Note: I am co-hosting an event in SF on Friday, Jan 16th.
In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth’s interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast subterranean oceans and air channels connecting every volcano on the planet. He wrote that “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.”. Alongside comments like this, Athanasius identified the legendary lost island of Atlantis, pondered where one could find the remains of giants, and detailed the kinds of animals that lived in this lower world, including dragons. The book was based entirely on secondhand accounts, like travelers tales, miners reports, classical texts, so it was as comprehensive as it could’ve possibly been.
But Athanasius had never been underground and neither had anyone else, not really, not in a way that mattered.
Today, I am in San Francisco, the site of the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and it feels a lot like Mundus Subterraneus.
There is ostensibly plenty of evidence to believe that the conference exists, that it actually occurs between January 12, 2026 to January 16, 2026 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell Street, San Francisco, and that it has done so for the last forty-four years, just like everyone has told you. There is a website for it, there are articles about it, there are dozens of AI-generated posts on Linkedin about how excited people were about it. But I have never met anyone who has actually been inside the conference.
I have never been approached by one, or seated next to one, or introduced to one. They do not appear in my life. They do not appear in anyone’s life that I know. I have put my boots on the ground to rectify this, and asked around, first casually and then less casually, “Do you know anyone who has attended the JPM conference?”, and then they nod, and then I refine the question to be, “No, no, like, someone who has actually been in the physical conference space”, then they look at me like I’ve asked if they know anyone who’s been to the moon. They know it happens. They assume someone goes. Not them, because, just like me, ordinary people like them do not go to the moon, but rather exist around the moon, having coffee chats and organizing little parties around it, all while trusting that the moon is being attended to.
The conference has six focuses: AI in Drug Discovery and Development, AI in Diagnostics, AI for Operational Efficiency, AI in Remote and Virtual Healthcare, AI and Regulatory Compliance, and AI Ethics and Data Privacy. There is also a seventh theme over ‘Keynote Discussions’, the three of which are The Future of AI in Precision Medicine, Ethical AI in Healthcare, and Investing in AI for Healthcare. Somehow, every single thematic concept at this conference had somehow converged onto artificial intelligence as the only thing worth seriously discussing.
Isn’t this strange? Surely, you must feel the same thing as me, the inescapable suspicion that the whole show is being put on by an unconscious Chinese Room, its only job to pass over semi-legible symbols over to us with no regards as to what they actually mean. In fact, this pattern is consistent across not only how the conference communicates itself, but also how biopharmaceutical news outlets discuss it.
Each year, Endpoints News and STAT and BioCentury and FiercePharma all publish extensive coverage of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. I have read the articles they have put out, and none of it feels like it was written by someone who actually was at the event. There is no emotional energy, no personal anecdotes, all of it has been removed, shredded into one homogeneous, smoothie-like texture. The coverage contains phrases like “pipeline updates” and “strategic priorities” and “catalysts expected in the second half.” If the writers of these articles ever approach a human-like tenor, it is in reference to the conference’s “tone”. The tone is “cautiously optimistic.” The tone is “more subdued than expected.” The tone is “mixed.” What does this mean? What is a mixed tone? What is a cautiously optimistic tone? These are not descriptions of a place. They are more accurately descriptions of a sentiment, abstracted from any physical reality, hovering somewhere above the conference like a weather system.
I could write this coverage. I could write it from my horrible apartment in New York City, without attending anything at all. I could say: “The tone at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference was cautiously optimistic, with executives expressing measured enthusiasm about near-term catalysts while acknowledging macroeconomic headwinds.” I made that up in fifteen seconds. Does it sound fake? It shouldn’t, because it sounds exactly like the coverage of a supposedly real thing that has happened every year for the last forty-four years.
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