Julia Belluz
speaker
540 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 8 May
Julia Belluz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But the megaphone is so much bigger and more fragmented, and it's so much more effective at creating this confirmation bias.
I think about my mom who was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she was trying to decide whether to go on one of these medicines that's available for the condition.
And she ended up in a complete YouTube rabbit hole of doctors who were really skeptical of osteoporosis drugs.
And she became quite frightened and it took her like a couple of years to go on the medication.
And this is happening at a scale that we've never seen before, right?
But this desire to optimize, like in our book, we found this wild example of after the First World War, there was an ingredient in explosives manufacturing that sped up the metabolism and caused people to lose weight.
And doctors at Stanford pivoted and turned it into a drug that was taken by hundreds of thousands of people and became one of the first targets of the FDA.
And it had terrible side effects and killed people and caused eye problems.
And so I think we've always done these wild things in search of looking for the magic cure, the quick fix or bettering our health.
But the in-your-face-ness of the messages and the way they're targeted with the algorithms, this we've never seen.
So I think you're touching on something really important, which is how this media landscape has changed.
not only around the blockbuster FDA-approved drugs like the GLP-1s, but around this broader ecosystem of wellness hacks and optimizers.
Right.
I think it's sort of the perfect drug for this social media algorithmic age that we're in because it's visual, right?
It's not like you have the before and after photos you have.
I spend way more time than I'd like to admit on TikTok and Reddit accounts where you see
the videos and the before and after photos and how people's bodies are transforming.
And we were kind of living in this very appearance obsessed culture.
And now for the first time, again, we have this drug that does something that humans have quested after for like a century or more.
And so it's meeting that moment.
Showing 301–320 of 540 · page 16 of 27
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