> Claim: My uncle says Mamdani will abolish the entire NYPD.
> Fact: Your uncle does say that.
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.
If someone’s writing in journalistic style I think it’s fair to criticize it as journalism, even if it’s on Substack
You are taking this far too seriously. It is a vignette which captures the flavor of a place at a particular time. And it is delightfully written.
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.
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?
I think it’s important to understand that AI, even at its current level, is revolutionary as are cheap Chinese peptides. This isn’t a crypto bubble, both of these will be world changing. I’ve been doing AI for decades and peptides for 5 years (treating an actual medical condition) so I was in this space before it was cool, happy SF finally caught up.
I turned to peptides because of how slow research has been, my medical condition (hEDS) has been known about since Hippocrates yet still no official treatments, so it’s not reasonable to expect one any time soon. Gray/black was my only option and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.
A lot of what we know about peptides comes from athletes cheating in sports and they’ve been doing it, some of them abusing it, for decades so the long term effects are not completely unknown. And this includes the GLP1As and the various combo stacks. Some people naturally have excesses of signaling peptides through genetic variation so they’re another good source of long term effects.
Of the things gay people inject into each other, ozempic is probably one of the safer options.
There’s a motte and bailey thing going on with this type of rationalist writing where someone writes authoritatively on broad subjects and then when anyone starts responding to it they immediately repeats to “it’s just a blog” to forgive all of the problems with it.
certainly there is no organized journalistic outfit behind it, but also, a lot of legit journalists want their substacks to be taken as facts of record.
But...
I'm also inclined to believe we are not the cool people being invited to these circles :)
Looking at what has happened with wegovy etc, it doesn't seem impossible.
Thats why I wrote that if you go back several years you’d find similar small social scenes around different trends: Steroids, Modafinil (when it was new and rare), RCs like 2-FA and MXE, or psychedelics depending on the era. Each time the social scenes that emerge around these have the same beliefs that everyone is doing excessive experimentation and that it’s only improving their lives. The later outcomes are not so rosy.
I think the author would agree with most of what you wrote.
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.
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.
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 instead of 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, this is 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.
"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)."
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.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/san-francisco-ai-boo...
To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.
Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author's argument.
Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
But ... it's also true that founders who exit successfully are like 0.001% of the Bay Area's population, but we talk about them like they're 10% ... so we should all stop talking about them so much ;)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
> 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.
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
Analemma_•1h ago