How the Internet Turned Biohacking Into a Cultural Obsession

Once we've reached the limits of innovation in silicone, we turn the microscope toward ourselves and try to optimize and innovate on the body.

11% of U.S. adults are on GLP-1s. 90% of Americans have heard of GLP-1s.

You want to believe that you can be ideal and eat salmon, rice, and vegetables every day. Then you DoorDash food and call it a day.

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

1. What Is Paracontent & Why Culture Feels So Confused

I've made it my mission to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what is actually happening in culture. I'm here with Ruby Justice Thelot, an academic and cyberethnographer, and we're here to continue a conversation that we've been having for a little bit about how to actually understand what's going on in the world, especially on the internet, when there's increasingly no real delineation between the internet and the real world.

Ruby, I think a good place to start is a piece you wrote last year on paracontent. From there, I think we can take a step back and get into a couple of topics and things that we've both been paying attention to recently.

Yeah, we live in a time of cultural confusion. I'm in a state of confusion.

So many things are happening. It's so hard to, as you said, disentangle what is real from what is merely amplified by social media or the internet, or merely by our small algorithmic bubbles. I wrote 2 pieces germane to this topic. The first one is called “The Age of Paracontent,” and the other one is called “The Post Is the Product.”

In “The Age of Paracontent,” I sort of present this idea of paracontent, which is content about content. What I noticed, taking a look at video game releases and movie trailers, is that oftentimes there's more content about content than content itself. We are submerged by paracontent, and we have very small pieces of a thing that we can glom onto, whether that be a music video, 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. What's interesting about paracontent is that it can actually take on a life of its own without having any material impact on the real world. People can keep talking about a thing, and it can grow out of proportion. It can be out of measure, and it can feel real in spite of not being grounded in any sort of material reality.

2. How Much Is Actually Happening vs Just Talked About?

I've made it my life's work to cut through the nonsense and answer the question of what is actually happening in culture. 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 wherever?

I think there are so many examples that we can point to, but I'm curious if you have any favorite examples of some kind of delta between the thing happening and the thing that people are commenting on.

Yeah. So many things come to mind. Some things actually do have an incidence in the real world, and “6-7” actually pierces through and becomes a behavior that we see in children.

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

I famously did a piece that got me into a lot of trouble around heteropessimism as well, which is this idea that straight relationships are kind of doomed from the woman's perspective. I took a look at content on Reels and TikTok, trying to analyze the sentiment across about 2,000 videos. People are mostly doing positive dating content—about 40%—and the rest that completes the half is fairly neutral.

I'm always trying to think about whether this thing that I'm hearing is just me going crazy, spending too much time online, or whether it actually has any sort of true consumer behaviors behind it.

Yeah. I think the thing we want to talk about is this whole wellness peptide optimization culture.

3. The Peptide Boom: San Francisco vs the American Heartland

Something I find very funny is that a lot of times you'll see San Francisco taking credit for cultural trends that long predated whatever particular cultural trend is being discussed. This happens a lot in San Francisco specifically because we justifiably get a lot of credit for exporting technological culture.

The way in which technology proliferates across the country and across the world is that 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 scale something first among the tech-insider crowd, then gradually across the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

Oftentimes, cultural trends are attributed to the Valley, too. A very interesting example of that is peptides. It's something that we saw percolating as a conversation last year, when people would talk about peptide parties, peptide events, or peptide influencers in San Francisco, or people using Chinese peptides in general.

A lot of this culture, and a lot of this activity, actually started in the American heartland or in bodybuilding communities in the Midwest. I remember I first heard about peptides in Austin, Texas, when I was visiting friends there, and everybody was going to some med spa that was giving them Chinese peptides.

That's the gray-market, quasi-legal use case, and then obviously there's the medical use case of GLP-1s. I think it's interesting that there were a lot of articles written, especially at the beginning of the year and even into the summer, talking about how tech culture or Silicon Valley culture was exporting this trend. Really, it was something that started elsewhere and then got professionalized, accelerated, and managed here.

No, absolutely. A lot of these novel techniques—now with creatine, I'm seeing it pop up among my non-tech friends as well. The chains of distribution are so rich and multifaceted now that you'll have a TikTok influencer who's doing more classic wellness for women take a product that was used by bodybuilders because she's seen on another blog that it can be used for this or that.

You really have a lot of confusion around who first came up with it and which subculture did it first. When I first encountered peptides, I was thinking to myself, “The thing from biology class in high school—the chain of amino acids—is that the thing people are talking about?”

Then, spending a lot of time in New York, I started seeing more of these new longevity clinics popping up. We have quite a few now, at least in Manhattan.

Yeah. There have even been some fun articles about people experimenting with them. Esther Marcus wrote a good piece on that.

I think this goes to the bigger question of how, obviously, people are aware of peptides. Either they're aware of peptides when it comes to GLP-1s and the more regulated use cases, or they're aware of the gray market. They're aware of Chinese peptides and less-regulated, not FDA-approved uses for a bunch of other outcomes.

People inject some peptides for muscle repair. They inject others to look more youthful. There are others that exist for memory and cognitive function. There are all these other gray-market things that people do.

I think it's interesting if you look at the polls. Gallup did a poll a couple of months ago and found that 11% of U.S. adults are on GLP-1s, while 90% of Americans have heard of GLP-1s. That's interesting because, as we were talking about at the beginning of this, there's this huge gulf between the number of people who are using the thing and the number of people who are aware of the thing and definitely have opinions about the thing.

I did a little bit of searching, and I asked Astra to come up with other things that poll similarly in public opinion, where it's X% aware and Y% have used it. Astra came up with another Gallup poll for crypto, where 95% of Americans are aware of or have heard of crypto, and 14% own it. That's compared with 90% of Americans having heard of GLP-1s and 11% being on GLP-1s.

There were other similar ratios that came up, like VR and meal kits. It's funny because a lot of these categories and things are tech categories, where the amount of users compared with the number of people who know about the thing is roughly a one-to-ten ratio.

Tech culture is so influential that you can have lower incidences of the thing and then a much larger percentage of people who are like, “I definitely have an opinion about this.”

Well, that’s sort of the impact of the marketing machine, right? I live in New York. Every subway has an ad for every single GLP-1 company, whether it’s the pill or the injection, and so the brand presence is really felt strongly. I think the average person knows the name Ozempic. They might not know the company that makes it, but they might know how to get it.

It’s always a conversion from actually knowing about the thing to setting up your crypto wallet or actually getting the subscription service. I think of different bodily things in the same way, like plastic surgery as well. People are very well aware because celebrities have been talking about it for a long time, but my guess is that the actual percentages must be 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. Right now, you can’t really talk about a celebrity without talking about whether or not they have “Ozempic face.” 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 a GLP-1.

When I think about the drivers, I think first and foremost of the technology being developed itself. I think about the adoption in tech-centric markets like San Francisco. Then, when you think about a model for what usually makes these things really stick culturally in terms of brand awareness, if that thing can be picked up by certain celebrities and actually get 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 low adoption.

You know about it, you’ve talked about it at the bar with your friends, but you might not have actually tried it.

4. Why People Actually Take Peptides

Why do people take peptides? I know it’s an obvious answer, maybe, but 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. This is mainly around TikTok, looking at a sample of around 960 videos posted between 2024 and 2026.

Most of the content was positive. People talked about their weight loss and how they felt better about themselves. A lot of it was still related to bodybuilding, so you saw that connection to the original subculture where it originated.

We did see an increase in 2025, and to some extent in 2026, in more contestatory content. People were saying, “It’s kind of a scam. It’s not really working.” A lot of that more negative content was creeping up a little bit. One of the most common themes we’re seeing in the later years, now that it’s more popular, is whether or not there are safety concerns. People are comparing different products, but we’re also seeing a lot of questions about whether something is okay or not.

Another very interesting fact, looking at this sample of TikTok content, is the idea that 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 “day in my life as a person on Ozempic” videos. That content starts to flip, or converge, with the promotional content.

The 3 main categories of content posted about peptides are promotional, personal exploration, and educational, with a fourth category at about 19%: skeptical warnings. We’re seeing a lot of people looking for that education and information so that they can potentially take that next step.

I think the educational and warning content plays a big part in 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?” They’re going to TikTok, to influencers, to get additional trust or additional information about this new pharmaceutical. Have you looked at similar user journeys over other trends? Are there breakdowns in the kind of content or the kinds of sentiment that you see?

Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at a thing I call friction technology, which is technology that prevents you from using technology. We’re talking about Opal, Brick, Yondr pouches—all the different things that you might have around the house that prevent you from using your phone.

Because there’s such a big competitive field right now, people are asking, “Which one do you use, and which one has worked for you?” You’re seeing everything from cybercelibacy content, which is almost lifestyle content about how to live your life without your phone, to “day in my life” videos with dumb phones being very popular.

5. The Filter Farm & the Attention Economy of Wellness

I think, once again, the proxy content is more prevalent. 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 not using their phone? What are they shooting it on?

Their iPhone 16s, of course.

Yeah, exactly.

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

Yeah.

But that kind of content is very popular because, in part, much like with 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. There’s no better way to feel that way than to, by proxy, watch someone do it.

Yeah.

We’re seeing that across many things I would call positive behavioral changes that people want to make in their lives. Healthy eating is a classic one. A lot of the top influencers we’re seeing on TikTok right now are healthy-eating influencers, both for simple and healthy meals. They get lots and lots of views.

To what extent does that actually reproduce as actual consumer behavior?

Well, there’s a big caveat there, too. It’s aspirational. You want to believe that you can be Emily Mariko and eat salmon, rice, and vegetables every day, but then you DoorDash food and call it a day.

I think it is interesting to ask: Are people actually getting healthier? I think there is some evidence that points to yes. On the same poll that I looked at around GLP-1 usage, there was also information about the overall obesity rate in America, and it actually is on the decline.

I think there’s reason to think that some of it is GLP-1 usage. Some of it might even be social media contagion, where people are getting healthier. Maybe an even more socially interesting question is: Why do people want to be thin? Is there a history to that? How does that history connect to technology? How can we understand this moment in the continuum of thinness in general throughout history, or health in general throughout history?

That’s a great question. We actually have these 2 parallel histories. One is thinness in men, and the other is thinness in women.

Thinness in men kind of appears in the 17th century, after the English really boosted sugar production in their colony of Barbados. At the time, sugar was reserved for the upper class. Take a look at any medieval image, or even any sort of medieval media or novel, and you’ll know that being portly was a sign of wealth.

But as sugar makes its way into England, into English society, its price decreases as the supply increases. Then you start to have sugar at your coffeehouses. They start to make something called sack, which is a sweetened wine. People in England get bigger and bigger, and you start to see an illness called gout develop even in the middle classes.

It’s Dr. Venner in 1620 who comes up with this word obesus, from the Latin, which means obese, to describe the portly or overweight man whom he sees as being unhealthy. He comes up with one of the first diets to get people to reduce their weight. Through that, there’s been this association between unhealthiness, mental dullness, and fatness.

There’s a famous line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar where Julius Caesar says, “Let them be fat men around me,” because he’s saying they’re too dull. They’re not going to fight against me.

That’s funny. What’s interesting is that at the time, you actually see this fluctuation. You start with the Renaissance—if you take a look at the Venus by Rafael, that’s kind of the shape. Castiglione talks about this as the ideal of female beauty.

Then, as time progresses and this ideal changes, the elites become more ascetic because they believe that the restriction of their urges and passions, through ordered eating, is a sign of control—a sign of intelligence. Everyone from Pope to Descartes talks about control of one’s appetites as a way to display intelligence.

And so thinness becomes related to that specific idea: “I am good, I am smart.” Then that also gets encoded in fashion. 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.

Yeah.

But what’s interesting, of course, is that you have 2 pendulums at the same time. You have female thinness and then male thinness kind of going on, and of course, at the time, the first people to adopt that are the elites, right, while the masses who were eating sugar sort of remained kind of portly.

Yeah. 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 GLP-1s. The first people to adopt them were the celebrities, the people who were the elites. And we’re seeing the same shape of trickle-down thinness happening right now with Ozempic and whatnot.

Yeah. I think the other thing that’s funny is that I was reading, actually, about the history of corsets specifically and the way in which corsets went from an elite fashion item that only very wealthy people could have to ones that anyone could have. It was a combination of both, obviously, the invention of the loom and the sewing machine, and of turning sewing machines into an entire industrial manufacturing process, orchestrating manufacturing around a bunch of people sewing in the same place and creating lots of corsets.

Of course, corsets used to be attached by servants or your lady-in-waiting, who would do the back for you and do the lacing. Then, at a certain point, they started designing them so you could attach them in the front and didn’t need anybody to help you put them on.

All of these technological innovations—creating the factory to mass-manufacture the corsets and redesigning the corset so it could be put on individually rather than with somebody’s help—and this is way too much of a stretch, but the analogy is to compounding GLP-1s and making injections easier by giving you your GLP-1 in pill form or in a pre-injected thing rather than a needle that you have to brutally put into yourself or have your significant other do for you. That is way too much of a stretch of an analogy, but you get the point.

Anyway, I think we ended at fashion, and then you wanted to talk about the birth of the supermodel: how that came about, when that came about, and why.

Yeah. What’s interesting is that we see the mores around thinness shift based on the economic situations, specifically in the West. When times get tough—we’re talking about the 2 world wars or even the Great Depression—there’s a cachet that starts to redevelop around plumpness as an indication of health, because people were starving, of course.

In the postwar period, in the baby boom, you kind of see—take a look at a beach image—people have almost gone back to the Renaissance idea, with these nice, well-proportioned bodies. One of the great examples of this is Albrecht Dürer’s human proportions, this idea of good proportions as the main definition.

But as we enter the 1990s, as European fashion starts to become more and more important in the American context, a new figure emerges: the supermodel. The supermodel of the 1990s comes to redefine femininity, specifically the shape of women, and thinness sort of roars back onto the stage as the ideal for women.

Famously called “heroin chic,” that becomes the ne 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 wear their clothes. And so, once again, it kind of swings back and forth. Right now, it seems like we’re swinging back into an age of thinness, driven by this novel technological advancement in the peptide, in the GLP-1.

6. Wearables, Oura Rings & the Rise of the Quantified Self

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

So wearables are very interesting. The Fitbit launched in 2007. That same year, Kevin Kelly, in Wired, said it was the year of the quantified self. That idea of the quantified self has been with us for 20 years. 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 Apple Watch in 2015. So, slowly, through proper product development and slow 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 Shorin. Toby wrote this essay a few years ago, and I always thought it was wonderful. He says, “Once we’ve reached the limits of innovation in silicon, we turn the microscope toward ourselves and try to optimize and innovate on the body.” That’s what he calls body futurism.

When I think about these dashboards that people have on these apps, or waking up and going to your longevity clinic, even something like Don’t Die, this is body futurism: the idea that you can use the same tools we used to make amazing phones and amazing tech and sort of revolutionize our external world. Now we’re trying to revolutionize our corporeal world—our internal world, our organs, and whatnot.

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

Anyone can get a DEXA scan or use a CGM. I know a lot of people who just buy CGMs intended for people with diabetes and use them to monitor their blood sugar, what spikes their blood sugar throughout the day, what they should be eating, and what they should be avoiding.

There was also—this is maybe one step further than quantified self—the group that I think was majorly funded by Nat Friedman and some other bigger names in tech, who took samples from a bunch of different food products and delivery items from restaurants and tested them all for microplastics. So it was like—

A packaged meal from Whole Foods, boba, a protein bar—all of these things. And they partnered with this lab in Austin, Texas, called Light Labs. They did all of these microplastic tests on them, open-sourced all of the results, and released all of the results.

I think there was also a kind of wave that it set off: they found a bunch of microplastics in baby food, and so one mom went off and said, “Okay, now I’m going to test a bunch more baby food and baby formula.” The medical consensus is still out on whether microplastics are bad for you or not, but a large enough contingent of smart people in the Bay Area think that they are bad.

I think paying attention to that is very interesting. 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 way more advancements in consumer testing or lab technology as a result. You’re probably going to see more microplastic-free products as a result.

7. How Small Bay Area Communities Reshape the Whole Culture

There’s a similar kind of logic that might apply to other food groups or other things that people are trying to avoid, too. There’s an entire anti-seed-oil movement. There are all of these food groups that get vilified, justifiably or not, and kind of get a movement built around them. You can really 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.

And absolutely. I think this speaks to the need—and this is definitely going to emerge if it hasn’t emerged yet—for an aggregator of whatever your specific thing that you don’t want to do is: microplastics, seed oils. We’re going to see these aggregators, goods that are certified, like novel ways of doing green or organic for these things, and self-run or group-run aggregators that have done the certification and the testing and are going to keep running it on their own. Probably their members are going to pay a fee to know that the thing they’re getting is good.

Anecdotally, if you go to Whole Foods, the water bottles are glass. You’re already seeing that, I think, in, once again, sort of the yuppie elite portion. But I think that we will see that kind of trickle-down as people become more and more aware of it.

I just wanted to note that we only have glass water bottles at the a16z office.

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

Same thing—going plastic-free in 2023 was the goal in our household.

Yeah.

Once again, another thing that I think is very interesting is taking a look at social media and how the tide is turning on some of these things. We can track, for instance, the Ray Peat diet. We can track sentiment around it in the same format that we've seen for these peptides: the educational content, the lifestyle aspirational content. Based on the distribution of these different kinds of content, we can see how far along and how mature a lot of these trends are. Usually, once it's further along the adoption curve, you see the backlash—you see the truthers come out, like, “Oh no, the Ray Peat diet is bad,” or, “Actually, you should be eating more microplastics.”

That's going to come in. Exactly. No, that's the inevitable thing. The thing that I find very funny is that I think you've already started to see that happen with seed oils, where people are like, “No, actually, ultra-processed food is really good for you.” You see certain trade groups trying to make the point that seed oils are good for you, and it just looks ridiculous. Also, to the seed oil point, there is now seed-oil-free packaging on different snacks and things that you can buy. So that has started to make it into the mainstream. I think seed oils, microplastics, and the Ray Peat diet are all way too early for the backlash. With seed oils, though, I think we have seen backlash to that.

A good signal that something has made it to the mainstream is when a characteristic of a food based on one of these trends becomes prominent. We talked about peptides, and we talked about wellness and quantification. Part of the wellness and quantification trend is 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 much more aware of how much protein they're consuming. It hasn't changed; the product is the same. But from a marketing standpoint, it makes sense for the brand or the company to highlight it because they know people are now looking for it.

8. Peptides & Looksmaxing: Are We Accelerating or Backlashing?

Yeah. I think protein is such a good example of this because it's also starting to fall victim to what you called out: people feeling utter protein fatigue. They're like, “My water doesn't need 20 grams of protein in it. Let me drink normal beverages, please.” People are starting to resist having protein shoved down their throats a little bit. But yeah, that's a great example of utter mainstream saturation. Protein is also interesting because it's gone through a lot of cycles. It was introduced in various forms: there was the Atkins diet, then keto, and now it's just, “Get a bunch of protein”—2× your body weight in protein. It is quite funny. Maybe to close out, we've been discussing and dancing around the question of whether, when it comes to peptide diets, looksmaxxing, and all of these things, we're just going to accelerate forever, or whether we're going to see some kind of backlash and reversal. If we do see a reversal, why would we see it? I wanted to get your take there.

Yeah. The interesting thing, from a historical perspective, is that I think we're at a similar point to where England was with the increase in sugar consumption. We've been knee-deep in processed foods, including fast food and fast casual. I think we'll see, for the foreseeable future, a big push to revert back and to see health as a form of virtue, as a form of radical self-care, and as proof that someone cares about themselves. Potentially, there's also an association, as I said, with health and with intelligence itself. I don't think that's really going to change for the foreseeable future.

On the quantification part, I'm seeing 2 things break apart. There was recently a study that did blind tests on people with Oura rings and gave them the wrong number for their sleep score. When the number was lower or negative, they reported having a worse day, despite the actual number being correct. So if these devices give incorrect numbers, they have a deleterious effect on your felt health, at least for that day. I'm seeing a lot of people push back against quantification and adopt more holistic or esoteric ways of knowing the body. I'm seeing a lot of growth in holistic practices, from Reiki and acupuncture to other forms of healing, among the same group of people who previously did a lot of quantification.

What's interesting when we look at trends these days is that, because we're in a, let's call it, pluralistic culture, with multiple frameworks, we're going to see both a growth in quantification and more esoteric ways of knowing the self at the same time. Whereas previously we were all swinging in the same direction, I think we're going to see both at the same time.

9. The Next Frontier: Sleep, Body Futurism & the Post-AI Body

Yeah, I definitely agree with the esotericism point. I think it relates to acceleration, but it's a different kind of acceleration. It's not that we're going to be surrounded by conventionally hot people who all look the same, who all have the same plastic surgery, the same Botox, or who are all injecting the same peptides. Everyone is not going to look like Clavicular. People are just going to do increasingly strange, biohacky things, and I think we're going to see increasingly extreme optimizations happen. I do think the next one is going to be sleep.

I've been talking with some hardware founders and some founders who are building wearable devices that allow you to get what feels like the equivalent of a full night's rest in 4 hours or something like that. People who are trying to achieve longevity not necessarily by living longer, but simply by having more hours awake in the day—that's something we're going to see more of. So I agree with acceleration, but it's not going to look like people getting hotter or even necessarily having healthier outcomes. It's going to look like people optimizing themselves in the direction they want to, with increasingly fringe and extreme technology.

Toby wrote his essay “Body Futurism” before the big AI boom. His idea was more that, once we ran out of things to do with silicon, we would move toward the body. I think now, in the age of AI, what we're seeing is that, in an age of great abundance and 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 over the next few years.

The next few years? 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.

Thank you so much.

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