The Real Story Behind the Internet's Biggest Wellness Trends Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 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. >> 11% of US adults are on GLPs. 90% of Americans have heard of GLPS. >> You want 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.

00:19 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. >> It's not like we're going to be surrounded by like super conventionally hot people.

00:41 Everyone is not going to look like clavvicular. People are just going to do increasingly like strange biohacky things. >> I've made my mission to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what actually is 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

01:20 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.

01:47 >> Yeah, we live in a time of cultural confusion. I'm in a state of confusion. >> 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 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 is called the age of par content and the other one's called the post is the product.

02:14 In the age of paracontent, I sort of present to reduce this idea of paracontent, which is content about content. And what I notice taking a look at video game releases, movie trailers that often times there's more content about content than content itself. meaning we are submerged um by Hera content and we have very very small sort of pieces of thing that we can sort of glum on to um whether that be once again music video or a movie or even a trailer for a video game.

02:44 I think in the essay I talk about the GTA 6 trailer came out last year and what's interesting about par 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 um out of measure and it could feel real in spite of it not actually being grounded in any sort of material reality.

03:08 And so um 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. So, 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.

03:36 And I like I think there there's so many kind of examples that we can point to, but but curious if you have have any favorite examples of like some kind of delta between what we're like like the thing happening and the thing that people are like commenting on. >> 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 children.

04:11 >> What does it mean? I don't even know. >> 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 a look at cont content on reals and um Tik Tok trying to analyze the sentiment across um you know about 2,000 videos people are mostly doing positive dating content about 40%.

04:37 Um and the rest you know the rest that completes the half is fairly neutral. Um, and so I'm always trying to think about, is this thing that I'm hearing just me kind of going crazy, uh, me spending too much time online, or does it actually have any sort of true consumer behaviors behind it? >> Yeah. >> And I think the thing we want to talk about is this whole sort of like wellness peptide um, sort of optimization culture.

05:04 Something that I find very funny is that um a lot of times you'll see San Francisco um taking credit for cultural trends that kind of long predated whatever particular cultural trend is is being spoken about. and and like this this happens I think a lot in San Francisco specifically um because we justifiably get a lot of credit for um exporting kind of technological culture and I think like the way the way in which techn technology like proliferates across the country and across the world is like some interesting new

05:49 trend will either start in the valley or the founders will very quickly move to the valley after they've started their company and kind of scale something first among you know the tech insider crowd and then gradually across the rest of the country and the rest of the world. Um and often times cultural trends are um attributed to the valley too. And I think like like a very very interesting example of that is actually um peptides.

06:22 Um, and it's something that I I think we like sort of saw percolating as a conversation last year where people would talk about, you know, peptide parties or peptide events or like peptide influencers in San Francisco, um, 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 um you know like like bodybuilding communities in the Midwest and or or something like that.

07:01 Like I remember I actually first heard about peptides in Austin, Texas when I was like visiting friends there and everybody was like you know going to some like med spa that was giving them Chinese peptides. So like and and that's that's in kind of the like gray market quasi legal kind of kind of use case and then obviously there's the medical use case of like GLPS.

07:28 Um, but I I think I think it is this like interesting this interesting thing that we're seeing where um 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 like Silicon Valley culture was exporting um this trend, but really it was something that kind of like really started elsewhere and then kind of got um professionalized or kind of got you know accelerated and managed here.

08:09 >> 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 are so rich and multiaceted now that like you'll have a Tik Tok 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.

08:37 Um and so you really have a lot of confusion around okay who first came up with it which sort of subculture did it first. Um when I first encountered peptides, I was thinking to myself like the thing from like biology class in high school, like the chain of amino acids, is that the thing that um people are talking about. Um and then, uh spending a lot of time in New York and there's a lot of these new sort of longevity clinics that have been popping up and that's where I sort of started um starting to see more and we

09:06 have quite a few now at least I would say in at least Manhattan. >> 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 goes to this bigger question of like okay, obviously um obviously people are aware of peptides either they are aware of peptides when it comes to like GLP1s and the more kind of like regulated use cases or they're aware of maybe the gray market.

09:42 they're aware of Chinese peptides and like um you know less regulated and like not not sort of like like FDA approved for a bunch of like other outcomes. You know, people inject some peptides for like you know muscle repair. They inject other ones for like looking more youthful. There are other ones that exist to like for like memory and cognitive function.

10:08 And there are all all these kinds of like other gray market things that people do. Um I think like like it's interesting if you look at the polls. If you look at something like like a Gallup uh like Gallup did a poll um a couple months ago and they found that uh 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 a as we were talking about at the beginning of this there is this like huge gulf between the amount of people who are using the thing and

10:50 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 um 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 Galllet poll for crypto um where 95% of Americans are aware of or have heard of crypto.

11:25 14% own and that's compared to 90% of Americans have heard of GLPs. 11% um 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 um like like one to 10 ratio.

11:56 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. >> 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 JLP1, you know, whether it's the pill or the injection.

12:25 And so the brand presence is really felt strong. I think the average person knows the name of Zampic. They might not know the company who makes it. They might know how to get it. Um, but it always is a conversion from like actually knowing about the thing to setting up your crypto wallet or actually gutting the subscription service. Um, I think of different sort of bodily things in the same way like um plastic surgery as well like people are very well aware because celebrities have been talking about it for a long time

12:50 but my guess is that the actual percentages must is is is around that same sort of coefficient. Um, moreover, for a lot of these issues, when we talk about the body in general, people have lots of opinions, which amplifies uh, 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 ozanic phase.

13:12 And I think 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 uh, on the GLP1. Um and so when I think about the drivers, I think of first and foremost the sort of uh technology being developed itself. I think about the adoption in techcentric markets like San Francisco.

13:34 And then um 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 or high awareness in general, positive or negative, and then sort of low adoption because you know about it, you've talked about it at the bar with your friends, but you might have not actually have tried it.

13:58 >> Why do people take peptides? I know it's an obvious answer maybe, but but you know why why do people take them? >> 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 >> um a first example of like what we're seeing across social media. So, this is um mainly around uh Tik Tok.

14:25 taking a look at um around 960 videos posted between 20 2024 and 2026. Um most of the content was kind of positive. Uh people talked about their weight loss. People talked about how they felt better about themselves. Um a lot of it was still related to bodybuilding. So you saw how that that set of as we talked about before that connection to that original subculture where it originated and um we did see an increase in 2025 and some some to some extent in 2026 of the sort of cont like contestatory content like people

15:03 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 um um one of the most common themes we're seeing in the later years now that it's more popular is uh whether or not there's safety concerns with that. So people are comparing different products, but we're also seeing a lot of is this okay, is this not?

15:22 So there's these questions being asked. Um another very interesting kind of fact looking at all the Tik Tok, well not all the a sample of Tik Tok content posted is this idea that um we're actually seeing a convergence between promotional content and personal experience. 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 oanic and that content starts to like >> um flip or like converge with the uh pro promotional content.

15:51 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. Um 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 play a big part of what people are posting about it because they've seen the ads but they don't know okay I've Serena Williams is

16:19 using it but should I and they're going to Tik Tok to influencers to get um I guess additional trust or additional information about this new um pharmaceutical. Have you have you looked at similar you know user journeys over other trends and and are there breakdowns in in the kind of content or or the kinds of sentiment that you see? >> Yeah. So spent a lot of time looking at um a thing I call parnchnology which is technology that prevents you from using technology.

16:50 We're talking about uh opal uh brick uh young nix pouches like all the different things that you might have around the house that prevent you from using your phone. Um, and because there's such a big sort of I think competitive field right now, people are asking like which one do you use and which one has worked for you. And so you're seeing um everything from like cyber celibacy content which is like lifestyle content almost about like how to live your life without your phone.

17:14 You're seeing days in my life with dumb phones being very popular. And I think once again the pair content there's more content about not using your phone than people truly not using their phones at this >> moment. Well, I was going to say how do they make the videos about them not using their phone? They're >> What are they What are they shooting it on?

17:32 >> Their iPhone 16s, of course. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. >> Um and they're posting it on Instagram, of course. >> Yeah. >> Uh >> 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 stop using your phone. You want to believe that um you can reduce your screen time.

17:52 And there's no better way to feel that way than to by proxy watch someone do it. >> Yeah. >> Um >> Yeah. >> 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 is a very classic one of it. Um a lot of the top influencers we're seeing on TikTok right now that um we're taking a look at are healthy eating influencers both for like simple but also healthy meals.

18:18 Um and they get lots and lots of views. To which extent does that actually reproduce as actual consumer behavior? Well, it's there's a big coefficient there, too. It's aspirational. You want to believe that you can be ely Marico and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day, but >> then you door dash food and >> you call it a day. >> I think it is interesting to to ask um you know, are people actually getting healthier?

18:45 Um, and I I I think there is some evidence that points to yes, on the same poll that I that I looked at around um GLP usage, uh there was also information about the overall uh obesity rate in America and it actually is on the on the decline. Um, so I think there is sort of a 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.

19:21 Maybe an even more sort of socially interesting question is why why do people want want to be thin 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. >> That's a great question.

19:50 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 innocent man kind of appears in the 17th century um after the English really boost the sugar production in their colony of Barbados. Uh 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 know like to be portly was a sign of wealth.

20:21 But as sugar makes its way into England into English society, it starts to its price decreases as the supply of course um increases. And then you start to have sugar at your coffee houses. They start to make something called sack which is a um sweetened wine. and people in England get bigger and bigger and you start to see this um illness called gout develop itself even in the middle classes and so it's Dr.

20:44 Vener in 1620 who comes up with this word obesus you know in the from the Latin which means obese to describe the portly um or or or overweight man which he sees uh as being sort of unhealthy. uh he comes up with some one of the first sort of diets to get people to reduce their weights. Um and through that there's been this association um between unhealthiness kind of like mental dullness as well and fatness.

21:10 Um there's this famous line in in um Shakespeare and Julius Caesar uh where Julius Caesar says let them be fat men around me because he's like they're too dull. They're not going to sort of fight against me. >> 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 kind of like if you take a look at the Venus by Rafael like that's kind of the the shape.

21:38 Um Castion talks about this as like the ideal of female beauty. Um and then as time progresses, as this ideal kind of goes down, as the elites become more aesthetic because they they believe that the restriction of their urges and passions through of course um ordered eating is a sign of control, a sign of intelligence, right? Everyone from Pope to Deart talk about control of one's appetites as a way to display as as a display of intelligence.

22:10 Um and so thinness becomes related to that specific idea of I am good, I am smart. Um 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. >> Yeah. >> Um but what's interesting of course is that you have kind of two pendulums at the same time.

22:31 you have female thinness and then male thinness kind of um going about um and of course at the time the first person the first people to adopt that are the elites right as the masses who were eating sugar sort of remaining kind of poorly. >> 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 GLP1 ones.

22:54 The first people to adopt it were the celebrities, were the people with, you know, were the elites. Uh, and we're seeing kind of the same shape of sort of trickle down trickle down thinness happening right now with like OMIC and whatnot. >> 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 corsets kind of went from an elite fashion item that only like very wealthy people could have to ones that anyone

23:22 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 um 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. Of course used to um be attached by like you know servants 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

23:56 could attach them in the front and you didn't need anybody to like help you do them. Um 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 um 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 ction easier by like making making like like

24:35 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 get the point. Um but um 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 and and kind of how that came about and when that came about and why.

25:10 >> 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 times get tough um we're talking in the two world wars or even in the Great Depression um there there's a cache that starts to red develop around uh poliness 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 they

25:39 kind of gone back almost to the Renaissance idea like like these nice kind of wellproportioned bodies um you know one of the Great example of this is Alrech Durer's um human proportions like this idea of like good proportions as the main definition um but as we enter the '9s as European fashion starts to become more and more important in the American context um a new figure emerges in the supermodel um the supermodel of the '90s comes to redefine femininity specifically um the shape of women and then thinness sort of

26:13 roars back onto the stage as the ideal for women, you know, um famously called like heroin chic. Um uh that becomes the sort of 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. Um and so once again, it kind of swings back and forth.

26:37 Um, and right now it seems like we're swinging back into of course um an age of thinness as driven by this novel technological advancement in the peptide in the GLP1. >> Did you want to talk about uh wearables or um kind of where that fits in? >> 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.

27:01 And so that idea of the quantified self has been with us for like 20 years. And it was a rather futuristic preian vision that Kelly had in calling it that. And I feel like it's only full being fully realized now 20 years later. Um, you have the Fitbit, Apple Watch in 2015. So slowly through proper product development and of course like slow adoption.

27:23 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. So Toby uh 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 we turn the microscope towards oursel and try to optimize and innovate on the body.

27:53 And that's what he calls body futurism. And so when I think about these like dashboards that people have on these apps or um you know waking up going to your longevity clinic um even something like don't die this is like body futures and the the idea that you can use the same tools we did to you know make amazing phones amazing tech um and sort of revolutionize our external world now we're trying to revolutionize our corporal world like our internal world um and our organs and whatnot.

28:22 >> 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 it to the rest of the world like like as far as far as my knowledges and as far as I'm concerned like as you pointed out Kevin Kelly um 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.

28:53 Um, and then it it it gradually became a much much bigger thing and now anyone, you know, can sign up for something like Function Health or like Superpower. Um, anyone can get a DEXA scan or anyone can use like a CGM. I know a lot of people who just kind of buy CDMs that are intended for people with diabetes and and just, you know, use them to monitor their their like blood sugar and what spikes their blood sugar throughout the day and what what should they be eating, what's what should they be avoiding.

29:25 Um there was also um this is this is maybe one step further than quantified self. Um, but there was the group that I think I think was majorly funded by by Nat Freiedman and some other um like bigger names in in tech who took samples from, you know, a bunch of different food products, a bunch of different like delivery items from restaurants and like tested them all for microlastics.

29:57 So it was like >> 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 um did all of these like microplastic tests on them and and like open sourced all of the results and released all of the results. I think there was like and and it also like set off a a kind of like wave which was um they they found a bunch of microplastics in like baby food and so this like one mom went off and she was like okay now I'm

30:35 going to test a bunch more like baby food and baby formula. the medical consensus is still out on are microlastics bad for you or not, but a large enough contingent of smart people in in the Bay Area think that they are bad. And so I think like 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?

31:02 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, microlastic free product. Um, as a result, I think similar similar kind of logic might apply to like other um other food groups or other things that like people are trying to avoid too. Like I there's there's an entire, you know, anti-seed oil movement.

31:33 There are all of these food groups that that get vilified justifiably or not and kind of get a um yeah, just like a movement built around them. And you can really kind of see that reverberate culturally and have a real outsiz impact when it's maybe a much smaller but very loud and committed group that's advancing these things. And absolutely and I think this speaks for the need and I this is definitely going to emerge if hasn't emerged yet like an aggregator of whatever your specific thing that you don't want to do is

32:10 microplastics seed oils like we're going to see these aggregators like goods that are certified like like novel ways of doing like green or organic for these things and sort of self self-run or like group run aggregators who've done the certification and the test and are going to keep on running it on their own and probably their members is going to pay a fee to know that the thing that they are good.

32:29 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 Yepy Elite uh uh portion. Um, but I think that we will see that that kind of trickle down as people get become more and more aware of. >> I just wanted I I just wanted to demo that we we only have uh glass water bottles at the A16Z office.

32:54 Um, but yeah. Yeah. So I I I I I see it. I also like I I make a point to only drink out of glass. >> Same thing, you know, that since since plastic free since 2023 was the was the goal on in our household. >> Yeah. >> Um I mean we we've I think we're seeing this and >> 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.

33:21 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 of you see the backlash like you see the truthers come out like oh no rape diet is bad or like actually you

33:53 should be eating more microplastics. >> 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.

34:19 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.

34:53 But >> 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.

35:24 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. >> 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.

35:46 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.

36:10 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,

36:51 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. >> 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.

37:25 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.

37:57 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.

38:17 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.

38:50 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.

39:14 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.

39:42 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

40:18 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.

40:47 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. >> 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

41:25 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. >> Next few years hopefully hopefully we have more than a few years left. I agree. Um well Ruby, thanks so much. Uh this was awesome. Uh, we'll do this again very soon. >> Thank you so much. >> 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.