Dr. Ken Spielvogel

I am not enjoying it.

And the reason for that is that what happens when we do pleasurable things?

Well, we have a dopamine reward center in the brain.

okay you have the uh it's called the vta i'm not going to even get into the scientific name for you vta produces dopamine you smoke a cigar richard's brain says god damn that's good dopamine surge goes to the nucleus accumbens nucleus accumbens says wow that really feels good let me tell the frontal cortex

Tell us to smoke another cigar.

That feels good.

Now let's take another drug that we're both familiar with, meth.

So meth will take that dopamine amplification and crank it up 10 times that of even cocaine.

Right.

So you get this massive surge of dopamine.

That's why people that use methamphetamine are hooked almost immediately because there's nowhere else.

There's no other substance that is going to give that of dopamine.

So now along comes the dopamine traffic cop.

which is semaglutide, terazepatide, they come along and they squash, I'm not gonna get scientific here, they kinda squash and temper that dopamine response.

So you don't get that surge.

And they also do a reset in the brain.

So where once you're a meth addict, their brain is flooded, rewired,

And to get to a place where they're, if we looked at brain imaging to say that their signaling was the same as a non-user, that is gonna take an awful long time.

And for these drugs, Terzapatide in particular, we see a resetting of the dopamine system in a much more timely fashion.

So that's why when you're doing these behaviors that normally gave you, boom, a surge of dopamine, you're not getting that nearly as much.