ZM's Fletch, Vaughan & Hayley - Fletch, Vaughan & Hayley's Lil Bitta Pod -14th August, 2025

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

On Today's Lil Bitta Pod; Johann Hari joins us for a podcast-only interview about weight-loss drugs, and our dwindling attention spans.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the Zedium Podcast Network, it's Fletchhorn and Haley's Little Bit of Pod. All right, I'm very excited about this. He's a New York Times bestselling author. He's been on the world's biggest podcast. And now he's on our podcast and radio show. Johan Hari, good morning. Hooray, I'm so happy to read you. And you said my name right, which no one ever does.

Do they hurt with a hard J? I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in an emergency room because they were calling for Joanna Harry to come forward. I'm very impressed you nailed it first time Vaughan's actually had that with takeaways haven't you V-A-U-G-H-E-N I've had V-A-U-G-H-E-N I've had V-G-H-A-N I've had V-G-G-H-G-N I'm pretty much picking up those takeaways and leaving with them Can I just start something, Joanna Harry?

Can I just ask, as a New York Times best-selling author, settle a debate for our show. Are audiobooks reading? Because Fletch, it accounts for reading. So, weirdly, it was when I was in your part of the world that I had a really freaky experience in relation to my own audiobook. And it is the only time in my life I've ever genuinely thought I had gone insane. So I flew from London to Melbourne to talk about one of my previous books, Stolen Focus. And I couldn't sleep the night before and I can never sleep on plane.

So when I landed, I'd been awake for like two and a half days and I was out of it. I was delirious, right? And I was standing at that little spot in Melbourne airport where you wait for the cars to come and pick you up. And I was sort of standing there and I felt really weird. And suddenly I could hear my own voice speaking, but my lips were not moving. And I was like, what is happening?

And I genuinely thought, oh my goodness, is this what psychosis feels like? Have I lost my mind? And suddenly I realized the person in front of me in the car was listening to the audio book of me reading out my book. Oh, wow. And if I'd been more on the ball, I would have like leaned forward and gone well

hello because can you imagine how weird that would be if you're in the middle of Melbourne and suddenly I know by the way you're in New Zealand not Melbourne and you're part of the world because the general sounds not but like like can imagine how bizarre that would have been but anyway she drove off before I was too out of it yeah because then you wouldn't have felt like you were crazy

she would have thought she was crazy because she was like oh my gosh I brought him into being insanity onto others that's the goal of life I've certainly loved I need his opinion do you think that when we say hey I read a book I read magic pill He goes, I read Magic Pill and I go, no, you didn't.

You listen to it. I think it counts as reading, yeah. It's not exactly the same, but I would say count. You're not the same, but it counts. Well, I certainly love reading your books. I think we should chat first about your latest book, which came out last year, Magic Pill. Now, you, for those that don't know, you took Ozempic or one of the weight loss drugs for an entire year and then did like 200 plus interviews about it? yeah i wanted to understand like we're at this crazy moment right the way one of the scientists who

designed these drugs put it to me is we've cracked the code of what controls human appetite so for the first time we really do have a drug that massively reduces your weight right the average person who takes ozumicovy loses 15% of your body weight for the next generation of these drugs which are now becoming available the average person loses 23% of their body weight which is wild right And I had been obese on and off most of my adult life. And I was about to turn 44, which is the age of my granddad was when he died of a heart attack. And I've got to say, the wrists of obesity team seemed very kind of abstract when you're young. And as you start getting older, you know, I had a friend who died who was only a little bit older than me.

I thought, wow, okay. And I remember when I first heard about these drugs, thinking really weird mixture of things. I mean, the first time, on the one hand, thinking, well, this could save my life, right? you know, I knew that being overweight makes you much more likely to get all sorts of health conditions. I also thought this sounds way too good to be true. Can this really be what they're promising? So that's why I wrote Magic Piltz, why I went on this big journey taking through. I'm actually still taking it now for reasons I can talk about. Because I really think at this moment of such profound change. I know it's only beginning to hit New Zealand, but you know,

half of Americans now want to take this drug about one in eight Americans are taking it. A few years from now, half Americans will be taking it and New Zealand will not be that far behind. This is coming for all of us. It's going to profoundly change our bodies, our cultures, the way we feel about ourselves in all sorts of good and bad ways. It's a attempt to sort of think that through really.

It was, I was listening to you on DiRover CEO and you were talking about the huge benefits, obviously, and you have benefited from them, but also the terrible side effects. And like, I don't know a lot about, I'm not a scientist, and that may shock you. but I am a woman who grew up in the 90s and 2000s

and diet culture was a huge part of my life and then I've spent my whole adult life trying to correct the wrongs that that cause which is like screwing my metabolism meaning I can't eat as much and so when I hear about things they go it's a weight loss drug I'm like no you're just starving yourself but it hurts less isn't that what it's doing

that's what I thought and what's really weird about it the best way I would explain why that instinct you had and I had at first isn't right is I'll never forget the second day I was taking a ZemPEC I woke up and I went to this I'm in London at the moment I went to this cafe

just at the road that I go to whenever I'm in London and I ordered what I used to order every morning I was slightly embarrassed to say which was a massive roll with loads of chicken and loads of mayo in it and normally I would wolf that down and I would still want like a bag of crisps right

and that morning I had three mouthfuls and I was just full. I didn't want it anymore. I remember when I left the cafe, Tatiana, the woman who runs it shouting after me, are you okay, Yohad? Because I never seen me leave any food before. And so the way this works is, you're obviously right. Dieting is where you feel hungry, but you find a way to distract yourself, deny yourself. You know, we've all been there, right? That's not what these drugs are. It's why I actually think diet drugs is a slightly misleading name for them. So the way they work is, it's actually very simple in one way. If you ate something now, it doesn't matter what it is, after a little while your pancreas

would produce a hormone called GLP1 and GLP1 is basically your body's natural system going hey you've had enough stop eating now right it's the brakes basically but natural GLP1 only stays in your system for a few minutes and then it's washed away and you can carry on eating if you want to what these drugs do is they inject you with an artificial copy of GLP1 that instead of sticking around for a few minutes

stays in your system for a whole week so it's like trying to drive the car with the brakes already on when you start to eat you just feel really full really quickly so the experience of being on these drugs is not being hungry denying yourself oh it's awful you're just not very hungry right it dials down your appetite so much now if you take too high a dose it can have the effect you're describing and this is happening to lots of people where they actually end up with malnutrition because you just don't eat but if you get the dose right where I am now i eat like a healthy amount I've lost about 20% of my body weight I'm now a BMI of 24 which

is the healthy little green on the upper end of the green zone on the BMI chart, right? So if you get the dose right, it can be, you know, you eat the right amount to be healthy. Obviously, if you go too far, which lots of people are, you can starve your stuff in the way of it's right. Yeah, I think that's what I was thinking of is like, God, if it crushes your appetite so much that you're only eating 800 calories a day, surely that can't be enough to sustain a body, sustain a menstrual cycle, sustain anything. but I didn't realize that you could do it so that you actually are eating the right amount of calories for you. Exactly.

I mean, I have stopped menstruating, which is disturbing meat. I'm so sorry. You're out there, enjoy it. But you're totally right. So I went down from eating maybe, I mean, a crazy amount, like 3,500 calories a day to like now I eat maybe 2,300, roughly. I mean, I actually count it. I added it up.

But before, I mean, before, and essentially because I'd obviously, tried dieting many times and kind of always yo-yoed around. And I had a real low point about this. Never forget it. It was just before Christmas 2009, I went into my local branch of KFC in East London, where I lived at the time. And the guy behind, I said my typical order, which is so disgusting, I'm not going to repeat it. And the guy behind the counter said, oh, Johan, I'm really glad you're here. Wait a minute. And I was like, all right. And he went off behind where they fry all the chicken. And he came back with every member of staff and a massive Christmas card in which they'd all written to our best customer, and they'd all written these personal messages.

And one of the reasons my heart sank is I thought, this isn't even the fried chicken shop I come to the most. Oh, God. So I'd gone, to go from that and having this very unhealthy relationship with food to now, like, eating really well. Like, I actually eat much better. It's not just that I eat less, because before I was really stuffing myself when I ate, right? Now I have to eat much more slowly.

If you eat really quickly on an Olympic, you would throw up, right? You have forces you to slow down your eating. Actually, I enjoy eating much more, although that's not everyone's experience on this drug, obviously. But yeah, it's been a – for me, it's been a really extraordinary experience. You know, if you take these drugs, if you were obese at the start, within a year, your chance of having a heart attack or a stroke goes down by 20%. Wow. Which is pretty incredible.

Yeah. So I've had a very – I mean, I've had obviously some of the side effects that we can talk about. But I've had a very positive experience. I go through in my book Magic Pill, the risks, the downsides. This is not right for everyone, but it means in fact there's some people who really shouldn't take these drugs. But I think for people who are obese or overweight, who've tried losing weight in other ways and it's not succeeded, and sadly, for 80% of people who go on a diet, they do regain

it the weight over time. For feeling that category, I would really urge them to give these drugs a look and to go through the risk of the 12 risks that I write about in Magic Pill and also the huge benefits and see if it's right for them. So with the, so the idea is that it's a forever thing, because I know you've talked about the fact that most people will put on at least 70% of the weight that they last the moment they stop it. Is that right? Like that it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not the moment, but in a year, yeah, yeah. So this is one of the big debates about the drugs.

So the drug companies will say these drugs are like statins or blood pressure meds. They're not a cure. So long as you take them, they solve the problem. But when you stop, the problem comes back, right? Yeah. Now, obviously, the drug companies have got a vested interest in saying that could they, obviously, make, if we take them forever, they make more money. They're so expensive. They're so expensive. And they are very expensive. They won't be soon. And I can explain why. But I do think the drug, if we look at the best scientific evidence, we don't have much. But the two studies we've got show that most people regain most of the weight within a year. So yeah, it's like getting married. And it's like getting married to a Mormon in like the 1890s. You get married. You're going to be married forever, right? It's a big commitment. There's lots of things that do give me pause about the drugs as well as the huge benefits.

And one is just, it's a big thing to commit to take a drug for the rest of your life. But whenever I would talk about that with the experts, not all of them, but a lot of them would say, well, the reality is you've got to weigh two sets of risks here. There's the risks of the risks. And there are real risks associated with these drugs. You've got away them against the risks of continuing to be obese, which for me was the most likely scenario, given that have been obese most of my adult life. And to be honest with you, and I'm embarrassed to say this. The thing that most shocks me in all the research I did for the book was the scientific evidence about just how bad for you obesity is.

Like, because I thought, well, obviously I know that, right? I've known since I was a little kid if you're obese as bad view. I was stunned by the evidence. It's one of the biggest causes of cancer. It's one of the biggest causes of dementia. It's one of the biggest causes of stroke. Just pretty much everything we fear is made dramatically more likely by being obese. Even if you think about diabetes, right?

you're obese when you're 18, you've got a 70% chance of getting type 2 diabetes in your life. But I thought, okay, that's not good. But if you're in a country like ours, New Zealand or Britain, you know, we've got good healthcare systems as long as you get insulin. You're basically like everyone else. That's not true at all. If you've got diabetes, even if you get insulin, it knocks on average seven years off your life, right? It's the biggest cause of blindness in our countries, preventable cause of blindness. Like the negative effects of obesity are enormous. You have to weigh the risks of the drugs against all of those risks. And when you weigh it in that way, you begin to see, I think, the upside, many of the upsides of the drugs, as long as some of the risks.

Can you talk a little bit about, sorry, no, I'm hydrogen. I just feel really, like, passionate about it because of this diet culture that I've, but. Yeah, yeah. We're right to. Can you explain a little bit more about, like, the accessibility, because you were saying, like, it's going to become more affordable and more accessible? Because my, like, deep, deep concern for younger generations, and I'm talking particularly again about women, is that women, or anyone actually, that don't really need this,

are going to take it because we want to be unobtainably thin. And then we look at Hollywood and you're like, what the fuck? Like, it is so screw. We all saw Ozzy Osbourne's funeral. And you're like, oh my God, there's skeletons have crawled out of the grave to go.

Like, that's some of my big concerns about how accessible we're making it. We want it for people that need it, but is anyone going to be able to get it and already thin people are going to start taking it to become unhealthily skinny. You're right.

The worst moment for me in the research for the book was I've got lots of nephews and gods but only one girl, only one niece who are incredibly protective. She's actually, she's 20, 21 now but in my head she's fixed as a six-year-old so whatever she has a boyfriend,

I'm like, get away from her, you know. But I'm never forget it was about maybe seven or eight months into taking the drugs. I was FaceTiming with her. She's a student in Liverpool. And she was sort of teasing me. She's like, oh, you look really good, Johan. I never knew you had a neck before.

You let a smegger at that age? And then she looked down and she said, well, you get me some Ozdenpick. And I laughed because I thought she was kidding, because she's a perfectly healthy weight. And I suddenly realized she wasn't just. and I was like, oh fuck, I'm counteracting all the messages I've been giving her since she was a little girl. And I think you've got to distinguish here, and this is a very hard distinction to make as you're getting at, between two sets of people. There are people who are overweight or obese

who take these drugs to get down to be a healthy weight. I think that's defensible and in fact a good idea for many, but not all. Then there's people who are already a healthy weight, or as you say, skinny, who take them to go down to be super skinny. And for those people, I would beg them not to do it. Now, women are made to feel, and you don't need me to man explain this to you, women are made to feel like shit about how they look, no matter what they do. So I'm not judging any woman who does this, right? And of course, some men do it as well.

It's mostly women. I'm not judging anyone who does that, but I would urge them not to do it for several reasons. One is, as you get out by alluding to Sharon Osborne, being underweight also brings really big health risks. And particularly as you age, as you get older, if you have very low muscle mass, which you will have if you're super thin. You're much more at risk of osteoporosis, muscle wasting illnesses. Like it's really, really bad for you.

So, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And alongside that set of risks, the thing I am most worried about for the society, not for myself, but for the society, is there are huge numbers of young girls with eating disorders who are getting hold of these drugs. and they are some of them are going to kill themselves with it but everyone who's known anyone with an eating disorder knows there's a conflict with everyone with an eating disorder

between the part of them that wants to eat because you want to live and there's the part of you that for complex psychological reasons wants to starve yourself and these drugs they can just amputate your appetite if you take them at a high dose so in addition to these amazing benefits and all sorts of interesting psychological insights that are opened up by these drugs

in positive ways for many of us and were for me there's a really big risk for that so it's why I've really urged people in New Zealand you can avoid the mistake we've made in Britain and the US the other country where I live where at the moment so I can see from looking at all of you

I can see you on this Zoom none of you are eligible for these drugs right you don't meet the criteria thank you you stop up if we had assumed you a year ago you might not have said the same thing but I could also guarantee

if you now pretended you were in Britain or the US, you could get a Zoom appointment, and you would all be prescribed it and have it delivered to an address in Britain or the US, right? Wow, yeah. So what a lot of the eating disorders experts are saying is do not allow this to be prescribed on Zoom. You should have to go to an in-person appointment with a doctor. They should check your BMI. If you're not diabetic or have the right BMI, you out because diabetes is another use for these drugs.

You absolutely should not be given them. That's a really important precautionary measure that should be put in place to protect people with eating disorders. Yeah, because you can put a fat filter on the zone. You can. Or a cat filter. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a fat cat. Well, that's why I would say I'd recommend Magic Pill because it's so fascinating.

It's honestly, just an incredible read. And while we've got you here and while we've got time, you really do have a book for every one of our generation's problems. Quams, problems, ailments. Because also amazing stolen focus. Tell people what stolen focus is about quickly. Now we've got a massive crisis of focus and attention. I don't think anyone needs any statistics to back that up. We are all struggling to focus and pay attention.

And I spent three years going all over the world and being the leading experts on attention. I learned there's scientific evidence for nine factors that can make your attention better or can make them worse. Loads of those factors have been getting worse. Your attention did not collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some really big and powerful forces. But once we understand what those forces are,

we can start to get our brains back. We've been talking for a while. Are we okay if we just have a quick Instagram break? I just want to do a bit of scroll in and then we'll come back. Do you know what? After the book came out, someone came up to me in the street and said, I saw you being interviewed. I'm really interested in this subject,

but I don't have enough attention to read a book. Could you just tell me what it says? Jesus. I mean, that sounds that I'm right. I think when I was listening to this book, it took me, I think there was a break halfway through about a month or so where I'd lost attention. And then I had to come back to finish.

stolen focus but it was it was fascinating and I know one of the things you talk about in there is like how important sleep is Haley I know I've been telling Haley I do I did three last night I think Vaughn did three last night two the night before I mean we work funny hours but I know it's so I know I know oh I felt like he was a dead he's worried it's totally fascinating so this I need to be one of the leading sleep experts in the world this amazing man named dr. Charles Seisor at Harvard medical school and I forget what he told me so the whole time you're awake, your brain is building up something called metabolic waste, which is also called brain cell poop, which help me to understand it. When you go to sleep, often in the seventh or

eighth hour, a watery fluid washes through your brain and carries this brain cell poop out of your brain down into your kidneys, eventually out your body. If you don't get eight hours to sleep a night, you have a feeling when you wake up and you feel clogged up, that is not a metaphor. Your brain is literally clogged up, right? It's what you process everything more slowly. So you've really, it's so important. And it's hard to go through, obviously, install and focus, how you can do that. But prioritising sleep, if you stay awake for 19 hours, which doesn't sound like much, to me, your attention deteriorates as much as if you got legally drunk.

And so many of us are sleep deprived. In Britain, the average kid, the average child, sleeps 85 minutes less per night than they did in 1945. That is mind-blowing, right? But it was the end of the war, you know, they were relaxed. They were more relaxed. Chilled out. Nazis. Nazis are taking care of.

They lay there in the ruins. screaming around and up, he's coming in and the ruins of London, having sweet, sweet, sweet. And you also talk in the book, I guess, how the tech companies have kind of, you know, rigged it against us. Yeah, every time you open TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, those companies make money out of you in two ways. First way is really obvious. You see advertising. We all know how that works. Second way is much more important.

Everything you ever say or do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms. to figure out who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you angry? What makes you happy? What makes you horny? What makes you sad? And they're learning and harvesting that information to figure out what to show you next to keep you scrolling. Because every time you open, yeah, every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money. Every time you close it, that revenue stream disappears.

So I interviewed people who'd designed this machinery, right? And the thing they said to me, the things that is, we built a machine designed to hack and invade your attention. and we are unbelievably good at it. And the thing that most struck me about them is how sick with guilt and shame they feel about what they've done. One of them, an amazing guy called James Williams, said to me, he was speaking at a tech conference one day where the audience were literally the people

who designed the stuff your kids are using today, right? And he said to the audience, if there's anyone here who wants to live in the world that we're creating, please put up your hand and no one put up their hand. I'm going to show you something. I know that it's the radio so I can show you guys, but the actual audience can't see. But for each of the things that I write about in style and focus, for all of the nine factors that are harming our attention, there are sort of two levels at which I think we've got to deal with them, right?

I think of them as defense and offense. So in terms of defense, I'm going to show you, have you ever seen one of these before? This is a K-safe. It's a plastic. Right. So I'm going to take this bar of soap. I normally use my phone, but obviously I'm talking to you all my phone. So you start in the bar of soap in the little box.

You put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top. I'm going to set it for three minutes, but you can do anything up to 24 hours. Push that button. In a second, it's going to lock. And once it's locked, I can't get, if I put my phone in it, that's it. I can't get my phone out, right? Wow. Okay.

Right. I use that for three hours a day to do my writing. I wouldn't get my books written if I didn't do that. I would say everyone with kids, buy a K-safe, you know, start, have 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day where you all put your phones in the case safe and lock them away. It's really hard at first, but the pleasures of attention are so great. So I go through dozens of things install and focus like that that we can all do. But I want to be really honest with people because I don't feel most people who are

communicating about attention are leveling with people. I am passionately in favour of these individual changes. They will make a really big difference to your life. On their own, they won't solve the problem completely because this is happening because of some really big forces and to get we've got to take on those big forces and I went to places that have begun to do that we've got to regulate these forces Australia for example just banned social media for under 18 year olds actually I came to New Zealand because the amazing four-day week experiments that happened in in Auckland and Rotorua which I think

a real example to the world there's so many bigger steps that we can all take yeah that in addition to these individual steps got to do both I need to get me one of those this is this brain thing so I be completely honest at the end of the day I just forget my ability to remember what happened the last thing in the day is fried and I don't get eight hours sleep a night like and I'm just like I thought it was a drinking problem because I've been a little reliant on some alcohol when you said not getting enough sleepers like being legally drunk I'm like what if we're doing both what if you're doing both but then there's like where I haven't and I still at the end the day. I just can't remember the last hour of the day.

I bet there's another factor going, I'd be surprised, there's another factor that I'd be surprised that's not playing out for you. So I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor O. Miller. He said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. But what's happened is we've fallen for a kind of mass delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.

The rest of us aren't that far behind. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller get people into labs and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time, right? You're listening to me, but you're also checking your phone or whatever it might be. And what they discovered is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time, but what you can do is juggle very quickly. You're like, what did you just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp?

What does it say on the TV Trump just did? What is this message on on Facebook? Wait, what did you just ask me again? So we're constantly juggling. And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The fancy term for it, which everyone should know, is the switch cost effect. When you switch between tasks, it comes with a cost. And one of them is what you're describing.

When you switch between tasks, you remember much less of what you do. You're much less creative. You make many more mistakes. It's a really big effect, right? So I would be surprised if that's not playing out because it's playing out for like all of us, right? Yeah. Which another reason why we've got to protect ourselves from these forces that are doing this to us and these technologies that are designed to interrupt us because the more often they interrupt us,

the more they get us to pick up the device, the more money these companies make. Amazing. Well, Johan, hurry, thank you so much. Thank you for being generous with your time. So generous. Oh, what pleasure. You can check out Johann's books, Magic Pills, Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, or many more. T-talks always are you.

How many times you've been on Diary of the CEO now? Three or four? Oh, my God. So, Stephen Bartlett came to his people. When he was a little baby podcaster. Yeah. And I was like, and I nearly didn't do it. And then I googles him and thought, he's quite hot.

I'll do it. And he's, like, before he was famous for all. And I was like, and I was like, but now he's become this like mega star. He's taken a lot. He's also extremely. I have to say about Stephen, this really impresses me. If I had his level of money, fame and success, I would be, when I was his age, I would be mental, horrible, and deranged.

Yeah, same. Absolutely delightful, lovely, grounded, saying. He's the other, he's the second, I guess they're real nucleus rather than another than Oprah. Yeah. He's the person I know who is richest, but listens the most. Yeah. Like normally rich people don't listen to anyone, right?

When you get to that level of wealth, your listening skills atrophy. And he's really curious, attentive. He's a really impressive person, Stephen. And I've got a lot of time for it. I listen to some of your old podcasts with him. And he's definitely gone a lot softer with the voice. That's a lovely voice. I love to ask questions.

It's a really lovely voice. And have you done Joe, you've done Joe Rogan as well, right? Joe Rogan a couple of times. I like him. It's okay. Yeah. And I like Joe. I like him as a person.

He's obviously, I agree with him a lot of things. But I genuinely like him. I think he's a nice bloke. Yeah, yeah. Well, amazing. Thank you so much chatting to us this morning. Really appreciate.

And can I give a shout out to my Uncle Johnny, who lives in Auckland and my cousin Shona, who are great people. I love them. Shona and Johnny are the most Kiwi names ever. Shona's what's really touched to me, my grandmother, who I really, really loved. She, Shona's daughter, one of Shona's daughters is named after her, is named Amy. And actually looks quite a lot like my grandmother. And my grandmother never left Britain apart from once.

So whenever I come to New Zealand and there's this little mini version of my grandmother, literally on the other side of the world it always chokes me up so I'm always a bit emotional I feel a bit emotion about it now but yeah it's so beautiful hey Johan thank you so much so much to think about

what a pleasure have a great day