
> 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’. [...] I’m happy to report that most of that is gone. [...] It’s hard to say what, exactly, led to the change. 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?
khelavastr 6mo ago
Nobody in the SF AI scene seems to want to talk about vector processing optimization and skiplist neuromorphism. So lonely.

141 points by theahura 6mo ago

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).

Aurornis 6mo ago
> 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.
- rconti 6mo ago
  Actually from the author's description it sounds like he has lived in SF for longer than most of the people he's meeting.

deleted 6mo ago

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ambicapter 6mo ago

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.

perching_aix 6mo ago
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.
alexjplant 6mo ago
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".
- dcrazy 6mo ago
  When a New Yorker says “east coast,” they mean “the New York City metro area.” Everywhere else is referred to by name.
kelnos 6mo ago
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.
KaiserPro 6mo ago
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"

halper 6mo ago

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.

kelnos 6mo ago
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.

Aurornis 6mo ago

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.

tptacek 6mo ago
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.

uxp100 6mo ago

20% work in tech? I think that’s gone up quite a bit since I last spent a lot of time there in 2015. I would see these articles from time to time and think, people are getting the wrong idea if they haven’t been there, when I think of SF I think of middle aged Chinese people and alleycat bike races and music venues and book stores and drug dealing and gays, though tech bros are also present (and overlapping). But damn, 20%, that’s a lot bigger than finance bros, maybe tech really is ruining the city. Shoot.

blululu 6mo ago
I think that’s 20% of the workforce not the population overall. That’s still a large number but its not the whole city. Also nobody is ruining the city, SF is doing just fine these days.
kelnos 6mo ago
I mean, the author just pulled that 20% number out of his ass. Not saying it's wrong or right, but... c'mon. Let's take all of this with a big helping of salt.

righthand 6mo ago

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.

balamatom 6mo ago

One word: Omelas.

richard___ 6mo ago

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.

keiferski 6mo ago
I really didn't get that vibe at all. If anything, he seems pretty balanced in his appraisal of SF.
KaiserPro 6mo ago
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 )

xrd 6mo ago

Can I claim I invented the term "partydes" for these events? Is there anyone else out there that can make that claim?

roxolotl 6mo ago

> 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.

keiferski 6mo ago

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-boom-artificial-intelligence-tech-industry-kids.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...

adregan 6mo ago

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.

pphysch 6mo ago
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.
- hungryhobbit 6mo ago
  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 ;)
  - pphysch 6mo ago
    > 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.
- kelnos 6mo ago
  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.

Invictus0 6mo ago

https://x.com/Kaz_Khadem/status/2045600370617995600?s=20 https://x.com/Kaz_Khadem/status/2045600370617995600?s=20

lucaslazarus 6mo ago

Strong parallels with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1967): https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

xrd 6mo ago

See also this recent article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people-injecting-themselves-with-peptides https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...

mbgerring 6mo ago

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.

dcrazy 6mo ago
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.

burnto 6mo ago

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.

apsurd 6mo ago

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.

mh2266 6mo ago

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

sroussey 6mo ago
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.
- hx8 6mo ago
  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."
cryzinger 6mo ago
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-injecting-themselves-with-peptides https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
trashface 6mo ago
Derek Lowe had a good blog post about it, mostly about the problems: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-begin https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ah-peptides-where-...

disposablehn 6mo ago

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.

rootsudo 6mo ago
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.
ausbah 6mo ago
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

arjie 6mo ago

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

Havoc 6mo ago

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

650REDHAIR 6mo ago
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.
kelnos 6mo ago
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.
almost_usual 6mo ago
Some people always want the ‘hack’ or easy way out. It’s unsurprising to me.
- hackerfoo 6mo ago
  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.
6mo ago

z0r 6mo ago

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

oceanplexian 6mo ago

Here comes another post reminding me of the SF crowd with Peter Pan syndrome and delusions of grandeur. Maybe if they weren’t such insufferable assholes, the rest of the country wouldn’t dig on California so much. 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.

kelnos 6mo ago
Here comes another comment reminding me that people for some reason think that the experience of a small group of people somehow generalizes to some sort of dominant "culture" in a particular place.

hmokiguess 6mo ago

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

sharadov 6mo ago

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.

dw_arthur 6mo ago

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.

operatingthetan 6mo ago
Bad news, a large portion of the "compounded GLP-1" market are re-sold Chinese peptides.

Ifkaluva 6mo ago

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.

iammjm 6mo ago

what the fuck did I just read. the dude used the word "peptide" 30 times without even coming close to explaining what they are, although he kinda tried. absolute incoherent rambling mess

kelnos 6mo ago

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.)

deleted 6mo ago

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redlewel 6mo ago

I quickly skimmed the article and decided it wasn't worth my time, peptides are interesting but this story/blogpost is not.

legerdemain 6mo ago

"SF" = science fiction?

JojoFatsani 6mo ago

I wonder what the Venn diagram is of peptide bro and anti-vaxxer.

rglover 6mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians

laiison 6mo ago

Is this at all representative of SF? It sounds ridiculous. Everyone in this story, including the author, comes across as completely insufferable.

bradlys 6mo ago

Sincerely hope this guy keeps his day job. I couldn’t be bothered to do more than skim a few paragraphs. 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.

apsurd 6mo ago
it's not really about peptides.
- bradlys 6mo ago
  Yes, pretty aware. Title and subject matter have little overlap. It jumps subjects every 2-3 paragraphs as well and just rambles with spoken thought. Would be best to curate and think than ramble.

rob74 6mo ago

> 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’. [...] I’m happy to report that most of that is gone. [...] It’s hard to say what, exactly, led to the change. 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?

khelavastr 6mo ago

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