Derek Thompson

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There's an aversion to the technology within certain aspects of media.

Like there are magazines and newsletter writers who are against GLP-1s because they promote a new thinness culture or they might represent some kind of unnatural way of getting a normal body.

That it accelerates us towards some kind of transhumanist future with which we feel uncomfortable.

And while enriching a small number of people.

While enriching a small number of people.

But I also think it's important to look at the fact that this is, by all accounts, the most popular

category of drug in the last 20, 30 years.

I mean, the pharmaceutical companies can't sell it fast enough.

The peptide makers with their relationships to Chinese or whatever labs, they can't sell it fast enough.

I mean, here you have an emerging technology that looks like it might have implications for neurodegenerative disease, for inflammation, for cardiovascular disease.

These are diseases that are among the highest mortality burden in the country, in the developed world.

Why aren't we devoting even more public resources to studying this drug faster and finding new ways of bringing down the cost in the next few years for all Americans?

What if the federal government spends a lot of money to promote a certain drug category,

reward certain companies with advanced market commitments, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars for companies that build these drugs so that the government essentially is buying those drugs and then can distribute them to the public at cost, which is exactly what we did for COVID vaccines.

And right now, the federal government just sort of seems MIA on this in a way that I'm not sure I entirely understand.

So if I were in government looking at this revolution, I would frankly be interested in something like an Operation Warp Speed for GLP-1s.

It doesn't just seem like an abject disaster.

It is an absolute disaster.

I mean, this is what you and I were talking about a lot with audiences in May and April of last year.