What Tony Wang Learned from His Ozempic Experiment

A chat with the strategist and former brand director of SSENSE and 032c about why culture is broken, getting strong, flying on private jets with billionaires, and his million-dollar protein idea.

I first met Tony Wang a few years ago when we were both enlisted by the big homie Phil Chang and C47 Creative to work on a project for Nike about the Future of Media, and it brings me little satisfaction knowing that we correctly predicted our current doomy ecosystem with frightening accuracy. Congrats to everyone involved.

But Tony! He’s one of the coolest dudes around, and someone whose brain works at a mesmerizing frequency. He’s the former brand director of SSENSE and 032c, and now he heads up his own consulting firm, the Office of Applied Strategy, that has done work for everyone from Prada to Netflix to Sequoia Capital. Today, he’s raising the curtains on a limited-run dossier that you can only get in print called HYPER-OPTIMIZATION: Creative Stagnation Amidst Cultural Abundance.

If you, like me, have been wondering why everything in our culture—streaming TV, movies, clothes, books—feels so shitty and half-baked, Tony makes the argument that technology has made it too easy for subcultures to properly gestate, let alone flourish. Instead nascent cool shit is plucked out of obscurity and immediately repackaged for the masses, where it’s adopted and discarded in a few weeks. As Tony writes in the introduction, hyper-optimization

“has streamlined and consolidated the distribution of cultural production to such a point that finding success outside of these major power players is more impossible than ever. Can a young designer succeed without being sold by SSENSE? Can an emerging musician grow their career without being on Spotify and Apple Music?”

“Hyper-optimization results in cultural stagnation because it actively removes any sources of friction in the system.  But without friction, creativity cannot thrive in a meaningful way. Much like with online platforms and their decreasing quality over time, the enshittification of culture is a logical conclusion when you consider how much culture has become treated as a tech product.”

If you’re in New York City, you can snag a copy tonight at Time Again, which is not far from where I sat down with Tony earlier this summer (Dimes, lol) for a few hours to chat. He’s the kind of guy who used to meticulously track all his macros and supplements and gains in spreadsheets—“It ended up causing me too much anxiety,” he says—but we got to chop it up about his decision to get strong during lockdown, all the weird health shit he’s experimented with, and, most importantly, getting flown to Paris on a private jet by a billionaire, which is the closest any of my friends have come to living the life of Taylor Swift.

TW: Some talk of disordered binge eating down below.

Chris: Was that your first time on a private jet? 

Tony: First time. Baby's first private jet. 

The dream. They’re smaller right? Was it scary?

No, it wasn't that scary. What was really interesting was that because it's a private jet, they have more flexibility in charting their path. Whereas commercial jets, they have to fly on predetermined paths, so if there's turbulence they have to fly higher or lower, but for the most part, they can't reroute entirely around it. But private jets can optimize their path. 

This made for such a funny rich people problem. Usually when you fly into Paris, you have to fly late at night and you arrive early in the morning. But because we could fly on our own optimal path, we got there in six hours. And my ass was like, this is so annoying that I didn't get to sleep on the plane! I finally get on private jet where they can convert the entire seat into a bed, but I couldn't sleep long enough because the flight was too fast.

Praying for you. So what time do you wake up in the morning these days?

I am not a morning person so I tend to train in the afternoon. For the past two, three years, I would just wake up whenever I would, and put blocks from nine to 11 in my calendar so that basically Diane and Haneu [Ed. note: Our wonderful C47 project managers, hi guys :)] would basically think I was in meetings. I would say it was personal development time but it was just an excuse for me to wake up later. 

Wowwww.

My trainer, Danny, was sending me these videos with rationales for why I should just wake up earlier, and he was like, “Yo Tony, have you heard of this guy? Andrew Huberman?” I was like… yeah. But I’m naturally a night owl, and I'm really productive after 11 or 12 at night. 

How did you start getting into health?

When I was at SSENSE a few years ago, I basically got really overweight. I burned out when I was in Berlin working for a fashion startup, and I was working 89 hours a week, and the founders were so toxic. So I went from 150 pounds to 240 pounds in a little over a year. I also lived in the Turkish part of Kreuzberg, and my comfort food was doner kebabs.

Oh man, I feel you. I ate like 90% Turkish food in Berlin because it’s the only thing with spice.

Yeah. It made my weight skyrocket. I started trying to lose weight when I moved to Montreal, and part of my strategy was I went on a ENT diet. Soylent.

I def had a Soylent phase too. It was just so easy, especially for lunch.

Eric Hu was the design director at SSENSE and he did the branding for Soylent. He gifted me a few crates, so at SSENSE, people knew me as the guy who would just drink Soylent for breakfast and lunch. Most of the time I'd skip breakfast and then just have two Soylent for lunch. It was not a very successful way to eat. I would not recommend it. 

So what do you eat for breakfast now? 

So currently what I'll do is I'll wake up, do a protein shake after an hour or two. Lunch is usually a protein shake. And then usually dinner is an actual meal. But my trainer's been trying to get me to rebalance a bit, so we're working on actually starting my day with an actual meal. I alternate between doing my own meal prep or using a service, but currently I'm on Factor.

How many hours of sleep are you getting usually? 

I don't know if you're familiar with bodybuilding or weightlifting, but especially if you're powerlifting, when you're structuring your routines, there are meso- and macrocycles. And basically a mesocycle is an eight to 12 week period with different blocks. And within each block you would have different goals, so week over week, you would change your set and count. Typically, you start with a higher volume and then you decrease. So you get to a rate you're training for your one rep max.

Point being is when I did that I was really intense about it, and it’s incredible how much sleep your body needs when you're really pushing yourself lifting. So I would say for the past two years I was trying to get 10 hours of sleep minimum. Nowadays, I'm trying to do eight to 10. 

I’m jealous.

I'm realizing that 10 hours of sleep is really a luxury that is hard to afford if you're trying to balance other things. When I was really deep into powerlifting, from like 2020 to 2022, I definitely deprioritized my social life. I didn't go out clubbing as often. I didn't really go out to see friends for casual drinks or dinners. Hanging out was a once-every-two-or-three-weeks kind of a thing. I would avoid random social activities during the week so I could really focus on work training. And then sleeping. Sleeping basically became a full-time job for me, which I kind of loved. 

When you wake up, what kind of supplements are you taking?

My supplements stack changes depending on training goals and more seasonal needs. For example, last year I got diagnosed as vitamin D deficient. I was like, “Oh shit, I thought only white people get vitamin D deficient.” I think the biggest thing actually with powerlifting, especially after I hit the 1000 club, which is when your combined deadlift squat and bench press is over a thousand pounds, is you're now at an intermediate to advanced level.

I consider myself intermediate, and your performance when you're lifting that heavy is so dependent on sleep, your hormones, your energy levels, your nutrients. When you're starting to train, you can not be dialed in and still make gains. But when you reach a certain point, it's so contingent on dialing-in all aspects of your lifestyle.

And so I started becoming very aware of my endocrine system and just how much my testosterone or my estrogen levels affected my general mood, energy levels, and ability to lift. But vitamin D was a big thing because if you’re vitamin D deficient for long enough, it creates a hormone imbalance.

So I take a lot of vitamin D during the fall and winter. So in the winter I'm 10,000 iu (250 mgs) which is kind of crazy, but I take 10,000 a day. And then in the summer it goes down to 2,500 or 5,000. I also take multivitamins and take a blend called “Masculini-T.” It's basically a pill for sexual performance because it's got all the things that are associated with libido, but in the short term it can boost your testosterone levels. Even just slightly increasing your testosterone can give you a little edge in your confidence and your focus. So I do that a lot.

And then the last thing that I incorporated is actually a beauty blend, and that's just because of work I did for a big beauty brand.

I remember you mentioning in the group chat that you were interested in making some sort of beauty beverage with collagen. Was that where this came from?

Yeah, I was doing this project for Target with my team, and we were joking about gay bodybuilders. I was like, should we make a protein powder for gay bodybuilders? Like a protein powder that also had biotin and collagen in it? So it’d be like beauty protein.

Yooooo. That’s a million dollar idea.

Right now I'm on this one pill… I can't remember the name of it, but my coach recommended it for me and it apparently reduces cortisol levels. He suggested it just simply to help me go to sleep earlier and to reduce belly bloating. I was just talking to him about aesthetics and how part of the reason why I shifted away from powerlifting, and I'm now doing more plyometric functional and Olympic lifting, is I went to a powerlifting competition to watch, and it was really impressive to see these people and how much they can lift. But I've also noticed that more serious powerlifters all have a similar body type, and that body type is meatball.

That’s tight.

And when you powerlift, you don't care about body fat percentage. So they look strong, but they look very meatball-y. And I'm still a gay dude, and I'm still vain, and I want to fit into my clothes, so I don’t want to look like a meatball.

Another part of sleeping earlier is that I binge eat, and that's just something I've been dealing with for a while. And I tend to binge eat at night. So my coach was like, well, if you sleep earlier, you get more sleep and you can maybe avoid binge episodes, which would help your belly bloating. And I was like, okay, great. 

I've gone into all kinds of weird supplements for a while. This one friend of a friend recommended glycerol or glycerin, literally just corn syrup, which increases your water retention. So on days where you want to look massively beefy, just basically take glycerin. You can get industrial grade glycerin on Amazon that's edible; you just put in water and just drink it. It spikes your water retention, and so your muscles for however many hours will look massive.

What about creatine?

I take this brand called Bulk Supplements, but lately I’ve been getting ads for creatine gummies, so I bought a pack. I’m not that into them. First off, they're so much more expensive. And second of all, I just don't really know if the delivery mechanism is that effective. And it tastes so artificial. 

How did you get into creatine?

I got it because I was deep in the YouTube bodybuilder rabbit hole. I was watching for a good year but then I had to stop because YouTube started pushing me more toward red-pill toxic masculinity-type YouTubers where it starts off with fitness advice for young men and then turns into “Don't be a beta, women belong in the kitchen”-type stuff. I was like ah shit. This is starting to turn.

Are you surprised it took a year for your algorithm to go that way?

Yeah. It’s pretty hilarious. It'd be like all these guys about young male empowerment and how we need men to be more confident in their masculinity. They do all these meetups. It’s so homoerotic. Ostensibly these really straight conservative guys who want to be alpha men, but when I see them get together I'm like, this is just a sausage fest.

That's so funny.

Oh! I also got to take PrEP. So I've got PrEP, I've got my Zyrtec, I've got whatever. So I've got the core things and all these other supplements. I feel a need to justify a certain net-incremental lift in my health and physical wellbeing for all my pills, because now it's just so much work. It actually takes me a good 10 minutes to take all of them.

Tell me about being on Ozempic. What was that like?

Okay so I like trying new stuff to optimize myself, like when I was on Soylent. Anyway, I got on Ozempic earlier this year to see if it could help with my cut cycle. I did it for four months but it wasn’t very effective. 

It was effective at curbing physical appetite, but my eating habits are so driven by emotional eating. Like, I had bad binge eating episodes when I was overweight. So Ozempic didn’t address the core problem with why I overeat, but it did make food taste less good. It dampens your pleasure receptors, I think. Which actually made it worse because I just ate more savory and seasoned foods to try to produce the same satisfaction. 

That sounds awful.

Yeah, it wasn’t creating a positive feedback or habit loop for me, so I stopped. I’ve actually been off Ozempic since late spring, and I’ve made much better progress in the last four months. My strength is back, I look better, and I eat healthier because I have a better emotional relationship to food.

I still think Ozempic is a sexy, problematic drug with huge implications for culture. I think it works for some people but it’s not a panacea. Hire me Novo Nordisk! 

Did you play any sports as a kid?

I did some but they were very much a padding for the CV kind of thing. So I started off doing swimming, and then I dropped out. I hated it. And then, I mean, I actually like swimming, but I just didn't like swimming culture. And then my parents then made me do taekwondo, and I got a second dan, so second degree. But the thing is I didn't take it seriously. I was mostly just doing forms, although I have as recently picked up a very strong interest to get in martial arts.

When you come to Five Points again I’ll hold pads for you. But what made you start working out?

In college, I only went to the gym once. First week of freshman year I went on a date with another guy. And I think we both picked the gym. It made us seem more masculine and more desirable. And then we started dating and neither of us ever went back to the gym. I was like, all right. Charade’s up!

So didn't take fitness seriously. And then when I moved to New York, I was pretty overweight, and fitness became a very obviously important part of how I became healthy again. The power lifting really came out of the pandemic because in New York City, re-openings were phased, and for whatever reason, gyms were part of phase one. Which made no sense from a public health perspective. I was like, this is clearly the gay lobby at work, because from a health perspective, epidemiologically, opening the gyms of all places was an awful idea.

And so the only reason to leave the home for prolonged periods of time was to go to the gym. I would just be at Equinox for hours to me just stretching, walking, whatever. It was a social activity for me. And I just started lifting a lot to kill the time, and it became pretty fun. And then six months in, one of the regulars there, he's this really tall, super jacked Korean guy. He's six foot two, huge. He was a regular there, and he was doing Olympic lifts, and I was super impressed. And we started talking to him. It was Danny and he was super interesting. He went to Columbia, he's ex Navy, works in finance, but trains on the side. I was like, holy shit, this is the kind of guy I want to be in terms of fitness. And then he became my coach.

Why do you think powerlifting was so attractive to you?

There's some actual science-backed approaches to powerlifting. It clicked. And I think the Asian in me was like, oh, it's like a high score. You can always beat your high score and progress higher and higher. Whereas aesthetics, I'm like, what do you optimize for a look, a feeling? But powerlifting is like you're optimizing for your squat, your bench press, your deadlift. It's an actual number that you can constantly bring up. And so I was like, oh, it makes sense. I get it. There's something super nerdy and reassuring about powerlifting that I didn't feel with bodybuilding or fitness.

What about snacks?

My current thing is I buy frozen mango in bulk. I basically will go to my local grocery store and buy every single pack of it to the point where they started reordering more of it, but the problem is I'm not consistent enough, so I feel bad because they probably think that they have all these customers who love frozen mango, but it's just me buying literally 14 in a go.

But work’s been so slow this year, and the slow pace of work, which is nice, has made me eat out more. And even order takeout.

So what's your go-to takeout? 

Oh, it's definitely Thai food or Korean food or Greek food… Soondubu.

Where do you order soondubu from usually?

If I’m going affordable, usually BCD Tofu House. But usually I do New Wonjo. My big problem is I will download Uber Eats and Caviar and DoorDash and then see who’s cheapest. And then I'll have a week where I just order consistently out and then I realize this is not the path to health. Then I'll delete the apps and then a month later I'll download them again. I need parental controls. I need Apple to develop a feature where I can permanently block these apps. 

That’s another million dollar idea.

Permanent app deletion. This is on my bad list, please never let me download it. But I think the big thing for me me is I grew through phases of extreme discipline and then extreme not-discipline. It can create some big swing cycles. I'm very consistent about lifting and training. But I think when it comes to the support structures around it, like sleep, diet, tracking, et cetera, et cetera, there are periods when I'm so dialed in, I’m so optimized, and then there are some periods where I'm just like, eh, I'll just wing it. But when I wing it, I really wing it and it's pretty ineffective. It's not a good strategy. 

That seems like a really hard thing to reconcile.

For me, the biggest challenge is if you want to be really dialed in, you kind of have to restrict what you eat. And I think as an Asian person, that is just hard. It's very amotivational to be that controlled and dialed in. I think another problem actually that's really interesting is I switched my food tracking app from MyFitnessPal to Macro Factor. 

I miss MyFitnessPal. I’m sad it shut down. [Ed. note: I had confused this with MyPlate, which has since shut down. MyFitnessPal is alive and well.]

Do you know Macro Factor? I really like the app. The challenge is that when I use Factor or Trifecta, all of those things, the food is very Western. It’s fine, but after a while my body needs Asian food. If don't get fucking white rice in my body, I will die. The ancestors call for white rice. 

The macro-counting apps are soooo bad with Asian food. 

All Asian food. So I can put in some random Western dish and generally it's pretty good or close enough. But Asian food is a huge blind spot on the apps. I’ll have congee at Congee Village and I'm like, how many calories? And so then I'm left breaking down individual ingredients: Hey, this is how many grams of rice I think is in a bowl, and I think this is how many grams of pork and even a thousand or century egg. They definitely won’t have calorie data for century eggs.

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