Your Body Is Not a Protocol. It's a Practice | Toby Shorin

I wanted to get started with the essay you wrote called Body Futurism.

I wanted to chat through what its argument is and this idea of the body as an asset.

And of course, this is against the backdrop of peptides and clavicular and looks maxing and Brian Johnson, who we had on this podcast.

As you wrote in your essay, builders are becoming bodybuilders.

In the age of AI and everything that's going to change about money, is the body the asset that sets us apart?

The overall argument, there's sort of two parts to the essay.

One is just overwhelming people with examples of this overall embodied turn in culture happening.

So a bit more close to my normal cultural analysis style.

showing everywhere from from pop culture to tech culture to hippie culture there is this like massive uh turn towards the body that that has been happening and it gets into a little bit of why that has been happening too there's many reasons for it the covid swing back people getting tired of like lifestyle companies trying to move towards practices instead of like products as a kind of organizing model for consumer behavior, which is something I discussed in a previous essay, Life After Lifestyle.

And then a big one is there's also a lot happening in the academy.

So there has been a movement towards

concepts of personhood that are understood as being embedded in all sorts of social and environmental affordances, and these are currently out-competing older, more straightforwardly dualistic mind-body kinds of...

Like Descartes.

Yeah, Descartes, although there's other versions of that too.

So there's been an embodied turn in the academy as well.

And that's not something I really got into in the essay, but it's everywhere.

And so that's the first part of the essay.

The second part of the essay talks about how we could orient to this embodied turn and the different paths that it might take from a kind of protocolized and scripted view on the body or way of relating to the body to a profoundly free way of relating to the body.

Let's start there.

So bro science, people experimenting on themselves, injecting themselves with quote unquote Chinese peptides, one in eight Americans trying GLP-1.