The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot

Elena Burger sits down with academic and cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot to explore the increasingly blurry line between internet culture and the real world, and how to tell the difference between a trend that’s actually changing behavior and one that simply feels enormous online. They use today’s wellness and optimization culture as a case study, from peptides and GLP-1s to protein maxxing, wearables, microplastics, and the quantified self. Ruby explains her concept of “paracontent,” where the conversation around a phenomenon can become much larger than the phenomenon itself, and what social media data can tell us about how these trends move from niche communities into the mainstream. They also trace the much longer history of body optimization, from changing ideals of thinness to the rise of the quantified self, and ask what comes next as technology gives people increasingly granular ways to measure and modify themselves. Ruby’s prediction: rather than everyone optimizing toward the same ideal, we may see increasingly individualized and sometimes extreme forms of “body futurism.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Once we've reached the limits of innovation in silicon, we turn the microscope towards ourself and try to optimize and innovate on the body.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  11% of US adults are on GLPs. 90% of Americans have heard of GLPs.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  You want to believe that you can be Emily Mariko and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you DoorDash food and you call it a day. We live in a time of cultural confusion. We are submerged by para-content, which is content about content. There was recently a study that did blind tests on people with O-rings and gave them the wrong number. They reported having a worse day in spite of the actual true number being correct.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  It's not like we're going to be surrounded by like super conventionally hot people. Everyone is not going to look like clavicular. People are just going to do increasingly like strange biohacky things.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  I've made my mission to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what actually is happening in the culture.

• 1:03Erik Torenberg?

  Are peptides, protein maxing, wearables, and longevity clinics actually taking over? Or does the internet just make it feel that way? In this episode, Elena Berger sits down with academic and cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice-Lo to unpack the gap between what's happening online and what people are actually doing in the real world. They explore Ruby's idea of para-content, where the conversation around a trend can become bigger than the trend itself, using today's wellness and optimization culture as a case study. From GLP-1s and peptides to O-rings, microplastics, and protein, they trace how niche behaviors become cultural conversations and sometimes eventually become mainstream behavior.

• 1:44Erik Torenberg?

  They also look at the history behind our obsession with optimizing the body and what might come next. As technology gives us more ways to measure and modify ourselves, Ruby argues we may be entering an era of body futurism, where optimization becomes increasingly personal, fragmented, and extreme.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  I'm here with Ruby Justice-Lo, an academic and cyber ethnographer. And we're here to kind of continue a conversation that we've been having, I think, for a little bit on how to actually kind of understand what's going on in the world and especially on the internet, when there is increasingly no real delineation between the internet and the real world. And Ruby, I think actually a good place to start is a piece you wrote last year on para-content. And from there, I think we can kind of take a step back and get into a couple of topics and things that we've both been paying attention to recently.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, we live in a time of cultural confusion.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  So many things are happening. It's so hard to, as you said, disentangle what is real to what is merely amplified by social media or the internet or merely our small little algorithmic bubbles. I wrote a piece, both two pieces are germane to this topic. The first one is called "The Age of Para-content" and the other one is called "The Post is the Product." In "The Age of Para-content," I sort of present, reduce this idea of para-content, which is content about content. And what I noticed taking a look at video game releases, movie trailers, that oftentimes there's more content about content than the content itself. Meaning, we are submerged by para-content and we have very, very small sort of pieces of thing

• 3:37Speaker 00

  that we can sort of glom onto, whether that be, once again, music video or a movie or even a trailer for a video game. I think in the essay, I talk about the GTA 6 trailer that came out last year. And what's interesting about para-content is that it can actually take a life of its own without actually having any material impact on the real world. People can keep on talking about a thing and can grow it out of proportion. And it could be out of measure and it could feel real in spite of it not actually being grounded in any sort of material reality. And so I've made my mission, my life's work, to kind of cut through the nonsense and kind of answer the question of what actually is happening in culture.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  So the question is, how much is any given phenomenon actually happening versus how much are people talking about it on social media? How much are people making a big deal about it on social media or YouTube or whatever? And I think there's so many kind of examples that we can point to, but curious if you have any favorite examples of some kind of delta between like the thing happening and the thing that people are like commenting on?

• 4:50Speaker 00

  So many things come to mind, right? Some things actually do have an incident into the real world. And like six, seven actually pierces through and actually becomes a behavior that we see in children.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  What does it mean? I don't even know.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  I famously did a piece that got me into a lot of trouble around heteropessimism as well, which is this idea of like straight relationships are kind of doomed from the woman's perspective. And taking a look at content on reels and TikTok, trying to analyze the sentiment across, you know, about 2,000 videos. People are mostly doing positive dating content, about 40%. The rest that completes the half is fairly neutral. And so I'm always trying to think about, is this thing that I'm hearing just me kind of going crazy? Me spending too much time online? Or does it actually have any sort of true consumer behaviors behind it?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  And I think the thing we want to talk about is this whole sort of like wellness peptide sort of optimization culture.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Something that I find very funny is that a lot of times you'll see San Francisco taking credit for cultural trends that kind of long predated whatever particular cultural trend is being spoken about. And like this happens, I think, a lot in San Francisco specifically because we justifiably get a lot of credit for exporting kind of technological culture. And I think like the way in which technology like proliferates across the country and across the world is like some interesting new trend will either start in the valley

• 6:30Speaker 01

  or the founders will very quickly move to the valley after they've started their company and kind of scale something first among the tech insider crowd and then gradually across the rest of the country and the rest of the world. And oftentimes, cultural trends are attributed to the valley too. And I think like a very, very interesting example of that is actually peptides. And it's something that I think we like sort of saw percolating as a conversation last year, where people would talk about peptide parties or peptide events

• 7:09Speaker 01

  or like peptide influencers in San Francisco or people using Chinese peptides just like in general. But a lot of this culture and a lot of this actually started in like the American heartland or in like bodybuilding communities in the Midwest or something like that. Like I remember, I actually first heard about peptides in Austin, Texas, when I was like visiting friends there and everybody was like going to some like med spa that was giving them Chinese peptides. And that's in kind of the like gray market quasi-legal kind of use case. And then obviously there's the medical use case of like GLPs.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  But I think it is this like interesting thing that we're seeing where there were a lot of articles that were written, especially at the beginning of the year, like even into the summer, where people were sort of talking about how like tech culture or like Silicon Valley culture was exporting this trend. But really, it was something that kind of like really started elsewhere and then kind of got professionalized or kind of got accelerated and managed here.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  No, absolutely. I mean, a lot of these sort of novel techniques, whether I think now with creatine, I'm seeing it sort of pop up into my non-tech prints as well. The chains of distribution are so- Rich and multifaceted. Now that you'll have a TikTok influencer who's doing more like classic wellness for women, who will take a product that was used for bodybuilders because she's seen on another blog that it can be used for this or that. And so you really have a lot of confusion around, okay, who first came up with it? Which sort of subculture did it first? When I first encountered peptides, I was thinking to myself, the thing from like biology class in high school, like the chain of amino acids, is that the thing that people are talking about? And then spending a lot of time in New York, and there's a lot of these new sort of longevity

• 9:09Speaker 00

  clinics that have been popping up. And that's where I sort of started to see more, and we have quite a few now, at least, I would say, and at least Manhattan.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there even have been like some fun articles about like people experimenting them. Ezra Marcus wrote a good piece on that. But yeah, this kind of goes to this bigger question of, okay, obviously, people are aware of peptides. Either they are aware of peptides when it comes to like GLP-1s and the more kind of like regulated use cases, or they're aware of maybe the gray market, they're aware of Chinese peptides and less regulated and not like FDA approved for a bunch of like other outcomes. People inject some peptides for muscle repair, they inject other ones for like looking more

• 9:57Speaker 01

  youthful, there are other ones that exist for like memory and cognitive function. There are all these kinds of like other gray market things that people do. I think like it's interesting, if you look at the polls, if you look at something like, like a Gallup, like Gallup did a poll a couple of months ago, and they found that 11% of US adults are on GLPs, 90% of Americans have heard of GLPs. Now, I, I think that's interesting just because there is, as we were talking about at the beginning of this, there is this like huge gulf between the amount of people who are

• 10:40Speaker 01

  using the thing and the amount of people who are aware of the thing and definitely have opinions about the thing. I also did a little bit of searching and I, I asked, I asked Astra to come up with like other, other things that poll similarly in like public opinion where it's like X% is aware and Y% has used. And Astra said, Astra came up with another Gallup poll for crypto, where 95% of Americans are aware of or have heard of crypto, 14% own, and that's compared to 90% of Americans

• 11:23Speaker 01

  have heard of GLPs, 11% are on GLPs. There were other similar ratios that came up, like VR meal kits. So it's funny because a lot of this, like a lot of these categories and a lot of these things are like tech categories where it's like the amount of users to the amount of people who know about the thing are like this kind of like, like one to 10 ratio. Tech culture is so influential that you can have lower incidences of the thing and then a much larger percent of people who are like, I definitely have an opinion about this.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that's the sort of the impact, I think, of the marketing machine, right? I live in New York, there's every subway has an ad for every single company of GLP-1, you know, whether it's the pill or the injection. And so the brand presence is really felt strong. I think the average person knows the name Ozempic, they might not know the company who makes it, they might know how to get it. But it always is a conversion from like actually knowing about the thing to setting up your crypto wallet or actually getting this proven service.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  I think of different sort of bodily things in the same way, like plastic surgery as well, like people are very well aware because celebrities have been talking about it for a long time. But my guess is that the actual percentage is must, is, is around that same sort of coefficient. Moreover, for a lot of these issues, when we talk about the body in general, people have lots of opinions, which amplifies a lot of the cultural prevalence and presence of these topics. I mean, right now, you can't really talk about a celebrity without talking about whether or not they have quote unquote Ozempic face, and that pushes the conversation even further into the mainstream because people are having to discuss whichever celebrity they like and whether or not they're on that, on the GLP-1.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  And so when I think about the drivers, I think of first and foremost, the sort of technology being developed itself, I think about the adoption in tech-centric markets like San Francisco. And then when you think about like a model for like what usually makes these things kind of really stick culturally in terms of brand awareness, if that thing can be like picked up by certain celebrities and actually have lots of eyeballs on it, you're going to get that big disparity between high brand awareness, high awareness in general, positive or negative, and then sort of a low adoption because you know about it, you've talked about it at the bar with your friends, but you might not actually have tried it.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Why do people take peptides? I know it's an obvious answer maybe, but, but you know, why, why do people take them?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Well, let me pull up some data that I spent the week crunching on what people are saying about peptides online as like a first, a first example of like what we're seeing across social media. So this is mainly around TikTok. Taking a look at around 960 videos posted between 2024 and 2026, most of the content was kind of positive. People talked about their weight loss, people talked about how they felt better about themselves. A lot of it was still related to bodybuilding. So you saw that that set of, as we talked about before, that connection to that original subculture where it originated.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  And we did see an increase in 2025 and some, some, at some extent in 2026 of these sort of like contestatory content, like people were like, oh, it's kind of a scam, it's not really working, a lot of that more negative content sort of creeping up a little bit. And one of the most common themes we're seeing in the later years, now it's more popular, is whether or not there's safety concerns with that. So people are comparing different products, but we're also seeing a lot of, it's okay, is this not? So there's these questions being asked. Another very interesting kind of fact, looking at all the TikTok, well, not all the, a sample of TikTok content posted, is this idea that we're actually seeing convergence between promotional content and personal experience.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  At first, there's more promotional content, of course, and as people adopt more, you're getting more of these like day in my life as a person on Ozempic. And that content sorts of like flipped or like converge with the promotional content. And so the three main categories of content posted about peptides are promotional, personal exploration, and educational, and with a fourth category at about 19%, which is the skeptical warning.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  And so we're seeing, I think, a lot of people looking for that education, looking for that information so that they potentially they can take that next step. But I think the educational, the warning, do you play a big part of what people are posting about it because they've seen the ads, but they don't know, okay, Serena Williams is using it, but should I? And they're going to TikTok to influencers to get, I guess, additional trust or additional information about this new pharmaceutical.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Have you, have you looked at similar, you know, user journeys over other trends? And, and are there breakdowns in the kind of content or the kinds of sentiment that you see?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so spent a lot of time looking at a thing I call parotechnology, which is technology that prevents you from using technology. We're talking about Opal, Brick, Youngness Pouches, like all the different things that you might have around the house that prevent you from using your phone.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  And because there's such a big sort of, I think, competitive field right now, people are asking like which one to use and which one has worked for you. And so you're seeing everything from like cyber celibacy content, which is like lifestyle content, almost about like how to live your life without your phone. You're seeing days in my life with dumb phones being very popular. And I think, once again, the paracontent, there's more content about not using your phone than people truly not using their phones.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I was gonna say, how do they make the videos about them not using your phone? What are they shooting it on?

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Their iPhone 16s, of course.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And they're posting it on Instagram, of course.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  But that kind of content is very popular because in part, much like with the weight loss, it's aspirational. You wanna, you only wanna believe that you can stop using your phone. You wanna believe that you can reduce your screen time. And there's no better way to feel that way than to by proxy, watch someone do it.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  And so we're, we're, we're seeing that across many sort of, what I'll call like, positive behavioral change that people wanna do in their lives. So it's like, healthy eating is a very classic one of it. A lot of top influencers we see on TikTok right now that we're taking a look at are healthy eating influencers, both for like simple but also healthy meals. And they get lots and lots of views, to which extent is that actually reproduced as actual consumer behavior. Well, it's, there's a big coefficient there, too. It's aspirational. You wanna believe that you can be Emily Mariko and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. But then you DoorDash food and you call it a day.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  I think it is interesting to, to ask, you know, are people actually getting healthier?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  And I, I, I think there is some evidence that points to yes. On the same poll that I, that I looked at around GLP usage, there was also information about the overall obesity rate in America. And it actually is on the, on the decline. So I think there is sort of, sort of reason to think, okay, some of it is GLP usage, some of it even might be social media contagion, where, where people are getting healthier. Maybe an even more sort of socially interesting question is why, why do people want, wanna be thin?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And like, is there a history to that? How does that history even, you know, connect to technology? Like, how can we understand this moment in the continuum of, you know, thinness in general throughout history? Or health in general throughout history?

• 19:41Speaker 00

  That's a great question. So we actually have these sort of two parallel histories. The one is thinness in man and the other one is thinness in women.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Thinness in man kind of appears in the 17th century,

• 19:54Speaker 00

  after the English really boost the sugar production in their colony of Barbados. At the time, sugar was kind of reserved for the high class. And so take a look at any medieval image or even any sort of like medieval media or novel, you'll kind of like to be portly was a sign of wealth.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  But as sugar makes its way into England, into English society, it starts to, its price decreases as the supply, of course, increases. And then you start to have sugar at your coffee houses. They start to make something called Sac, which is a sweetened wine. And people in England get bigger and bigger. And you start to see this illness called gout develop itself even in the middle classes. And so it's Dr. Veneren, 1620, who comes up with this word obeseus, you know, from the Latin, which means obese, to describe the portly or overweight man, which he sees as being sort of unhealthy. He comes up with some, one of the first sort of diets to get people to reduce their weights.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  And through that, there's been this association between unhealthiness, kind of like mental dullness as well, and fatness. There's this famous line in, in Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, where Julius Caesar says, let them be fat men around me, because he's like, they're, they're too dull. They're not gonna sort of fight against me.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  And so what's interesting is that at the time, you actually see kind of the fluctuation. You start with sort of the, let's call it a, a sort of Renaissance, kind of like if you take a look at the Venus by Raphael, like that's kind of the, the shape. Castiglione talks about this as like the ideal of female beauty. And then as time progresses, as this ideal kind of goes down, as the elites become more ascetic, because they, they believe that the restriction of their urges and passions through, of course, ordered eating is a sign of control, a sign of intelligence, right? Everyone from Pope to Descartes talk about control of one's appetites as a way to display, as a, as a display of intelligence.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And so thinness becomes related, that specific idea of I am good, I am smart.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  And then that also gets encoded in fashion, like when you think about like a Victorian corset, like that is a, a garment that pushes you to be even thinner as an expression of that believed virtue. But what's interesting, of course, is that you have kind of two pendulums at the same time. You have female thinness and male thinness kind of going about. And of course, at the time, the first person, the first people to adopt that are the elites, right? As the masses were eating sugar, sort of remaining kind of portly.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  And when you think about the adoption curve of some of these technologies, especially with the price early on, right? The prices decreased for GLP-1s. The first people to adopt it were the celebrities, were the people with, were the elites. And we're seeing kind of the same shape of sort of trickle down, trickle down thinness happening right now with like Ozempic and whatnot.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and I think the other thing that's funny is like, I, I was reading, I was reading actually about the history of corsets specifically, and the way in which corsets kind of went from an elite fashion item that only like very wealthy people could have to ones that anyone could have. And it was a combination both of like, obviously, the invention of the loom and the sewing machine and, and sort of turning sewing machines and like, like orchestrating entire industrial kind of manufacturing around, you know, a bunch of people sewing in the same place and creating lots of corsets. Corsets used to be attached by like, you know, servants

• 23:38Speaker 01

  or like your, your like lady in waiting who would like do the back for you and do the lattice. And then at a certain point, they started designing them so you could attach them in the front and you didn't need anybody to like help you do them. And, and so it's like all, all of these kinds of like technological innovations, both like, you know, creating the, the factory to mass manufacture the corsets and like redesigning the corset so it could be, you know,

• 24:12Speaker 01

  put on individually rather than like with somebody's help. And like this, this is way too much of a stretch. But the analogy is compounding of GLPs and, you know, making injection easier by like making, making, like, like giving you, you know, your, your GLP in a pill form or in like the pre-injected thing rather than like a needle that you have to like brutally put into yourself or have your like significant other do for you. That is like way too much of a stretch of an, of an analogy, but like you got the point. But anyway, so, so I think we were talking, we ended kind of at, at fashion and then you wanted to talk about like then the birth of the supermodel

• 24:56Speaker 01

  and, and kind of how that came about and when that came about and why?

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so what's interesting is we see the moors around thinness kind of shift based on the economic situations specifically in the West, right? When times get tough, we're talking in the two world wars or even in the Great Depression, there, there's a cache that starts to redevelop around portliness as a form of indication of health, because people were starving, of course. And so in the post-war, in the baby boom, you kind of see, you know, take a look at like a beach image, people are kind of like these, the, the kind of gone back almost to the Renaissance idea, like, like these nice kind of well proportioned bodies. You know, one of the great examples of this is Albrecht Dürer's Human Proportions, like this idea of like good proportions as the main definition.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  But as we enter the 90s, as European fashion starts to become more and more important in the American context, a new figure emerges in the supermodel. The supermodel of the 90s comes to redefine femininity, specifically the shape of women. And then thinness sort of roars back onto the stage as the ideal for women, you know. Famously called like heroine chic, that becomes the sort of...

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Neck plus ultra of what the female body should be, but it is really driven by the influence of European designers who've chosen these models to represent and to wear their clothes. And so, once again, it kind of swings back and forth. And right now, it seems like we're swinging back into, of course, an age of thinness as driven by this novel technological advancement in the peptide in the GLP-1.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Did you want to talk about wearables? Or kind of where that fits in?

• 26:45Speaker 00

  So, wearables are very interesting. The Fitbit is launched in 2007. That same year, Kevin Kelly in Wired says, "It is the year of the quantified self." And so, that idea of a quantified self has been with us for like 20 years. And it was a rather futuristic, prescient vision that Kelly had in calling it that. And I feel like it's only being fully realized now, 20 years later. You have the Fitbit Apple Watch in 2015. So slowly, through proper product development, and of course, like slower adoption, we're seeing more and more adults adopt wearables as a way to control, understand, and of course, improve their bodies. An idea that I like a lot around this concept of quantification of the self is the idea of body futurism by Toby Shorn.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  So Toby wrote this essay kind of like a few years ago, and I always thought it was wonderful, where he says, "Once we've reached the limits of innovation in silicon, we turn the microscope towards ourself and try to optimize and innovate on the body." And that's what he calls body futurism. And so, when I think about these like dashboards that people have on these apps, or you know, waking up, going to your longevity clinic, even something like Don't Die, this is like body futures. And the idea that you can use the same tools we did to, you know, make amazing phones, amazing tech, and sort of revolutionize our external world, now we're trying to revolutionize our corporeal world, like our internal world and our organs and whatnot.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the quantified self thing is a really interesting call out because that's an example of something where Silicon Valley actually did export it to the rest of the world. Like as far as my knowledge is and as far as I'm concerned, like as you pointed out, Kevin Kelly sort of articulated this trend that had been going on among biohackers and maybe a much smaller contingent of people in the valley and in, you know, in the Bay Area. And then it gradually became a much, much bigger thing. And now anyone, you know, can sign up for something like Function Health or like Superpower. Anyone can get a DEXA scan.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Or anyone can use like a CGM. I know a lot of people who just kind of buy CGMs that are intended for people with diabetes and just, you know, use them to monitor their like blood sugar and what spikes their blood sugar throughout the day and what do they be eating? What should they be avoiding? There's also, this is maybe one step further than quantified self. But there was the group that I think was majorly funded by Nat Friedman and some other like bigger names in tech who took samples from, you know, a bunch of different food products,

• 29:43Speaker 01

  a bunch of different like delivery items from restaurants and like tested them all for microplastics. So it was like packaged meal from Whole Foods, Boba, a protein bar, you know, all of these things. And they partnered with this lab in Austin, Texas called Light Labs. And they did all of these like microplastic tests on them and like open sourced all of the results and released all of the results. I think there was like, and it also like set off a kind of like wave, which was they found a bunch of microplastics in like baby food. And so, this like one mom went off and she was like,

• 30:25Speaker 01

  "Okay, now I'm going to test a bunch more like baby food and baby formula." The medical consensus is still out on are microplastics bad for you or not? But a large enough contingent of smart people in the Bay Area think that they are bad. And so, I think like paying attention to that is very interesting. And also like, okay, well, what actually would be downstream of a bunch of people in the Bay Area thinking that microplastics are bad? You're probably going to see like way more advancements in consumer testing or lab technology as a result. You're probably going to see like more, you know, microplastic free product as a result.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I think similar kind of logic might apply to like other food groups or other things that like people are trying to avoid too. Like there's an entire, you know, anti-seed oil movement. There are all of these food groups that get vilified, justifiably or not, and kind of get a, yeah, just like a movement built around them. And you can really kind of see that reverberate culturally and have a real outsized impact when it's maybe a much smaller, but very loud and committed group that's advancing these things.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  And absolutely. And I think this speaks for the need, and this is definitely going to merge, hasn't merged yet, like an aggregator of whatever your specific thing that you don't want to do is, microplastics, seed oils. Like we're going to see these aggregators, like goods that are certified, like novel ways of doing like green or organic for these things. And sort of self-run or like group-run aggregators who've done the certification and the test, and they're going to keep on running it on their own. And probably their members are going to pay a fee to know that the things that they eat are good. I mean, anecdotally, if you go to Whole Foods, the water bottles are glass. Like you're already seeing that, I think, in, once again, sort of like the yuppie elite portion.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  But I think that we will see that that kind of trickle down as people get, become more and more aware of.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  I just wanted to demo that we only have glass water bottles at the A16Z office.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  But yeah, yeah, so I see it. I also like, I make a point to only drink out of glass.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Same thing, you know, that since plastic free since 2023 was the goal in our household.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  I mean, we've, I think we're seeing this. And once again, another thing that I think is very interesting is taking a look at social media and how the tide is trending on some of these things. And we can track, for instance, like the Ray-Pete diet. We can track sentiment around it in the same format that we've seen for these peptides. The sort of educational content, the lifestyle aspirational content. And based on the distribution of the different kinds, we can kind of see how far, how mature a lot of these trends are.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  And then usually, once it's kind of further on to the adoption curve, you see the backlash, like you see the truthers come out, like, "Oh, no, Ray-Pete diet is bad." Or like, "Actually, you should be eating more microplastics." That's going to come in like a few years.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's, well, that's the inevitable thing. The thing that I find like very funny is like, I think you've already started to see that happen with like seed oils, where people are like, "No, actually, like ultra-processed food is like really good for you." And like you see like certain trade groups kind of trying to make the point that like seed oils are good for you. And it just like, it kind of looks ridiculous. There are also, to the seed oil point, there are, there's now like seed oil free like packaging on like different snacks and things that you can like buy. So that has started to make it into the mainstream. I think with seed oil, I think with microplastics,

• 34:34Speaker 01

  the Ray-Pete diet, like those are all way too early still, I think, for the backlash with these. Actually, I think the seed oil thing, we have seen backlash to that, but.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  A good symbol, a signal that something has kind of made it to the mainstream is when a characteristic of a food based on one of these trends, right? We talked about peptides, we talked about sort of wellness and quantification. Part of the wellness slash quantification, like protein maxing. Certain foods have always had the same amount of protein. But that same number is now prominently featured on the yogurt because people are now much more aware of how much protein they're consuming. It has not changed, the product is the same. But from a marketing standpoint, it makes sense for the brand, for the company, to highlight it because, you know, people are now looking for it.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, well, I think protein is actually such a good example of this because it's also sort of starting to fall victim to what you called out, which is people, just like people feeling utter protein fatigue. They're like, "I like, you know, my water doesn't need 20 grams of protein in it." And like my, you know, just like, "Let me drink normal beverages, please." So like, I think people are starting to kind of like resist having protein shoved down their throat a little bit. But yeah, that's a great example of like just utter mainstream saturation. Like protein also, it's interesting

• 36:08Speaker 01

  because it's like gone through a lot of cycles. Like it's been introduced in various forms. Like there was the Atkins diet then, there was keto. Now it's just like, get a bunch of protein, like, you know, 2X your body weight in protein. It is quite funny. I think maybe to close out, we kind of have been just discussing and dancing around as well, which is when it comes to peptides, when it comes to looks maxing, when it comes to all of these things, are we just going to accelerate forever? Or are we going to see some kind of backlash and some kind of reversal?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  And if we do see a reversal, why would we see it?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And just wanted to get your take there.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, the interesting thing is, from a historical perspective, right? I think we're at a similar point where England was with the increase of the sugar consumption, where we've been kind of knee-deep in processed foods. We've.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Even fast food, fast casual, I think we will see for the foreseeable future, a big push to revert back and to sort of see health as a form of virtue, as a form of sort of, you know, radical self-care, as a proof of someone that cares about themselves, and potentially also this association, as I said, with Descartes, with intelligence itself. And I think that culturally, that's not really going to change for the foreseeable future. Now, what I'm seeing on the quantification part, which I'm seeing two things kind of break apart. There was recently a study that did blind tests on people with O-rings and gave them the wrong number as to what their sleep score

• 38:01Speaker 00

  was. And when the number was lower or negative, they reported having a worse day in spite of the actual true number being correct. And so, a lot of these devices, if ever their numbers are incorrect, have a noxious effect on your felt health, at least for that day. And I think I'm seeing a lot of people push back against the quantification, adopting more of these like holistic or esoteric ways of knowing the body. I'm seeing a lot of growth in holistic practices from like Reiki or acupuncture or other forms of healing in the same group of people who previously were doing a lot of quantification. And what's

• 38:43Speaker 00

  interesting, when we take a look at trends these days, is actually because we're in a, let's call it plurilithic, right, polylythic culture, there's multiple kind of frameworks, we're going to see both, I think, a growth in quantification and more esoteric ways of knowing the self at the same time. Whereas I think previously, we were kind of all swinging the same way. I think we're going to see both at the same time.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely agree with the esotericism point. And I think it relates to acceleration, but it's a different kind of acceleration, where it's like, it's not like we're going to be surrounded by like, super conventionally hot people who all look the same and all have the same like, plastic surgery, or all of the same, you know, like botox done, or all injecting the same peptides. Like, everyone is not going to look like clavicular. People are just going to do increasingly like, strange biohacky things. And I think like, we're just going to see like, increasingly extreme optimizations happen. I kind of do

• 39:50Speaker 01

  think the next one is going to be in sleep. I think, and like, I think, going back to your aura point, like, I've been talking with some like, hardware founders and some founders who are building wearable devices that allow you to get like, what feels like the equivalent of a full night's rest in four hours, or something like that. And I think people who are trying to kind of like, achieve longevity, not through necessarily living longer, but just having more hours awake in the day, I think is like, something that we're going to see more of. So, I agree with acceleration, but it's not going to

• 40:31Speaker 01

  look like people getting hotter, or people, you know, even necessarily having like, healthier outcomes. It's just going to look like people optimizing themselves in the direction that they want to with increasingly like, fringe and extreme technology.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Toby wrote his essay, Body Futurism, kind of before the big AI boom. And his idea was more that, once we run out of things to do with silicon, we would move towards the body. I think now in the age of AI, what we're seeing is, in an age of great abundance, in an age of like, potential total automation, the only thing we have to actually improve potentially is our body. So I think we're going to be focused on it for quite a bit of time for the next few years.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Next few years. Hopefully, hopefully, we have more than a few years left. I agree. Well, Ruby, thanks so much. This was awesome. We'll do this again very soon.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 41:39Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z, and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z firm. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies

• 42:22Erik Torenberg?

  discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.