从硅基创新到肉身黑客：互联网如何将身体优化演化为全民文化执念

Ruby Justice Thelot: Once we've reached the limits of innovation in silicone, we turn the microscope towards oursel and try to optimize and innovate on the body.

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

Ruby Justice Thelot: You want [music] to believe that you can be alio and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you door dash food and you call it a day. We live in a time of cultural confusion. We are submerged by paracontent which is content about content. There was recently a study that did blind tests on people with or rings and gave them the wrong number. They reported having a worst day and got the actual true number being correct.

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

Host: I've made my mission to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what actually is [music] happening in culture. I'm here with Ruby Justice The Low, an academic and cyber ethnographer. Um, and we're here to kind of continue a conversation that we've been having, I think, for for a little bit on how how to actually kind of understand what's 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 I think actually a good place to start is a piece you wrote last year on par content. And um from there, I think we can kind of take a step back and and get into a couple topics and things that that we've both been paying attention to recently.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Yeah, we live in a time of [clears throat] cultural confusion. I'm in a state [music] of confusion.

Host: Um, so many things are happening. It's so hard to, as you said, disentangle what is real to what is merely amplified by social [music] media or the internet or merely our small little algorithmic bubbles. I wrote a piece well two pieces are gerine to this topic. The first one

Ruby Justice Thelot: Yeah. So I mean so many things come to mind, right? uh some things actually do have an incident in into the real world and like 67 actually pierces through and actually becomes a behavior that we see in everyday life. And other things are just purely algorithmically induced hallucination.

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

Ruby Justice Thelot: I famously did a piece that got me into a lot of trouble around heteropesimism as well. um which is this idea that like straight relationships are kind of doom from the woman's perspective and taking that on as an aesthetic. It doesn't actually stop you from seeking and falling in love with men. It's more of like a general mood.

Host: Yeah.

Host: And I think the thing we want to talk about is this whole sort of like wellness peptide um, sort of optimization culture. Something that I find very funny is that um a lot of times you'll see San Francisco where I live, you'll see people sort of using these novel technologies. But this seems like one that really escaped the lab and didn't really start there in the first place, but is now definitely everywhere.

Ruby Justice Thelot: No, absolutely. I mean a lot of this you know 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. um the chains of distribution have completely shifted.

Host: Yeah. And there there even have been like some fun articles about like people experimenting them like um Esther Marcus wrote wrote a good piece on that. Um but yeah, I think I like like this kind of growing normalization.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Well, I mean that's the sort of the impact I think of the marketing machine, right? I live in New York. There's

Host: every subway has an ad for every single company of JLP1, 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 of GLP1, they know Ozempic, they know Wagobi, they know Manjaro, whatever they may be taking.

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

Ruby Justice Thelot: Well, um let me pull out some data that I spent uh the week crunching on um what people are saying about peptides online as like a first

Ruby Justice Thelot: um a first example of like what we're seeing across social media. So, this is um mainly around uh Tik Tok. taking a look at um around 960 videos posted between 2023 and 2024 with a total of over 50 million views, looking at the distribution of content and what people are posting about. And so the three main categories of content posted about peptides are promotional, personal exploration, and educational.

Ruby Justice Thelot: um flip or like converge with the uh pro promotional content. And so the three main categories of content posted about peptides are promotional, personal exploration, and educational.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Yeah. So spent a lot of time looking at um a thing I call parnchnology which is technology that prevents you from using technology. We're talking about uh opal apps, dumbphones, brick, you know, all these things that are meant to stop you from using technology.

Host: moment. Well, I was going to say how do they make the videos about them not using their [laughter] phone? They're

Host: What are they What are they shooting it on? [gasps]

Ruby Justice Thelot: Their iPhone 16s, of course.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [laughter]

Ruby Justice Thelot: Um and they're posting it on Instagram, of course.

Host: Yeah.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Uh [laughter]

Ruby Justice Thelot: uh but that kind of content is very popular because in part, much like with the weight loss, it's aspirational. You want to you you want to believe that you can be that person.

Host: Yeah.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Um

Host: Yeah.

Ruby Justice Thelot: And so we're we're seeing that across many sort of what I would call like positive behavioral change that people want to do in their lives. It's like healthy eating, working out, you know, you want to believe that you can be all Leo and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day.

Host: then you door dash food and

Ruby Justice Thelot: you call it a day. [laughter]

Host: I think it is interesting to to ask um you know, are people actually getting healthier? Um, and I I I think there is some evidence that points to yes, on the same token, you know, we we have to wonder about the long-term historical implications of thinness and aesthetic ideals.

Ruby Justice Thelot: 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. um innocently in men thinness was associated with intellect, going back to Descartes and the mind-body split where the body was seen as base and the mind was elevated. Physical labor meant you had muscle, whereas intellectual elites were slender.

Host: That's funny. 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 uh uh sort of renaissance ideal and then it swings back and forth through Victorian eras.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Yeah.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Um but what's interesting of course is that you have kind of two pendulums at the same time. you have female thinness and then male thinness kind of um going about in parallel and shifting according to economic conditions.

Host: Yeah. Um, and when you think about the adoption curve of some of these technologies, especially with the price early on, right, the price has decreased for GLP1s, but early on it was very expensive and became a status symbol of wealth and discipline.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Yeah. And 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 corsetry functioned in Victorian times as a form of bodily discipline and a visible marker of wealth, since you couldn't do manual labor while wearing a tightly laced corset.

Ruby Justice Thelot: 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? um when food is scarce, fatness is wealth; when processed food is abundant, thinness becomes the ultimate luxury.

Host: Did you want to talk about uh wearables or um kind of where that fits in?

Ruby Justice Thelot: 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 is when tracking your biology became an engineering problem.

Host: Yeah. I well I I think the quantified cell thing is is a really interesting call out because that's an example of something where Silicon Valley actually did export a mindset to the broader culture, turning everyday health into a dashboard of metrics.

Host: packaged meal from Whole Foods, boba, a protein bar, you know, all of these things. And they they partnered with this lab in Austin, Texas called Light Labs. And they showed how pervasive microplastics are in everyday packaging, which created a whole new wave of health anxiety.

Host: I just wanted I I just wanted to demo that we we only have uh glass water bottles at the A16Z office. Um, but yeah. Yeah. So I I I I I see it. I also like I I mean it's everywhere.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Same thing, you know, that since since plastic free since 2023 was the was the goal on in our household.

Host: Yeah.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Um I mean we we've I think we're seeing this and

Ruby Justice Thelot: once again another thing that I think is very interesting is um taking a look at social media and how the tide is turning on some of these things. Um and we can track for instance like the rape diet. we can track sentiment around it in the same format that we've seen for um these peptides, the sort of educational content, the lifestyle aspirational content. And based on the distribution of these different kinds, we can kind of see how far how mature a lot of these um trends are. Um and then usually once it's kind of further onto the adoption curve, you kind you see the backlash like you see the truthers come out like oh no rape diet is bad or like actually you should be eating more microplastics. [laughter]

Host: That's going to come in Uh, exact. No, that's Well, that's the inevitable thing. The the 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 ultrarocessed 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 it just like it kind of looks ridiculous. There also to the seed oil point there are um there there's now like seed oil free uh like packaging on on like different snacks and things that you can like buy. So So that has started to make it into the mainstream. I think I think with with seed oil, I think with microlastics, uh the Ray Pete diet, like those are all way too early still. I think for the backlash with the actually I think the the seed oil thing, we have seen backlash to that. But

Ruby Justice Thelot: a good symbol signal that something has kind of made it to the mainstream is when um a characteristic of a food based on one of these trends, right? We talked about peptides. We talked about uh uh uh sort of wellness and quantification. Um part of the wellness/quantification is like protein maxing. Certain foods have always had the same amount of protein, but that same number is now prominently feature featured on on the 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 for the for the brand, for the company to highlight it because they know people are now looking for it.

Host: Yeah. I think well I 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 gram of protein in it and like my you know just like let me drink normal normal beverages please. Um, so, so like I I think people are are starting to kind of like resist having protein shoved down their throat a little bit. Um, but but yeah, that's a great example of like just utter mainstream saturation. Um it it like protein also it's interesting 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 like you know 2x your body weight in protein. It is quite funny. Um I I think um maybe maybe to close out, we we kind of have been just discussing and dancing around as well, which is when it comes to pep diets, when it comes to looks maxing, um when it 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? Um and if we do see a reversal, why would we see it? Um and uh just just wanted to to get your take there.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Yeah. So I mean the interesting thing is from a historical perspective, right? I think we're at a similar point where um England was with the increase of uh the sugar consumption where we've been kind of kneede in processed foods. We've even fast food fast casual. Um I 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. Um and potentially also this association as I said with Deart with intelligence itself um and I think that culturally that's not really going to change for the um 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 uh did blind tests on people with or rings and gave them the wrong number as to what their sleep score was. And when the number was was was lower or negative um they reported having a worse day in spite of the actual true number being correct. And so a lot of these devices, if they're if ever their numbers are incorrect, have a noxious effect on your felt health, at least for that day. Um, and I think I'm seeing a lot of people push back uh against the quantification, adopting more of these like holistic or esoteric ways of um of of knowing the body. I'm seeing a lot of growth in holistic practices from like Reichy or acupuncture or um our other forms of healing um in the same group of people who previously were doing a lot of quantification. And what's interesting when we take a look at trends these days is actually because we're in a let's call it purely right polylithic culture there's multiple kind of frameworks um we're going to see both I think a growth in quantification and more esoteric ways of knowing the self at the same time u whereas I think previously we were kind of all swinging in the same way we're I think we're going to see both at the same time.

Host: Yeah, I I definitely agree with with the like esotericism point. Um, and I I think it relates to acceleration, but it's a different kind of acceleration where it's like it's not 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 clavvicular. People are just going to do increasingly like strange biohacky things and I think like we're just going to see ex like increasingly extreme optimizations happen. Um I kind of do think the next one is going to be in sleep. I think and like like I think and going back to your aura point like um I 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 4 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, um, I think is like something that we're going to see more of. So, so I agree with acceleration, but it's not going to 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 the increasingly like fringe and extreme technology.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Toby wrote his essay body futurism kind of before the big AI boom. Um and he his 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 um AI, what we're seeing is in an age of great abundance, in an age of like potential to 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.

Host: Next few years hopefully hopefully we have more than a few years left. [laughter] I agree. Um well Ruby, thanks so much. Uh this was awesome. Uh, we'll do this again very soon.

Ruby Justice Thelot: Thank you so much.

Host: We're going to work on these legs. That's right. I call it my funky leg workout. I mean, just feel the groove. All right.