The world after Ozempic

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0:01:53 If you track the news at all, you’re aware of a potentially revolutionary new weight
0:01:59 loss drug called Ozympic.
0:02:02 To be honest, I don’t have anything profound or novel to say about Ozympic.
0:02:08 But I know it’s monumental, or certainly has the potential to be, and I wanted to find
0:02:13 out more about it.
0:02:15 So I invited someone who’s done the research as a journalist and as a patient.
0:02:23 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:02:40 Today’s guest is Johan Hari.
0:02:41 He’s the author of a new book called Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing
0:02:47 Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs.
0:02:51 I just read the book and it was eye-opening to say the least.
0:02:55 Hari talks to the scientists and researchers developing these drugs, but he also, importantly,
0:03:02 experimented with them himself and writes vividly about that experience.
0:03:07 Make no mistake, some of the early findings here are incredible and the potential health
0:03:13 benefits are immense.
0:03:15 So I invited Hari on the show to talk about what he learned and what he thinks we should
0:03:20 know about these drugs.
0:03:27 Johan Hari, welcome back to the Gray Area.
0:03:30 I always find it really weird coming on your podcast, Sean, because I listen to it so much
0:03:33 that I feel like I’ve slipped into my own phone.
0:03:36 It’s a slightly disconcerting experience, but I’m very happy to be here.
0:03:39 This is a familiar tactic.
0:03:40 You butter up the host right at the outset to set the turn.
0:03:44 I’ve seen this before, sir.
0:03:46 Tactics have been exposed.
0:03:49 Let’s start with the basics here.
0:03:51 What is Ozympic for people who don’t really know anything about it?
0:03:55 I remember the exact moment I asked this question for myself.
0:03:58 It was the winter of 2022 and it was the end of the pandemic and I got invited to a party
0:04:05 for the first time in all those months and I decided to go in the Uber on the way there.
0:04:10 I was feeling a bit self-conscious because I gained loads of weight.
0:04:13 So I was going to a party that was thrown by an Oscar-winning actor.
0:04:15 I’m not saying this just to name-drop, it’s relevant.
0:04:18 I suddenly thought, “This is going to be fascinating because everyone I know gained weight.
0:04:22 It’s going to be so interesting to see these actors kind of looking different with a bit
0:04:26 of podge on them.”
0:04:28 I arrived and it’s not just that they hadn’t gained weight.
0:04:32 Everyone was gaunt, everyone was thin and I was kind of wandering around in a bit of
0:04:36 a daze and I bumped into a friend of mine and I said to her, “Wow, looks like everyone
0:04:42 really did take up palates during lockdown.”
0:04:45 She laughed at me and I said, “What are you laughing at?”
0:04:47 She said, “Well, you know it’s not palates, right?”
0:04:50 And she pulled up an ozempic pen on her phone and I don’t remember ever feeling so conflicted
0:04:56 about anything as what I learned, the kind of basics I learned in the next couple of
0:04:59 days.
0:05:00 So we have a new kind of weight loss drug which works in a completely new way on new mechanisms
0:05:05 in your gut and in your brain that produces massive weight loss.
0:05:09 The average person who takes ozempic loses 15% of their body weight.
0:05:14 The average person who takes minjaro, which is the next in this class of drugs, loses
0:05:18 21% and for the next one that’s coming down the line that will be available next year,
0:05:22 the average person loses 24% of their body weight which is only slightly below bariatric
0:05:28 surgery.
0:05:29 And I remember as soon as I learned this, I don’t remember any topic I ever learned about
0:05:33 where I felt so profoundly conflicted as I did about these drugs because I immediately
0:05:38 thought, “Well, I know that obesity causes all sorts of health risks.
0:05:42 I’m older now than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when
0:05:46 he was 44, loads of the men in my family get heart attacks.
0:05:50 My dad had bad heart problems, my uncle died of a heart attack.”
0:05:54 So I thought, “Wow, if there’s a drug that reverses obesity, that could be really big
0:05:57 for me.”
0:05:59 But I also thought, “Come on, I’ve seen this story before, right?”
0:06:02 Every 20 years or so a new miracle diet drug is announced, millions of people take it and
0:06:08 then we always discover it has some terrible side effect that means it’s pulled from the
0:06:11 market leaving a wave of devastated people in its wake.
0:06:15 So to really investigate this, I ended up going on this really big journey all over
0:06:19 the world from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo to interview the leading critics of these
0:06:24 drugs, the leading defenders of these drugs, and really dig into, “Well, actually, what
0:06:27 are these drugs and what are they going to do to all of us?”
0:06:30 Well, you mentioned how we’ve had these miracle drugs in the past, again, it’s perhaps too
0:06:38 soon to say, but what makes this one different or potentially different?
0:06:44 Lots of things.
0:06:45 So the first is that it works on a completely new mechanism.
0:06:48 If you ate something now, Sean, your gut would produce a hormone called GLP1.
0:06:53 And we now know that’s part of your body’s natural signals, just saying, “Hey, Sean,
0:06:57 you’ve had enough, stop eating.”
0:06:59 But natural GLP1 only stays in your system for a few minutes.
0:07:03 So what these drugs do is they inject into you an artificial copy of GLP1, but instead
0:07:09 of lasting for a few minutes, it stays in your system for a whole week.
0:07:12 So it has this bizarre effect.
0:07:15 I’ll never forget the second day I took it, because I took it to research it for the book.
0:07:20 I was lying in bed, I woke up and I had this really strange sensation and I couldn’t locate
0:07:25 in my body what it was that I was feeling.
0:07:28 And then I realized I wasn’t hungry.
0:07:32 I had woken up and I wasn’t hungry.
0:07:33 I don’t remember that ever happening before.
0:07:35 And I went to this diner near where I live and I ordered what I used to order every day,
0:07:39 which was a huge brown roll with loads of chicken and mayo in it.
0:07:43 And I had like three or four mouthfuls and I couldn’t eat anymore.
0:07:46 I felt full.
0:07:47 So one of the things that’s different is we know that these drugs produce a feeling
0:07:51 of satiety that lasts, the feeling of being full and having had enough.
0:07:56 And we know that they produce sustained weight loss over a significant period of time.
0:08:01 How confident are we in these early results?
0:08:03 Well, it’s an extremely high level of confidence that it produces significant amount of weight
0:08:07 loss.
0:08:08 I mean, there’s been hundreds of studies involving tens of thousands of people.
0:08:10 And that’s just in its trick use for obesity.
0:08:12 These drugs have also been used for diabetics, for other purposes, which gives us some insight
0:08:17 onto the safety risks around the drugs as well.
0:08:19 So yeah, huge numbers of people, I mean, as robust a finding as you get with any new drug.
0:08:26 So if we’re talking about this hormone that’s not just in your gut, but also in your brain,
0:08:31 does that mean that this drug could potentially be a general anti-addiction drug, a drug that
0:08:38 bolsters your capacity for self-control, as opposed to just a weight loss drug?
0:08:44 Because this is a hormone that’s made in your gut, it was thought that these drugs primarily
0:08:49 affect your gut, that they work by slowing down your gastric emptying or some other mechanism.
0:08:54 And that’s true and there is certainly an effect on your gut.
0:08:57 But we also know that you have GLP-1 receptors not just in your gut, but in your brain.
0:09:02 It’s increasingly clear that these drugs work primarily not on your gut, but on your brain.
0:09:07 If you give these drugs to rodents and then you cut open their brains, you see that the
0:09:11 drug goes everywhere in their brain.
0:09:14 And the neuroscientists I interviewed and the science they’ve produced strongly suggest
0:09:19 that these drugs work primarily by changing what you want, by changing your cravings and
0:09:25 your desires.
0:09:26 There’s a huge debate about how that works, and it’s slightly disconcerting to interview
0:09:30 the leading neuroscientists and say, “Okay, you’re saying this works primarily on my brain?
0:09:34 What’s it doing to my brain?”
0:09:36 And they all said a very erudite vision of, “Ah, we don’t really know.”
0:09:40 There’s also a huge debate about both negative and positive effects that may be happening.
0:09:45 There is debate about whether it’s causing depression or even suicidal feelings in a
0:09:49 minority of users.
0:09:51 So what we know at the moment is we have a huge amount of unbelievably promising evidence
0:09:56 in animals.
0:09:57 So I interviewed loads of scientists who’ve been doing experiments on this.
0:10:00 Think about, for example, Professor Elizabeth Jarlhag, who’s at the University of Gothenburg
0:10:04 in Sweden.
0:10:05 What she does is they get a load of rats and they get them to drink loads of alcohol and
0:10:10 get used to it.
0:10:11 And rats quite like getting drunk.
0:10:12 They wobble around their little cages, and so they give rats alcohol for quite long periods
0:10:16 of time until eventually their cage looks like a bar in downtown Vegas.
0:10:21 And then they inject them in the nape of their neck with GLP1 agonist, the active component
0:10:26 in ismpic and wogovi.
0:10:29 And what they find is a dramatic reduction in how much alcohol they consume.
0:10:33 It’s usually about 50%.
0:10:35 And we discover that they get less dopamine when they drink alcohol.
0:10:39 They like it less.
0:10:40 They crave it less.
0:10:41 They’ll put in less effort to get it.
0:10:43 It really does change the amount they want alcohol.
0:10:45 But initially it was thought, OK, well, that could just be these drugs reduce your desire
0:10:50 for calories.
0:10:51 Obviously, alcohol has caloric content.
0:10:53 Maybe it’s just that.
0:10:54 So other scientists then experimented with drugs that don’t have any calories in them.
0:10:58 For example, Professor Patricia Griggsen, who I interviewed is at Penn State University,
0:11:03 got rats to use fentanyl and heroin heavily, gave them GLP1 agonists found they used significantly
0:11:09 less.
0:11:10 And Dr. Greg Stanwood, who’s at Florida State University with mice, gave mice cocaine.
0:11:16 When they give them GLP1 agonists, they discover the mice use far less cocaine again by around
0:11:21 50%.
0:11:22 We have very little amount of human evidence.
0:11:25 We’ve got a lot of anecdotes, a lot of people I spoke to who started to take ismpic and saw
0:11:29 their addictions go away.
0:11:31 But very little human evidence so far.
0:11:33 What we do have is a little bit of a mixed picture.
0:11:35 We know that these drugs reduce smoking, but only if you combine them with a nicotine patch.
0:11:40 We know they reduce alcohol use, but only for people who want heavy drinkers at the
0:11:44 start.
0:11:45 We’ll know a lot more in the next few years because there’s a huge number of trials going
0:11:48 on.
0:11:49 But you’ve stated, rightly, the most optimistic possible scenario, which we should treat with
0:11:54 caution, but equally shouldn’t dismiss, which is that actually this is not an anti-obesity
0:11:59 drug, that this is a drug that boosts self-control across the board.
0:12:02 Now, we need a lot more evidence before we start backing up statements like that.
0:12:06 But I would say it’s not totally implausible.
0:12:09 With that necessary caveat, what do you make of all these preliminary findings?
0:12:14 Again, there’s just so much too good to be true energy, and it makes me very, very cautious,
0:12:20 but wow, the potential here is obvious and dramatic.
0:12:25 The book is called Magic Pill because there’s three ways in which these drugs could be magic.
0:12:30 The first is the most obvious, they could just solve the problem, right?
0:12:33 And there are days when I feel like that, Sean, you know, I’ve been addicted to junk
0:12:36 food all my life, I’ve been obese most of my adult life, and now I inject myself once
0:12:41 in the leg every week, and I’m not obese anymore, like it feels like magic.
0:12:47 The second way in which it could be magic is, it could be a magic trick, it could be like
0:12:52 the magician who shows you a card trick while secretly picking your pocket, right?
0:12:56 It could be these drugs in addition to these benefits cause such severe drawbacks that they
0:13:01 end up screwing you over.
0:13:02 I do not rule out that scenario, I think it is plausible.
0:13:06 The third way in which they could be magic, I actually think is the most likely.
0:13:09 If you think about the stories we tell about magic, you find the lamp, you get the genie,
0:13:14 you make your wish, and your wish comes true, but never quite in the way you expected.
0:13:18 Well, one of the problems with a lot of these fad diets and other things people have done
0:13:23 to lose weight is that as soon as you stop doing the thing, whatever the thing is, you
0:13:29 put all the weight back on.
0:13:31 What happens when you stop taking this drug?
0:13:32 In other words, when you start taking it, do you have to keep taking it?
0:13:35 Just add in for an item?
0:13:37 We’ve got mixed evidence about this.
0:13:39 There may be a minority of people who keep the weight off, but it seems that most people
0:13:43 regain most of the weight pretty quickly after they stop taking it.
0:13:47 So it’s not a kind of holiday romance, it’s a lifelong marriage, or it’s like statins
0:13:51 or blood pressure medication.
0:13:52 It works as long as you take it, and when you stop taking it, it stops working.
0:13:55 So is the basic causal mechanism here that the drug deactivates the reward centers of
0:14:01 the brain?
0:14:02 That’s basically how it works.
0:14:04 This is highly disputed.
0:14:06 So there are different theories about what it is doing to the brain, and everyone who
0:14:10 gave me a theory said, “Look, at this point, it’s speculative, we don’t know.”
0:14:14 So one theory is exactly what you’ve articulated.
0:14:17 You have in your brain something called the reward centers, and everything you do that
0:14:20 gives you pleasure, whether it’s having sex, eating food, meeting up with a friend.
0:14:24 We do in part because it makes your reward centers hum.
0:14:27 And one theory is that I’m eating more salad and less Big Mac because the Big Mac is significantly
0:14:33 less rewarding to me, so the gap between the Big Mac and the salad is now much smaller.
0:14:37 Now that theory obviously raises a whole series of concerns.
0:14:42 If it’s dampening my reward system for Big Macs, how do we know it’s not dampening my
0:14:46 reward system for writing my next book or having sex or whatever it might be?
0:14:51 And indeed, there has been a safety signal raised around depression and suicide in a
0:14:56 small minority of people using these drugs.
0:14:58 A different theory is that these drugs boost a different system in your brain, as Professor
0:15:02 Paul Kenney explained to me, who’s the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai.
0:15:07 In addition to a reward system in your brain, you’ve got something called your satiety system.
0:15:12 Satiety is a really important concept for understanding how we got into the obesity
0:15:15 crisis and how these drugs work.
0:15:18 Your satiety is just your feeling that you’ve had enough and you don’t want any more.
0:15:21 You’re sated when you don’t want any more.
0:15:23 We all get that feeling sometimes maybe Thanksgiving dinner or whatever.
0:15:26 And he argues it’s not that it dials down your reward system, it’s likely that it’s
0:15:30 dialing up your satiety system, actually dialing up the bit of you that goes, “Oh, I’ve had
0:15:34 enough now, I don’t want any more.”
0:15:37 But the reality is, I have to say, it’s disconcerting to realize this is an experiment on millions
0:15:42 of people.
0:15:43 I’m one of the guinea pigs and there is an enormous amount we don’t know.
0:15:47 There’s a huge amount we do know, some really extraordinary benefits, some quite disturbing
0:15:52 risks.
0:15:53 But a lot of what you’re asking quite reasonably, when I put it to the scientists, they just
0:15:57 kind of go, “Good question, come back in five years, we might know.”
0:16:01 A huge part of the book is your own experimentation with Osemic.
0:16:05 And look, I should stress that your experience is your experience.
0:16:09 It’s a sample size of one.
0:16:11 It may not be the experience someone else will have, but it nevertheless is relevant.
0:16:18 How long have you been taking it?
0:16:19 It’s been a year and four months now.
0:16:23 And how much weight have you lost?
0:16:24 42 pounds.
0:16:25 I went from being 33% body fat to 22% body fat, it’s an enormous fall.
0:16:31 And one thing you talk about in the book is feeling not quite depressed, but feeling
0:16:37 emotionally doled, I think is the phrase that you use in the book.
0:16:41 How would you explain that distinction between not feeling depressed, but feeling emotionally
0:16:45 doled?
0:16:46 Because they’re certainly similar.
0:16:47 Yeah, you know, it’s funny, my friend Danielle was pregnant the first six months I was taking
0:16:51 the drugs and every time I saw her, it was like we were on reverse trajectories, like
0:16:54 she was swelling and I was shrinking.
0:16:57 And I remember saying to her one day, “This is really weird, I’m getting what I want,
0:17:01 I’m losing loads of weight, but I don’t actually feel better.”
0:17:04 And there seems to be, although there’s much debate about this, a significant minority
0:17:10 of people who experience something like that.
0:17:15 And we know with a parallel bariatric surgery, which is the best form of medical assisted
0:17:20 weight loss we’ve had up to now, after you have bariatric surgery, in fact, your suicide
0:17:24 risk almost quadruples and 17% of people who have that surgery have to have inpatient psychiatric
0:17:29 care afterwards.
0:17:30 And I’ll show you why that might be.
0:17:32 So obviously one potential theory is the brain effects we’ve been talking about and other
0:17:35 brain effects.
0:17:36 I actually think for me it was something different, seven months into taking these drugs, I was
0:17:41 in Las Vegas, I was researching for a different book I’m writing, and I went really on autopilot,
0:17:47 I went to a branch of KFC, I’ve been to a thousand times, I went on West Sahara.
0:17:51 And I went in and I ordered a bucket of fried chicken, which is what I would have ordered
0:17:54 a year before.
0:17:55 And I ate a chicken drumstick and I suddenly thought, “Shit, I can’t eat the rest of this.”
0:18:01 And I really felt like an epiphany, “Oh, I’m just going to have to feel bad,” right?
0:18:06 And I realized, and there’s a lot of evidence for this, what these drugs do is they interrupt
0:18:10 your eating patterns.
0:18:11 And one of the consequences of that for many people is they bring to the surface the deep
0:18:16 underlying psychological factors that make us overeat in the first place.
0:18:21 So for me, I realized, you know, I had been using food to manage my emotions and calm myself
0:18:26 down going right back to when I was a very small child, I grew up in a family where there’s
0:18:29 a lot of addiction and mental illness.
0:18:30 And one of the ways I dealt with that was just by numbing myself with food.
0:18:34 And you can’t do that when you’re on OZMPIC.
0:18:36 For a lot of people, that transition is very bumpy and some people never make that transition,
0:18:40 they just remain feeling really bad.
0:18:44 Are you scared to stop using it?
0:18:46 I’m not going to stop using it.
0:18:47 And for me, it’s for a very simple reason.
0:18:51 So I actually think some of the best evidence for what these drugs will do to us, we can
0:18:54 get from looking at this parallel.
0:18:56 Because up to now, it’s been extremely hard to lose huge amounts of weight and keep it
0:18:59 off.
0:19:00 I mean, some people can do it purely by calorie restriction and exercise, but that’s actually
0:19:04 surprisingly rare.
0:19:05 So we’ve got good evidence from bariatric surgery.
0:19:08 And as we know, bariatric surgery is a horrible, horrifying, grisly operation.
0:19:13 One in a thousand people die in the operation.
0:19:15 It’s no joke.
0:19:16 But if you have bariatric surgery and reverse your obesity, the benefits are absolutely staggering.
0:19:23 In the years that follow, you are 56% less likely to die of a heart attack, 60% less
0:19:29 likely to die of cancer, 92% less likely to die of diabetes related causes.
0:19:34 In fact, it’s so good for you, you’re 40% less likely to die of any cause at all.
0:19:40 And we now know the drugs are moving us in a similar direction alongside some risks.
0:19:43 And for me, that just decided it, right?
0:19:46 So many men in my family have heart problems.
0:19:48 I’ve been worried about that all my life.
0:19:51 So I’m not going to stop taking it.
0:19:53 If we ran out of supply, which I really worry about, not only that I would regain the weight
0:19:57 and regain the heart risk, but I actually may gain more weight than I have before.
0:20:01 So yeah, I worry about that.
0:20:03 Are there any other potential downsides that researchers are thinking about?
0:20:08 When you talk about the risks, a lot of the scientists say absolutely rightly, actually,
0:20:14 we’ve got quite a lot of evidence here on these drugs.
0:20:16 Diabetics have been taking them for 18 years.
0:20:18 So they say, look, if they cause some horrific short to medium term effect, it would have
0:20:24 shown up in the diabetics now by now.
0:20:26 If it made you grow horns, the diabetics would have horns, right?
0:20:29 And that’s a good point.
0:20:31 And it should give us some sense of security.
0:20:34 But equally some other scientists said, okay, if we’re going to base our confidence that
0:20:38 these drugs are safe on the diabetics, let’s really dig into the data around the diabetics.
0:20:43 So for example, there’s a brilliant French scientist called Jean-Luc Fayet.
0:20:47 And what he looked at was a very large group of diabetics who use these drugs, and then
0:20:51 he looked at a comparable group of diabetics who were very similar in every other way,
0:20:55 but didn’t use these drugs.
0:20:56 And what him and his colleagues calculated is these drugs, if they’re right, increase
0:21:00 your risk of thyroid cancer by between 50% to 75%.
0:21:05 That’s significant.
0:21:06 Yeah.
0:21:07 As he said to me, it’s important to understand what that doesn’t mean.
0:21:10 That doesn’t mean if you take the drug, you have a 50% to 75% chance of getting thyroid
0:21:15 cancer.
0:21:16 If that was the case, we’d be having bonfires or a zempik all over the world.
0:21:19 What it means is, if you take the drug, whatever, if he’s right, and this is highly disputed,
0:21:25 if you take the drug, whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, that risk will
0:21:31 increase by between 50% to 75%.
0:21:33 Now other people say thyroid cancer is relatively rare, 1.2% of people get it in their life,
0:21:39 82% of people survive.
0:21:42 Nonetheless, I was extremely alarmed by that.
0:21:45 Since that, lots of other scientists said to me, “Well, look, even if that’s right,
0:21:49 you’ve got to compare it to what would happen to your cancer risk if you just remain obese.”
0:21:54 Right?
0:21:55 And actually, I was stunned by the evidence about the cancer risk just from being obese.
0:22:00 One of the biggest preventable causes of cancer in the United States and Britain is obesity.
0:22:04 So the thing I think we have to do, you have to look at two competing sets of risks here.
0:22:10 The risks of obesity and the risks of these drugs.
0:22:13 And there isn’t a pattern answer to that.
0:22:15 It’s a weird thing.
0:22:16 To start the book so divided and then go on this huge journey and read hundreds and hundreds
0:22:22 of studies and interview so many experts, and here I am at the end of it, I know much
0:22:27 more about the benefits and risks and what it’s going to do to the culture.
0:22:30 But to be honest with you, Sean, and this hasn’t happened to me in my books before, I’m still
0:22:34 really, really conflicted.
0:22:36 I don’t really know.
0:22:38 That itself was kind of revealing.
0:22:39 Yeah.
0:22:40 Yeah.
0:22:41 When we get back from the break, what does this demand for a weight loss drug say about
0:22:54 our culture and our food?
0:22:57 Stay with us.
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0:27:08 Another part of the book that I do want to discuss a little bit here is the story of
0:27:13 how we got to this place as a society.
0:27:17 And the main character here is the modern food industry.
0:27:22 What did you want to say about this in the book?
0:27:23 What should people know about this dimension of the problem?
0:27:26 So I guess the most important thing to know is just how recent and unusual the obesity
0:27:30 crisis is.
0:27:32 You have 300,000 years where obesity is exceptionally rare.
0:27:36 So what happened?
0:27:38 We moved from eating mostly whole foods that are prepared on the day to eating mostly processed
0:27:45 and ultra processed foods that are assembled in factories made out of chemicals in a process
0:27:50 that isn’t even called cooking, it’s called manufacturing food.
0:27:53 And it turns out that processed food affects our bodies in a completely different way to
0:27:59 the kind of food that human beings evolve to eat.
0:28:01 There’s a brilliant scientist called Professor Paul Kenney, who I mentioned before, head
0:28:05 of neuroscience at Mount Sinai.
0:28:07 He grew up in Dublin in Ireland, and he moved in his 20s to San Diego to do his PhD, I think.
0:28:12 And he quickly clocked, whoa, Americans do not eat like Irish people did at the time.
0:28:17 They eat much more processed food, much more junk food, much more sugary and salty food.
0:28:22 Unlike many a good immigrant here, simulated, and within a year he’d gained 30 pounds.
0:28:27 And he started to feel like these foods weren’t just changing his body, they were changing
0:28:34 his brain, they were changing his cravings, they were changing what he wanted.
0:28:38 So he designed an experiment to test this, it’s very simple.
0:28:40 He got a load of rats and he raised them in a cage.
0:28:43 And for the first part of their life, all they had was the kind of nutritious whole foods
0:28:47 that rats evolved to eat for thousands of years.
0:28:51 And when they had that food and nothing else, they would eat when they were hungry and then
0:28:54 they would stop.
0:28:55 They never made themselves fat.
0:28:57 They seemed to have some kind of natural nutritional wisdom when they had the food they evolved
0:29:01 for that just said, okay, stop now.
0:29:04 Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet.
0:29:08 He fried up some bacon, he bought some Snickers bars and crucially he bought a lot of cheesecake
0:29:13 and he put it in the cage.
0:29:14 And they still had the option of healthy food, but the rats went crazy for the American diet.
0:29:20 They would literally dive into the cheesecake and eat their way out, just completely kind
0:29:24 of slicked and caked in this cheesecake.
0:29:28 They ate and ate and ate and ate.
0:29:31 The way Professor Kenny put it to me, within a few days they were different animals and
0:29:35 they all became very severely overweight quite rapidly.
0:29:38 Then Professor Kenny did something that to me as a former junk food addict since pretty
0:29:42 cruel, he took away all that American food and left them with nothing but the healthy
0:29:46 food again.
0:29:47 He was pretty sure he knew what would happen, that they would eat more of the healthy food
0:29:51 than they did before and this would prove that junk food expands the number of calories
0:29:54 you eat.
0:29:55 That is not what happened.
0:29:57 What happened was much weirder.
0:29:59 They refused to eat anything at all.
0:30:02 When they were deprived of the American food, they would rather starve than go back to eating
0:30:05 healthy food.
0:30:06 It’s only when they were literally starving that they went back to eating it.
0:30:09 Now all this shows, and we have a huge amount of evidence for this in humans, there’s something
0:30:14 about the food we’re eating that is profoundly undermining our ability to know when to stop.
0:30:20 It is destroying our satiety and what these drugs do is they give us back that satiety.
0:30:26 The way one scientist put it to me, is there satiety hormones?
0:30:29 When you see it like that, you realize one Professor, Michael Lowe in Philly, said to
0:30:35 me, they’re an artificial solution to an artificial problem.
0:30:39 The point you were making earlier about how disevolved or maladapted we are to this environment,
0:30:45 we evolve under conditions where salty, sugary, starchy foods were very hard to come by and
0:30:52 now these unhealthy, super processed foods are cheap and omnipresent.
0:30:58 I’m not saying it’s impossible to be healthy in the modern world, but as you say in the
0:31:02 book, we have built a system that almost deliberately poisons us, which is insane.
0:31:08 Yeah, it’s catastrophic and it’s profoundly harming our health.
0:31:12 It didn’t have to happen.
0:31:13 It’s not an inevitable effect of modernity.
0:31:15 It’s the effect of allowing the food industry to systematically poison the minds and bodies
0:31:21 of the country.
0:31:22 Now, they’re not doing that because they’re wicked bond villains.
0:31:25 They’re doing that to make money, but we’ve allowed them to do it and they have lobbied
0:31:29 to prevent laws that would have sensibly prevented this and they’ve massively pumped
0:31:34 our heads full of bullshit.
0:31:36 So, you think about from the moment we’re born, we are bombarded with imagery, telling
0:31:41 us to eat things that are really bad for us and I include myself in that by the way.
0:31:46 Well, they kind of are the bond villains.
0:31:49 Some of them are.
0:31:50 I read in the book where you talk about an internal memo from 1998 from a company that
0:31:56 makes biscuits.
0:31:57 The memo was talking about how to market their shit food to kids.
0:32:04 And they’re literally saying, we’ve got to get them when they’re young.
0:32:06 We’ve got to get them to shape their tastes before they’re making rational choices, right?
0:32:11 And they talk about, well, let’s use cartoon characters, let’s advertising kids TV, let’s
0:32:16 give our shitty food free to schools so that when they go home, they demand it.
0:32:20 Yeah, these are reprehensible people.
0:32:23 As angry as I am with the food industry, and I am very angry with them, I think it’s despicable
0:32:27 and they should have made different moral choices, I’m more angry with the society that
0:32:32 didn’t regulate them, right?
0:32:34 Because those companies are maximizing profit for their shareholders.
0:32:36 That’s what the company is built to do.
0:32:38 The bigger issue is not just moral condemnation of them.
0:32:41 I don’t think that gets us very far.
0:32:42 They’re not going to morally change.
0:32:44 The issue is why have we not regulated them?
0:32:47 So we end up with this shitty choice of, do I continue with a risky medical condition
0:32:52 or do I take this risky drug?
0:32:54 That choice didn’t have to happen.
0:32:56 And that choice does not have to be the choice for the next generation of Americans.
0:33:00 If we get this right, we can fix this.
0:33:03 We don’t have to let our kids grow up in this trap.
0:33:05 It’s really important that people know that.
0:33:07 And if that sounds very pie in the sky, I would say think about smoking, right?
0:33:11 Think about when we were kids.
0:33:12 When we were kids, people smoked everywhere.
0:33:16 People smoked on the subway.
0:33:18 People smoked on planes.
0:33:19 People smoked on game shows.
0:33:20 The doctor used to smoke while he examined you.
0:33:22 I remember that when I was a kid.
0:33:24 There’s a photograph of me and my mother where she’s breastfeeding me, smoking and resting
0:33:29 the ashtray on my stomach, right?
0:33:31 Now, I’m speaking to you from Britain, you know, the British government has just begun
0:33:34 the criminalization of smoking.
0:33:36 That’s an enormous public health transformation.
0:33:38 We can make similar changes like this.
0:33:40 I’ve been to places that have begun to do it.
0:33:43 But it requires first an honest reckoning with how this happened and what it is physically
0:33:49 doing to us.
0:33:50 One of the reasons I identified pretty early on in my life as on the political left is
0:33:57 I would constantly see these arguments about this or that societal problem.
0:34:03 And I thought conservatives overestimated the role of agency and choice and liberals
0:34:11 seemed more tuned to the realities of the incentive structure that we live in and how
0:34:18 those constrain our actual choices.
0:34:20 And this is the same dynamic I struggle with here, right?
0:34:23 Like sure, people need to make wise life choices.
0:34:26 I get that.
0:34:27 We need to exercise more.
0:34:28 We need to eat as well as we can.
0:34:30 But if you’re poor or working class, eating healthy is expensive.
0:34:35 Finding the time to work out if you’re a single mom or working two jobs or whatever is hard.
0:34:42 So I guess what I’m asking is how do we avoid tumbling into a post-ozympic world that’s
0:34:47 even more unequal than the world we already live in?
0:34:51 You’re totally right.
0:34:52 My grandmother left school when she was 13.
0:34:55 She raised three kids on her own because her husband died when he was very young.
0:34:58 She had a heart attack and my grandmother came home dog-tired from a day cleaning toilets,
0:35:04 working bars.
0:35:06 And the one comfort she had in her life was eating Stodge and carbohydrates and she ate
0:35:10 a lot of them and became very obese.
0:35:12 And anyone who criticizes her as an asshole.
0:35:15 So you’re absolutely right.
0:35:17 There’s the inequality of access to healthy food and then there’s just it’s really stressful
0:35:21 to be poor and you don’t have many comforts when you’re poor and one of them is food.
0:35:27 With ozympic there’s some possible scenarios for how this might play out now and one of
0:35:31 them is a pretty dystopian one which is that these drugs work, that the benefits outweigh
0:35:35 the risks but they are only accessible to a tiny elite.
0:35:39 So you have the Real Housewives of New Jersey get to be super skinny and the Real School
0:35:43 Children of New Jersey get to be diabetic at the age of 12, right?
0:35:46 That’s a real risk.
0:35:48 I think it’s possibly the most likely scenario given the current configuration.
0:35:52 It’s not because the drugs are inherently expensive.
0:35:54 The drugs cost about $40 a month to manufacture.
0:35:57 It’s because of the patenting system and the insane way the American medical system works.
0:36:01 You know, I live half the time in the US half the time in Britain.
0:36:05 When I’m in Britain I buy these drugs for about £200 a month.
0:36:09 What’s that?
0:36:10 $280 something like that.
0:36:11 When I’m in Las Vegas it costs me like $1,000 a month, right?
0:36:15 This disparity in drug prices happens in the US the whole time.
0:36:18 It’s madness and it’s insane that the United States tolerates this.
0:36:21 It doesn’t have to be that way.
0:36:22 There are all sorts of ways that we can bring down the price and the price will come down
0:36:26 anyway in eight years time because in 2032 a Zempik comes out of Payton.
0:36:31 So eight years from now these drugs will almost certainly be in pill form.
0:36:35 You can already get the pills but the pills will be more effective.
0:36:38 At that point, I anticipate if we don’t find really horrific side effects, I would guess
0:36:43 half the American population will be taking them and don’t take my word for it.
0:36:48 Look at the markets and what they’re saying.
0:36:50 Jeffrey’s Financial just did a big report for the airlines saying prepare for the fact
0:36:56 that you’re going to have to spend far less money on jet fuel because the population’s
0:36:59 about to become much thinner and you’re going to have to spend a lot less money on it.
0:37:02 The CEO of Nestle, Mark Schneider, has been making very nervous noises about the future
0:37:07 of their ice cream market.
0:37:08 Even think about little things.
0:37:09 There’s a company that manufactures the hinges for hip and knee replacements.
0:37:14 Their stock is down because fewer people are going to be having hip and knee replacements
0:37:18 because the main driver of those operations is obesity and a lot of fewer people are
0:37:22 going to be obese.
0:37:24 Some of that sounds really overstated to me in terms of the impact.
0:37:29 Talk me through that a little bit.
0:37:31 Even if half the country is taking this drug and losing 20, 25 pounds or whatever the case
0:37:38 may be, is that really going to be significant enough to tank airline prices and up in the
0:37:44 market in that way?
0:37:45 That seems wild.
0:37:46 I think you have to think about it in the wider context.
0:37:50 In terms of the consequences of this, I mean, by many measures, obesity is the biggest killer
0:37:54 in the United States.
0:37:56 If you can massively reduce the biggest killer in the country, yeah, that has enormous consequences.
0:38:02 It also has huge cultural consequences, by the way, in all sorts of complex and much more
0:38:07 worrying ways about what young women aspire to be like, what the young women they see around
0:38:11 them look like.
0:38:12 But yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s overblown to say if you can reduce the biggest killer
0:38:16 in the society, and you can transform how people look and how they move and how their
0:38:22 bodies work and what kind of illnesses they get, that’s pretty, pretty big.
0:38:26 If 50% of the country is taking this, then presumably that will include kids, young kids
0:38:33 and teenagers.
0:38:35 And I read what you wrote about this in the book, and it is appropriately nuanced.
0:38:40 But man, I don’t know what to think about that.
0:38:43 The first thing I feel when I think about this is profound anger.
0:38:46 It was the angriest I got when writing the book.
0:38:49 So the first thing we should say is it is an outrage that parents are being put in the
0:38:54 position where they have to make this choice.
0:38:56 It isn’t happening in countries that made better societal choices.
0:39:00 We shouldn’t allow it to continue.
0:39:01 But my biggest worry about these drugs for myself and for these kids is we just have
0:39:07 no idea about the long term effects.
0:39:10 You know, these drugs are activating key parts of the brain, right?
0:39:14 I had a quite chilling conversation with one of the neuroscientists.
0:39:17 She was explaining to me which brain regions we know are affected by these drugs.
0:39:21 And I remember saying to her, “So what else does that brain region do?”
0:39:24 And she said, “Oh, memory processing, control of your gut.”
0:39:27 And I was like, “Oh well, just the trivial stuff then.”
0:39:30 Of course this raises the question, if you are chronically activating these parts of
0:39:33 the brain and you think about an eight-year-old child to have the benefits throughout their
0:39:38 life, they will have to take it for what, 80 years?
0:39:41 What will be the effect of that?
0:39:43 The answer is we have absolutely no idea.
0:39:45 Is that the biggest concern for you in terms of the risk, just simply the unknown?
0:39:52 It’s the biggest risk for me personally because a lot of the risks don’t apply to me.
0:39:56 I’m obviously not going to get pregnant.
0:39:58 I’ve never had thyroid cancer in my family.
0:40:00 I didn’t experience a loss of pleasure in food.
0:40:03 The one that I’m most worried about, this is not for myself, but eating disorders in
0:40:07 young women.
0:40:08 So prior to the pandemic, we already had historically high levels of eating disorders
0:40:13 among American girls.
0:40:14 It is overwhelmingly girls of their course, some boys.
0:40:18 And then during the pandemic, incredibly it rose from the already historically high level.
0:40:23 And I am extremely worried about what happens when people who are determined to starve themselves
0:40:30 get hold of an unprecedentedly powerful weapon to amputate your appetite.
0:40:35 My biggest worry is that we will have an opioid-like death toll of young women who starve themselves
0:40:42 to death using these drugs who would not have been able to without these drugs.
0:40:45 Now there’s a lot we can do to prevent that.
0:40:48 At the moment, you can get these drugs from a doctor on Zoom.
0:40:51 Doctors on Zoom are not good at assessing your BMI.
0:40:54 These drugs should only be prescribed in person by doctors who have training in detecting
0:41:00 eating disorders.
0:41:02 That’s not perfect.
0:41:03 There are still holes in that system, but it would prevent a lot of this harm.
0:41:06 Well, I think this relates to another tension you deal with in the book, which is that on
0:41:11 the one hand, the body positivity movement has been good in lots of ways.
0:41:16 We’ve shattered stigmas and around weight and all of that.
0:41:20 But on the other hand, it’s just a biological fact that carrying too much weight leads to
0:41:24 bad health outcomes.
0:41:26 And if we can conquer that, that would be a pure, unminigated good for society.
0:41:35 Can we embrace this medical revolution without unwinding some of that cultural progress we’ve
0:41:40 made, which is connected to these issues with eating disorders and the like?
0:41:44 I really agonized over this question.
0:41:46 One of the people who really helped me to understand it and think it through was an amazing woman
0:41:51 named Shelly Bovee.
0:41:52 She’s basically the person who introduced body positivity into Britain, so she grew
0:41:58 up in a working class town in Wales where she describes herself the only fat girl in
0:42:02 her school.
0:42:03 And one day when she was 11, her teacher said to her, “Bovee, stay behind after class.”
0:42:10 So she stayed behind thinking, “What have I done wrong?”
0:42:13 And the teacher said to her, “You’re much too fat.
0:42:15 It’s disgusting.
0:42:16 Go see the school nurse.
0:42:17 She’ll sort you out.”
0:42:18 So kind of shaken, Shelly went to see the school nurse.
0:42:21 The school nurse said, “Why are you here?”
0:42:22 She said, “Well, the teacher says I’m too fat.”
0:42:24 She said, “Take off your clothes.
0:42:25 I’m going to inspect you.”
0:42:27 She took off her clothes and the school nurse said, “This is disgusting.
0:42:30 You’re a greedy pig.
0:42:32 Stop eating so much.”
0:42:33 She just berated her.
0:42:34 So Shelly left and her whole life she was soaking up abuse and insults like this.
0:42:39 And it made her hate herself and hate her body.
0:42:41 In fact, she told me she hadn’t ever looked at her body when she was showering even.
0:42:45 She’d never looked at her body naked because she hated it so much.
0:42:48 And then she learned about the body positivity movement, which had obviously begun in the
0:42:52 US, that was saying, “This is just a form of bigotry and bullying and cruelty and we
0:42:56 don’t have to take this shit.”
0:42:58 And Shelly introduced it to Britain, where I heard of it for the first time.
0:43:01 I remember seeing her on TV when I was 10 years old when she was presented as this kind
0:43:04 of laughable mad woman.
0:43:06 And she really pioneered opposing stigma and she remains proud to this day of the work
0:43:10 she did, rightly so in my view.
0:43:13 But Shelly also faced another problem.
0:43:15 She was extremely obese and she was finding it hard to walk.
0:43:19 In fact, she was in a wheelchair a lot of the time and a doctor told her she had heart
0:43:22 problems.
0:43:23 And she really began to wrestle with, “Well, am I betraying my body positivity if I talk
0:43:28 about the harm caused by obesity to my health?”
0:43:32 And she began to say, “Well, what kind of body positivity would it be that would judge
0:43:37 me for keeping my body alive?
0:43:39 That doesn’t seem like body positivity to me.”
0:43:42 She lost an enormous amount of weight through calorie restriction and exercise and became
0:43:47 much healthier.
0:43:49 And she stands by everything she said about stigma, but she said, “It’s not either all.
0:43:53 It’s not either you’re against stigma or you’re in favor of reducing obesity where possible.
0:43:58 It’s both and.
0:43:59 If you love someone who’s obese, you want to protect them from cruelty, shaming and bullying.
0:44:04 And if possible, you want to protect them from diabetes, heart disease, dementia.”
0:44:08 So to me, there’s no playoff between those two.
0:44:10 I think your question goes to a wider and deeper problem.
0:44:15 And actually weirdly, of all the time I spent writing the book, the worst moment for me
0:44:22 was what might seem like a small moment in some ways, but I’ve got a niece called Erin.
0:44:26 She’s the baby in my family.
0:44:27 She’s the only girl in her generation and she’s 19 now.
0:44:30 But last year when I first started taking the drugs, we were FaceTiming.
0:44:35 And she was kind of teasing me about how good I looked.
0:44:37 She said, “I didn’t know you had a neck.
0:44:38 I didn’t know you had a jaw before.”
0:44:40 And I was kind of laughing and she was saying, “Oh, you look really good.”
0:44:44 And then she looked down and she said, “Will you buy me some Mozempic?”
0:44:49 And I thought she was kidding.
0:44:50 And I laughed.
0:44:51 She’s a perfectly healthy weight.
0:44:53 And then I realized she wasn’t joking and I thought, “Oh, shit.
0:44:56 Have I undercut here all the advice I’ve been giving her since she was a little girl?”
0:45:01 And I think there’s two quite different things here, but they’re very hard to separate culturally.
0:45:05 There’s overweight and obese people who are taking these drugs to be a healthy weight.
0:45:10 And then there are people who are already a healthy weight or indeed skinny who are taking
0:45:14 these drugs to be very thin.
0:45:15 They’re in fact incurring health risks in the opposite direction.
0:45:17 Like the actors at the party.
0:45:20 Exactly.
0:45:21 None of them were fat to start with, right?
0:45:23 And again, we can look at historical examples.
0:45:25 Between 1966 and 1968, the number of young women who felt they were too fat exploded.
0:45:31 That’s really weird.
0:45:33 What happened between 1966 and 1968 is very short period.
0:45:37 What happened is a new model known as Twiggy was presented as the face of beauty of the
0:45:42 sixties.
0:45:43 Now, it’s not Twiggy’s fault.
0:45:44 She was naturally skinny, but very few girls looked like Twiggy, right?
0:45:48 A new thinner body norm was created and that made more girls hate their bodies.
0:45:53 I’m very worried about that dynamic.
0:45:54 I think that is in fact happening now.
0:45:56 And it’s not like young girls didn’t already have a nightmare set of pressures on them.
0:45:58 Of course they did.
0:46:06 After one more short break, we talk about the decision to take these drugs and some
0:46:10 of the difficult trade-offs.
0:46:12 Stay with us.
0:46:13
0:46:33 Support for the gray area comes from green light.
0:46:36 Here’s something I think we can all agree on.
0:46:39 The world is filled with adults who can’t handle money.
0:46:42 My theory, nobody taught them when they were kids, myself included.
0:46:47 At one point I invested my life savings into a dude wears my car sequel.
0:46:52 So if you don’t want your children to turn out like me, still waiting for that Hollywood
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0:49:36 Thank you.
0:49:37 I’m always wary of treating symptoms, not causes.
0:49:55 And in this case is one of the bigger risks that the availability of these drugs will prevent
0:50:02 us from dealing with these systemic problems that we have with the food industry and pop
0:50:08 culture and that sort of thing.
0:50:10 And if it does in fact make it harder for us to deal with these systemic problems, what
0:50:17 is the net good over the long haul?
0:50:20 I wrestled with that myself and I still wrestle with that.
0:50:23 One person I put that to.
0:50:25 I said, “Will it undermine the political pressure to deal with the food system?”
0:50:28 And this is a very prominent person, I won’t say who, but it said, “What pressure to change
0:50:34 the food system?
0:50:35 You won’t ever find a more popular person than Michelle Obama, a more charismatic and
0:50:39 brilliant communicator.
0:50:41 Even Michelle Obama couldn’t get any political traction for this.
0:50:44 She couldn’t get any political traction for the idea that you should physically move your
0:50:47 body.”
0:50:48 I mean, that was regarded as controversial.
0:50:50 Let’s get our children to move.
0:50:52 I think that’s too pessimistic.
0:50:54 I do believe we can build political pressure around this, but I don’t feel I can say to
0:51:00 people, “You should incur negative consequences now because it will create more political
0:51:06 pressure further down the line to make it better for future people.”
0:51:11 I get it and I wouldn’t tell that to anyone else either, but we have the benefit of being
0:51:15 able to think dispassionately about this in conversations like this, removing ourselves
0:51:20 from the immediate emotional impact of that.
0:51:23 Yeah, there’s just not easy answers, for sure.
0:51:27 I guess the dream scenario is many people start taking these drugs, they work, our collective
0:51:33 health skyrockets, and then, as you say in the book, that awakens us to the insanity
0:51:39 of the situation we got ourselves into, and then maybe that spurs reform.
0:51:44 I don’t know if it’s going to play out that way, but that’s the timeline I would sign
0:51:47 up for.
0:51:48 In the range of scenarios from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic, obviously the most
0:51:52 pessimistic is that this is like the diet drug Fen Fen in the 1990s, hugely popular front
0:51:58 page of Time magazine said the new miracle weight loss drug, 18 million Fen Fen prescriptions,
0:52:04 and then we discover it causes catastrophic heart defects and lung problems, it gets yanked
0:52:10 from the market, leads to the biggest compensation payout in the history of the pharmaceutical
0:52:13 industry.
0:52:15 That’s quite unlikely given what we know about the diabetics, but it’s not inconceivable.
0:52:20 If that’s the most pessimistic, the most optimistic is precisely, as you say, that the drugs work,
0:52:24 that the benefits outweigh the risks, and that we wake up and go, how did we get to
0:52:29 this point?
0:52:30 I think the probably most likely scenario is somewhere in the middle, that’s very disconcerting.
0:52:35 I think what we don’t know yet scares me as much as what we do know excites me, and I
0:52:41 guess I’m just conditioned to believe that there are no biological free lunches.
0:52:45 Be a smaller free lunch if it’s those unpicked.
0:52:48 One of the last things you write in the book is that these drugs are going to change the
0:52:54 world.
0:52:55 For better or for worse?
0:52:58 So what do you think it’ll be, for better or worse?
0:53:01 I think it’ll be both.
0:53:02 I think it’ll be better for people like me who had heart attack risks.
0:53:05 I think it’ll be much worse for people with eating disorders, and I don’t think there’s
0:53:09 a kind of moral calculator where you can put me not dying of heart attack versus a person
0:53:13 with eating disorders dying because they were able to starve themselves.
0:53:16 I don’t think you can really make those calculations.
0:53:19 We can definitely take the steps needed to protect those people with eating disorders
0:53:22 now, and many of the other risks, warning people with thyroid problems, warning people
0:53:27 who are pregnant, a whole range of things.
0:53:30 It’s definitely both, but I can’t measure out the proportions yet.
0:53:36 I’m inclined to say for the better, that’s just a wild guess.
0:53:39 A hundred years from now, someone in the smoking ruins of our civilization will find this episode
0:53:43 of this podcast, and go, “Gah, Sean, did he get it right?
0:53:47 They’ll know.
0:53:48 We don’t know.”
0:53:49 I mean, to me, the big hinge is the access question, right?
0:53:52 We have to get that right.
0:53:53 We have to get that right.
0:53:56 If we don’t, if this becomes a drug for rich people, that will be a moral catastrophe.
0:54:01 Yeah.
0:54:02 Oh, it’ll be disgusting.
0:54:03 That’s an eight-year window, right?
0:54:05 We’ve got an eight-year window until a Zempik goes out of patent, at which point they’ll
0:54:07 be able to manufacture it for $40 a month for anyone.
0:54:11 So we’ve got eight years in which this could be confined to a small elite, and that’s scandalous
0:54:15 and lots of people will die in that eight-year window who could have lived.
0:54:19 And then 2032 onwards, we don’t have that dilemma.
0:54:24 The book is called Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risk of the New Weight
0:54:28 Loss Drugs.
0:54:29 Yo-ha and Hari.
0:54:30 Always a pleasure, my friend.
0:54:31 Oh, what a delight.
0:54:32 Cheers, Sean.
0:54:33 Thanks so much.
0:54:33 Thanks so much.
0:54:41 What did you think about this episode?
0:54:43 For me, I know this wasn’t necessarily a conventional TGA episode.
0:54:47 We weren’t deep in the works of Aristotle or Nietzsche or something like that.
0:54:52 But I learned a lot about this drug.
0:54:55 And I think we should all know a lot about this drug because it is going to be huge.
0:54:59 It’s already huge, and this was a useful education.
0:55:04 But I’m curious what you think, as always.
0:55:06 So drop me a line at the gray area at Vox.com and tell me.
0:55:09 I’ll read it and I will respond.
0:55:12 And as always, please, please, please rate, review, subscribe.
0:55:15 That stuff really helps our show.
0:55:19 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:55:26 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:55:29 New episodes of the Gray Area Drop on Mondays, listen and subscribe.
0:55:34 The gray area is part of Vox, which doesn’t have a paywall.
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