Ezra Klein

My family has a lot of cardiovascular disease in it that has hit members of my family young.

And as everybody sort of around me began going on GLP-1s, I began reading these things about cardiac events.

I was like, am I an idiot for not being on one?

Are we all going to be...

on one of these in a few years.

And so I've tried them.

I want to talk about that experience in a minute, but I want to ask that underlying question of you, given these three buckets you just described and how many things they seem to be helping to treat.

It increasingly seemed to me like, shouldn't everybody be on low dose?

ozempic or trisepatide.

If you're seeing reduction, possible reductions in dementia that we don't really know, but reductions in weight, reductions in cardiovascular events, reductions in liver and kidney disease, reductions in sleep apnea, improved blood sugar.

We'll talk about the addiction and compulsivity findings later, but it began to seem like a thing we should be putting in the water.

This was amazing to me that 63% of people in your survey said even if the drug didn't work for weight loss, they'd want to stay on it.

I understand why the researchers have to say, well, look, we don't know.

But we don't know actually isn't an answer to that question.

You have to make a decision, like as a person, with one life and a life where you have a chance of getting heart disease, a chance of developing dementia, a chance of developing kidney disease, a chance of developing all these different things.

And you have to look at these studies or the coverage of these studies more to the point and say, or say with your doctor, do I think I should be on this thing that seems to modulate inflammation, which appears to be a source cause of all kinds of major chronic and acute illnesses people develop or not?

And one reason I think you're seeing like really, really aggressive experimentation

particularly around this class of drugs, is because something that has all these effects for the well or for chronic conditions, saying, well, I don't know, in 12 years, maybe we'll know more, you actually kind of have to make a yes or no decision as a person.

Because if you miss out on protecting your body from the chronic effects of ongoing inflammation for five years, you've missed out on five years of protection and you have accumulated five years of damage.

But I know different doctors feel differently about this.