What A Day - The Age Of Self-Optimization

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Americans spend nearly $30 billion a year on plastic surgery procedures, including fillers and Botox. And there's probably no better example than the White House, where the "Mar-A-Lago face" – a very specific, very smooth, very… augmented appearance – runs rampant. But maybe that's starting to change. Faced with actors, actresses, influencers, and AI, some people are starting to forgo their pursuit of aesthetic perfection in favor of something a little more natural. But does that mean more people are going to go without Botox – or will more people want procedures that don't make them look like they had Botox? To find out, we spoke with Amanda Mull, senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.And in headlines, the national debt surpasses a record $40 trillion, North Korea launches multiple short-range ballistic missiles, and the U.S. has sent 20 deportees to Liberia as part of a new deal.Show Notes: Check out Amanda's piece – tinyurl.com/33w2rm56 Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

You can get fake lashes and Botox and filler pretty much wherever. And it costs a couple hundred bucks. So once these things have become much more widely available and much more widely adopted in an effort for, you know, less culturally elite people to look like they have something in common with the very wealthy and powerful, the very wealthy and powerful have to move on to something else to signal where they are in the hierarchy. I'm Jane Kost. And this is What a Day, the show wondering if Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is trying to stay employed, or if Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is one of the dumber people alive.

Here he is today at the White House. We've got a spike in oil prices today that I don't really understand. Maybe that's the economic D-Day President Donald Trump was talking about. On today's show, we talk about our faces. Specifically, what it means that people are starting to ask for plastic surgery procedures that don't make them look like they've had plastic surgery. with Bloomberg Business Week's Amanda Mull. Before we face our fears of our own, weird-looking faces, here's what we're following today, Thursday, August 20th.

The $40 trillion mark that we passed from the national debt, would you comment on that, and how do we reverse that? Yeah, look, the $40 trillion is a big number. It is smaller when we look at a publicly traded amount because our Social Security funds and other government entities hold a substantial amount. And what we're going to do, we're going to have to grow our way out of this. Scott Bessent, the gift that keeps on giving. Maybe he should try blaming the Biden administration or something.

Oh, wait. He did that too. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke to reporters today about the national debt, which surpassed a record $40 trillion on Wednesday. So if you're behind on your credit card payments, don't feel bad. The actual United States of America isn't doing any better. Experts say the exploding debt is affecting Americans' wallets. by raising borrowing costs for things like mortgages and cars, lowering wages and creating more expensive goods and services.

Still, the White House claims the Trump administration, quote, has been focused on slashing waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending while accelerating economic growth to get America's debt-to-GDP ratio trending in the right direction. Oh, okay. Is that what our war against Iran is doing? Got it. North Korea launched multiple short-range ballistic missiles on Thursday, according to South Korean military sources. That news comes as Donald Trump reignites one of his first-term friendships with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Earlier this week, Trump announced that the U.S. is stepping back from its usual joint military exercises with South Korea.

Why? Because according to Trump's Sunday true social post, the exercises, quote, send the signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to North Korea. Here's Trump on Wednesday talking about how Kim Jong-un is very nice and very cool. You know, I just got along with them very good. We had great meetings. We speak. And I think our nation and I think other nations, frankly, whether it's Japan or South Korea, they're a lot safer if I'm president of somebody else's president. Now, I didn't like the fact that we're doing these massive military exercises really against.

North Korea. It was, you know, exercise against North Korea. When I'm friendly with him, when we have, I don't see anything happening for certainly two and a half years. It's not going to happen with me. Trump's other issue with South Korea was that they allegedly refused to get involved in Trump's war of choice with Iran. Anyway, according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump wants to meet with Kim Jong-un later this year. But Kim Jong-yo-jong, Kim Jong-un's sister and a powerful North Korean official herself, told state media that Trump's choice to reduce a side. of the military exercises was meaningless, adding quote, if the U.S. calculates that it can propagate its recent measure as one of so-called good faith,

they will not get the desired answer. Aw, tough crowd. The U.S. has sent 20 deportees to Liberia as part of a new deal in which the African country will receive 1,200 migrants. According to Liberia's information minister, the deportees will include African nationals as well as nationals from North America, South America, and the Caribbean. all part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration through mass deportation. The Liberia-U.S. Agreement is expected to see some of the largest numbers of third-country deportations,

and this isn't new. Advocates say that under a series of often secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that aren't their own. The State Department declined to answer questions about the agreement with Liberia, but said that implementing the administration's immigration policies was a, quote, top priority. Trump announced on Wednesday his pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Heidi Overton. Overton is a medical doctor and deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and I hope she's ready, because between diarrhea lettuce, salmonella jalapenos, screw worms and cattle, and just the general problem of Secretary RFK Jr.,

she'll have a lot to deal with if confirmed by the Senate. Just this week, the FDA categorized a recall of frozen blueberries as class one. That risk level warns that exposure to the product could, quote, cause serious adverse health consequences or death. The Greenwise Organic blueberries sold at public's grocery stores have been recalled because of potential E. coli contamination. And that's the news. Let's talk about looks.

How we feel about our appearance touches on every aspect of who we are. Our race, our gender, and how we perform it, how we vote, and for whom we cast a ballot. For example, ever notice how one of the go-to right-weigh? slurs against liberal women is that we're ugly? So it's not much of a surprise that the rise in ubiquity of plastic surgery is pretty much everywhere. Americans spend nearly $30 billion a year on plastic surgery procedures, including fillers and Botox.

And there's probably no better example than the White House, where Mara Lago face, a very specific, very smooth, very augmented appearance runs rampant. But maybe all of that is starting to change, faced with actors. and actresses and influencers and AI, some people are starting to forego their pursuit of aesthetic perfection for something a little more natural. But does that mean more people are going to go without Botox? Over more people want procedures that don't make them look like they had Botox.

To find out more about what we do with our faces and what it can tell us about our culture, I spoke to Amanda Mull, senior reporter at Bloomberg Business Week, where she writes Buying Power, a column on consumer culture. Amanda, welcome to what a day. Thank you so much for having me.

So I was so interested in your most recent piece, where you're right that people are getting tired of everything and everyone looking so perfect. I'm curious, what are you seeing? What are you getting that from? And when we're talking about perfect, what do we mean? I guess let's define perfect first. And I think that what we're talking about is this sort of like hyper optimized, hyper, shiny, clean, flaw-free, filtered look. And some of that comes from Instagram photos, some of it comes from

TikTok, some of it comes from AI. But it's just like basically like being poreless and having no frizz in your hair and having your nails done all the time and a perfect home with a perfect white kitchen that nobody has ever cooked in, but it is palatial nonetheless, even though you don't use it. And we're starting to hear like anecdotal evidence from plastic surgeons, from dentists, interior designers that their clients are starting to ask for a little bit more variation in their look. They're asking their Botox Injector to leave some wrinkles intact. They're asking their cosmetic dentist not to make their teeth so white and veneered and perfect. They're asking interior designers to put some like warm wood in their home instead of all white marble. And then you're

seeing also like a big backlash to influencers and the people who sell us this idea of perfection. as well. How far has this backlash gone? Because I think that if you watch reality television, specifically say, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which might be the plastic surgery capital of television, they're still looking like this. You know, you mentioned kind of anecdotal evidence. Is this something that's starting to come on social media and that we'll see more broadly soon? Yes. I think that this is a sentiment that is sort of nascent. It's starting to bubble up in a lot of areas of digital culture in a lot of areas of, you know, places where you see trendsetters starting to make bets on what is next. That you see it on Real Housewives, that you see it on Love Island is actually

a great indicator that this is about to change. When you see aesthetic trends end up at, like, reality TV stars, that's a great indicator, honestly, that people who set trends, people who are very fashionable and very forward-looking are going to find something else, anything else, to do with their bodies and their looks? Yeah, I think that there's a lot here. So plastic surgery is not new. Plastic surgery, you know, it started, people were starting to do plastic surgery after the First World War because you had people with horrible injuries who were still alive

because they were able to stay alive because of amazing surgeons. In the 50s and 60s and 70s, Hollywood starlets were getting plastic surgery, but it was definitely more of a hush-hush thing that most people could not access. It was something for the rich, for the famous. It was something you would kind of, you know, people would talk about in magazines, but it was not something in general everyday people did. But now, everyday people are doing it. So to your point, now that it's gotten to Love Island and Real Housewives, the people who were doing this to look elite, now that it doesn't look elite anymore. Is that what's happening?

Right. I think that that's a big part of it. People often think of trends as this sort of like flash in the paper. one instance at one time. It starts, it ends, period. It hits everybody at the same time. But trends have like a very long tail. They move through culture and through groups within culture sort of over time. And there are people who are like, you know, very fashionable, very wealthy, who may move toward a trend at the beginning. And then there are other types of trends where you see them, you know, bubble up first among like black teenagers. Like trends can come from a lot of places

and move through culture in a lot of ways. But, you know, you know, bubble up first among like black teenagers. Like, trends can come from a lot of places. but they never just happen once. So when you look at trends as far as like how your face should look, how your hair should look, how your body should look, those often come first and foremost from like very wealthy, very culturally elite people at the upper echelon of our sort of like social hierarchy in the United States and in, you know, rich nations. And that is where a lot of these plastic surgery and sort of cosmetic injection treatments first started. because you had to have access to the types of practitioners who could do them. You had to have a lot of money to pay for them. But over time, these procedures have gotten a lot more widespread.

They've spread to more types of practitioners. And the ability to do them has spread to a lot more just physical places in the U.S. Part of that is advancements in what sometimes gets called tweakments, which are like injectable procedures, many spa facials that like can't be sold to the public. But these places are in like every strip mall in America at this point. Like you can get fake lashes and Botox and filler pretty much wherever. And it cost a couple hundred bucks. So once these things have become like much more widely available and much more widely adopted in an effort for, you know, less culturally elite people to look like they have

something in common with the very wealthy and powerful, the very wealthy and powerful have to move on to something else to signal where they are in the hierarchy. We'll get back to my conversation with Amanda Mall in a moment. If you want to hear what the wealthy and powerful will do now that everyone in their dog can get filler, stick around. In the meantime, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Watch us on YouTube and share with your friends.

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Get matched with a therapist based on your needs and switch therapists at any time if it's not the right fit. See the reviews, see what stands out, and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com slash wad. That's better, help.com slash wad. If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods,

packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. Let's get back to my conversation with Amanda Mall. As you mentioned, you call this overall trend self-optimization, but let's get specific. What kind of aesthetic work are we talking about here? We're talking about treatments that sort of push people toward very specific conventional American beauty standards. So we're talking long hair, smooth skin, big eyelashes, skinny waists, long nails, you know, all of these sort of things that push you further and further toward like a somewhat Barbie aesthetic, ultimately. you should be ageless, your hair should be smooth, you should have an even skin tone, all of these types of things. And there are, you know, lots of pretty expensive ways to achieve all

that pretty much no matter who you are, as long as you have a particular type of bank account or a particular predilection for credit card debt. And so it's pushing people toward like a quite narrow ideal. And exactly who embodies that ideal sort of shifts over time. For much of the last 10 years, it's been Kim Kardashian. And you see sort of a lot of Kardashian lookalikes on Instagram, on TikTok, who have, you know, become sort of culturally powerful in those realms for having that like very specific, very refined look. And by refined, I mean like physically refined. And I think that that raises something. that also plays a part in here, because part of why I wanted to talk about this issue is that it

touches on pretty much everything, and that is race. So something that we have seen from the Kardashians is that the aesthetic they had about 2015, 2016, is not the aesthetic they have now with regard to their body shape and the body shape that they have been attempting to perform, how best to put it. Right. And I'm curious as to your thoughts on that, where we talk about class and race, but I think that those are interwoven because when we're talking about this self-optimization idea, we don't talk about breast implants. And you see the Kardashians taking part or allegedly taking part in procedures like a BBL that is intended to, shall we say, enhance your curves. So in your thinking about this, how does race and kind of the idea of looking

how best to put it, which is funny for me to say this, as someone who is mixed race, the ideal of looking kind of mixed race. Has that shifted and changed over the last 10 years? Where, you know, Kim Kardashian and the Kardashians in general were adhering towards a very, I would argue, mixed race aesthetic. And then one day, they weren't. One day, Kim Kardashian was like, I am going to fit into and wear Marilyn Monroe's,

happy birthday Mr. Kennedy dress. One day they all looked different. How has that shifted over time? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think the case of the BBL has been sort of an interesting leading indicator in all of this because for much of the past 15 years, getting a BBL, you know, for listeners who are not familiar, a Brazilian butt lift, it basically makes your butt bigger and rounder in the way that Kim Kardashian had for much of the past 15 years.

that was sort of the upper echelon of how you adhered to these like optimized Instagram beauty standards. Like that was the gold standard procedure that everybody wanted that, you know, not everybody, but a lot of people who were chasing this ideal wanted. And it started to fall out of favor a couple of years ago. It was like a leading indicator that perhaps some things were changing. And Kim Kardashian and her sisters sort of leaning away from from that type of look, I think, was when a lot of people went, huh, something's going on here. And I think that black culture in general for much of the past 15 years has been so influential in like broad American pop culture. And in the

past couple of years, you've seen that sort of recede a little bit in a certain number of ways. There's probably political reasons for that. But like right now you have country songs is a huge part of the Billboard top 10 in a way that they haven't been in a long time. and rap has been sort of absent from that spot for longer than it has been in, I think, decades. So you see a sort of receding moment of blackness or mixed raceness or sort of, you know, panracial pop culture in certain ways in the U.S. right now. And I think that that is part of what we see in what's going on on Instagram and TikTok as far as like what the beauty standards are that we're being pushed toward or the,

viewers of this type of content are being pushed toward. So if people are starting to be sick of that kind of Instagram face perfection, what will that look like? What will that mean? I think that we're still trying to figure that out right now. What we know anecdotally from the practitioners that deal with the sort of like highest end clients who who are sometimes a leading indicator on where these trends are going, you're still seeing people go in to get Botox to get filler, to get facelifts, to get cosmetic veneers and things like that. But you're seeing them ask for different things, ultimately because people, I think, tend to think of the concept of perfection is static, but it's like a moving indicator.

It changes depending on cultural moods. And so I think that we're still going to be pushed toward certain beauty ideals. I think that those beauty ideals are going to be the kind that are achievable with maybe like a more talented cosmetic injector, maybe a more expensive facelift, which ultimately like this sort of you but better look is not necessarily more achievable for the average person, but I think it is less sort of visibly slick, invisibly adjusted in a way that makes it harder to, like, least for right now, harder to detect. And that is, I think, what people are sort of looking for as far as, like, a new ideal. Yeah, it tells me that people are performing this for an audience that expects them to have had work done and they're looking for the indicators. Yes, definitely. I think that that's definitely the case. Amanda, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me.

That was my conversation with Amanda Mull, senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. We'll link to her piece in the show notes. before we go. The police claim they're here to protect us, but what if their original purpose was something else altogether? Come join Cricket Ideas in New York City for an immersive two-hour walking tour

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The next tour is Saturday, September 26th. Tickets are just $10. Head to crooked ideas.org slash Empire City to learn more. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, enjoy more Darlene Graham debate duds and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading,

and not just about how Graham has been making the rounds on Fox News, attempting to explain that her Tuesday debate whiff on foreign policy actually made her more, quote, honest, because she doesn't, quote, speak politician, but... There's 50 million people in South Carolina. Half of them live paycheck to paycheck. Like me, Whataday is also a nightly newsletter.

Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and the actual population of South Carolina is 5.5 million. But if 50% of the population of a deep-red state of any size is living paycheck to paycheck, whose fault is that? What a day is a problem? production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Forre, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Canter. We had

helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers' Writer's Guild of America East. If you miss some of your favorite crooked pods this week, don't worry, you can now catch up on the week's best moments on MS Now on Saturday nights. MS Now is streaming an episode of highlights from your favorite crooked pods, packing as much analysis, funny moments, and 100% correct opinions into 40 minutes as humanly possible. Crooked on MS Now airs every Saturday at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific.