Body by Podcast

With their focus on personal optimization, podcasters and streamers have ushered in a new male beauty standard that is tanned, jacked, and ridiculously square-jawed. What comes after supplements, testosterone therapy, and mouth exercises? We visited the Beverly Hills office of the manosphere's favorite plastic surgeon to find out.

- By JOSHUA HUNT

ON A WARM evening in May of 2024, Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old tech entrepreneur who has spent millions of dollars attempting to reverse his biological age, hosted a dinner party. In attendance were Kim and Khloé Kardashian, their mother, Kris Jenner, and Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist whose podcast, Huberman Lab, discusses how scientific research can be harnessed for personal improvement for an audience of millions.

At Johnson's home in Venice, California, his guests ate broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, and pudding made from walnuts, berries, pomegranate juice, macadamia nuts, and cinnamon. The meal was documented by the Kardashians' camera crew, and when snippets from the evening were posted to social media, the default response seemed to be confusion: Fans of Huberman, whose appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience helped vault him to celebrity, imagined the burly, bearded academic leaving early to grab a steak. One Instagram user summed up the cognitive dissonance by saying it looked like an "AI generated evening," while another called it "the collab nobody asked for." But someone had asked for it, and that person was the celebrity plastic surgeon Jason Diamond.

The dinner itself was a rich text for anyone interested in charting the shifting sources of ideas about how bodies should look. Here were two prominent voices from the ascendant, phallocentric world of podcasting, where an urge to get square-jawed and kettlebell-yoked rises out of wide-ranging chitchat, alongside two women whose bodies were among the most scrutinized and idealized during the last decade of cable television's cultural significance. (Kim Kardashian is a recipient of Diamond's bespoke laser and platelet-rich plasma Diamond InstaFacial procedure.) What most fascinated and confounded me, though, was the fact that an old-school Beverly Hills plastic surgeon seemed to be the bridge connecting the previous paradigm to something new.