The Hollow Men of Hims
alexkesin.com
The Hollow Men of Hims
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Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#2so Hims found a way to VC back, blitzscale, and legitimize those shady online internet pharmacies from the dark corners of your inbox
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#3>What happened in those eight weeks reveals something essential about the kind of company Hims has become. Even as they shook hands with Novo executives in April 2025—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—Hims continued selling what their new partner called "illegitimate, knockoff versions" of Wegovy. These were compounded semaglutide injections sourced, according to Novo's investigation, from Chinese suppliers whose quality control standards remained opaque at best and terrifying at worst.
Yes, problematic
>We threw in Elizabeth Holmes for a lot less—though one suspects her fatal error was not the fraud itself but the transparency of it, the sheer crudeness of promising blood tests that did not work rather than the more sophisticated approach of selling actual drugs through loopholes so baroque that even their exploitation carries a patina of legitimacy.
What?
>The pharmaceutical equivalent of putting both ketchup and mustard on a hot dog and calling it gourmet—though one suspects the hot dog vendor would display more honest shame about his craft.
Huh?
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#4The writing is hard to engage with—possibly trying to be funny, but it comes off as overly antagonistic. Phrases like “—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—” feel distracting and undermine the point.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#5>What happened in those eight weeks reveals something essential about the kind of company Hims has become. Even as they shook hands with Novo executives in April 2025—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—Hims continued selling what their new partner called "illegitimate, knockoff versions" of Wegovy. These were compounded semaglutide injections sourced, according to Novo's investigation,…
Yeah, the sound of the axe grinding obscured the message.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#6"The law, as Hims understood it, was not about intent but about technicalities,"
Well, according to the principle of lenity, or strict construction, that's exactly how the law is supposed to work.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#7>The real tragedy is not that Hims exists, but that it works so perfectly. Every day, thousands of people choose their compounded weight-loss drugs over FDA-approved alternatives, their combination ED pills over established single-ingredient treatments, their algorithmic consultations over actual medical care. They make these choices not because the products are better, but because the entire experience has been optimized to feel more like shopping and less like confronting the mortality and vulnerability that define the human condition.
Strongly disagree with almost everything in this article, but specifically this. The reason people make these choices is not because of slick marketing working against them, it's because the existing process to get medical treatment is paternalistic, hard to navigate and often expensive.
If you want safe and really high quality medical care you should absolutely have a personal physician you have a personal relationship with, who understands your lifestyle, your risk factors for side effects, and your medical needs deeply. How many Americans have that? Maybe a few dozen? The market has responded to just how terrible the existing system is.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#8I might be crazy, but I am more sympathetic to Hims after reading this than I was before.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#9The writing is hard to engage with—possibly trying to be funny, but it comes off as overly antagonistic. Phrases like “—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—” feel distracting and undermine the point.
I had the opposite take, actually. I had to think about it for a sec and suddenly, “oh, right. Novo nordisk == Danish == Scandinavian design” cute.
This style of writing is a welcome change from all the AI slop or self promoting blogs out there.
It’s a personal touch without making it all about the author. Long form articles with some humor used to be all I wanted to read on the web.
Re: The Hollow Men of Hims
#10This buried lede is really the core of the article:
> They make these choices not because the products are better, but because the entire experience has been optimized to feel more like shopping and less like confronting the mortality and vulnerability that define the human condition. This is what disruption looks like when applied to the oldest human needs: not improvement, but the illusion of improvement
And contrary to what the article claims with hundreds of words of flowery indictment, it is improvement. As everyone on this site should be able to tell you, UX matters, and the medical establishment has some of the most frustrating, unpleasant, and confusing UX of any necessary service.
Of course shady companies are going to get lots of business when all the competition following the law most faithfully provide a broken UX, and the only way to do otherwise is to bend the rules.