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Johann Hari is an author of many bestselling books—Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream. Johann is a fellow cultural psychic and his latest book—the subject of today’s conversation—bears this out. He takes on drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro in Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. He also writes about his own relationship to these drugs, as Johann is taking them. His book is a subtle and sensitive navigation of what is a tightly bound convergence of health and culture—and every page of his book anticipates and precedes the conversation. (As a disclaimer, I’m in it.) We talk about all of it in today’s conversation, along with what would have happened if a woman had written this book first.
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE: Maybe someday I'll be in your company, but I think of you as one of our great cultural psychics. You tend to see what's coming, and maybe it's so obvious to you, but you tend to see what's coming, and you're so swift that you are one of the first writers, I feel like, out of the gate to attend to whatever wave is on us. You must sense that. Yeah?