GLP-1s Are Making Work Weird(er)

There’s a joke in my family that on days I start working crack-of-dawn early, I’m at higher risk of “hallucinating” by afternoon. Not in the medical sense. In the chatbot sense.

I’m often up before dawn puzzling through reporting and writing this newsletter. And at 5:17 a.m., I’m ninja-sharp. But give me a full day of interviews, studies, Slack, email, Zoom, 37 open tabs, half-written paragraphs, Instagram posts, and by late afternoon, I start to glitch. I forget a word mid-sentence. I text Matt something I’ve already told him twice. I walk into a room and lose the plot.

Context rot.

That’s the term for what happens when an LLM gets overloaded with information and its responses start to degrade. It also describes how I feel after a long day of consuming and synthesizing too much. My “context window” at 5 p.m. is not what it was before breakfast.

So I laughed while reading a new Atlantic piece this week—“Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?”—cataloging the AI vocabulary showing up in human conversations. You used to feel loose or maybe random. Now people describe themselves as “high temperature” when they’re in a say-anything mood. They “update their weights” when they learn something new. And if they can’t answer a question, it simply wasn’t in their “training data.” Guilty here, too: I’ve started telling Matt to “ask Claude” when he poses a question I can’t answer. (The new “Google it.”)

I think it’s pretty shivery that humans are starting to sound like the machines that were taught to sound like us. But at the same time: Isn’t this what language does? We pick it up from the worlds we spend time in. We’ve been spinning our wheels, reinventing them, and switching gears for a long, long time.

I’ll speak for myself. After more than two decades in the fitness and health space, “wellness” words have completely infiltrated the way I talk. I don’t sit with an idea; I metabolize it. I do reps. I pivot between protocols. I flex new muscles, professionally. I get dysregulated by deadlines, and then I need a deload week. I’m probably one sauna away from describing a challenging week as hormetic stress.

We end up talking like whatever we’re around all day. Which can be delightful or dystopian, depending on what fills those hours. So allow me to prompt you? (Gah!) Pay attention to your word choice.

And on the subject of attention: Here’s a beautiful new piece about the poet Mary Oliver (also in The Atlantic), whose life’s work was rooted in the practice of noticing the world around her. Excellent companion reading.

With that, let’s get into the news…

• If you’ve ever wondered how many longevity clinics NYC can support, like I have, the answer is: apparently, more. Neko’s Soho clinic, opening in October, reportedly has a 25,000-person waitlist.

• The Atlantic digs into evidence that men’s average testosterone levels have been falling for decades. Obesity? Chemicals? Less exercise? Changes in how we measure it? There are plenty of theories.

• Vogue has been ramping up its health and fitness coverage recently. Exhibit A: this “Ferritin Face” explainer. I think rebranding iron deficiency as a “beauty” problem is a smart Trojan horse—it may get women to a blood panel faster than fatigue does.

• One in five Americans has used a GLP-1, and the workplace has no playbook for what you’re supposed to say—or definitely not say—about it. This week I guest co-hosted Across the Bar, my friends Peter Rahbar and Laura Brounstein’s awesome workplace and culture podcast, and we discussed GLP-1 office etiquette, employee gyms, and some opinions I typically avoid airing in this newsletter.

• Here’s the NYT on the normalization of needles in Americans’ lives: peptides, GLP-1s, Botox, etc.

• Would you use a skin-darkening, unregulated peptide that’s raised concerns about melanoma? I say heck no, but GQ interviews guys who say yep.

• I came of age in the era of SlimFast, fen-phen and magazine covers promising “Lose 10 Pounds in 2 Weeks!” Today’s teens have social media feeds filled with before-and-afters and GLP-1 journeys. Bloomberg looks at how this iteration of diet culture is shaping how teens think about their bodies.

• Girls are walking into therapy appointments introducing themselves through a diagnosis—ADHD, OCD, anxiety. A psychiatrist’s advice in the NYT: Take therapy-speak seriously, not literally. For example, “I have ADHD” may mean I feel scattered, I’m overwhelmed, or I’m afraid something’s wrong with me.

• Therapists, they’re just like us. Complicated humans with opinions, political leanings, and lives outside each session. The WSJ explores where the line sits between having a worldview and prescribing one.

• This week in plant medicine: Scientific American explains new research about a brain signature for the “oneness” people report on psilocybin—and it may help explain the drug’s therapeutic effects.

• Fitness brands are making moves. Solidcore shakes off the Pilates label with an eye on strength training. Crunch moves boutique studios inside its big-box gyms. And per IG Stories, the Ladder workout app is cooking up some sort of non-gym content with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

• Exhibit B from Vogue: “It’s Time for Brands to Invest in Women Who Lift,” by Grace Cook, who also writes the excellent Salty newsletter. I’m here for it.

• In the name of service journalism, I wrote about constipation for Danimás—how your gut can mess with your lifts, runs, abs, and confidence—and what actually helps.

~HALFTIME~
Woodsy scents are my love language, and Sangre de Fruta may be coming for Aesop’s spot in my bathroom. I can’t stop spraying myself with their Garden of Earthly Delights tonic, which smells like cedar, sandalwood, and bergamot. The directions say to mist it on your “face, linens or lover.”

• Neutrogena responds to backlash over an alleged morality clause invoked after a TV interview that touched on postpartum depression, in the wake of Hayden Panettiere’s death. The company now says it regrets making her feel unsupported.

• The quantified-self optimization era is coming for our pores. Lumeria’s Lumoscope, a $199 clip-on that turns your phone into a clinic-style skin scanner, sold out its first batch in under 24 hours.

• It’s almost U.S. Open time (yesss), and NY Mag says the tournament is getting super schmancy. The signature Honey Deuce will reportedly still cost $23…practically a bargain considering you’ll definitely post a portrait-mode pic of yours. It’d be cool if they’d debut a mocktail version for the non-drinkers; we love melon balls, too!

• One of my favorite swim brands, Left On Friday, just became the first-ever apparel sponsor of Volleyball World’s beach tour. As someone currently learning to whip a sauna towel (aufguss is becoming my personality) around in a bathing suit, I can confirm: their stuff stays put.

• Related: Women’s sports continue to be a very good place to invest your money. Nielsen’s new report says viewership is up 18% year over year, ad spend is up 120% since 2022, and NWSL sponsor valuations are up 82%. LFG!

• This LA Times headline—“The Santa Monification of NYC”—seems specifically designed to bait wellness creators into covering it. So here I am.

• Organic produce, meet artificial intelligence. According to a leaked invitation that went viral, Gwyneth Paltrow is hosting a private, off-the-record Hamptons dinner in honor of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this weekend. Between this and OpenAI’s recent wellness-focused press trip in the Hudson Valley, AI seems pretty interested in courting the wellness world.

• First The New Yorker gave us the sauna-subway cover. Now we have “Before the Plunge.” Message to the art department: I feel seen.

• Degree’s new “Sweat Central” campaign leans into the city’s famously steamy subway platforms, complete with “Boiler Room” signs. Pairs nicely with the explosion of sauna/subway Reels taking over my IG feed.

• I get a lot of great travel ideas on Substack, so it’s cool to see Travel + Leisure joining this platform with a newsletter titled The Fast Track. (They didn’t import their marketing email list; 2K subscriptions so far.) And a heads up: I’ll be speaking about wellness travel at the brand’s World’s Best Summit in London in October. Obviously I’ll conduct BCS research while I’m on the ground.

• Dallas is making a serious play to become a wellness destination. It already has WorldSprings; now Therme is one step closer to building an $850 million resort near downtown.

• I’d like to send a passive-aggressive message to fellow passengers by wearing Lufthansa’s new sweatshirt on my flight to L.A. later this week: “Middle seat gets the armrests.” What a delightful campaign.

Thank you so much for reading! This post required a 4:07 a.m. alarm and used a healthy portion of my context window. If you want to keep BCS coming to your inbox, your paid subscription makes my work possible. ♥️