Ezra Klein

If you want to take L-theanine or whatever, go for it.

I mean, my gut is that this is going to become a disaster.

My personal view is actually fairly conservative.

I'm trying to be the devil's advocate here.

But it seems like people are taking a lot of things right now to increase cell growth, which...

maybe is good in the short term but has really frightening cancerous properties in some of these cases in the long term i mean i think we might end up realizing that a couple of the things that people are starting to get excited about you know are really not good for folks which has happened before i mean we were talking about fen fen and things like that earlier we have had periods where people got really into something and it wasn't good for you we used to put cocaine in coca-cola

One thing that I think is just a deep appeal of these drugs, of broader peptides and other things that are becoming culturally influential, is on some level we all want is control.

Control of our bodies, control of our health, control over never getting the diseases that scare all of us.

And on the one hand, if you are able to be given control

a real possibility for control.

If it's true that the GLP-1s at low doses protect you against heart disease, amazing.

Statins have been amazing.

I have a friend, somebody who I care about tremendously, whose parent died young of dementia.

And I've been following all this Alzheimer's research on them very closely because if they're prophylactic against dementia, I want my friend to take them.

So I'm not saying that wanting to protect yourself is a bad impulse.

It isn't.

on the other hand a desire for endless control over your own body and future can be mentally poisonous too because you can't control it the great insight of buddhism is that you know desire and craving are the root of suffering and you know the more we trick ourselves into believing we can control what will happen to us then when things do happen to us we feel like we failed

I feel like I've heard this argument as long as I've been touching this issue, which like, as you know, the beginning of my career as a healthcare reporter, you know, we would debate food deserts and what would happen if we put, you know, good grocery stores in food deserts and we did this in a bunch of places and it didn't really work.

I've become very cynical about this.

I mean, yes, it would be much better if everybody was wrapped around with more walkable places to live and better and healthy foods.