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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
143 comments
Then again, I’m now seeing ads for “leukopaks” on tech websites. It really does feel like the culture has shifted for the worse.
I work in big tech and have never heard anyone talk about "peptides". Is this a startup scene thing or just an SF thing? (I live in New York)
all of my coworkers are pretty normal, sure there are the stereotypical fitness types that are marathon training, cycling, or have a climbing gym membership but no one is talking about buying weird Chinese drugs
Peptide manufacture is not as difficult as other drugs because they are injected.
Because the brand names cost a lot, and their manufacture is not too difficult, obviously lots of people got in on the action. Compounding pharmacies, gray market providers, and lots of cheap chinese copies. For one month cost of the name brand you could get many years worth of chinese copies. That is a pretty good hook.
Now that you are injecting one chinese peptide, and it works amazingly well, it is pretty common to check out some of the others. And it is hard to avoid since by the time you find the gray market / chinese suppliers, it is only one of the things they sell.
I'd never actually heard anybody talk about it before. At first it was the generic CrossFit talk I'm used to hearing, then to diet and recovery / injury stuff, but then it too the peptide turn. It sounded like both of them are injecting themselves from stuff they're buying on the Internet. They both talked about it like it was just the most natural thing.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
Frankly as I am aging myself and noticing a lot of changes to recovery time and overall physically feeling good, I can totally understand getting on testosterone, for example, but random peptides that show up in white bags from random Chinese labs? no.
https://www.wada-ama.org/en/prohibited-list
https://www.vice.com/en/article/sunset-on-the-dark-enlighten... (brief article on another SF party attended by land, yarvin, altman and Sillicon Valley influencers)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-... (last year profile on yarvin. exceptional reporting)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/silicon-valleys-f... (recent profile on land. only skimmed it)
but apparently after the catastrophic failure of the MAGA movement they're shifting gears:
> A year ago, when I last wrote about the Bay, I was surprised and dismayed to find that edgy right wing black pilled nonsense was considered ‘cool’. ...... Sometime in the last 6 months, everyone collectively decided that being super right wing is actually really cringe. ...... But regardless of the reason, everyone agreed: “wow, it’s kinda really embarrassing that we spent so much of last year partying with real life eugenicists.”
Edit: New York had pretty much the same thing, called the Dimes Square movement. it was linked to the controversial remilia/milady NFT collection
https://www.fastcompany.com/90756392/inside-remilia-corporat... (very long as it seems to tell the tale of the entire remilia drama. i've only skimmed the section “A LOT OF US ARE ART SCHOOL GRADUATES OR DROPOUTS” which seems the most relevant part)
https://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.
> 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.
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.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/why-are-people...
>
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?
Software is fun, but lots of people in other cities change the world without writing another AI harness. For example a group of aerospace engineers from across the country (Including Utah, Alabama, etc.) sent humans around the Moon and back. Something tells me they aren’t bragging about injecting research chemicals.
This is from someone who has a dozen peptides in his freezer, gives them to friends, and is on them as well. You’d think I would be interested in reading an article that is supposed about “me”. I am not in the rationalist peptide space though. Find these guys to be the most “uhm, akshually” freaks that have the worst behavior of all: wrong all the time.
What surprises me most is that this even has any upvotes or comments. Astroturfing is my only guess.