The truth behind the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

Summary

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, “...