The One You Feed - Understanding the Truth About Obesity and Weight Loss Drugs with Johann Hari

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

In this episode, Johann Hari explores the complexities of obesity and weight loss drugs. He dives into the seemingly simple relationship between our food choices and innate biological responses. Reflecting on his upbringing, shaped by a diet of processed and junk food, Johann’s journey is intertwined with scientific revelations. His research and personal experience offers a thought-provoking narrative on the impact of modern diets on our bodies and minds. In this episode, you will be able to: Understand the long-term impact of weight loss drugs on your health and well-being Explore the health risks associated with obesity and effective management strategies Uncover the role of GLP-1 receptor in appetite regulation and weight management Embrace body positivity and learn how to combat the stigma surrounding obesity Compare the pros and cons of bariatric surgery and weight loss drugs for effective weight management To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's not the individual's fault. We need to release them from shame while also having an honest conversation. We can't talk honestly about the risks and benefits of these drugs if we don't start by talking about, unfortunately, there are really significant risks to continuing to be obese. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor.

What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is one of our favorites, Johan Hari.

He's a writer, journalist, and has written for New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and other newspapers. His TED Talks have been viewed tens of millions of times. Johan's work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky and Joe Rogan. Today, Johan and Eric discuss his new book, Magic Pill, the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs. Hi, Johan. Welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be here. And this is weird because we're in my old neighborhood, right? I used to live just a couple of blocks away from here. So it's slightly surreal to see you in the flesh. We've done so many interviews. I didn't realize you exist in corporeal form

as well. Indeed I do. Very impressive. We're in New York City and we're going to be discussing your book, Magic Pill, the extraordinary benefits and disturbing risks of the new weight loss drugs. I think that for this episode and one episode only, we should rename your podcast, The One You Don't Feed. Yes. Talking weight loss drugs. But we will do the parable to start like we always do. So you know it by now, but there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you now after writing this book? You know, I was thinking about it on the way here made me think about a whole area of science that i learned about for the book that

really haunted me because for a long time when i was researching the book i thought i was looking at two quite different questions so i started by looking at why did obesity blow up so rapidly that we've reached the point where 47% of Americans say they want to take the new weight loss drugs. What happened? Because this is unprecedented in human history. I think we're probably about the same age. How old are you, Eric? 52. Oh, so you're slightly older than me. But in our lifetime, so I was born in 1979. Between the year I was born and the year I turned 21, obesity doubled here in the United States, more than trebled in Britain, where I'm from.

And in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again. So we're talking about in the entire world, according to the World Health Organization, obesity trebled. This has never happened in the whole of human history. Look at a picture of just an ordinary beach in Atlantic City or wherever, anywhere in the world in 1970. Everyone is what we would call slim, right? Literally everyone. It's very strange when you look at it. So first I thought I was looking at why did we become obese? And then separately, what do these new weight loss drugs

do, right? How do they work? What are the benefits and risks? But then I actually learned that there's a word that kept coming up in both conversations with the scientists and that word is satiety so it's not a word we use that often in everyday English but we know what being sated is right it's when you feel like you've had enough you don't want any more thanksgiving dinner you feel stuffed you don't want any more you're sated right that's actually even beyond being sated that's when you're stuffed and I was thinking about your parable in relation to one really disturbing bit of science that i learned so i was raised my mother and my grandmother were kind of working class scottish women and they fed me basically nothing but processed and junk food right and this was an act of love on their part they liked this food they wanted me to have it

and it was a gift to themselves because they were exhausted extremely hard-working women and the day we got a microwave was the happiest day of my grandmother's life she's like it's cooking but you don't have to do anything right and what we now know is a huge amount of science has shown that we're eating in a way that destroys our ability to get a sense of satiety or profoundly undermines it and i thought about your parallel because in relationship experiment that happened here in new york so there's a brilliant scientist called Professor Paul Kenny. He's the head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai, not so far from where we are now. And he grew up in Ireland and he grew up eating the kind of food Irish people ate at the time in the 70s and 80s.

And then he moved to San Diego to continue his neuroscientific research and quickly discovered that Americans do not eat like Irish people did at the time. They eat a lot more processed food, a lot more ultra processed food, a lot more junk food, a lot more sugar and salt and fat. And like any good immigrant, he assimilated pretty quickly. And within, you know, a year, he'd gained 30 pounds. And he felt like this different American diet was in some ways changing his brain, changing what he wanted, changing his desires, obviously changing his body. So he designed an experiment to test this, which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park. That's not his official name. So he got a lot of rats and he raised them in a cage. And for the first part

of their life, they've got nothing but access to the kind of healthy, non-processed food that they evolved eating for thousands of years. So it's pellets, but they're pellets based on the kind of food they evolved to have. And when they have the kind of food that they've eaten for thousands of years. So it's pellets, but they're pellets based on the kind of food they evolved to have. And when they have the kind of food that they've eaten for thousands of years, even though the rats had loads of these pellets, they could have eaten a huge amount, they would eat enough until they felt sated, you know, to deal with their basic hunger, and then they stopped eating. So they never made themselves obese, they never made themselves overweight. Given the kind of food they evolved to have, they had a kind of natural nutritional wisdom and they stopped.

Then Professor Kenny introduced them to the American diet. He gave them a load of cheesecake. He fired up some bacon. He gave them a load of Snickers bars and they went wild for it. He put down the cheesecake and the rats would hurl themselves into it and eat their way out and emerge just going slicked with this cheesecake all over their whiskers and very quickly the nutritional wisdom that they had when they had the kind of food they evolved to eat just disappeared and they gorged themselves the

way professor kenny put it to me it's within a few days they were different animals right they were physically different and they were psychologically different. And they ate and ate and ate and ate. And quite rapidly, they were severely obese. Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment again. In a way, it seems a bit cruel to me as a former junk food addict. He took away all this American food and just gave them back the healthy food they'd grown up with. And he was sure he knew what would happen. He thought what will happen is they will eat more of the healthy food than they ate in the past and

this will prove that junk food and processed food expands your palate expands the amount of calories you eat and makes you want more that's not what happened what happened was much weirder once they'd had the american diet and they had it taken away they refused to eat any of the healthy food at all it was like they no longer recognized it as food at all. They shunned it and they chose to starve rather than eat it. And it was only when they were really starving that they eventually went back and started eating it again. And I think this shows, obviously, the one you feed. My God, what could be a more direct experiment than that, right?

As Gerald Mand, who's one of the leading experts at Harvard on this, he designed the nutritional label that's all food in this country. As he said to me, there's something about the food we're eating that is profoundly undermining our ability to know when to stop. And what these drugs do with some cost is they give you back your sense of satiety. They boost the parts of your biology in your gut and particularly in your brain that make you feel full again. So as one scientist, Professor Michael Lowe put it to me, they're an artificial solution to an artificial problem, right? So we fed ourselves with something that undermines our sense of satiety. It's caused a huge crisis in obesity. And now, you know, 47% of us want to take these drugs that artificially give us back that sense of satiety, which obviously leaves us with all sorts of practical

and philosophical dilemmas, right? Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. Listener, while you were listening to that, what resonated with you? What one thing to feed your good wolf comes to mind? If the thing that came to your mind was more time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you really haven't liked it, then I want to give you a quick tip that might make it better for you. And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're going to sit down and meditate and they're going to stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that means they're doing it well. But no one does that. And so we end up feeling like we're failing all of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.

We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me slash calm. In it, I walk you through my process to engage with meditation in a new way. And a lot of people have found it really helpful. That's goodwolf.me slash calm. That rat experiment seems, I mean, poor rats, they go, they really get put through the ringer, but that's a different show. Rings true to me in general, right? Because I know that when I'm eating a lot of sweets, and then I try and stop

eating sweets, it's really difficult for a little while. And then it's almost as if something sort of resets and settles down a little bit. And it's not so bad. But then if I eat them again, you know, and I've often been like, well, that seems to lend credence to the idea that, you know, sugar is sort of addictive. But I think that your book to me, and you illustrate it kind of right out of the gate is one of profound conflict, right? It's one where you are recognizing, and it's in the title, the amazing benefits to both perhaps individuals and society of these weight loss drugs, things like Ozempic and Wagovi. Do I say that right? Yeah.

And yet there's risks. And as you said, you know, an artificial solution to an artificial problem. And in the end of the book, you say, I've decided at least for now, because the book is very much a personal journey of you beginning to take these medicines. At the end of the book, you say, I have decided for now that it makes sense for me to continue to take these medicines. At the end of the book, you say, I have decided for now that it makes sense for me to continue to take these. I know that books get written and turned in well in advance of publication. So I'm guessing that that maybe was a year ago or so that you might have written that sentence? Much more recently. Oh, okay. We had a pretty quick turnaround. Your book's turning around really quick. Okay. All right. So is that still a place you're at?

I don't remember ever feeling so intensely conflicted about a subject right from the start. So for people who don't know, and some people who listen to this won't know, we now have a new kind of weight loss drug working in a completely new way on a new kind of mechanism that I can explain that delivers extraordinary levels of weight loss. The average person taking Ozempic or Wegovy loses 15% of their body weight within a year. For Munjaro, which is the next generation of the same class of drug, the average person loses 21% of their body weight. And for the next one that will come out next year, it's 24% of your body weight, which is only a little bit below bariatric surgery. Staggering levels of

weight loss. And when I first learned about these drugs, of course, immediately I thought, I learned about them just as I was crossing a kind of psychologically strange threshold where i was older than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when he was 44 a lot of the men in my family on both sides have heart problems my dad had to have major surgery my uncle died of a heart attack my other uncle had to have major surgery and i knew the scientific evidence is overwhelming that obesity makes you much more likely to have a very broad range of health problems one of which is the heart problems but extremely broad over 200 complications and diseases are made much more likely by obesity

and we know that when you can reduce or reverse obesity which is very hard to do but when you can do it you largely reverse those disease risks so of course i could immediately see the benefits right but i immediately thought just so many things. Well, we've seen this story before. There's been loads of weight loss drugs in the park, but pretty much every 20 years, going back to the first world war, there's a new miracle weight loss drug announced. They say it's, you know, solution to obesity. Most people take it. Then it causes some horrendous side effect and has to be withdrawn from the market leaving a trail of terribly damaged people in its wake so i was very conscious of that risk

i also just thought well can there be really such a thing as a free lunch or i guess in this case a smaller free lunch right like can you really get such extraordinary benefits without incurring costs i worried about will this reverse some of the progress we've made on body positivity? What will this do to people with eating disorders? I had a whole kind of array of worries in my mind, as well as excitement right from the start. And it was a really weird experience because I went all over the world for the book. I went on this big journey from Reykjavik in Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo. I interviewed over a hundred of the leading experts, the people who pioneered the drugs, their biggest critics, everyone in between. And I know much more now than I did at the start about the benefits and the risks, about the cultural effects, about the psychological effects of these

drugs. But to be honest with you, Eric, and this has never happened to me with any of the books I've worked on before, all of which we've talked about weirdly, I'm as conflicted now as I was at the start. I mean, maybe not quite as conflicted but pretty close like this is a really complex topic with really significant benefits and really significant risks both for individuals and the culture and i think what we have to do is really weigh that complexity very very carefully and it's not easy and the answers are not obvious so what i hope i've tried to do in the book is sort of take people on the journey to think through the complexity with me rather than give answers which I can't give. Yeah, well, you do a great job of it. It's a book that at first glance, I was like, I'm not particularly interested, but it's you, right?

And so I was like, I love your books. I love reading. And I was like, this is absolutely compelling. There's so many aspects of this that are fascinating. But let's talk about the heart of those conflicts. You know, you talked about body positivity, right? We've entered into a world where at least we are trying to lessen the stigma around being obese. And we've made some progress and we have a long way to go. And you take on something in the book that I thought was really difficult to take on, and yet it felt really important. And it was this idea of how do we encourage body positivity and reduce the stigma around being obese, while also be able to talk about the very

real health challenges that being obese bring. Walk me through your thought process on sort of arriving where you did with that. The worst moment in writing the book for me, yeah, by far the worst, was a moment, it was maybe six months into taking the drugs. I've got a niece called Erin and she's the baby in my family. She's the only girl. She's the youngest of all my nephews and my niece. And in my head, she's fixed as like a six-year-old forever she's actually 19 now but whenever she has a boyfriend i want to go get away from her you pedophile and i'm like oh no she's actually an adult woman right and a little while into taking the drug i was facetiming with

her and she was saying oh you've lost so much weight you know i'd lost a huge amount of weight by then and i was sort of preening she said i didn't know you had a jaw until now um kind of joking and then i was kind of preening and laughing and then she looked down and she said will you get me some ozempic and she's a perfectly healthy weight and always has been and I thought she was kidding so I laughed and then suddenly I realized she was being serious and I thought oh fuck what am I doing here right all her life I've been trying to give her this message you know you shouldn't be valued on how you look don't internalize these images about women only have value when they're thin and i thought shit if i just undone all that and you went to the

tension there with almost every topic related to these drugs there's a lot of complexity and this is one of them and one of the people who really helped me to think through this complexity is an amazing woman called shelly bovie so when i was a kid and when you were a kid it was just taken for granted on television that fat people were like the butt of the joke, right? They were particularly fat women, but fat men as well, were there to be kind of laughed at. And the fact they were fat was itself a joke, right? And the first person I ever heard challenge this, and I remember it quite vividly, is when I was 10 years old. So there was a woman called Shelley Boving, and I saw her on television. She was really the pioneer of body positivity in Britain. She was the first person I ever heard say,

you know, this isn't right. This is just a form of prejudice and stigma. And I went to see Shelley. She lives in a village in England now. I had a really interesting day with her because... So she grew up in a working class town in Britain called Port Talbot. And when she was a kid, she was the only fat girl in her school. That's the word she would have used, fat girl in her school. And one day when she was 11 or 12,

her teacher told her to stay behind after class. So she stayed behind thinking, what have I done wrong? And the teacher said to her, you are much too fat. It's disgusting. It's wrong. Go to the school nurse. She'll sort you out. So feeling completely taken aback,

Shelly went to the school nurse. The school nurse said, why are you here? She said, well, the teacher says I'm too fat. And the school nurse said, take off your clothes. I'm going to look at you. So she took off her clothes and the school nurse the school nurse said why are you here she said well the teacher says i'm too fat and the school nurse said take off your clothes i'm gonna look at you so she took off her clothes and the school nurse said she's right you're much too fat you're gonna die young it's disgusting stop being so greedy eat less and shelly kind of left feeling completely thrown and every girl in the school every other person around her was constantly giving her these messages you're disgusting you're revolting she was really smart and she was constantly giving her these messages you're disgusting

you're revolting she was really smart and she was advised by her teachers to go to university and she just couldn't do it she thought she'd just be fat shamed there and as she got older you know it was just constant you know she went to a doctor when she was pregnant first thing the doctor said was we shouldn't be pregnant when you're your weight after she gave birth she had quite a difficult birth. First thing that she's lying there covered in blood. And the midwife said to her, you know, you really need to lose some weight. When her son couldn't feed properly, wasn't attaching, she took him to the doctor.

The doctor said, what are you trying to do? Make the baby as fat as you are. So you've got to understand that overweight women, particularly overweight women, are constantly soaking this up. 45% of women who have a bmi higher than 35 are insulted every single day wow and shelly really pioneered in britain obviously there's been some movement here in the us before that that inspired her pioneered challenging this way of talking and thinking this is just a form of bigotry it's unacceptable it's a form of cruelty and bullying

and we need to fight back she wrote a very beautiful book arguing for this. It was a big and important book in Britain in the late 80s, which is when I saw her. And Shelley was very proud of what she wrote and stands by every word of it. But in the years that passed, something else also happened to Shelley. She weighed, you know, more than 200 pounds. And her doctor told her there was problems with her heart because of her weight. And she was losing the ability to walk she took her kids to a theme park one day a bit like kind of british version of

disneyland and she just couldn't walk anywhere and they found a wheelchair for her and her husband couldn't even push the wheelchair because she'd become so large and shelly was in this real dilemma she passionately opposed stigma and still does and always will but could also see it's just a scientific fact that there are physical harms caused by obesity you're much more likely to become diabetic your knees and your joints are more likely to be ruined i mean you're much more likely to get cancer dementia heart disease is an extraordinary list and there is no scientific debate about this no among mainstream scientists no scientific debate and shelly was like it's an act of love for yourself and for people who are in this situation you have to be able to do two things you have to be able to oppose stigma which a form of cruelty

and hatred and you have to be able to have an honest conversation about the harms caused by obesity to human health we understand those mechanisms we know how they work and it is not a form of stigma to talk about the harms caused by health because it can be done in a cruel and stigmatizing and mean way. And we should oppose that. But she said, you know, what kind of body positivity would it be that would lead to my body dying? Which is the path she was on. So in Shelley's case, she lost a huge amount of weight through diet.

She was the first to acknowledge that it's extremely hard to do. The vast majority of people who diet, including me, it doesn't work and they regain the weight. But in her case she was able to reverse it and it massively well her health problems largely went away and we know this is the case wherever you can reverse obesity with for example at bariatric surgery one of the best ways of trying to figure out the benefits and harms caused by these new weight loss drugs it's not perfect but one of the best ways is to look at bariatric surgery because that's actually up to now that's the only other form of medical intervention that's caused a huge amount of weight loss now bariatric surgery is a horrible thing right it's

a really grueling operation one in a thousand people die in the operation dreadful but the reason people take that tremendous risk and go through such a grueling process is because the benefits for health are so enormous. If you have bariatric surgery in the seven years that follow, you are 56% less likely to die of a heart attack. You are 60% less likely to die of cancer. You are 92% less likely to die of diabetes related causes. In fact, the benefits are so great. You're 40% less likely to die of any cause at all. And we now know that increasingly the evidence is becoming clear that the benefits from these new weight loss drugs are similar.

If you start with a BMI higher than 27 and you take these drugs, you are 20% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next few years. Obviously a topic very close to my own heart, literally very close to my own heart. So the reason I've given this monstrously long answer is because there's so much complexity here and there's so much is because there's so much complexity here and there's so much pain and there's so much shame and shelly is the first person to stress it is no individual's fault if they have become overweight or obese there are people to blame

it's the processed food industry and the society that's failed to regulate them but it's not the individual's fault we need to release them from shame while also having an honest conversation. We can't talk honestly about the risks and benefits of these drugs if we don't start by talking about, unfortunately, there are really significant risks to continuing to be obese. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. It makes me think a little bit about the journey as a recovering drug addict, right? Because there's this delicate balance that kind of has to happen within the addict, right? My experience is the stigma and the shame perpetuates the using, right? You talk about that pretty convincingly in the book. Same thing with weight loss. Stigma makes people less likely to lose weight, right? It's a catastrophic tool to promote change. A lot of stigma is just cruelty and fear.

But some people use stigma, and I think we should take them at their word. Some people think, well, I'm stigmatizing this person for their own good, to her benefit if she loses weight or his benefit. But actually actually there's lots of research on this and the evidence is overwhelming if you stigmatize people they are more likely to gain weight right yeah partly because people will come for eat more partly because as lindy west a very beautiful writer and a body positivity advocate puts it you can't take good care of a thing you hate yeah if we make people hate their bodies that doesn't make them take better care of a thing you hate. If we make people hate their bodies, that doesn't make them take better care of it, right?

And all sorts of other reasons as well. It makes people not want to exercise because they'll feel humiliated. I mean, there's a whole range of reasons. So yeah, stigma is a catastrophically, not only a poor tool for change, it's a counterproductive tool for change. It will make the problem worse for most people. Right, so stigma doesn't work to change, right?

So as an addict, you've got to lose that stigma. And yet there does have to be very honest consequences or very honest conversation about the consequences of your use, right? At least my experience was there was a way to do both those things. There was a way to go, you know what, this isn't really my fault that I'm this way, right? I need to take responsibility for it. It's not my fault. But if I'm not willing to look clear-headedly at what this is doing to my life and my health, I'm also not motivated to get better. And so, you know, it's not exactly the same thing by any stretch, but I think there's some parallels there that we can draw from recovery when recovery is done in a healthy and life-promoting way.

That's really interesting. I think there's a lot of insight in that. And I think it brings us to the drugs because for me, it was such a strange experience taking them. I thought I can't really honestly write about this if I don't take them. And also I was very conscious of the heart risks in my family and I was quite obese at the time. And it's the weirdest thing. I started taking Ozempic and never forget it i woke up two days later i was lying in bed and i thought i feel something really weird what do i feel and i couldn't locate the feeling and i and it took me a good five minutes or so to realize oh i'm not hungry every other day of my life i'd woken up feeling hungry often ragingly hungry

yeah i thought i'm not I'm not hungry at all. I was in London at the time. I live in London half the year. And I went to this, what here we would call a diner, just up the street from where I live. And I went in and I ordered the same thing I order every day, which was a kind of huge brown roll with loads of mayo and chicken in it. And I had like three mouthfuls. I don't want any more.

I felt full full i remember when i left tatiana the woman who runs it shouting out to her you okay right yeah and then for lunch that day next to my office there's a um turkish restaurant and i went in i ordered the same thing i always ordered which was a mediterranean lamb again i had like three four mouthfuls i just didn't want anymore it was like the kind of shutters had come down on my appetite obviously i later interviewed the scientists who play key roles in the breakthroughs that led to the drug and so if you ate now eric if you had anything after a little while your pancreas would release a hormone produce and release a hormone called glp1 and glp1 is just part of the natural signaling in your body saying eric you've had enough stop eating right but the natural signal

for glp-1 stays in your system for a few minutes and then goes away so you can just kind of power through it if you want to a lot of people don't but you can what these drugs do is they inject into you an artificial copy of glp-1 but instead of being washed away in a few minutes it stays in your gut and crucially in your brain for a whole week. So instead of just lasting a few minutes, it lasts a long time. Which is why when I go, as I literally did on the way to the studio here hurrying, you know, I was eating a croque monsieur from Pret, you get that sensation of fullness very, very rapidly. Now it was initially thought that effect was primarily on the gut, increasingly from interviewing lots of neuroscientists who were at the cutting

edge of research on this. The evidence is increasingly clear. It's primarily in your brain, which brings with it a whole different set of benefits and risks that we can talk about if you like. It was so strange to feel such a dramatic transformation so rapidly as the result of something so small. It was very disorientating. Yeah. Yep. Well, I know some people who are taking these drugs and they describe, I think you talk about it a little bit in the book too, that the noise around food in their head sort of disappears to some degree. That they felt like their life was always a lot of noise up here about what am I going to eat? When am I going to eat next? Craving, wanting this, wanting that.

And that it's just been turned way, way way down huge numbers of people talk about the food noise thing weirdly that wasn't actually my okay that was i did not have a big issue around food noise it's not that i obsessively thought about food for me it was slightly different and it's a funny thing and i want to stress that i think i'm unusual in this respect yeah so one of the big drawbacks to these drugs i go through a lot of the drawbacks in the book and 12 quite big risks i think probably the biggest drawback for most people is one that i didn't experience at all and i'll explain why most people experience a profound loss of pleasure in food some people say they don't enjoy food at all and some people say they enjoy food much less yeah so for example there's a brilliant british food critic who writes for the guardian who started taking his mpic and

just said you know he would go to the finest restaurants in Paris and just nothing, wasn't doing anything for him. And obviously this is a really big drawback. You know, one of the people who, one of the scientists who designed the drugs has talked about how a lot of people will just quit after a few years because it's just not tenable to live like that. I did not have that experience because I don't think it's for a particularly good reason. One of the things I realized, and it's related also to the food noise thing, I think, I grew up in a quite violent and chaotic environment and it gives a lot of addiction in my family.

And I realized I've never been someone who took a great deal of pleasure in tasting food. For me, one of the pleasures I took in food, by far the biggest pleasure I took in food, was by stuffing myself. Stuffing is where you deliberately eat beyond the point of fullness, right? We all do it sometimes thanksgiving or whatever and you feel like the pressure outward on your stomach and upward on your esophagus and some people it's

clearly a minority but some people get a sort of sense of calming or relief from that feeling of stuffing and i realized i was definitely in that category once i started taking these drugs i could not stuff myself you can't i mean you would just throw up if you tried to i think you literally couldn't do it i certainly am not inclined to try because i think it would make me sick right and so for me i had to eat much more slowly than i ever had before and i remember going out for dinner with a friend of mine and her saying it's always been a bit weird going out to eat with you because you eat so fast but you don't ever seem to really enjoying the food you eat and now you do actually look like you're enjoying the food you eat. And now you do actually look like you're enjoying the food you eat. It's actually much nicer to watch. So for me, stress is very typical and I was starting from

a very low base, but I think for me, it actually increased the amount of pleasure I take in food. I'm tasting it a bit more now. All right. Now let's pause for a quick good wolf reminder. And this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating, your mind wanders, you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment of failure, like, oh, my mind wandered again. But let's flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered. So it's a win. wandered. So it's a win. So if we can flip that right on its head and say, oh, good job brain, we actually make it more likely that A, our brain is going to do it more often because we're training it and B, that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me slash calm. It's interesting that

someone I know who's taking these has reported that as the week goes on, the effects seem to sort of taper down. And so in the later part of the week, they start to enjoy food a little bit more again, and then it comes time to take the thing. But the point I was making around the food noise is that, again, tying it sort of the idea of addiction, right, is that one of the good things about addiction is that for most people I know who are able to achieve, you know, abstinence, is that if you do that long enough, eventually that craving just kind of goes away. And it's really hard to function when that noise, the craving for whatever it is you want is really that high. And I think it's part of what speaks to what makes food so difficult for people, right? Is that that doesn't necessarily in a lot of people

go away without the help of these medicines. Well, I think there's another parallel with addiction, which we're curious what you think about eric so i had this weird thing that happened to me when i was taking them you know i remember i had i've got a friend called danielle who was pregnant at the time and every time i saw her it was like we were on reverse trajectories right she was getting bigger and i was shrinking and i remember one day running into her and i was getting what i wanted i was losing huge amounts of weight all sorts of nice benefits not just to my health like my neighbor's hot gardener hit on me like i remember one morning just thinking i'm getting what i want why don't i feel good yeah actually i don't want to overstate this but i wasn't depressed but if anything i felt like

my emotions were a little bit more muted yeah and there's a big debate about why and so i want to stress the majority of people taking these drugs are not experiencing this and there's a scientific debate about it. But the FDA does have a suicide warning on these drugs here in the United States. The European Medicines Agency was not persuaded by that risk, but there is a debate about is this causing depression in some people or indeed even suicide in some people. It's an ongoing scientific debate, but it's plausible enough that there was a safety signal raised and that the fda has this has this warning and of course if it's causing that effect

on some people it's plausible that could be causing muted feelings or somewhat lowered emotional affect in other people yeah i wonder why would that be and some people argue it may be literal brain effects and we can talk about them because i talk about them a lot in the book but i suspect for me it was a different thing so again maybe or seven months, maybe a little bit more into taking the drugs. I was in Vegas. I spent a lot of time in Vegas writing a book about a series of crimes that are happening there. A nonfiction book. I've been researching for a thousand years.

I will have to eventually write it. And that day I was investigating the murder of someone that I knew and I loved. And I was looking into it in great detail. And as you can imagine, it's not a pleasant thing to do. It's a tough day. And on autopilot, I went to the KFC on West Sahara and I did what I would have done a year before. I went in, I ordered a bucket of fried chicken.

It's something I've done a million times in my life. And I sat there and I looked at this chicken and I think I had one drumstick and I thought, I can't eat this. And I looked at Colonel Sanders, he was on the wall and it was like, he was looking down at me going, hey, what happened to my best customer, right? But I couldn't eat this. And I looked at Colonel Sanders, who was on the wall, and it was like he was looking down at me going, hey, what happened to my best customer, right? But I can eat it.

And I suspect for me, and I'm sure this dynamic is happening with lots of people, though it may not be the primary determinant of what we're talking about, that's more contested. There's an enormous amount of evidence for comfort eating, right? Huge numbers of people come to eat. After any shocking or surprising event, there's a massive spike in fast food consumption it's really interesting study of the nfl if the home team wins junk food

sales massively go down that week if the home team loses junk food sales massively go up that week right that's why comfort eating there's a lot of evidence for it men lose their jobs their massive increase in comfort eating in particular and on these drugs you cannot comfort eat and what i would say to people is people who think you're taking these drugs one of the things you should be aware of which i don't think is being discussed very much is for many people the underlying psychological drivers of your eating will come to the surface there are lots of potential underlying psychological drivers of overeating not just comfort eating i go through lots of them in the book and how they can emerge in this way that's not necessarily a bad. I remember going to one of my friends

when I was really struggling with that after that day, the KFC in West Sahara and saying, you know, I think I should stop taking these drugs. I want some fucking comfort food. And she said to me, look, you can stop if you want, but you should know these drugs are not causing this problem. This is a problem that was there all along. Yep. What these drugs are doing is surfacing this problem, which again is a very familiar concept from addiction. One of the great difficulties in stopping addiction, let's say to heroin or gambling or whatever, is that the underlying feelings that were being numbed or suppressed or managed by these addictions will come to the surface. It's a very familiar concept.

But yeah, so I was surprised when I started writing about this by how many things there are, given this is one of the hottest topics in culture right now, how much about this is not being discussed. How much of the effects, the concerns, the cultural, not just the personal effects, are not really being talked about at the moment. So I was surprised by how much there is to bring to the surface here. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no, really. Yeah, really.

No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. I think that that point of whatever you're using as a coping mechanism, when you take it away, you either are going to do one of a number of different things, right? You're just going to find another unhealthy coping mechanism

or you're going to be forced into facing the thing that is happening. We see this with addiction all the time, right? You stop one thing and you pick up another. I think that's true. And this is one of the risks associated with drugs. I go through 12 risks in the book because some people will be thinking, well, that's not going to play out for me. So there was some real flashing red lights for me.

When you look at the safety of these drugs, there's a very good argument put forward by the proponents of these drugs, by the defenders of the drugs, that we should give a lot of weight to sorry it's so difficult to even talk about this like weight or weighing but anyway you know what i mean um we should give a lot of non-ozympic weight to uh which is they say diabetics have been taking these drugs for 18 years on prescription for people who don't know in addition to having these effects on appetite these drugs also stimulate the creation of more insulin which of course is what diabetics need so diabetics have been taking these drugs for 18 years we've got a lot of evidence on those diabetics if it caused some catastrophic short to medium term effect we would know by now that's a

really compelling argument and there's a lot of truth in it but some scientists have responded by saying, okay, so let's look at the diabetics. Let's really dig into that. So for example, there's a brilliant scientist called Professor Jean-Luc Fayet, who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier. And he was tasked by the French Medicines Agency to investigate the safety of these drugs. So he started looking at them and he chose one issue in particular we know if you give these drugs to rats their thyroid cancer risk massively increases which also has makes a sort of intuitive sense in addition to having glp1 receptors in your gut and in your brain you also have them in your thyroid so you can see there's some plausible mechanism there so france has very good medical databases they don't have the equivalent of hipaa it's really hard to opt out

so you can do this research in France, but it's much harder to do here. What they did is they looked at diabetics who'd been taking these drugs for more than three years, between I think it was 2006 and 2016, and they compared them to comparable diabetics who'd not taken these drugs. And what Professor Fayy and his colleagues found

is pretty sobering. If his research is right, and there's a a debate about it these drugs increase your thyroid cancer risk by between 50 and 75 percent now it's important to understand what that doesn't mean because when you first hear it you're like what it doesn't mean 50 to 75 percent of people who take it will get thyroid cancer obviously if that was the case they'd immediately pull it from the market what it means is whatever your thyroid cancer risk was going in it will if this research is right again stress is contested it will go up by between 50 and 75 that's a big risk now it's a big increase in a relatively small risk only 1.2 percent of people get thyroid cancer in

their lifetime 84 of them survive it nonetheless that's pretty sobering right and that's just one of the many risks that are emerging now against that the defenders of the drug say and you begin to see again the ferocious complexity of this debate they say even if that's true and some of them dispute it even if that's true if the alternative is continuing to be obese well being obese causes cancer for a lot of people right in fact it's one of the biggest causes of cancer cancer research uk the biggest british cancer charity explains if you carry excess weight it doesn't just sit there it's not inert it's active it sends signals to the rest of your body and one of the signals it sends is for your cells to divide more rapidly which can cause

cancer right so at every turn when you feel like oh that's really pulls you up short you have to then go okay but then let's compare it to the alternative scenario let's weigh this very carefully at each stage it's like looking at a picture that's only slowly forming and it's very complicated so i think every individual really has to go through the benefits and risks for themselves and think very deeply about it and you know maybe you'll maybe you'll have thyroid cancer in your family. Maybe you're thinking of becoming pregnant. Another one of the big risks is we know these drugs cause birth deformities in rats. You can't do experiments on humans in this in the same way. So there's all sorts of things where you want to game out as an individual, what's the risk here? Yep. So one of the things that people talk

about with these drugs very often is that once you're on them, you have to remain on them to get benefit out of them. And that if you stop taking them, you know, most people will see a return to weight loss gain. Is that primarily because they will resume the behaviors that they did before? Or is there something else that's the mechanism of action of causing that weight loss to stop? Meaning, if I stop taking them, my satiety cues will go down, these other things will stop, I will suddenly have the same relationship I had with food before, I will begin to eat as much as I did, I will gain the weight back. Is that the mechanism of action? Or are they doing something else that makes it more likely you'll gain the weight back. Is that the mechanism of action or are they doing something else

that makes it more likely you'll gain the weight back? Well, no, you just regain the weight you had. I mean, it's like blood pressure medication or statins. They work as long as you take them. And when you stop taking them, you don't get the benefits for your blood pressure or cholesterol anymore. There's a debate about can you make changes while you're taking them that would mean that when you stopped, you would be able to sustain that benefit? As with a million things related to these drugs, the honest answer is we don't know. Anecdotally, there are some people who are reporting that. I mean, even if you think about it at a more basic level, we don't even know if people develop tolerance to these drugs when they use them for obesity, right?

So the longest term studies we have, so people don't know when you take a drug, many drugs, this isn't the case, but often your body gets used to the drug and the effect sort of wears off over time. Think about the old amphetamine-based diet drugs. One of the reasons they were such a disaster is because if you take amphetamines, you lose loads of weight, but you develop tolerance to anyone who's been a recreational amphetamine user will know this. You develop tolerance to amphetamines over time, so you have to take higher and higher doses to get the same effect. And if you take very high doses of amphetamines, you develop psychosis. So probably not a price worth paying to be thin, psychotic, but skinny. Not the best slogan.

Not a great ad slogan, I don't think. So we don't know. You've got to reverse it. Skinny, but psychotic. Right. It's the order of words you've got there. That's the way. That's the way.

Exactly. Hire that guy. Make him work for No man orders we know with diabetics they don't develop tolerance over time they don't need higher and higher doses to get the same benefits from these drugs to controlling their blood sugar but we don't know about weight so the longest term study of these drugs was i think 62 months it's very interesting if you look at the graph so it's a very familiar graph massive weight loss then you hit a plateau and stabilize a much lower weight which is a good thing that's what you'd want obviously people just infinitely lost weight

they would die so it plateaus at a much lower weight depending on what dose you're on depends on the plateau and then it continues at that lower weight and then in the only long-term study we have at the end it very slightly ticks up again obviously at a much lower level than it was yeah probably if i had to guess and i stress this is a guess i would stress again we have to go back to the end it very slightly ticks up again obviously at a much lower level than it was yeah probably if i had to guess and i stress this is a guess i would stress again we have to go back to bariatric surgery if we look what happens with bariatric surgery people have bariatric surgery they lose staggering amounts of weight they retain that lower weight for a few years and then their weight goes slightly up again and stabilizes again at a slightly higher level which is much much lower

than where they began if you made me guess i think that's probably where it is there are lots of ways in which the benefits and risks of these drugs seem to game out in a similar way to bariatric surgery both the benefits obviously we talked about benefits from reversing obesity or reducing it but also some of the risks we were talking about you know depression and so on you know if you have bariatric surgery your suicide risk almost quadruples. Now, it's still low. Most people who have bariatric surgery are glad they did it. And some of that may be because of the grueling physical effects of the surgery, but I suspect it's because of what we were talking about, right?

Also, other people who've worked on bariatric surgery, and this will be true for the drugs as well, I think, say some of it will be people who've said all their lives, you know, if only I wasn't fat, my life would be great. I'd be happy. And then they lose the weight, but their husband's still an asshole and they've still got a job they hate. And they realize, oh, this was not the magic solution we wanted it to be. And the way they think about it was magic solution was brought to the title because the book is called Magic Pill. And some people think that's like a lording of the drugs. But for

me, there's three ways in which these drugs could be a magic pill right the first is the most obvious they could just solve the problem right so rapidly and so swiftly and so effectively that it feels like magic and there are days when it feels like that what my whole life i crave this shitty food and then once a week i do a little pinprick into my leg and it's gone. Like there are days when I think that. The second way in which it could be magic is it could be a magic trick, right? It could appear to give you these benefits, but actually f*** you over in some other way, like a conjurer that, you know, shows you a card trick, but picks your pocket.

I would rule out the companies are not deliberately conning us. Right. But I wouldn't rule out that there's some disastrous side effect that will outweigh the benefits. There's a real risk of that. The third way, to be honest, I think is the most likely. If you think about all the classic tales about magic, like Aladdin or Fantasia, you get your wish, but it plays out in a way you didn't imagine. You make a wish with the genie and he grants your wish, but it's not quite how you

thought he would at the start. Or in Fantasia, the magic runs away from you, right? It creates all these effects that you can't control. I suspect these are going to be magic in Fantasia, the magic runs away from you, right? It creates all these effects that you can't control. I suspect these are going to be magic in that sense, right? There are all sorts of unpredictable effects we can begin to see. There's going to be a huge rise in people with eating disorders dying. I think that's practically baked in. We know that, which is catastrophic. There are huge numbers of people we know who want to starve themselves.

In fact, going into the pandemic, eating disorders were very high. Then they massively rose during the pandemic. I'm really worried about that. There are things we can do to reduce that risk that I can talk about. There's things like that. There's a whole array of risks. And it's very striking to me, Barclays Bank, a very sober-minded financial institution, commissioned a very sober minded financial analyst called Emily Field to just look into these drugs to game out how it's going to affect long-term investing decisions and she came back and said if you want the best comparison it's the invention of the smartphone that this will just have all i'm speaking now this will have all sorts of enormous and unpredictable effects on the society if we've been sitting here in 2007, the day Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone,

we would not have been able to predict TikTok and Trump and a million other things that have transformed delivery, all the things that have transformed Uber Eats, DoorDash, all these things that have transformed how we live. I think we're only just at the beginning of seeing how these drugs are going to explode like a bomb over us. And there was a moment, I remember I was interviewing one of the experts at Cambridge University and we were sitting in a cafe and she's explaining these extraordinary effects to me.

And there's people just walking past the cafe and you know, it's Britain, there's the normal distribution of body weight in Britain, which is, you know, not quite as severe as here in the United States, but we're the most obese country in Europe by quite a long way. And I'm seeing lots of overweight and obese people as I was at the time walking past. And we're thinking, oh, wow, you don't know what's coming. You don't know what's about to hit us, right? It was a very strange feeling. Yeah. I love that comparison to magic. And, you know, I do think that that makes sense, right? That obesity is a huge health risk, right? And there are a lot of emotions that come with it. But dramatically reducing your propensity to in the future get cancer or in the future have a heart attack doesn't immediately change the quality of your life right here, you know? And so I think it makes sense, like with the bariatric surgery, that you may get to the other side of that and go, oh. And I think there's a similar effect in recovery too.

There's a pink cloud that, you know, some people have, which says you stop doing drugs and all of a sudden, lots of pretty big problems in your life go away. I no longer was looking at going to jail for 25 years. That's pretty good, right? I no longer weighed 100 pounds. I was no longer homeless. Things got really better, right? And then life is life, right? And life becomes challenging and you start to face the challenges that everybody faces in life and you kind of come off that pink cloud. And it sounds like there's something similar you're describing here. Yeah.

And the reason to do it, I mean, essentially you said at the start of your question about the health risks. I'm really embarrassed to admit this. The most shocking bit of all the research I did for the book was looking at the scientific evidence of what obesity actually does to you. So think about diabetes, right? I'm guessing that I've known since I was 10 years old that if you're obese, you're more likely to get diabetes. In fact, it's much more likely if you're obese when you're 18 your chances of developing diabetes in your life are 70 it's extremely high much more likely than not but i

thought okay diabetes if you live in a country where you've got a good health care system admittedly this is not one of them but if you live in a country that's got a good health care system and you get access to insulin then basically your life is like mine right you're like everyone else you just you have to take a drug and but then you're okay that is not the case at all i mean diabetes knocks 15 years off your life it causes horrendous complications it's the biggest cause of blindness preventable cause of blindness i mean more people have to have a limb or extremity amputated in this country every year because of diabetes than because of being shot, right? I mean, this is a really serious, it's such a serious healthcare condition in terms of your life expectancy and your quality

of life that one of the most well-known doctors in Britain, Dr. Max Pemberton said to me, if you gave me a choice between being HIV positive and being diabetic, purely on medical grounds, I would choose to be HIV positive. Because if you're HIV positive and being diabetic purely on medical grounds i would choose to be hiv positive because if you're hiv positive and you get treatment you live as long as everyone else if you're diabetic even with the best treatment you know it has devastating effects on your body and your life expectancy and all sorts of and just your quality of life and i thought and that's just one of just an extraordinary array of factors so sometimes when you talk about the i did an interview the other day where i was talking about the risks of these drugs right the interview went very heavily on the

risks of these drugs and i take those risks very very seriously and i'm very worried about them and it is plausible i don't think it's the most likely scenario but it is plausible that 20 years from now someone will find my book and go wow all the bad stuff turned out to be right and the good stuff you know and it massively outweighed the good stuff so when people go wow all the bad stuff turned out to be right and the good stuff you know and it massively outweighed the good stuff so when people just look at the bad side at the downsides of the drugs it's very tempting to go well why would anyone take these drugs and then you've got to go well if you've tried dieting and it really hasn't worked and the vast majority of overweight people have tried dieting 17 of people in this country are on a diet at any given time

and i don't know an obese person who hasn't dieted a lot. If you've tried that and it hasn't worked and the alternative is obesity, there's a brilliant expert called Dr. Shauna Levy at Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans said to me, you know, we don't know the long-term risks of these drugs, but we do know the long-term risks of obesity. And this is me speaking now, not Dr. Levy, but they would have to be really bad to outweigh the long-term risks of obesity yeah and this is me speaking now not dr levy but they would have to be really bad to outweigh the long-term risks of obesity and i'm conscious that would be people hearing that for whom that's very painful thing to hear it's an extremely painful it was extremely painful thing for me to partly because lots of the people i love are obese partly because my obesity was

intimately tied to things that soothed and comforted me, partly because they will have heard some arguments that claim that obesity is not bad for you. And I, with an open mind, investigated those claims, and I'm afraid they're not true. The evidence that obesity harms health, it's one of the most solid scientific findings in the whole of medical science it is as certain as that smoking causes lung cancer now of course there are exceptions my mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day she's alive and well she's 78 right there's a photograph of me and my mother when i'm six months old she's breastfeeding me smoking me and resting the ashtray on my stomach right uh when i found that photo and showed it to her, she said, you were a difficult baby. I needed that f***ing cigarette, right? So of course there are exceptions, but we don't judge science by outliers. We judge it by average effects. And unfortunately, average effects, there was one study, a big study that was done in Britain at UCL, University College London, followed 2,500 government bureaucrats over a long period of time, more than 20 years, and found that that if you were obese you were eight times more likely to become unwell over that period than people who were not obese

It was a really significant effect. Yeah That doesn't mean anyone of course. We need to passionately oppose people being shamed for it. It's not their fault That is someone whose fault is it's the process been industry didn't get to talk about but yeah can did this to us, right? Yeah someone whose fault it is it's the processed food industry like i said get to talk about but yeah fucking did this to us right yeah and there's definitely people who deserve to be the recipient of our anger and it's not individual people like me who were overweight it's them but i do think you know we know this because we spent so much time in the addiction world it's not love to not level with people about what's really going on yeah it's not love to pretend something that's a problem isn't a problem. You might get

some temporary psychological relief from that, but we all know the case for hearing bad news. The bill that you can't pay, the letter from the doctor that might be news that you can't bear to hear. We all feel the impulse to not open those letters. And most of us open them because we know we're better off knowing the truth, even if it's a very painful truth. And especially now, if we're in a trap, and I believe we are, there is at least something of a trap door. It's a risky trap door. And in the longer term, there are definitely solutions to this. I went to countries that have massively reduced their amount of obesity. I went to Japan where they never had an obesity crisis because they made big social changes that we can introduce if we want to, made big social changes that we can introduce

if we want to and talk about how we can do that and that's something we absolutely need to fight for in the longer term but we've got to be honest about this because the stakes are really high here yeah whether we get this right on these drugs and on obesity more generally will determine whether millions of people live or die we can't go into this trivially we can't go into this denying scientific evidence we've got to go in with an open-minded, open-hearted engagement with the evidence. And we've got to really reckon with it in all its ambiguity and complexity and the painful truths that it contains, I think. That's great. So, listener, in thinking about all of that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight or thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember that little by

little, a little becomes a lot. And a habit for me that has accrued in benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the things that gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice is that very striving, right? Of course, we're doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something happen, some special moment. We want to let go of that. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at goodwolf.me slash calm.

I think that's what you did do is you really took an open-hearted, open-minded look at all these things. It's a really great book. I think I recommend it to everybody and it's always such a pleasure to have you on. Oh, it's totally my pleasure, Eric. I'm so glad we did this face-to-face as well.

Me too. And I meant to say my publisher's taser I'm so glad we did this face to face as well. Me too. And I meant to say my publisher's taser me that anyone who wants to know where to get the audio book, the ebook or the physical book can go to magicpillbook.com. I'm also meant to say you can get it from all good bookstores, but I always want to say you can get it from shitty bookstores as well. We don't have like a quality test. It's like, no, you're not good enough to start. Any bookstore these days is probably a good one.

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thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

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