The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot

0:00Once we've reached the limits of innovation in silicon, we turn the microscope towards ourselves and try to optimize and innovate on the body.

0:07Elena Burger:11 % of U.S. adults are on GLPs. 90 % of Americans have heard of GLPs. You want to believe that you can be Emily Mariko and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. Then you door dash food and you call it that. 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 O-rings and gave them the wrong number. They reported having a worse day in spite of the actual true number being correct. It's not like we're going to be surrounded by, like, super conventionally hot people. Everyone is not going to look, like, clavicular.

0:50Elena Burger:People are just going to do increasingly, like, strange biohackies. things. I've made my mission to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what actually is happening in the culture. 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 Thilo 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.

1:32From GOP-1s and peptides to oral rings, microplastics, and protein, they trace how niche behaviors become cultural conversations and sometimes eventually become mainstream behavior. 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.

2:04Elena Burger:I'm here with Ruby Justice Thaloux, 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 topics and things that we've both been paying attention to recently.

2:48Yeah, we live in a time of cultural confusion.

2:57So 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 germane to this topic. The first one is called The Age of Pair Content and the other one is called The Post is the Product. In the age of para-content, I sort of present to 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.

3:30Meaning we are submerged by para-content and we have very, very small sort of pieces of thing 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 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.

4:06And 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.

4:17Elena Burger: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. 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.

4:59What does it mean? I don't even know. No. It's that. It's that. I famously did a piece that got me into a lot of trouble around hetero pessimism 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 2000 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?

5:34Or does it actually have any sort of true consumer behaviors behind it?

5:38Elena Burger:Yeah. And I think the thing we want to talk about is this whole sort of like wellness peptide sort of optimization culture. 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 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.

6:44Elena Burger: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 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.

7:41Elena Burger: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. 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. No, absolutely.

8:25I 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?

9:04and then 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 to see more. And we have quite a few now, at least I would say, and at least in Manhattan.

9:17Elena Burger: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 youthful.

9:58Elena Burger: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 a Gallup. Like, Gallup did a poll a couple months ago, and they found that 11 % of U.S. adults are on GLPs. 90 % of Americans have heard of GLPs. Now, 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 using the thing and the amount of people who are aware of the thing and definitely have opinions about the thing.

10:47Elena Burger:I also did a little bit of searching and I asked Astra to come up with like other things that poll similarly in like public opinion where it's like X percent is aware and Y percent has used. And Astra said Astra came up with another Gallup poll for crypto where 95 percent of Americans are aware of or have heard of crypto, 14 percent own. And that's compared to 90 percent of Americans have heard of GLPs. 11 percent are on GLPs. There were other similar ratios that came up like VR meal kits. So it's funny because 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 one to ten ratio.

11:50Elena Burger: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. 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 has really felt strong. I think the average person knows the name of Zempick. 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 gutting the subscription service 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 around that same sort of coefficient.

12:47Moreover 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 Ozampic phase. 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 the GLP-1. 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.

13:26And 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 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 not actually have tried it.

13:50Elena Burger:why do people take peptides? I know it's an obvious answer maybe, but, you know, why do people take them? Well, let me pull out some data that I spent the week crunching on what people are saying about peptides online as a first example of 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 set of, as we talked about before, that connection to that original subculture where it originated.

14:45and we did see an increase in 2025 and to some extent in 2026 of the sort of 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, not that it's more popular, is whether or not there are 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, but a sample of TikTok content posted is this idea that we're actually seeing a convergence between promotional content and personal experience.

15:29At 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 starts to like flip 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. And so we're seeing, I think, a lot of people looking for that education, looking for that information so that 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, Serena Williams is using it, but should I?

16:13And they're going to TikTok to influencers to get, I guess, additional trust or additional information about this new pharmaceutical.

16:22Elena Burger:Have you looked at similar, you know, user journeys over other trends and are there breakdowns in the kind of content or the kinds of sentiment that you see? yeah so spent a lot of time looking at um a thing i call paratechnology which is technology that prevents you from using technology we're talking about uh opal uh brick uh youngness 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.

17:05You're seeing days in my life with dumb phones being very popular. And I think, once again, the pair of content, there's more content about not using your phone than people truly not using their phone.

17:13Elena Burger:Yeah, well, I was going to say, how do they make the videos about them not using your phone? What are they shooting it on? Their iPhone 16s, of course. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're posting it on Instagram, of course. Yeah, yeah. But that kind of content is very popular because in part, much like with the weight loss, it's aspirational. You want to believe that you can stop using your phone. You want to 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. Yeah. And so we're seeing that across many sort of what I would call like positive behavioral change that people want to do in their lives.

17:58It'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 does that actually reproduce as actual consumer behavior? Well, there's a big coefficient there too. It's aspirational. You want to believe that you can be Emily Mariko and eat salmon and rice and vegetables every day. But then you door dash food and you call it that.

18:30Elena Burger:I think it is interesting to ask, you know, are people actually getting healthier? And I think there is some evidence that points to yes. On the same poll that I looked at around GLP usage, there was also information about the overall obesity rate in America. And it actually is 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 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?

19:24Elena Burger: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. 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 thinnest in 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 but as sugar makes its way into england into english society it starts to its price decreases as the supply of course increases.

20:19And then you start to have sugar at your coffee houses. They start to make something called sack, 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. Vener in 1620 who comes up with this word obesus, 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 one of the first sort of diets to get people to reduce their weights. And through that, there's been this association between unhealthiness, kind of like mental dullness as well, and fatness.

21:05There's this famous line in Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, 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 oh 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 um castiglione talks about this is like the ideal of female beauty um and then as time progresses as this ideal kind of goes down as the elites become more ascetic because 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?

21:52Everyone from Pope to Descartes talk about control of one's appetites as a way to display, as a display of intelligence. And so thinness becomes related to that specific idea of I am good, I am smart and then that also gets encoded in fashion like when you think about a Victorian corset that is 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 people to adopt that are the elites as the masses were eating sugar sort of remaining kind of poorly.

22:39And when you think about the adoption curve of some of these technologies, especially with the price early on, 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 a same shape of sort of trickle-down thinness happening right now with like a Zempic and whatnot.

22:56Elena Burger:Yeah, well, and I think the other thing that's funny is like 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 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. Corsets used to 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.

23:44Elena Burger: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 factory to mass manufacture the corsets and like redesigning the corset so it could be, you know, put on individually rather than like with somebody's help. And like this is way too much of a stretch, but the analogy is compounding of GLPs and, you know, making injection easier by like making, like giving you, you know, 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.

24:39Elena Burger:That is like way too much of a stretch of an analogy, but like you got the point. But anyway, so I think we were talking, we ended kind of at fashion and then you wanted to talk about like then the birth of the supermodel and kind of how that came about and when that came about and why. 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's a cache that starts to redevelop around poorliness as a form of indication of health because people were starving, of course.