00:00:10.900That thing, that thing that's at the top of your body, the front of your head.
00:00:16.800I gotta tell you, I feel pretty good about mine, but the paradox is that as I've reached
00:00:22.920my mid-40s, I am both simultaneously intensely secure about myself and also intensely vain,
00:00:32.660which means that I love myself and I also am totally okay with doing pretty much anything
00:00:38.360to my body that makes me feel even better about myself. Look, beauty standards have been bananas
00:00:46.480for women since the beginning of women and beauty standards, okay? But they've gotten really0.99
00:00:52.780out of control with the saturation of social media. And let's not forget, you know, all of
00:00:58.060the Zoom meetings that we take all the time where we're constantly staring at our own faces.
00:01:04.020I make everything a phone call, by the way, because I don't want to look at myself. You could be like,
00:01:09.120oh, just look at other people. No one does that. Okay. Everyone is staring at themselves on those
00:01:13.460screens. Today, we're talking about what digital culture has done to our standards of beauty
00:01:18.820and to our wallets when we have to spend to reach those standards of beauty.
00:01:24.080How have social media and digital platforms increased the pressure on all of us to look
00:01:30.660better? And not even better sometimes, sometimes just different. Increased this pressure on all
00:01:36.060of us to look different if we have the money to do it. Today we're talking to Elise Hu.
00:01:42.760She's a journalist who used her time as a correspondent for NPR in Korea as a jumping-off point for her book Flawless, Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital.
00:01:54.700She's also the host of TED Talks Daily and the new co-host of one of my favorite podcasts with my good friend Dori Shafrir, Forever 35.
00:02:05.420I'm very excited to have Elise on today to talk about my face.
00:02:08.920hey everyone i am elise hue i am the child of immigrants a mother a sister a friend a convener
00:02:20.960i love to throw theme parties where people dress up i love food on sticks and uh for a for my
00:02:30.140entire life I've been a big fan of like chili dogs the Costco dollar 50 hot dog and drink meal
00:02:39.000yes yes and I spent a lot of my leisure time just trying to get people together outdoors
00:02:47.460indoors at bars at parks at parties um if my the one thing I wanted my tombstone
00:02:54.980when I die which is hopefully in a long time is all her friends became friends
00:03:00.140oh my god I just got chills I love that it means a lot to me I mean that is so good and you know
00:03:07.940what I mean sometimes it will not happen because there are friends that are never going to be
00:03:10.860friends that's true but but you know I I too am a convener like I too want people to gather
00:03:19.420be it at my house yep in a park I just like I want I want all of my friends to be friends with
00:03:26.180each other. So I'm like, that was a really great introduction because I just, I love everything
00:03:32.540about that, including food on sticks. Or just giant turkey legs you can get at like Renaissance
00:03:40.360fairs. I'll walk around with that. It's food on a bone, really. I mean, it's food. A drumstick.
00:03:46.840A drumstick, like food that is easy to walk around with. That's right. I don't ever want
00:03:52.140to be at a party balancing both a drink and a plate yeah it's so much it's so so much i just
00:03:58.100need it to be on a bone or or on a stick that makes it just makes life better it really does
00:04:03.940and in fact i do think that food on a stick is an underrated food group food group really you know
00:04:10.780yeah section amazing subcategory but i have discovered a social hack for when you do need
00:04:17.380a high top table. I like to sort of find an empty space at a high top table at a party where there's
00:04:24.000already people standing around. But because I'm so like flustered with trying to hold my drink
00:04:29.780and my plate, they can't help but offer me a little space at their table because I look
00:04:35.000disorganized and a mess. And so when I manage to join a table that's already in progress,
00:04:42.280I end up meeting all sorts of strangers that I would have never otherwise met,
00:04:45.820which is a great opportunity at a party totally yeah it's a great way to like kind of like
00:04:51.020you know especially at a party where you don't know anyone anyone a great way to just kind of
00:04:55.760like shoehorn your way into a group that's what i do that's my that's my hack that's your hack
00:05:00.920because it's like i'm a hot mess i need i need your table and hi i'm released so i just did this
00:05:07.940yesterday and i met this great tv director whose name is um black horse and i'm like yes oh well
00:05:15.680then yeah yeah i'm friends with black horse now you're friends with black horse and you never
00:05:20.220would have been friends with black horse if you hadn't needed a high top table that's right
00:05:23.120great that's right yeah these are these are all excellent life hacks all excellent life hacks
00:05:27.020um and costco the costco hot dog meal i'm sorry i mean i love costco we are late comers to costco
00:05:34.580i also know dory who you also work with loves costco and i mean it just it has changed my life
00:05:41.780I, you know, it's completely changed how I buy groceries.
00:08:19.180So I was a TV news reporter in local markets that took me to places I would have never otherwise been.
00:08:25.660And eventually wound up doing a digital startup in Austin called the Texas Tribune, which is still around, and then getting hired away to work at NPR, which is where most of my career has been.
00:08:36.820And NPR sent me abroad to open its first ever Korea and Japan Bureau.
00:08:49.380Repatriated here to Los Angeles, where we are and where all the great Costco's are.
00:08:54.080and um have since become a host for hire so my steady eddies are ted talk daily which comes out
00:09:03.720every day and is the flagship podcast for ted and kind of the ted talks brand and then i co-host
00:09:09.220forever 35 now with dori shafir who is a good friend of yours and one of your co-hosts as well
00:09:13.500she hasn't too much money so yeah we have a great time i have some other podcasts uh that i host for
00:09:19.180like runs here and there, you know, for a season. Right, right. Yeah. Same, same girl. Yeah. And
00:09:25.780then last year, I like dip my toe in the arduous and painful process of putting out a book. I have
00:09:31.600a nonfiction book about my time in Korea and just about how digital standards and technology are
00:09:37.120changing what we expect of our bodies and changing what we do to our bodies. And that's called
00:09:40.880Flawless Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. Yeah, no. And that is, I mean,0.83
00:09:46.360I want to dig into that today because I love, love this book and love talking about, you know, what digital culture has done to our standards of beauty, what it does to our wallet when we think that we have to spend to hit these standards of beauty.
00:10:12.460When did you know that you wanted to write this book?
00:10:16.360Probably when I left and I felt as though I hadn't done enough reporting and illuminating the giant gender disparity in South Korea, the really patriarchal norms, and then how it played out for women.
00:10:34.500Because when I left Seoul at the end of 2018, that was the same year that Me Too had really erupted internationally, right?
00:10:43.560And then the way that it manifested in South Korea was that it was in the form of online and in-person rallies.
00:10:52.480So there were the largest women's rights rallies in Korean history happening in 2018.
00:10:58.800It was 50,000 women on the streets, then 60,000, and then 90,000 by the time I came home.
00:11:06.380And the reason I wasn't able to cover a single one was because that was also during the Trump presidency when him and Kim Jong-un were doing like, my nuclear button is bigger than yours.
00:11:17.960And then Kim Jong-un was like, I'm going to bracket Guam, which is a U.S. territory with my intercontinental ballistic missiles.
00:11:25.080And so the news imperative, the hard news imperative in the U.S. was constantly like cover this muscular national security stuff, like be hard news.
00:11:33.500But I think it ignored and kind of I had to cover these sort of like provocations instead of what was actually an arguably just as big, if not bigger social story happening on the ground with women in South Korea.
00:11:52.480And so I felt like I really had unfinished business because, and this became the thesis of Flawless, South Korea and those women were kind of a canary in the coal mine for what we ended up seeing and are seeing here in the West and all over the world, which is like that our expectations for ourselves and how we're supposed to look are getting dramatically shifted.
00:12:14.040And like the bar is only being raised by filters and by seeing ourselves on screens all the time and being able to fix our images on screen.0.57
00:12:21.960Being able to fix our images on screen, that's what gets me.
00:12:25.800Because when we can fix our images on the screen, then we look at ourselves in the mirror and we're like, why am I so busted?
00:12:51.960You spent so much time in Korea. As you said, you were covering the quote unquote hard news, the things that are very important. But I will say, I think that this is also incredibly, incredibly important. Now, in a lot of ways, what you were seeing in Korea was happening a little bit earlier than it was happening in the U.S. with regards to digital media creating completely bananas standards of beauty. Talk to me a little bit about that.
00:13:20.500South Korea is the world's first fully wired nation.
00:13:23.280They had broadband internet, a national broadband internet by the early 1990s.
00:13:28.300Fastest internet speeds in the world in 2015 when I moved there.
00:13:32.260So I would be deep in the bowels of the subway and never lose connection if I was streaming.
00:15:04.260Well, they were pioneers in all of this.
00:15:07.200And it's an example of how like people were streaming and streaming themselves all the time.
00:15:11.040And as a result, you know, there's that. This is what I call the technological gaze or the artificial gaze. Like we're used to playing for the male gaze and criticizing the male gaze. But the artificial gaze is doing it for the algo, right? It's doing it for this algorithmically driven perspective that we perform for. And then by taking in all our data, it learns to perform us. And it's this endless feedback loop that we learn so young.
00:15:39.92080% of 13-year-old girls, according to a Dove survey, have already been using filters for photo editing to change their appearance.
00:15:46.640And so I was seeing a lot of this in Seoul because it was such a technologically connected society.
00:15:53.020But also, it's the cosmetic surgery capital of the world.
00:15:55.960Four times more plastic surgeons per capita than the United States.
00:16:00.080and South Korean women, by the time they're college aged, more than half have said they've
00:16:05.460already undergone some cosmetic surgery. So it's very normalized. It's very accessible. It's not
00:16:10.600as expensive. It's like a quarter of the cost because it's such a saturated market. And so
00:16:14.620everybody is just kind of like upgrading their appearance all the time. And that I argue is
00:16:19.280also a form of technology, right? It's like a totally biomedical and like engineering advances
00:16:25.640and innovations that allow for us to like change our jawlines and contour our noses and reshape
00:16:31.100our skulls and all those things. And that's happening in Seoul too. So you're changing
00:16:35.000expectations of your body because of all the filters and the screen time, but then you're
00:16:39.760also actually changing what is possible to modify about your bodies, right? Because they're
00:16:47.220constantly inventing new lasers and new procedures and new fillers and injectables and all the
00:16:54.200things and you know this it's very very real and i think back to my god 15 years ago when i was
00:17:02.260doing a lot of like talking head stuff on tv um you know because i was a celebrity journalist so
00:17:08.180i was on all on all the shows doing doing soundbite talking about you know brangelina
00:17:13.320yeah yeah kardashian things early kardashian things and so i had to see my face on tv a lot
00:17:19.200there were not that many like in your normal life you would not see your face that much unless you
00:17:23.720were looking in the mirror not back then not back then no no no no this these were normal times
00:17:28.180normal times but like and so after i started seeing my face so much i started hating my nose
00:17:32.160hating it i was like it's got this bump it's more it was like crooked so if you see me from a like
00:17:38.560certain angle i just like i hated it i was also like in like my miserable single phase at the
00:17:43.260time so i got a nose job um and i will say i love my nose okay freak it like that's so super happy
00:17:50.260with the nose job whatever but like that was just from my exposure to seeing myself on television
00:17:55.900for maybe a total of 20 minutes a week wow and like so but now we live with our faces on the
00:18:04.280screens i mean i just got off four hours of zoom calls where i had to stare at my face and you know
00:18:09.640for podcasts too we're supposed to record video now which i am so against i'm like i did not want
00:18:14.080to make i did not get into this to make a talk show friend i got in this to make an audio show
00:18:18.720but not a video show um and then you know with the facetimes and the instagrams and the tiktoks
00:18:24.800so like i can totally totally sympathize that this makes you want to change everything about
00:18:31.020yourself no matter how much confidence you have and then when you are presented with the possibility
00:18:35.860everywhere you go in town like it's just floor-to-ceiling ads of how you can fix your face
00:18:41.020how you can fix your body so you're if you want any part of your body rejuvenated or reshaped or
00:18:48.220enhanced, you're being sold to with the possibility of doing these things. And I think that's such an
00:18:55.040important cautionary tale that soul offers us because it is happening. It's happening if you
00:19:02.920are of a certain means. Like if you're a certain class in the U.S., you're doing all the same
00:19:07.560things because you can afford it. And then that keeps kind of underclasses wanting to change
00:19:13.060themselves and wanting to get those procedures or getting curious about it. We're seeing it with0.93
00:19:17.860all the off-label use of the semi-glutides, the ozempics, right? Like so many celebrities started
00:19:24.240using it, not for diabetes, but for weight loss. And then everybody else started flooding into
00:19:28.720their doctor's offices asking about it. Totally. So many celebrities are on it now. So many
00:19:34.360celebrities. It seems that way anyway. When I watch the awards shows, I'm like, gosh, you know,
00:19:38.720Kathy Bates. Wow. They 100% are. Okay. Like, let's be honest here. I've covered celebrity
00:19:45.340culture for so long. I have never seen weight loss and mass like I have in the past year.
00:19:52.920Yeah. Something's happening. Something's happening. And also, you know, the part about,
00:19:56.800and also, again, not against these things. Like if I could get my doctor to help me lose
00:20:01.740these last like 20 pounds. So mostly I just want to fit into my pretty clothes again. I don't want
00:20:07.500to buy a whole new wardrobe. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm a 44 year old woman who's had three babies.
00:20:13.000things change but like i'm looking at these celebrities where i'm like it would not be
00:20:19.500possible for you to lose weight like this i know how bodies work at this point i know how 40
00:20:23.400something bodies work and 50 something 60 something um it is all the ozempic the ozempic
00:20:29.520and the semi-glutides and all of the things and then you know i was who was i talking to the other
00:20:33.560day about boob jobs talking to one of my girlfriends and she's up oh i was talking to
00:20:38.080just gross um one of my girlfriends and she was like i just feel lied to because i finally realized
00:20:45.260that every celebrity in holiday in hollywood has had some kind of boob situation done because no
00:20:51.780one's boobs after a certain age look the way that literally every celebrities look and i'm like
00:20:56.800truth man truth especially not after you've had kids so like even if they're not getting implants
00:21:02.360everyone is having like a tip a nip and a tuck and like a lift of some sort and so yeah i mean i
00:21:07.940I've said for a long time, celebrity culture makes us feel terrible about ourselves.
00:21:11.360But now we've got these things in the palms of our hands that we're staring at all of the time.
00:21:17.500Yeah. And I get with celebrities and folks who kind of live in front of cameras and their entire livelihoods are dependent on how they look, that they do have more of a reason, like an economic reason to have to modify themselves.
00:21:34.120But also what it does is it creates this bar or creates standards for all of us socially, right?
00:21:40.700Where there is a pretty privilege and that's been acknowledged on various dynamics.
00:21:45.620And so we're rewarded for being thinner.
00:21:48.020We're rewarded or we're stigmatized for being fat.
00:21:51.040And my whole argument and something that I'm probably going to be talking to, talking about forever is that we've got to do something about this.
00:21:58.120We've got to be having conversations about it because it's incredibly marginalizing, incredibly marginalizing.
00:22:04.120Because the more narrow or more thin our idea of beauty is, the wider the pool of ugly or
00:22:11.780unacceptable becomes. And so it's worse for everybody who can't fit in. And now we have
00:22:17.820this digital culture that's reshaping our actual faces and bodies. And I worry that under this
00:22:24.060technological gaze I talk about that our bodies become projects to be worked on forever. And like
00:22:30.160We can never stop. And that's awful. That's not a way to live. That's not how I want. It's not liberating to me to want or to have to, like, constantly be monitoring myself or regimenting what I eat or, like, having to go in for Botox or whatever you're having to start and then never stop, you know?
00:22:48.280Yeah. To never be allowed to age. To essentially never be allowed to change or age or, yeah, to constantly feel like you're performing an idea of beauty. I want this on your tombstone, too. Your tombstone's going to have a lot of stuff on it. We should maybe get you a bench. Let's get you a bench as well.
00:23:11.160because these are impossible standards they truly they truly truly are and i was watching0.86
00:23:16.820um for work i was watching the the secret lives of mormon wives oh yeah somebody was asking me
00:23:22.700about that yesterday so you're watching it all right i'm watching it i'm watching it i'm watching
00:23:25.880it and we've got like seven episodes coming up about it okay i've got a great one tomorrow um
00:23:30.800and then i just can't stop talking about it but one of the things is the women and everyone says
00:23:35.560this that the women all look exactly the same and they and everyone's watching it they're like i've
00:23:41.580got this weird face blindness going on i can't tell who is who and sames sames and but they
00:23:47.020acknowledge it they're like oh we just like decide that we're gonna look how we look based off what's
00:23:51.920trending and so it is this hamster wheel of well this is trending so i'm gonna get this botox and
00:23:56.680this filler and these hair extensions and we're all gonna look like this based off what an algorithm
00:24:01.500is telling us what to look like i mean essentially we're letting the robots dictate what we all look
00:24:04.820like. Yeah, it's like a body augmentation arms race. And theoretically, if we are chasing
00:24:13.280artificial standards, if we're chasing like algorithmically driven AI generated standards,
00:24:20.020then the enhancements only get farther and farther out of reach. Because digital beauty standards,
00:24:26.840which are now kind of the bar for us, the limit doesn't exist, right? Because AI's idea of good
00:24:31.940looks is just more and more inhuman. It's more and more cyborgian and a mix of features that
00:24:37.280are from different parts of the world that just don't exist in like biology unless there's a lot
00:24:44.000of interventions going on. So that's kind of scary to me. I find it eerie and uncanny.
00:24:49.640We're living in an uncanny valley. Okay. Let's be honest about that. Okay. We're going to take
00:24:56.940one more quick break. And when we get back, I want to talk a little bit about Ted Daly and
00:25:03.020one of my favorite shows, Forever 35. Yay.
00:25:14.980Okay, we are back. You're the host of a daily podcast, which seems like so much work to me.
00:25:20.720It is watching a lot of TED Talks. So I've probably seen thousands and thousands and thousands of TED Talks now that I'm in my fourth year of hosting TED Talks daily. And it's like going to grad school. It's like an education that I'm getting in like 10 to 15 minute bursts over and over because do you feel smarter? I do. I feel like I'm much more interesting at cocktail parties.
00:25:43.600When you, like, elbow your way into a high-top table, Miss Naves?
00:25:54.800I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous on lots of different topics, like from robotics to ancient civilization to various business topics.
00:26:06.200But it's all so shallow and not deep, right?
00:26:08.680because it's enough to get it's enough to get curious about it but like not really get into
00:26:14.260detailed study about it so um it's been just a thrill and a lot of fun i also the ted community
00:26:20.160is worldwide and often meets in real life so i get to go to vancouver every april for the big ted
00:26:26.820and then other big ted conferences that are happening on various topics like there's ted ai
00:26:31.300there's ted countdown which is about climate and so i've just gotten to meet and be connected to
00:26:36.820so many people that I would have never otherwise gotten to meet. So I consider it an awesome
00:26:41.580privilege. It's a great organization to be part of. It is. It is. I actually, I have yet to go
00:26:46.780to a TED. Oh, we've got to invite you. Okay. No, no, I've got to go. I've got to go. All right.
00:26:51.040Yeah. Because I love TED. We listen to you. We listen to all of the things. But is it very
00:26:58.660strenuous to do a daily podcast? I mean, I'm twice a week and I'm like, this is so much work.
00:27:03.680Yeah. And the three times a week for Forever 35 too has been added to my plate. And so it is,
00:27:09.780I do feel like I'm talking in front of a mic a lot, but TED Talks Daily is a really well-oiled
00:27:16.220machine and we've gotten our workflow really efficient such that I can batch record. So I'm
00:27:20.440not necessarily recording like a fresh episode every day. I'm recording, you know, like eight
00:27:25.060at once or 10 at once at a regular clip of every few days. And so that I feel like makes things
00:27:31.800more manageable. Totally. Yes. I love an efficient, efficient project pipeline. Yes. Totally. Totally.
00:27:38.580Absolutely. Absolutely. And you recently came on as co-host of Forever 35. That's right. Because
00:27:44.760Kate retired. Because Kate retired. I know. I know. I didn't think it was ever going to retire.1.00
00:27:50.220And, you know, love both Dory and Kate. And it's such, I think it's such a great show. But you had,
00:27:57.060um i don't want to say big shoes to feel fill oh you had big costco underwear to fill yes yeah
00:28:03.520giant kirkland underpants giant kirkland brand underpants to fill um what what has what has it
00:28:10.700been like joining this show that is so enormously popular um has such a big audience um and you know
00:28:17.480you come in you're like the new girl it's like it's been it's like entering a very warm and
00:28:23.960convivial community like a party it's like like it's like going to a house party where everybody
00:28:29.360offers you a snack oh that's nice we were worried actually like when i came on when i first came on
00:28:36.660just as a temporary co-host um dory said look our community is awesome but it's very engaged
00:28:43.800and when i say very engaged it means that if they don't like something they'll be vocal about it
00:28:48.760because we have the permission to kind of like and the we give everybody the license to speak
00:28:52.620their mind. And that's kind of part of the glue, you know, of this community. And so I was kind of
00:28:59.160scared, just in the way that like, as an author, you get scared of reviews that are just going to
00:29:03.520drag you, you know, so totally. But nothing of the sort has happened. You know, people have their
00:29:10.940various opinions. And but they're not nasty, you know, and for by and large, I mean, I would say
00:29:18.120like the vast vast majority has been so welcoming they have been calling calling in and writing in
00:29:26.020with all sorts of questions for us to weigh because we do wednesday mini apps which are like
00:29:29.780listener questions yeah and those are my favorite types of episodes and so i've gotten to know a lot
00:29:35.080of the listeners this way and they've gotten to know me and maybe hopefully in like a um reciprocal
00:29:40.680way too because i've been able to for the first time really because as a journalist i just never
00:29:45.740really shared this much of myself and now as a podcaster at forever 35 people like know about my
00:29:50.960partner they know about my kids they know about like my various uh dramas like rob my partner got
00:29:56.960like stung by a stingray um over the summer and we have so many callers from all over like people
00:30:03.120in panama people in europe like calling in with stingray tips you know and that just feels so
00:30:09.700loving and supportive and so i really have i have like nothing bad to say about my experience coming
00:30:15.680on forever 35 you have to be very careful around sting stingrays that is how to shuffle yeah well
00:30:21.780that's how steve erwin met his untimely end i was reminded of that yeah yeah yeah i was i was taught
00:30:28.560that by my seven-year-old who um bought the book you know how they have those like who was history
00:30:34.380books like who was taylor's book there's one for steve erwin okay oh yeah and it it does indeed end
00:31:08.980i am gonna end with one very important question for you i just got i just got back from paris
00:31:15.320and so i spent a lot of time in the french pharmacy buying french pharmaceutical stuff
00:31:21.540like stuff to put on my face for not a whole lot of money i get the embryolese um concentrate
00:31:28.000and a313 uh i'm curious what do you think is like the very best k-beauty product that ever
00:31:35.500all of us should have oh gosh sunscreens of course so if you're not using korean sunscreens
00:31:42.520you're missing out they come in all sorts of delivery methods i use sunscreen sticks
00:31:47.920because i like you're so easy i love a stick i love a stick yeah i don't want to put things on
00:31:52.420my hands yeah so there's a beauty of joseon sunscreen stick that i almost always have on my
00:31:57.320in my purse so if i had to recommend one item it would be that but i have become very loyal to
00:32:04.380an essence called the Misha Time Revolution First Essence or something. Don't catch me lying. We'll
00:32:12.520get the correct name and link y'all to it. Yeah, great. But it's so moisturizing and I put it on
00:32:19.420before I put on moisturizer. So it's one of the early steps after cleanser if you're doing like
00:32:24.160a multi-step routine. And I make sure that my friends from Korea like mule it back for me0.97
00:32:29.220anytime they're coming to the States. But it's available on Amazon and all the places.1.00
00:32:33.280Yeah, you could find all these things on Amazon. But I have a question for you because my French friends and my friends that go back and forth a lot tell me that a lot of the stuff on Amazon can be expired sometimes. So like your best bet is to get someone to buy it for you there.