Ezra Klein

But people are reporting not just a desire to eat less, but a desire to do all kinds of things less.

Drink alcohol, take drugs, online shop.

And then this anhedonia thing is also being reported by people.

And so what have you seen about the whole reward system dynamic of it in your reporting?

Yeah.

My assumption of why some people were getting anhedonia, some people were seeing lower desire for drinking, was actually not necessarily that it would end up proving to be a clear treatment.

but that it is messing with a system we don't really understand.

I mean, I sort of think what's interesting about this whole conversation is we're basically saying we don't understand any of the systems very well.

We don't understand the appetite system.

It's working a different way than we hypothesized.

The cardiac system is not doing what we thought it would be doing.

We don't know why the inflammation system is responding.

The reward system is changing.

I mean, the human body is a very, very, very complex set of systems.

And this seems to be a complex change to them that at the population level is positive, probably, but not in a way where we can precisely define the mechanisms by which it is positive or tell you for whom it will be positive, for whom it will be negative, and who will actually lose weight and who won't and how much.

It's a very weird thing.

space actually.

What about all the drugs that are coming now?

So I know people who are getting retitutride from some compounding pharmacy in China or something.

And retitutride, maybe you can explain it, but it's another Eli Lilly drug.