I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.

My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."

• epistasis

  01/14/2026

  All the action at PSB happens in the hot tub discussions. I didn't spend any time in them, as I was too junior and didn't know the right people, but PSB did get me some good post doc options!

  Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.

  (Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).

  • shaftway

    01/14/2026

    Given that hot tubs have been brought up twice in this thread, I'd pose that hot tubs at conferences might be their own Schelling points.

    • ben_w

      01/15/2026

      This would explain why I've never gotten a lot out of conferences…

  • 01/14/2026

• defalcon47

  01/14/2026

  > I've been inside the conference

  Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.

  Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.

  • blitzar

    01/14/2026

    > Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.

    I suspect you are thinking of burning man

    • davsti4

      01/14/2026

      Couldn't be burning man, because the people are dressed too nicely.

• saaaaaam

  01/14/2026

  Ok, sure, but were you also involved in dosing the creature that lives under the Westin St Francis?

  • dekhn

    01/14/2026

    So, I actually only read the first half of the article before making my post.

    Please don't mention the beast that is at the heart of SF. It does not like the publicity.

    • saaaaaam

      01/14/2026

      Haha, I did wonder! Looking at the various comments in this thread, I don't think you're the only person who did that. I nearly did the same - and was very glad I stayed to the end!

• buildbot

  01/14/2026

  For some reason this rings a bell - is there an article/blog/post/message in a bottle about Lynn Conway at that conference (and how it’s not really conference; lol?).

• gadders

  01/14/2026

  Aren't these conferences setup like this as they are tax write-offs so you get a holiday for cheap?

  • simonw

    01/14/2026

    I've heard that a lot of medical conferences take advantage of the fact that doctors need to fulfill a quota of "professional development" every year, so they set themselves at very pleasant resort hotels.

    • dekhn

      01/14/2026

      When I was in grad school in SF, my Aunt who was a doctor (dermatologist) attended the annual dermatology conference there. She invited us out to dinner at several of the nicest restaurants in the city and we were treated to the full course experience, plus lots of nice wine.

      At the end, all the doctors fought to pay the bill because it was a tax write-off (business expense? I don't know how professional doctors with practices account for these things). As a grad student in SF living on $25K/year it was quite an eye-opener.

      • quickthrowman

        01/14/2026

        > At the end, all the doctors fought to pay the bill because it was a tax write-off (business expense?

        Either these doctors went to the Michael Scott School of Business or it was some other reason they were fighting over who pays.

        A tax write off is only worth (dollar amount - (dollar_amount * tax rate in percent)

        Example: You spend $100 and pay 30% in corporate tax. Your write off that you spent $100 for is worth $30, end result is you’re out $70.

        If you let someone else pay and just pay $30 of taxes on your $100, you keep $70, which is over twice as much money as the previous scenario.

        If no one else was willing to pay for the meal, having the business pay for it would save you the tax rate.

        This only makes sense if it’s something like a car that you’re going to own anyways, not for fancy ass meals unless that’s how you eat anyways.

        • blitzar

          01/14/2026

          Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything.

  • epistasis

    01/14/2026

    "Tax writeoff"? What?

    • gadders

      01/15/2026

      Or to be more specific, you can take your whole family to a tropical location and pay for it out of pre-tax money, effectively getting a discount of whatever your tax rate is.

      At least that is how it would work in the UK if it was allowed.

  • lesser-shadow

    01/14/2026

    [dead]

• lesser-shadow

  01/14/2026

  [dead]

The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.

Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.

All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.

• rbanffy

  01/14/2026

  > The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.

  In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.

• cal_dent

  01/14/2026

  I'd say this is true of almost all corporate conferences

  • monkeydust

    01/14/2026

    I would strongly agree. Having been to a lot of industry conferences all over that world it's just the same.

    Part of the problem is that the conference organizers open up panels to press and panellists (including me) are then very restricted on what we can say. The panel becomes a hash of corporate sound bites which no one likes.

    To counter this increasingly panels are being requested to be under Chatham House by the companies paying to attend and sponsor.

  • matwood

    01/14/2026

    Agreed. I go to many industry conferences and rarely step foot on the conference floor. It's a great way to get everyone I need to speak to in one place for a few days.

  • rurban

    01/14/2026

    Similar thing happened to me at a surf competition at an anon place. People were flown in from everywhere, my surfboard arrived too late because the plane sucked.

    But as me, everybody just gathered at the hot tub, nobody took part at the real sports event, we just fooled around and were happy to meet people from all around the world. Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, Canada, US. Really nice event. No idea if there even was a winner at the event. Maybe they did put something onto the web page, but nobody cared.

• baxtr

  01/14/2026

  Many conferences work like that, yes.

  There are even some companies that offer this style of conferences as meetings for money to vendors.

  What I wonder though: How many deals are really made in these rooms? I always had the feeling that the conversion rates were rather low if not zero.

  • abyssin

    01/14/2026

    I've been told personally by the organizer of one of these conferences in the retail industry that illegal non-compete agreements and price-fixing agreements are made in the hallways. It was 10 years ago, and the whole conference existed for this reason.

• tptacek

  01/14/2026

  This is how RSA works, too.

• potato3732842

  01/14/2026

  > It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.

  It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.

  People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.

  • nradov

    01/14/2026

    There's no need to deny anything. Many of the deals made at the conference will be publicly announced after lawyers sort out the details.

    • potato3732842

      01/14/2026

      Of course there's business happening and it will be publicized in the normal ways. This is completely tangential to all the business not happening and all the other sharing of information that's not set in stone enough to be creating a paper trail over.

      Like you can't just schedule a conference call with a bunch of important people at your competitors for the purpose of bitching about suppliers or something. You can do that at a conference.

"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"

The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]

"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."

That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.

The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGK_OaMVPUs

• rbanffy

  01/14/2026

  > The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.

  Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.

  • paddleon

    01/14/2026

    no no no, you are misreading causality here. The error of 5 seconds a month is between the One True Clock (the one with the pendulum) and all those silly cessium and gps dohickies.

• dboreham

  01/14/2026

  Edinburgh has a similar concept: the "Binns Clock". Although Binns no longer exists, the clock is still there.

I got power schmoozed once. Why they mistook me for being worth the investment in time was beyond me. It's a strange feeling being led into the presence, assumed to have knowledge and power, and be offered.. something intangible to help them do .. something unclear.

Maybe my failure to read latent signals is why this doesn't repeat. When you do get to the elven castle, you don't remember much that happened inside, but now you're back on a quest and your donkey has more food.

I do think this stuff happens. Side deals which move markets, people who taste test in lowly techs and then advise private equity buyers to move or not. You aren't the talent, your information value informs the talent going to do their job with bigger fish.

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

1. Do you know anybody from "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?

2. Have you ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?

3. Do you know anybody who has ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?

• Havoc

  01/14/2026

  Spent new years in bielefeld. The place is so generic and forgettable I’m not surprised it was picked for the saying

• CGMthrowaway

  01/14/2026

  I'm convinced JMPHC is all a conspiracy to get me to pay $1400/night for a room at the Kimpton the one week I need to visit SF for an unrelated reason

• Anon84

  01/14/2026

  Remember Moab!

> The conference has six focuses: AI in Drug Discovery, AI in Diagnostics, AI for Operational Efficiency, AI in Remote Healthcare, AI in Regulatory Compliance, and AI Ethics. Every single theme of this conference has converged onto AI as the only thing worth discussing.

I experienced the same situation at the human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) annual conference a few months ago. This was fine for me because I'm part of the (relatively small) AI/ML group at my company, which has traditionally focused on developing human factors engineering solutions and services. In fact the reason I was sent to HFES was to help bridge my background (phd in computational neuro) to the broader company mission. And to be honest I was looking forward to hearing (what I assumed was going to be) a wide diversity of talks. I mean, ergonomics... there will probably be like companies presenting next generation office chair designs or some shit, I thought. Instead I estimate that 50% of the talks were on one of three topics: AI trust, Explainable AI, or Human-AI teaming. Another 30-40% were on some other AI related issue, with the remaining 10-20% accounting for all other possible topics related to human factors and ergonomics.

I wonder what will be the repercussions from this current hyper-obsession with AI, and the resulting neglect to many other viable areas of research. I foresee a near future where chairs are packed with AI features, and are the source of much back pain.

Glad someone is taking up the mantle left by Hunter S. Thompson’s demise.

This sort of writing is what AI will take from us.

The conference sessions aren't what matters. The important thing about these kinds of industry conferences is the ability for investors, leaders, regulators, journalists, and others to meet with each other in a neutral zone. Multiple M&As are being negotiated, IPOs being considered, funds trying to raise a new vintage, and companies starting press junkets in preparation for a roadshow.

> it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

Moscone Center tends to be the primary hub for industry conferences in the City (eg. RSA, Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld way back in the day), and more niche executive events are in the Four Seasons or St Regis. My hunch is that JPM has a multi-year deal with the Westin to host the conference at the Westin.

• abhishaike

  01/14/2026

  I will investigate these other locations!

  • alephnerd

    01/14/2026

    If you want to actually talk with people about some of your thoughts on the industry, I'd recommend just going to a hotel bar, grab a pint, and just spark a conversation.

• gosub100

  01/14/2026

  After JPM involvement in the Epstein scandal and coverup, it raises some doubt as to what kind of people might be lurking in their exclusive club.

Seems like a subset of enthusiasts - early stage VC types, people working in product, people who write lengthy healthcare posts on LinkedIn, have been trying to position it as another HLTH, but that’s not what it is. It’s an investor conference that you need to be invited to. Wouldn’t be surprising if JPM somehow had taken a stake or done a deal with your company, combined with some government insiders. The digital health community, however, has used it to start off the new year with a bang. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

• fancyfredbot

  01/14/2026

  That's what they want you to think.

There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?

• rbanffy

  01/14/2026

  > and how late is it open?

  And to whom.

This would make a pretty decent premise for an SCP article.

• rbanffy

  01/14/2026

  The financial system is definitely an Archon.

Not surprising. Take any conference and look at the schedule of some CEO or other “socialite” attending said conference. They’re not in the building, they’re running around town attending meetings. At JPMHC everyone is a “socialite”

This is good writing at its peak. I don't care about the subject matter, but reading it is a joy. The references, the writing style, the pace.. Love it.

I can't speak for this conference, but fake conference scams do exist.

I have a friend who fell for one. He won the Dutch "Student of the Year" award in... I think 2006. When our then-minister of education proposed to make maths more popular in high school by dumbing down the curriculum, he organized a giant STEM activity day on a nation-wide scale to popularize it. We were both physics student at the time.

Anyway, as part of the award he was allowed to pick a conference to go to. He chose one in Spain. When he arrived it turned out he had fallen for an internet scam: the conference only existed as a scam website and the money had disappeared. He still had a nice weekend with his best buddy (now husband) though, and at least it didn't cost him anything.

Damn I would read a whole book in this writing style

• bsenftner

  01/14/2026

  William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Hunter Thompson all made their careers in variations of this style.

• npilk

  01/14/2026

  You might enjoy Sam Kriss' writing, starting with 'The Internet Is Already Dead'.

The website linked in the article appears to not be _the_ website (to be fair, tfa only calls it _a_ website). The website actually hosted by JPM is very sparse, but even mentions that such unofficial websites exist.

https://www.jpmorgan.com/about-us/events-conferences/health-...

(tfa is a fun read, regardless)

Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut - what a wonderful and absurd article

• Obscurity4340

  01/14/2026

  What is the Vonnegut-esque in your view?

  • selcuka

    01/14/2026

    > The Sirens of Titan [1] is a comic science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., first published in 1959. His second novel, it involves issues of free will, omniscience, and the overall purpose of human history, with much of the story revolving around a Martian invasion of Earth.

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

    • Obscurity4340

      01/14/2026

      Right but what in your view makes something Vonnegutesque where it isnt otherwise so labelled?

      • selcuka

        01/14/2026

        I'm not the poster of the original comment, just wanted to point out that The Sirens of Titan has a similar storyline. If I have to guess, the GP might have meant the absurdity of the article and casual mention of an unbelievable "fact".

What an incredible read.

• buildbot

  01/14/2026

  Seriously the way it slowly goes from totally coherent, to slightly coherent, to flat earth, is as another commenter said; “absolute cinema”.

  • cbozeman

    01/14/2026

    It really is a masterpiece.

A plausible fake is otherwise known as a honeypot; they way others interact with your creation tells you their role in the system.

I can't comment on the authenticity of JPMHC. But it's interesting to think about who might benefit from creating a similar fake and observing how the world reacts to it. Will job candidates fraudulently list it on their resumes? If people publish articles claiming to have attended, what are their incentives? If you promote the conference ahead of time, will real researchers pitch talk ideas to you?

Close to my heart as I'm at the actual JPM conference this year. The author's not running in the right healthcare circles though which is why they hasn't met them. If they were connected with the CEO and/or CFOs of health systems or any of the public companies presenting, they'd definitely know people that have attended. Regardless, fun read though. And it is true, -hard- to get in.

I can tell you that this conference for sure exists because I am here for unrelated reasons right now and the hotel prices are ridiculous this week.

Absolute cinema

Possibly related: The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com

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

Beautiful writing, thank you. I have already incorporated this into my world view and am ready and willing to die for the creature that lives underneath San Francisco.

That essay is literature, in a style similar to a mixture of William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. Wonderful.

I just finished reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and this could have been one of the chapters.

• cyberpunk

  01/14/2026

  Ha, funnily enough I just bought it after hearing about it on that thread with the 90's 'strange website'. Not cracked it open yet, it's quite a tome.

  • Metacelsus

    01/14/2026

    Don't read it, unless you're in for psychological trauma. That book is messed up

    • browningstreet

      01/14/2026

      He has a new one out too. Also, he's the brother of the singer Poe.

  • semiquaver

    01/14/2026

    Skip the Johnny Truant bits and its half the length with hardly anything of value lost.

Sounds a lot like Davos

lol best thing I read all day

"Somehow, every single thematic concept at this conference has converged onto artificial intelligence as the only thing worth seriously discussing."

[flagged]

• abhishaike

  01/14/2026

  I'm going to be honest: I have absolutely no idea what this comment means

  • tclancy

    01/14/2026

    I’m sure it was positive, whatever it said.

from my understanding, it's a healthcare investors conference where investors meet companies (both public and private), esp those looking to fund raise.

• abirch

  01/14/2026

  My wife was there last year. There are a lot of investment opportunities. Plenty of dinners and meetings away from the conference. It's the whole drinking from a fire hose as there is too much to see and do.

  • themadturk

    01/14/2026

    Makes me wonder if this how the creature under California feels.

    • kfarr

      01/14/2026

      We are the creature

  • 01/14/2026