a16z podcast: scoring thousands of TikToks to separate real trends from manufactured ones
a16z · x · 2026-09-15
Cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot joins a16z's Elena Burger to explain scoring thousands of TikToks by category and sentiment to measure what people do versus what they post. Applied to the wellness boom: why Silicon Valley gets credit for the peptide trend it didn't start, 400 years of thinness, quantified-self people turning to energy healing, and the body as the last thing left to optimize once AI handles the rest.
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