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

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

Like black market steroids except with less track record

> Every single person that I met in SF was dangerously opinionated about AI best practices. It is impossible not to be! When everyone is constantly jumping from idea to idea, trying to stay on top of the Twitter firehose, you need some kind of opinion just to stay relevant and sane.

SF-specific assumptions aside, this the most useful takeaway. Seems they're calibration and signaling costs to being in the center of everything.

I read the whole thing. Good, easy writing style.

People live so many parallel lives, even in a small town like San Francisco, that you can take so many paths through the scene without even going through the same points.

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

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.

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

I don't blame them - the collective optimism about AI has been replaced by paranoia.

So everyone is trying to make a fast buck before the music dies.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1990 after graduation to work a corporate job in the valley but quit shortly after meeting a group of eccentrics that ran a small business setting up networks for commercial clients and joined their gig. I was making startup money before the word "startup" had any significant meaning. The skillset wasn't AI any kind of coding, but pure network admin. Companies paid obscene amounts of money for us to jumpstart their IT.

I moved into an 8 bedroom mcmansion (location omitted) with a rotating occupancy of about 10-20 people at any one time. We didn't do peptides, we did X and crystal, but it was near constant. The jargon was similar. And there were several houses like this from Oakland to Novato (to LA). It was just constant drugs, sex, partying and a little bit of work to cash a huge check. People moved through houses like they owned them, showing up and crashing, then going to another house, then flying down to LA and doing the same.

I burned out after 5 years of the lifestyle but kept in touch with the rolling scene that still had the same vibe through the startup madness of the late 90's (which unfortunately I missed out on due to years-long medical issues), but I've visited every few decades and it seems nothing has changed except we're greyer and fatter, and the houses are still monstrous, but cleaner and people wear clothing more often.

So when I hear stories like this, I'm glad to hear the culture hasn't changed and the torch has been passed.

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.

Not directly related to the piece but this explains so much. I’ve always seen it as high credulity. That is to say all lots of people are lying but lots of other people trust them. The missing part has been why would you take some of these people at face value. If there’s also a lot of sincere people it would then make sense that many would end up overly credulous.

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

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

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

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.)

This isn't anything new. Certainly it's easier nowadays to get stuff from overseas than it was 15+ years ago. But those black market steroids you mention probably weren't much (or any?) safer, honestly, regardless of track record.

People have been experimenting with drugs for longer than I've been alive, and will continue doing so long after I've turned to dust. San Francisco, in particular, has a long and storied history with the sort of experimentation described in this article. The author seems to have made the mistake of thinking that this sort of thing is incredibly common and "everyone is doing it" here, but I have no doubt that it does exist and people do it.

I 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.

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

Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.

To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.

> You should recognize that they are a bad person

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.

You may enjoy Didion's 1967 Slouching towards Bethlehem[1], a similarly anecdotal (and substantially better-written) piece about the drug scene in SF's Summer of Love.

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

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.

"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)."

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.