26:00

looking at like what makes you feel

26:02

full because these individuals never feel full

26:04

and they will keep eating, you know, to

26:07

the point of hurting themselves greatly. But

26:10

what was so surprising to me is that with

26:14

this medication, you're

26:16

not losing weight because like it's changing

26:18

your metabolism, you know, like

26:21

you're not shifting a mindset. You're

26:24

literally taking a drug that

26:26

makes you not eat. And

26:29

that felt scary to me because

26:32

as someone who has disordered eating

26:34

and works a 12 step program

26:36

surrounding that, you know, for

26:38

me, like I have to believe that learning

26:41

that it is normal to take in nourishment,

26:43

to eat three square

26:45

meals a day and if permitted by

26:48

your sponsor, two healthy snacks. You know,

26:50

this really, that's kind of what

26:53

scared me. And the

26:55

way that I found out about Ozempic is I

26:57

don't, I've stopped going on social

27:00

media, which is better for everyone's mental health, not

27:02

just mine, but the people around me. But

27:05

I saw a link to like an awards show

27:07

and I was like, oh, you look at the

27:09

red carpet. Sometimes there's cool dresses and suits, whatever,

27:11

you know? And I couldn't

27:14

recognize anybody, meaning I was looking at

27:16

people and I was looking at the

27:18

name and these were very well-known celebrities

27:21

that I've watched my whole life and

27:23

there was something unrecognizable about them and it

27:26

wasn't just that they were very, very thin.

27:29

Like their face didn't look like their face, you know?

27:31

It was like in the Men in Black movie, it

27:33

was like they were wearing a suit of them, you

27:35

know? It was like, and I don't wanna name names

27:37

because I don't know who's on what, it's not my

27:40

business, but to me, that

27:43

felt astonishing. And

27:45

when I learned about this drug, and again, I'm not

27:47

gonna say that I know who's on what, it

27:50

made sense and I'm like, oh, if

27:52

you stop eating, you get really skinny,

27:55

right? It's odd

27:57

to me though, that that's the mechanism we're

27:59

talking about. I

36:00

would say we do do quite a good job of regulating

36:02

alcohol actually. I bet your kids, if they're under

36:04

21, can't go into a bar,

36:06

right? And they can't go into a liquor

36:08

store and buy alcohol. So there's some things

36:10

we do actually do a pretty good job

36:12

of protecting people from. Not

36:15

like guns, for example, going

36:17

crazy. So

36:19

I'm not saying we do a great job. No, but

36:21

it's a great pain. It can be done, right? It

36:24

can be done. So and there

36:27

are lots of things we do actually regulate,

36:29

you know, you and I could

36:31

not go to the doctor and get all sorts

36:33

of drugs that are prescribed just

36:35

by asking for them. Right. There are loads of

36:37

things a doctor would say. No, I'm not going

36:40

to give you this drug for, you know,

36:43

whatever it might be, because you don't have that

36:46

illness. Right. So we do we're fairly good. OK,

36:48

but a lot of doctors in your 15 minute

36:50

visit, if you say, gosh, you're really having trouble

36:52

sleeping and I'm taking SSRI

36:54

that we have no idea if it's

36:57

even indicated for you. Do you have

36:59

a history of mania? Is there any

37:01

suicide in your family? That's when SSRI

37:03

has become a weapon

37:05

and not a tool. Right. So for

37:07

me, like I mean, look, I don't

37:09

mean to collapse everything onto you, but

37:12

I do want you to take on

37:14

the FDA next and also the entire

37:16

healthcare system. Well, because it's not unrelated.

37:18

It's not unrelated. 100 percent unrelated. No,

37:20

you're totally right. And I think when

37:22

you think about it in relation to

37:24

eating disorders, I would beg people

37:26

to do that regulation. My fear is that what

37:29

we will end up doing is what we do

37:31

with opioids, where it will be

37:33

now the opioid crisis is actually more complicated than

37:35

people think. The biggest driver of the opioid addiction

37:37

was actually despair. We can talk about that more

37:40

if you want. But clearly,

37:42

the drug companies gave out opioids far

37:44

too liberally, far too much. And indeed,

37:47

created financial incentives for doctors to give

37:49

it out, which was horrendous, criminal, criminal.

37:51

But what? So my fear is that

37:53

the pattern will be. So what happened

37:56

is massive over prescription and.

44:00

doctors and scientists are concerned

44:02

these drugs may be causing

44:04

depression or even suicidal thoughts in some people.

44:07

There's a big

44:09

debate about if that's happening and if so why. Some

44:12

people think it may be because the and may immune a much

44:14

more like this than I do but maybe

44:16

that these drugs so we

44:18

now know these drugs are primarily affecting not

44:20

just the gut but the brain. You have

44:22

GLP1 receptors in your brain they're changing your

44:24

brain from interviewing cutting-edge neuroscientists that's clearly the

44:26

case that they are. Well there's a

44:28

big debate about how and why but I

44:31

actually think for me and for a lot of other people there's

44:34

something much more basic going on and

44:38

I had an epiphany about it in a branch

44:40

of KFC so my nephew said to me the

44:42

other day it's really weird how many of your epiphanies

44:44

in your life happen in KFC which is a good

44:46

point. The biscuits are so

44:48

delicious. So delicious

44:50

you can't imagine. I'm actually genuinely worried

44:52

that their stock price might must have

44:54

crashed since I started taking a zap

44:57

because you cannot conceive

44:59

of how much KFC I've eaten in my lifetime. But

45:01

the if I

45:03

had a real low point about this once

45:05

it's not the story that I'll turn to

45:07

second about Vegas but in the run-up to Christmas

45:09

in 2009 I lived in East

45:11

London and I went to my local branch at KFC

45:14

to have lunch and I went

45:18

in and I said my standard order which is so gross

45:20

I won't repeat it and the guy behind the

45:22

counter said oh Johan I'm really glad you're here and I

45:24

was like all right and

45:27

he went off behind where they fry all the chicken and he came

45:30

back with every member of staff and a

45:32

massive Christmas card in which they

45:34

had all written to our best customer and they'd

45:36

all written these like personal messages to me and

45:39

one of the reasons why my heart sank is

45:41

I thought this isn't the fried

45:43

chicken shop I come to the most. How

45:46

can this be happening to me?

45:48

Anyway the epiphany of the other

45:50

day a different epiphany in the Vegas and

45:52

KFC I'm literal. I'm literally. You

45:54

give everyone the best of you.

46:00

pimp me he would be doing

46:02

it at this very moment. But

46:05

I remember that I was in

46:07

Vegas and I was seven months into taking the

46:09

drugs I think and I was doing

46:11

a research a really difficult thing. For

46:14

ages I've been researching a book about a series of murders

46:16

that are happening in Vegas and

46:18

I was researching the murder of someone that I knew

46:20

and really really loved and so it was very hard

46:22

as you can imagine. And I really

46:25

an autopilot I went to the KFC on West

46:27

Sahara. I'm sure you've got lots of listeners in

46:29

Vegas that is they'll know what I'm talking about

46:31

this is the skeeziest KFC in the whole world

46:33

and believe me I've been to every branch. And

46:36

I went in and I ordered what I would have ordered before I

46:38

was taking a Zen pic. I ordered a

46:41

bucket of fried chicken just to numb myself

46:44

and I ate one of the chicken drumsticks and

46:46

I looked at the bucket and I suddenly thought fuck

46:49

I can't eat this right. Like you just can't

46:51

overeat when you're on a Zen pic. If you

46:54

imagine if I came to you after you'd had

46:56

a massive Thanksgiving dinner and I said great news

46:58

guys I got you a KFC bucket right. That's

47:00

basically how you feel right. You just can't eat

47:02

it. And I remember very

47:04

consciously a voice in my mind saying

47:08

you're just going to have to feel bad now. There it

47:10

is. And I really

47:12

realized you know what these

47:14

drugs do is they radically interrupt your underlying eating patterns.

47:17

Obviously that's a good thing in many ways it's why

47:19

I lost a huge amount of weight. But

47:21

I write in the book about the five

47:23

psychological reasons why we eat. Only one of

47:25

them is like to sustain your

47:28

body right. The rest are psychological factors. So

47:30

for me I realized in the environment I

47:32

grew up in with all this addiction all

47:34

this craziness you're very little agency

47:36

over that when you're a kid. And I

47:38

had some awareness about this before I don't

47:41

like it was a sudden blinding revelation but

47:43

I realized it so much at that moment.

47:45

I realized how

47:47

much I used

47:49

food to numb myself

47:51

and soothe myself and calm myself

47:54

down. And I couldn't

47:56

do that when I was taking these drugs.

47:58

And I think that's why. that

52:00

I go through why in the book we can talk about it. But

52:03

up to now the most reliable way of

52:05

doing that has been bariatric surgery, things

52:07

like gastric band, gastric sleeve, and so

52:09

on. So

52:11

what do we know about bariatric surgery? It's very relevant to what you

52:14

were just saying in a really important way. So

52:16

bariatric surgery is a fucking

52:19

horrible operation, right? One in a thousand

52:21

people die in the operation. It's no

52:23

joke. But the reason people put

52:25

themselves through that is for a very simple reason,

52:28

which is that the scientific evidence is overwhelming

52:30

that if you reverse obesity, you dramatically or

52:32

reduce it, you dramatically improve your health. So

52:34

if you have bariatric surgery, in the seven

52:36

years that follow, you are 56% less likely

52:38

to die of a heart attack, 60% less

52:41

likely to die of

52:47

a stroke, and incredibly 92%

52:51

less likely to die of diabetes related causes,

52:53

right? In fact, it's so good for your

52:55

health, you're 40% less likely to die at

52:57

all in those seven years. And we

53:00

know that these drugs are producing similar

53:02

health benefits for people who are

53:04

overweight or obese, which is very different to people who are

53:06

not overweight or obese, who shouldn't be taking them and

53:08

will come back to that unless they're diabetic. And

53:12

we know that, you know, if you take

53:14

these drugs, it reduces your heart attack or

53:16

stroke risk by 20%. So

53:18

there's these huge health benefits. But as you

53:21

were saying, what you just said, Maim, I

53:23

was thinking about, there's another thing about bariatric

53:25

surgery, which is really interesting. If

53:28

you have bariatric surgery, in the years

53:30

that follow, your suicide risk quadruples, almost

53:33

quadruples, reaching is still quite

53:35

low, I don't want to overstate it, but

53:38

quadrupling is a big increase, right? And

53:40

you think, well, why would that be? What's going on?

53:42

Now, some of that might be the after effects of

53:44

the surgery, which can be pretty grim. But I actually

53:47

think it's what you were talking about. And for example,

53:49

Professor Corelle-Laru, who works with

53:51

people with bariatric surgery said to

53:53

me, you know, a lot of people

53:55

tell themselves, if only I wasn't

53:57

fat, I'd be happy. was

1:04:00

lying there covered in blood and the midwife looked at her and

1:04:02

said, you know, you really need to lose

1:04:04

some weight. This was just all

1:04:06

through her life. And

1:04:09

then she learned there was this movement

1:04:11

at the time called Fat Pride, which

1:04:13

the term some people still use. And

1:04:15

she writes this book and she makes

1:04:17

the case that this is just cruelty.

1:04:19

And she pointed out

1:04:21

absolutely correctly that stigma is a

1:04:24

just a form of hateful bullying

1:04:26

and B completely counterproductive when it

1:04:28

comes to promoting weight loss. In

1:04:30

fact, there's lots

1:04:32

of scientific evidence that go through in the

1:04:35

book. If you stigmatize people, they eat more,

1:04:37

they gain more weight. You know, partly because

1:04:39

of comfort eating partly because as Lindy West,

1:04:41

a very powerful body positivity advocate puts it.

1:04:47

I'm trying to explain exactly how she said it. She

1:04:49

put it better than this, but she said, you

1:04:53

don't take good care of a thing you

1:04:55

hate. If we make people hate

1:04:57

their bodies, it doesn't make them treat their bodies

1:04:59

better. You know, Shelley told me she had never

1:05:01

looked at her body naked, literally never.

1:05:04

She was so hated her body. So she

1:05:07

wrote this amazing book about stigma had this

1:05:09

huge effect inspired a movement in Britain. And

1:05:11

she remains rightly incredibly

1:05:13

proud of what she wrote. But

1:05:17

then something else happened to Shelley. She

1:05:22

was not yet 50. She weighed over

1:05:24

200 pounds. And

1:05:26

she was having a lot of health problems as a result

1:05:28

of being so overweight, she had heart problems, which a doctor

1:05:30

told her were connected to her weight. She

1:05:32

was losing the ability to walk. And

1:05:36

she felt really conflicted. She was

1:05:38

like, is it a betrayal of my anti

1:05:40

stigma work for me to try to lose weight? And at

1:05:44

that time, there was a body positivity publication

1:05:46

called fat news in Britain. She

1:05:48

wanted to write about this dilemma. And they said, No, you can't

1:05:50

write about that. We're here to tell the good news about it.

1:05:53

She was like, but shouldn't we be telling the complex truth? They're like, no,

1:05:55

that's not that's not what we want to hear. So

1:05:57

Shelley, and she's the

1:05:59

first person different

1:10:00

types of bodies, you know, varies

1:10:02

depending on, you know,

1:10:04

where your family's from and what your culture

1:10:07

sort of, you

1:10:09

know, appreciates. It's

1:10:12

super complicated. And, you know, as you were talking, like,

1:10:15

that's, you know, I hear, I don't know why,

1:10:17

I hear my mother's voice, you know, you know,

1:10:20

saying like, but are they healthy? You

1:10:22

know, and I hate to

1:10:25

kind of comment it from that view because

1:10:28

I also don't want us

1:10:30

to get into, you know, a

1:10:32

game of competition metrics of

1:10:35

if your BMI is 26.9, it's

1:10:38

okay, but if it's 27.1, it's not, you know, or,

1:10:42

you know, I don't,

1:10:45

I'm going to let this lead into a conversation

1:10:47

about the government because what

1:10:49

I don't want is to have some

1:10:51

abstract entity, whatever that entity is, maybe

1:10:54

it's the government, you know, saying,

1:10:56

this is

1:10:58

the blood sugar level we're comfortable with to

1:11:01

prescribe this. And this is the

1:11:03

level we're not comfortable with. You

1:11:05

know, one of Jonathan and my, you know, sort

1:11:07

of unifying love languages

1:11:10

is talking about processed

1:11:13

food. And, you

1:11:16

know, this is something you've alluded to and

1:11:18

it's something you talk about in the book,

1:11:20

you know, more specifically, you know, I, and

1:11:24

I think Jonathan also, you know,

1:11:27

we lay a tremendous amount of

1:11:29

this burden at the feet of

1:11:32

a government that incentivizes people to

1:11:34

eat poorly, to

1:11:37

eat, you know, food that

1:11:40

is inexpensive, which also is

1:11:42

incredibly high in calories,

1:11:44

fat, salt, and sugar. And,

1:11:50

you know, for Jonathan, we have

1:11:52

a very different approach. Jonathan is

1:11:54

very, very disciplined about

1:11:56

food. He's one of the cleanest eaters I've ever

1:11:59

met in my life. I think he's one of

1:12:01

the cleanest eaters I will ever meet in my

1:12:03

whole life. I also find

1:12:05

him very pedantic, restrictive, and it

1:12:07

annoys me a lot. On

1:12:09

the other side of that, is the fact

1:12:12

that I'm a vegan person who has in particular over the

1:12:19

last 20 years been sold a

1:12:22

lot of highly processed foods that

1:12:24

I did not know were really

1:12:26

not good for me. It

1:12:29

was people like Jonathan and even

1:12:31

vegans who like, you know, Jonathan

1:12:33

is not a vegan, but there

1:12:36

were even vegans who said, don't eat any of

1:12:38

that stuff. Just keep eating whole foods. Keep

1:12:41

eating foods the way the earth produced them. And

1:12:44

you know, I'm terrified at what

1:12:47

my children, you know, what I've given my children

1:12:49

to inherit. But you

1:12:51

know, there was recently this enormous

1:12:53

study about ultra processed food. And

1:12:56

you know, what it revealed is what most

1:12:59

people kind of already had a hunch about.

1:13:02

It's not good for you to eat

1:13:04

food that is so far removed from

1:13:06

any nutritional or, you know, kind

1:13:08

of conceptual food that exists that, you

1:13:10

know, the good earth has created. I

1:13:12

mean, it was just published recently after

1:13:15

this bombshell report saying that ultra processed food

1:13:17

is known to cause cancer, is known to

1:13:19

cause obesity, is known to cause all these

1:13:21

health problems. The response by

1:13:24

the government's top diet adviser

1:13:27

says ultra processed food does not cause

1:13:29

obesity. So maybe

1:13:31

you can speak about the state

1:13:35

and the incentive structure that

1:13:37

creates the environment that promotes

1:13:41

this misinformation and really poor

1:13:44

health choices and food choices for most people.

1:13:47

I had to just say when you said, man,

1:13:49

when you said, you know, my mother says this,

1:13:52

I was picturing the mother from beaches because one

1:13:54

of you a camel skedaddle, right? So

1:13:57

I know that that's not your actual mother. No,

1:14:00

my mother does not share a lot

1:14:03

of features. But no, and I think

1:14:05

it's a universal sort of mother voice

1:14:07

of like, you know, kind of that,

1:14:09

you know, hypercritical, hyper, you know, vigilant,

1:14:12

like, I want you to be like

1:14:14

me. I want you to agree with

1:14:16

the way that I'm doing things. And,

1:14:18

you know, yeah. Yeah,

1:14:21

totally, totally. And so

1:14:23

this is, you've

1:14:26

both brought up such an important thing. Christian,

1:14:30

because when I started working the book, right,

1:14:32

so 47% of Americans want

1:14:34

to take these new weight loss drugs. And

1:14:39

given that eight years from now, it will be a daily pill and

1:14:41

it will be a dollar a day. Actually, that's

1:14:43

an underestimate of how many people are going to be taking these

1:14:45

drugs. And

1:14:49

you sort of hear that and think, how the fuck

1:14:51

did we get here? How did we

1:14:53

get to the point where half the population want to take

1:14:55

a drug to reduce their eating? What's going on? So

1:14:58

I was really exploring why did obesity rise? And

1:15:01

it's really important for people to understand. I just

1:15:03

urge everyone listening and watching to just do something

1:15:05

for me for just one second, right? Pause this

1:15:08

podcast and Google photographs

1:15:11

of beaches in the United

1:15:13

States in the 1970s, so the decade

1:15:15

we were all born, right? Just stop for

1:15:17

a second and look at them and then come back, right? If

1:15:20

you've just done that, you will have noticed something really

1:15:22

weird. Pretty much

1:15:24

everyone in those photos looks

1:15:26

to us to be either skinny or jacked,

1:15:28

right? And you look at it and go,

1:15:30

huh, that's weird. Where was everyone

1:15:33

else on Miami Beach that day? Were they

1:15:35

having a skinny convention, right? What's going on?

1:15:38

And then you look at the figures. That's

1:15:41

what people look like in the United States in

1:15:44

the 1970s, not a million years ago when we were

1:15:46

born, right? So you have

1:15:48

300,000 years where human beings exist

1:15:51

and obesity exists, but it's like

1:15:53

really, really rare. You would have had people

1:15:56

like Prada Ville syndrome, which you studied. You

1:15:59

put that very rare. Like a tiny number

1:16:01

of people. Or with all due respect, my

1:16:03

grandparents who also came from a very different

1:16:05

culture and diet. Yeah, but

1:16:07

it was like a tiny percentage of the

1:16:09

population. Nothing like my grandmother as well, but

1:16:11

like a tiny, tiny number of people, right?

1:16:13

And then between the year I was born and

1:16:15

the year I turned 20, obesity more than

1:16:17

doubled in the United States. And then in

1:16:19

the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again,

1:16:21

right? You think, what happened, right?

1:16:24

Why did we, in our lifetimes, according

1:16:26

to World Health Organization, obesity has more

1:16:28

than tripled, right? That's weird.

1:16:32

What happened, right? And

1:16:34

we know what happened. This

1:16:36

change, this explosion in obesity happens

1:16:39

everywhere that makes one change. It's not where

1:16:41

people suddenly become lazy or lack willpower or

1:16:44

the other stigmatizing things we say. It's where

1:16:46

people move from mostly eating a diet of

1:16:48

whole fresh foods that they prepared on the

1:16:50

day to mostly eating

1:16:52

a diet of processed and ultra-processed foods,

1:16:55

which are constructed out of chemicals in

1:16:57

factories. And it turns out

1:17:00

this new kind of food that never existed

1:17:02

before and now dominates our diets, 67% of

1:17:04

the calories the average American child eats in

1:17:07

a day are ultra-processed foods. They

1:17:09

affect our bodies in a totally different way

1:17:11

to the food that all humans before us

1:17:13

ate. And there's an experiment that to me,

1:17:16

I go through the seven reasons why it

1:17:18

does this to us in the book, but

1:17:20

there's an experiment that to me just totally

1:17:22

nailed what it does to us and what

1:17:24

it did to me. I've nicknamed it Cheesecake

1:17:26

Park. That's not the official title. It's

1:17:29

carried out by Dr. Paul Kenny, who's the

1:17:31

head of neuroscience at Mount Sinai in New

1:17:33

York. Very simple

1:17:35

experiment. He got a load of rats and

1:17:37

he raised them in a cage. And all

1:17:39

they had to eat was the kind of healthy natural

1:17:42

food that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years.

1:17:45

And when that's all they had, the rats would

1:17:47

eat when they were hungry and then they would

1:17:49

stop. They seemed to have some

1:17:51

natural signal that went, hey guys, you're full.

1:17:54

Quit eating. They had some innate

1:17:56

nutritional wisdom. None of

1:17:58

them became overweight. None of them artificial

1:20:00

solution to an artificial problem, right?

1:20:02

That these drugs dug the whole

1:20:04

of hunger in us and then

1:20:08

They're sorry. Sorry that the processed food dug this

1:20:10

hole of hunger in us and then these drugs

1:20:13

fill that hole But at a cost this

1:20:15

is really upsetting to me. This is

1:20:17

terribly upsetting I'm

1:20:19

gonna upset you more. Let's break her. Let's break

1:20:21

her down mine will

1:20:23

tease and she'll talk to me about restrictive

1:20:26

eating but The

1:20:29

only reason I got to where I am right now

1:20:31

and I don't think I'm the healthiest eater that she's

1:20:33

ever seen I think there are people who are doing

1:20:35

far better. I said you're the cleanest eater I

1:20:38

was an intense intense sugar addict growing

1:20:40

up. I Like

1:20:42

Halloween for me was not

1:20:45

a holiday. It was a workday That

1:20:48

was when I would go get my and I

1:20:50

would like Pick

1:20:52

the best neighborhoods and I would start early

1:20:54

and I had pillowcases and I like I

1:20:57

was Targeted it

1:20:59

was planned out for months in

1:21:01

advance and then I would ration the

1:21:03

candy All my effort was

1:21:05

to get money to get candy I played Competitive

1:21:07

hockey as a kid and I would plan how

1:21:10

I could get to the vending machines without my

1:21:12

parents knowing and get to the Concession stands and

1:21:14

I would eat till I had sores in my

1:21:16

mouth. I had I was so extreme I

1:21:19

also ate an enormous amount of cheese I had

1:21:22

pizza was like all I wanted to eat was

1:21:24

pizza and eventually as I grew up

1:21:26

like I stopped I was I didn't feel good and

1:21:29

I began to be aware over many

1:21:31

many years that the more I ate

1:21:34

Highly processed food the

1:21:37

more I craved it the less control I had on

1:21:39

it the less I would be hungry for other things

1:21:42

and it was a very long process of Recognizing

1:21:44

and training myself to be to see

1:21:47

if I have a french fry. I

1:21:50

will want more french fries If

1:21:54

I have chips I want more chips I have no self-control

1:21:56

if you give me a bag of cookies They're

1:21:58

gone like I don't have one cookie And

1:22:01

what I'm concerned about is that in

1:22:04

the effort to not shame

1:22:06

people because it's extremely hard,

1:22:09

it really is labor intensive,

1:22:11

time intensive, financial cost, the

1:22:13

food planning required in order

1:22:15

to not eat highly processed

1:22:17

food is so difficult that

1:22:19

we tell people it's not so bad for you in

1:22:22

moderation. Eat intuitively and

1:22:25

don't be extreme in one version or

1:22:27

another because that creates setbacks. But

1:22:29

fundamentally what we're doing is we're putting these

1:22:31

chemicals into our bodies that are changing our

1:22:34

hunger signals. And why

1:22:37

are we depressed? Our microbiomes are

1:22:40

messed up. Our attention, yes,

1:22:42

it's electronics, but also we don't have

1:22:44

the general nutrients and variety

1:22:47

of food to help us feel okay on

1:22:49

a regular basis. We don't move our bodies,

1:22:51

we're not getting outside. And so we've created

1:22:53

a world for ourselves and then are lying

1:22:55

to ourselves about the impact of the world

1:22:57

that we're living in and then

1:23:00

finding solutions elsewhere. And that at

1:23:02

least we should be starting to say, yes,

1:23:04

these are the environmental factors and the influences

1:23:06

and these are the real impacts that are

1:23:09

affecting us. You're totally right.

1:23:11

It's funny that you've just told a Halloween story

1:23:13

more disturbing than the film Halloween. If you had

1:23:15

merely gone and murdered some babysitters, it would have

1:23:17

been less freaky than that story. But Jason

1:23:20

Voorhees didn't have wounds in his mouth. And

1:23:23

part of my guess in the final one, Jamie

1:23:25

Lee Curtis does in fact stab him. So

1:23:29

you think about this, I'm just thinking

1:23:31

there's so much in what you said that's so true.

1:23:35

So in this

1:23:37

environment that we've created, you have

1:23:40

to have tremendous amounts of control

1:23:43

and put in place tremendous guardrails

1:23:45

to resist these problems. Now you've done that

1:23:48

and huge credit to you for that. That's

1:23:50

a genuine achievement. The way

1:23:52

I think

1:23:55

about willpower in this environment is

1:23:58

willpower is like an umbrella in a really bad

1:24:00

storm. Some people, if

1:24:02

you give them that umbrella, they'll be able to get

1:24:04

off across the street and stay dry. You're one of

1:24:06

those people. But for most people, the storm

1:24:08

is so great, it's just going to break the willpower,

1:24:11

the umbrella, and you're going to just get drenched, right?

1:24:13

I'll do 30 other things rather than

1:24:15

do what he did, literally.

1:24:18

Meaning everything he says makes total sense. And A,

1:24:20

I didn't have enough somatic awareness to understand, quote,

1:24:22

like when he says, like, oh, I didn't feel

1:24:24

good. I didn't even know what that meant. I

1:24:26

don't know what that means. I don't feel good

1:24:29

when I eat something. Like I literally don't. And

1:24:32

I will understand what he's saying

1:24:34

for a week and then

1:24:36

it will leave. It will

1:24:38

leave. And then it's like,

1:24:40

oh, is that the difference between willpower and

1:24:43

not? Is the difference between like, and that's

1:24:45

the thing. And that's why I said it's

1:24:47

so, it's terrifying to me. And that's why

1:24:49

I understand the people that you talk about

1:24:51

in your book, because it doesn't stick for

1:24:54

a lot of people. Like you have a

1:24:56

whole chapter on like, why not die at

1:24:58

an exercise because it doesn't stick. You

1:25:01

know, one of the most depressing conversations I've ever had

1:25:03

in my life was with

1:25:05

a guy called Professor, so this is so awful.

1:25:07

I have to laugh as I say it because

1:25:09

it's so depressing. I

1:25:11

went into this guy called Professor

1:25:13

Roy Baumeister, who is at the

1:25:15

University of Queensland in Australia. And

1:25:18

he is the leading expert in the world on

1:25:20

willpower, right? He's done the most important experiments over

1:25:22

like, I think 40 years over willpower. If you've

1:25:24

ever heard of the marshmallow test, a very famous

1:25:27

experiment, he's the guy who did that, right? And

1:25:30

so this is when I was writing my book, Stolen Focus, about

1:25:32

why we can't pay attention. I thought I'm going to see him.

1:25:34

He'll be a good person to talk to. So

1:25:37

I went to see him. He wrote a book

1:25:39

called Willpower, right? To give you a sense of why

1:25:42

he was the right person to talk to. And

1:25:44

I went to see him and I said, you know, I'm writing this

1:25:46

book about why we can't pay attention. I seem to be looking

1:25:48

at my phone all the fucking time. What can I do? And

1:25:52

he said, the exact words are in the book, I'm doing

1:25:54

this from memory, but he says something like, you

1:25:57

know, it's really interesting you say that because I've noticed.

1:26:00

I just play Candy Crush a lot now. I look

1:26:02

at my phone all the time. I just, uh, yeah,

1:26:04

I just don't seem to have much willpower. It's like,

1:26:08

wait, what? Et tu, Bertie? You're

1:26:10

the guy. Wait, you wrote a

1:26:12

book called Willpower. Are you telling

1:26:14

me you play Cad? It

1:26:16

was like the moment at the end of the body snatches where you're like, oh,

1:26:19

they fucking body snatched everyone. Like,

1:26:21

it was just, it was so

1:26:23

depressing. But what I would say

1:26:25

is, um, the

1:26:28

way I think about it, right? But obesity for any

1:26:30

of these factors that we're talking about,

1:26:34

and indeed the subject of

1:26:36

some other books, for depression, attention,

1:26:38

attention problems, um, addiction. There's, there's,

1:26:40

there's, there's three, um, factors,

1:26:43

three kinds of cause that drive these problems.

1:26:45

The fancy way of talking about it, and

1:26:48

it sounds complicated, but bear with me. It's

1:26:50

not, is that, I don't know, you guys

1:26:52

know this, it's the biopsychosocial model, right? It's

1:26:54

very simple. There's three kinds of cause of

1:26:57

these problems. There are problems.

1:26:59

There's biological causes, right? Things

1:27:01

like your genes, real

1:27:04

changes that happen in your brain as you

1:27:06

become addicted or depressed or obese that can

1:27:08

make it harder to go back. So biological

1:27:10

causes. There's psychological

1:27:12

causes like trauma

1:27:14

or shame or more positively willpower. Those

1:27:17

are psychological things that you can bring

1:27:19

to it. And

1:27:21

then there's social factors like the

1:27:23

food supply, also that affects your biology, but

1:27:25

you know, the food environment we grow up

1:27:27

in, we would all eat very differently if

1:27:29

we'd grown up in rural Japan compared to,

1:27:32

you know, if we grew up where I

1:27:34

used to live two blocks away from Times

1:27:36

Square, right? So biopsychosocial, they're

1:27:38

all true. They're all real. You,

1:27:40

you were able to use one

1:27:43

sliver of the psychological component, willpower,

1:27:45

to overcome

1:27:47

these other factors. Huge credit to

1:27:50

you. For me, I

1:27:55

think the biological, I

1:27:58

think the social component was a huge factor. But

1:28:00

I was fatter than most of the people around

1:28:02

me, so it can't just have been that. I

1:28:04

think the psychological components about I grew up in

1:28:06

a family where there was a lot of violence

1:28:08

and, as I say, a lot of lunacy. And

1:28:17

so I ate to steady myself and calm

1:28:19

myself. For

1:28:21

me that overwhelmed, I'm someone with

1:28:23

quite a lot of willpower, right? I work really, really

1:28:26

hard. If willpower is the only... I know you're

1:28:28

not saying this, I'm not saying this to argue against you. It's

1:28:31

hard to think of anyone in our society who

1:28:33

has more willpower than firefighters. They run into burning

1:28:35

buildings for a job, right? I could

1:28:37

not do that. And yet firefighters are

1:28:40

significantly more obese than the rest of the

1:28:42

population. So if willpower

1:28:44

was all it took to not be

1:28:46

obese, that wouldn't compute, right? So

1:28:48

there's these other factors going on. And we've

1:28:50

got to deal with those factors. And

1:28:53

we can deal with those factors. So

1:28:55

these new weight loss drugs give us some way

1:28:58

of dealing with it. The way I think about it is we were

1:29:00

raised in a trap and these drugs are

1:29:02

a trapdoor. They are a risky, rusty trapdoor. Some of

1:29:04

us should go through them and some of them shouldn't.

1:29:07

And I hope my book is a guide to help

1:29:09

me think about that. But also we can...

1:29:11

Much more importantly, we need to make sure our kids

1:29:14

don't grow up in that trap and our grandchildren don't

1:29:16

grow up in that trap. And that can sound high

1:29:19

in the sky, but I went to places that have begun to

1:29:21

do it. And just before I mention those places, do you

1:29:23

want to say, because you're going to think, yeah, yeah,

1:29:25

good luck with that. We can't do that. I

1:29:29

would just get you to think a bit about

1:29:31

smoking. I think if we could

1:29:33

take your kids or my nephews, my niece,

1:29:35

my god sons back to

1:29:37

when we were eight years old, I

1:29:39

think the thing that would most shock them is

1:29:42

that people smoked fucking everywhere.

1:29:44

On airplanes. On the subway. On

1:29:47

planes. I remember my doctor,

1:29:49

my family doctor, used to smoke while

1:29:51

he inspected me. There's

1:29:54

a photograph of me and my mother when I was six

1:29:56

months old. She's breastfeeding me

1:29:58

smoking and resting the afro. lives,

1:46:00

84% of them survive. But nonetheless, it's

1:46:02

a pretty big increase in a small

1:46:04

risk, right? And that's just one

1:46:06

of many risks that I go through in the book. So

1:46:10

yeah, there's a lot that I'm worried about. We

1:46:12

know that if you give these drugs to rats

1:46:16

and the rats get pregnant, they're much more likely

1:46:18

to have babies with birth deformities. So I would

1:46:20

say if you're, not just if you're planning to

1:46:22

get pregnant, but if you're at risk of getting

1:46:25

pregnant, don't take these drugs. At risk. There's

1:46:27

a whole array. I think you thought you were being a risk. At risk,

1:46:29

at risk. Skip your legs closed, ladies.

1:46:31

What's the line in absolute, what's the line of

1:46:33

in absolutely fabulous, my mother didn't give birth, she

1:46:36

had something removed. But the,

1:46:38

yeah, you know, if you're, if there's,

1:46:41

yeah, it's funny, it's funny she said that,

1:46:43

because as you can probably tell, I'm gay. And

1:46:46

I only have had sex with two girls in my life when I was

1:46:49

15. And not very long ago, I

1:46:51

bumped into one of them for the first time in all

1:46:53

this time. And she had a baby in her arms and

1:46:55

literally my first thought was, it's my

1:46:57

child. And then I was like, oh,

1:46:59

no, wait, unless she had a very

1:47:02

low pregnancy. Well, I think that

1:47:05

should be on your, that should be on your

1:47:07

book jackets that you are at very low risk

1:47:09

of getting anyone pregnant. Exactly.

1:47:11

It's exceptionally low, I think is the, is

1:47:14

the, is the benefit there. But yeah, so

1:47:16

in terms of what I want to get

1:47:19

off my chest, obviously I go through a lot of the risks in the

1:47:21

book, but for me, the

1:47:26

thing I most want to thump the table and say is at the

1:47:29

moment, people like me have a choice that

1:47:31

is really painful. It's between

1:47:33

a risky medical condition and a

1:47:36

risky set of drugs. Right. And I hope

1:47:38

my book is a guide so people can think through those risks

1:47:40

for themselves and make their own decisions in

1:47:42

consultation with their doctor. But

1:47:45

the main thing I want to say is that

1:47:48

doesn't have to be the choice. I

1:47:51

went to Japan, Japan is the third richest

1:47:53

country in the world. Right. Japan

1:47:57

has almost no obesity at all.

1:48:01

42.5% of Americans are obese in Japan, it's 4%. That

1:48:03

childhood obesity rate is almost literally

1:48:06

zero. It is really weird

1:48:08

to go to Japanese schools with a

1:48:10

thousand kids and walk around and say

1:48:12

to the teachers, where are

1:48:14

your overweight children? And they

1:48:16

say, we don't have any

1:48:19

overweight children, right? And

1:48:22

the reason they do it is because they

1:48:24

protect their children from processed and ultra-processed foods

1:48:27

and they educate them to

1:48:29

love and enjoy healthy, fresh

1:48:31

foods that feed their bodies and

1:48:33

make them well. We can

1:48:35

do that too. Just like we

1:48:38

changed the culture around smoking profoundly, very

1:48:40

few 16-year-old Americans smoke now compared to when

1:48:43

we were that age. Okay, we've got issues

1:48:45

around vaping and that's a real thing but

1:48:47

vaping is, if you had a

1:48:49

choice between vaping and smoking cigarettes, we choose vaping every

1:48:51

time, right? So

1:48:55

we don't have to tolerate this. We can

1:48:57

fix this, we can put this right. We

1:49:00

absolutely need to do that. Now

1:49:02

though, for someone like me, it's too

1:49:04

late. I've had a life on KFC,

1:49:06

right? I

1:49:09

can't go back in time and undo that

1:49:11

environment. I've made

1:49:13

the difficult choice I've made. Other

1:49:16

people will have to make a difficult choice. Even

1:49:19

just knowing about the environmental factors has reduced my

1:49:21

shame. I felt like such a failure for being

1:49:23

fat. I was in fact an

1:49:25

entirely typical product of the environment I grew

1:49:27

up in, right? It

1:49:29

was not my fault. So

1:49:32

I would say know that this was done to

1:49:34

you, not something you did to yourself and

1:49:37

know that it doesn't have to keep happening to

1:49:39

the next generation and the next generation and the

1:49:41

next generation. And we can put this right

1:49:43

if we want to. We've got a new tool to deal with

1:49:45

this problem which is exciting and

1:49:47

disturbing. And I

1:49:49

hope it wakes us up to go how the fuck did

1:49:51

we get to this point? Well,

1:49:56

I mean, I never in

1:49:58

a million years did I think. I think I'd get to

1:50:00

speak to you. And I insist, or

1:50:02

I will literally hang myself, that we

1:50:04

end this podcast with the last lines

1:50:07

from Beaches, which are, I

1:50:09

remember the line you say, which is, well sure,

1:50:11

we're friends, aren't we? That's right. What's the line

1:50:14

that she says before that? She says, hold on,

1:50:16

Valerie, can you pull this up? So for people

1:50:18

who don't know, for me, gay people

1:50:20

are listening and they don't know this, if

1:50:22

you have not watched Beaches, you must just immediately stop and

1:50:24

your life will never be the same again. You just literally

1:50:27

need to, whatever you're doing, I don't care if your child

1:50:29

is about to die and you need to go to the

1:50:31

hospice, abandon the child and watch Beaches, because it is the

1:50:33

greatest film I've made. But, I do

1:50:35

care if your child is dying, don't get

1:50:37

me wrong, but priority's here. So

1:50:40

there is a flashback at the end

1:50:42

of Beaches, this is a slight spoiler,

1:50:44

but where Hillary and

1:50:46

CeCe, who meet when they're little

1:50:48

children in Atlantic City, go

1:50:51

into those things that no longer exist,

1:50:53

photo booths that take photos of you, and

1:50:55

this is the day they meet, and they say something

1:50:57

like, we're gonna say the line, and

1:51:00

then at the very end of the film, after they've gone through many

1:51:02

travails and many things have happened, which I will not ruin to you,

1:51:05

tell me the line. Okay, okay, Valerie found

1:51:07

it. I'll be you, be you, and I'll

1:51:09

be Barbara Hershey. Okay, I'll be me. So

1:51:11

your line is, be sure

1:51:14

to keep in touch, CeCe, okay? That's

1:51:17

it, that's it. Okay, ready? Okay, she says,

1:51:19

she's meant to be like a little posh

1:51:22

girl as well. Well, you're actually working for

1:51:24

me, yes. Okay, okay, yeah. Be

1:51:27

sure to keep in touch, CeCe. You

1:51:29

have to say okay. Oh, so be

1:51:32

sure to keep in touch, CeCe, okay? Well,

1:51:35

sure, we're friends, aren't we?

1:51:40

Could I just say this is the greatest moment of my life?

1:51:43

This is nothing better will ever,

1:51:45

my life has now peaked, and

1:51:47

nothing better will ever happen to me again. So

1:51:51

this is it. Johan

1:51:53

Hari, you are delightful. You are

1:51:55

such, you're such a gift with

1:51:57

your writing and your journalism and

1:51:59

your research. and it has just

1:52:01

been so much fun and so

1:52:03

helpful to talk this out with

1:52:05

you. We're so grateful to you. Oh,

1:52:08

hooray. And I meant to say on my publishers' tase

1:52:10

me, they give me this fucking thing to say, if

1:52:13

you'd like to know where to get my

1:52:15

books, you can go to j-o-h-a-n-n-h-a-r-i.com. You can

1:52:17

get them as audiobooks, e-books, or physical books.

1:52:19

You can also see where to follow me

1:52:21

on social media. And

1:52:25

you can also get them... I meant to say you

1:52:27

can get them from all good bookshops, but you can

1:52:29

also get them from shitty bookshops. It doesn't really... We

1:52:31

have no quality test, right? We've

1:52:33

talked about Magic Pill, but, you know,

1:52:37

I cannot recommend highly enough really all

1:52:39

of Johan's books. So please go to

1:52:41

his website, check him out. There's

1:52:43

so much here to be mined, and we're

1:52:45

just so grateful to even scratch the surface

1:52:48

of everything that you have to offer. So thank you

1:52:51

so much. Some

1:52:55

of the things that we didn't get to talk

1:52:58

about with Johan, were some

1:53:00

of the other side effects, which I just sort of

1:53:02

feel like, because we've talked so much about Ozembeg in

1:53:04

this episode, and these kinds

1:53:06

of drugs, I do want to mention that besides

1:53:08

the gastrointestinal stuff that we talked about, you

1:53:12

know, some people do... Like a side effects,

1:53:14

one of the side effects is like pancreas

1:53:16

issues, like inflammation of the

1:53:18

pancreas. Some people

1:53:21

have changes in vision, you know,

1:53:23

related to like diabetic retinopathy stuff.

1:53:26

One of the side effects is kidney issues, risk

1:53:30

for kidney failure. Obviously blood sugar

1:53:32

issues are gonna come up, as Johan talked about,

1:53:34

because this is, you know,

1:53:36

a manipulation of the insulin system.

1:53:40

Some people do have allergic reactions. We talked about

1:53:42

thyroid cancer, and those are things that... These are

1:53:44

things that Ozembeg has to tell people about. Like

1:53:46

these are things... And people might

1:53:48

be like, acetaminophen can cause problems, you know, so like

1:53:51

it's true, everything can cause things, but I did want

1:53:53

to just mention it. And he

1:53:55

mentioned the depression risk, which I think is really interesting.

1:53:58

He also talks about... people's faces

1:54:01

changing. It's known

1:54:03

as kind of a deflated face, and I think that's

1:54:05

what I was referencing when I looked at all these

1:54:07

celebrities, male and female, and I was like, it's like

1:54:09

they look like they're wearing a skin of themselves. So,

1:54:13

yeah, and malnutrition is a real concern.

1:54:15

You know, when I've experienced people who,

1:54:18

you know, are on these drugs and

1:54:20

have said, I'm on this medicine, it's

1:54:23

like they don't, they said, they just like, I don't

1:54:25

want to eat, they don't eat. So, like, yeah, eating

1:54:27

is important. And obviously you're going to

1:54:29

get loss of muscle mass, you know, from that as

1:54:31

well. That

1:54:33

was a very interesting conversation. I mean, honestly, I

1:54:35

could talk to him about each of his books

1:54:37

for hours and hours because I just, I love

1:54:40

the way that he writes. I love the way

1:54:42

that he goes about his research. I think that's

1:54:44

what's so interesting about this book. It's not just

1:54:46

about like, I took this drug and here's what

1:54:48

happened. It's about what is

1:54:50

the culture? What did he say? The

1:54:52

biopsychosocial environment that we're all, you know,

1:54:55

having to navigate. And

1:54:57

he really, he finds people doing research about, you

1:54:59

know, things that previously we

1:55:01

would have considered esoteric, which

1:55:03

are now really at the forefront of

1:55:06

understanding the underlying mechanisms of these kinds

1:55:08

of drugs and what it

1:55:10

does not only to our bodies, but

1:55:12

to our brains. And as you and I would argue, it's

1:55:14

all connected. When he talked about biopsychosocial,

1:55:16

I was like, how do you tell the difference? Everything

1:55:20

psychological has a physiological component,

1:55:22

has like the gut, the

1:55:24

mind. It's all related. I

1:55:27

totally agree. I want to

1:55:29

also be careful that I'm not underplaying

1:55:31

the need for many people to be

1:55:33

on these drugs. I'm concerned that we

1:55:36

don't talk about the interrelated nature

1:55:38

that you just mentioned. I'm

1:55:41

concerned that we

1:55:45

just jump so quickly without thinking about the side

1:55:47

effects. Loss of muscle

1:55:49

mass can

1:55:52

have real serious implications for longer

1:55:54

life. And I would say most

1:55:56

people, especially women, would say like,

1:55:59

I'd rather...