Ezra Klein

And it makes the ideal both like ever more unreachable and ever more punishing to try to reach people.

So the conversation we've been having here sort of tracks what I would call like the first cycle of Ozempic coverage excitement.

And then a new thing begins happening.

And it's sort of when I began paying closer attention.

There was a study that came out that particularly caught Maya as a former health care reporter saying,

Which was that we were seeing huge drops in mortality from any form of cardiac event.

But the drops didn't seem to be connected or didn't need to be connected to losing weight.

So can you explain what we saw then and then how that begins to shift the story here?

And notably, past weight loss drugs like Fen-Phen, which were not diabetes drugs, like did increase the risk of cardiovascular events, right?

We've had wonder weight loss drugs before and they gave people heart issues.

How big is that?

There's possible benefits on dementia.

I mean, my understanding of this is that observationally, people on these seem to have much lower risk of dementia.

They did a study seeing if it, a randomized controlled trial, seeing if it improves people who have Alzheimer's and it didn't, but we're not sure about whether or not it can prevent Alzheimer's.

And some people seem to believe Alzheimer's or dementia are metabolically activated.

And so now there's this whole question of, is it cognitively protective?

Or if it's earlier, right?

So these weight-independent results, they break our theory of the mechanism of health improvement here a little bit.

So as doctors and scientists try to grapple with this, how does our sense of what the drug is doing and why it is helping the body change?

Why would it do any of that?