TikTok Constitutionally Challenges Forced Sale, Lawmakers Exploit Holocaust to Feed Moral Panic over Antisemitism; PLUS: The Ozempic Craze with author Johann Hari
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
TikTok Ban (6:20)
Antisemitism Moral Panic (32:21)
Interview with Johann Hari (46:46)
Outro (1:14:06)
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Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, if I had to pick the most direct and explicit legislative abridgment over the last decade of core constitutional rights, it'd likely be the wildly expanded definition of, quote, anti-Semitism that was just incorporated into federal anti-discrimination law last week.
We examined that bill in detail, but a close second Perhaps even the top threat to core constitutional rights would be the extraordinary forced sale and or banning of TikTok that President Biden signed into law last month.
The likelihood that TikTok's corporate parents can divest themselves in accordance with the law and in the time period set is extremely low.
Which means that this app, voluntarily used by more than 150 million Americans, will be banned and that banning would take place in January of 2025, conveniently set right after the presidential election to ensure nobody is held accountable for this visible assault on free speech.
In a federal court earlier today, both TikTok and its parent company ByteDance filed suit against the Biden administration, arguing at length why this bill constitutes a grave and glaring violation of the First Amendment free speech rights of American citizens, as well as the 14th Amendment and other secondary arguments.
Now, there's been all kinds of fear-mongering generated about TikTok to justify its banning.
This fear campaign is always the foundation of any authoritarian act.
You have to put the population enough fear to make them agree to anything that is being done in the name of protecting them from this new threat.
But so much of these fear campaigns, and certainly this one, are based on exaggerations or outright fabrications.
And the arguments made by TikTok today, along with other reporting relating to it that we've covered before, visibly, vividly demonstrates why this is.
We'll tell you about this constitutional challenge and what its implications are.
Then, the moral panic that the U.S.
government is deliberately cultivating on a bipartisan basis in the United States to justify all of these repressive measures that American Jews now face an epidemic of violent bigotry, even a second Holocaust, Continues to be pushed by leaders of both parties.
Both President Biden and Speaker Mike Johnson gave very similar speeches over the last 48 hours with this theme at the Holocaust Memorial.
Namely that the anti-war protests on American campuses are merely disguised movements of radical Islam or Sharia law and above all an attempt to bring another Holocaust against Jews to the United States.
That's no exaggeration.
And Johnson's speech today in particular was so riddled with obvious falsehoods and hoaxes, though so was Biden, that both are worth examining.
Finally, the British journalist and writer Johan Hari has written some of the most consequential books over the last decade, including Chasing the Scream, which revolutionized how addiction is understood, Lost Connections, which explores the spiritual causes of growing mental health pathologies in the West, and Stolen Focus, on how modern society is destroying our ability to concentrate.
Johan has a new book out entitled, quote, Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, including Ozempic, which, among other things, interviews a wide range of scientists and physicians to understand both the safety and the efficacy and the dangers of the Ozempic craze and similar drugs.
Now, before we get to that, a few programming notes.
First of all, I am going to be in Canada on Friday for an event that is sponsored by Rumble that is designed to bring a free speech event to Canada in opposition to a new bill proposed by the Trudeau government that would be among the most repressive I am going to be in Canada on Friday for an event that is sponsored by Rumble that is designed to And part of the event is designed to oppose this and to warn Canadians of its dangers,
Rumble was originally created as a Canadian company.
Its founder and CEO Chris Pawlowski is a Canadian citizen and so it's going to be I think a very important event to bring together free speech proponents from around the world in opposition not just to this law but ones like it.
That means that I'll be traveling to Canada tomorrow night which means we won't have a show tomorrow night.
On Thursday night we're going to broadcast The speech that I'm scheduled to give on free speech and the importance of it, it should be 45 minutes to an hour, and we're gonna broadcast that on Thursday night.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the key tactics for introducing any attack on core civil liberties or basic constitutional rights is to constantly elevate the fears that the population has about some new threat in order to get them to agree to the abridgment of their own rights because they're so frightened by some boogeyman that they've been told they're not going to be.
The gold is so threatening to them and they're willing to not only accept but almost cheer for and demand.
a violation of the Constitution in order to keep them safe.
Obviously, safety is a very important human drive.
We all have it.
It's necessary to our survival.
And so when governments can manipulate fear of our own safety, that is the age-old hallmark tactic for any authoritarian act or any authoritarian government.
And that is what has been repeatedly done for years now in order to ban TikTok, a platform that 150 million Americans choose to use, but which the United States government has more difficulty censoring and controlling the content of than it does Facebook and Google.
Although TikTok has made a lot of efforts to place their, quote, content moderation decision in the hands of the U.S.
security state, it hasn't been enough.
And as a result, and we've talked about the reporting on this, after lurking in Washington for four years, the TikTok for sale, which is really a ban for reasons we'll explain, finally was enacted by the Senate and the House and then signed into law by President Biden.
And the reporting shows and the sponsor of the bill have admitted, we showed you Mitt Romney saying it yesterday as well, that the reason this bill finally got approved after lurking in Washington for decades, for years, is because members of Congress became convinced that the reason there's so much anti-Israel sentiment and anti-war sentiment among young Americans is because TikTok is allowing too much anti-war free speech on that platform.
Too much criticism of Israel is permitted to circulate there and they decided they need to ban TikTok in order to regain control of the minds of young Americans in particular.
TikTok today filed a suit in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia of the DC Circuit And essentially it's a petition for review of the constitutionality of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Application Act.
And you can see here in the caption that it's brought by both TikTok and their parent company ByteDance, about which all kinds of false claims have been circulated, false perceptions of both of those companies constructed.
And they're suing Merrick Garland in his official capacity as the Attorney General of the United States basically to prevent enforcement And what this lawsuit basically argues is that by forcing a sale of TikTok to a company more susceptible to American control really amounts to a ban because there's almost no way within the parameters of the law and the parameters of the time limit given that the parent company will be able to divest itself of TikTok.
And they scheduled this ban to take place in January 2025, once the election is safely over and whichever party wins won't have to be accountable.
There'll be all these angry users, but they'll have nowhere to go until two years from then to express their anger at the polls because it's purposely scheduled to take place right after the presidential election.
Now, I want to show you some of the arguments that have been advanced as part of this lawsuit by TikTok because I think it really captures so much of what the
Real issue here is about, so the suit begins with the following, quote, Congress has taken the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning TikTok, a vibrant online forum for protected speech and expression used by 170 million Americans to create, share, and view videos over the internet.
For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single-name speech platform to a permanent nationwide ban and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.
That law, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Application Act, is unconstitutional.
Banning TikTok is so obviously unconstitutional, in fact, that even the act's sponsors recognize that reality and therefore have tried mightily to depict the law not as a ban at all, but merely a regulation of TikTok's ownership.
But in reality, there is no choice.
The quote qualified divestiture demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible, not commercially, not technologically, not legally, and certainly not in the 270 day timeline required by the Act.
TikTok and ByteDance have expressly explained to the U.S.
government and sponsors of the Act we're aware of that divestment is not possible.
There is no question the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok By January 19th, 2025.
Silencing the 170 million Americans who use that platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.
Now, keep in mind that this bill is not just limited to a ban of TikTok.
It really couldn't constitutionally be written just to ban TikTok because there's prohibitions on what are called bill of attainers when Congress tries to pass a law designed to punish one particular company.
So they had to make it broader than that.
And the Republicans?
Vested in the Biden administration and the Democrats vested in a possible future Trump administration, the power to deem any platform that Americans are using in the United States to communicate with one another and to organize one another and to create communities as a sufficient threat to Americans so that the government can ban them if the president decides that it's threatening enough
As long as it's owned by a foreign adversary, that they can ban not just TikTok, but any other social media platform like it.
As TikTok says, "If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down." And for TikTok, any such divestiture would disconnect Americans from the rest of the global community on a platform devoted to shared content, an outcome fundamentally at odds with the Constitution's commitment to both free speech and liberty.
Now, one of the things we've been reporting for a long time now, and I first did this reporting when one of our videos on TikTok was banned.
We've had that happen twice now.
One of the videos was an attempt to debunk a lot of the propaganda being issued about the U.S.
government regarding the war in Ukraine.
Why would the Chinese government, if it were really censoring this platform, want to suppress a video that we published critical of the U.S.
government, the U.S.
national security state?
And then the censorship of us and our show happened on TikTok again, a place we're obviously using to reach people who only use TikTok, which is a lot of people.
When we reported on how the CIA intervened in the Brazilian election in 2022 in order to tell the Brazilian right and Jair Bolsonaro that they did not want any attempts to call into question the integrity of the election outcome.
Clearly the Biden administration was siding with Lula.
They wanted Bolsonaro to lose.
Bolsonaro is a close ally of Trump.
And bizarrely, the Brazilian left that typically postures as being completely opposed to any foreign intervention was thankful to the CIA for doing that.
So we published this report based on a lot of public reporting.
And that report went viral, thanks mostly to Brazilians, but also to Americans, quite viral.
And as it viralized, TikTok banned it as well and refused to restore it.
So again, that is why would the Chinese government have an interest in banning reporting that reflects negatively on the CIA and the US security state?
The reason is what has actually happened is that TikTok desperately wants to stay in the United States because it's such a lucrative market.
They're not here for ideological reasons.
They're here for profit reasons.
We've gone over before who the CEO is, who the leadership is of this company.
They're classic capitalists.
They're people from Singapore, from other parts in Asia.
They went to London, the London School of Economics, to Harvard Business School.
They worked in Goldman Sachs and other places on Wall Street.
They're capitalists.
They're making an enormous amount of money.
And they have repeatedly demonstrated their eagerness, their willingness, to turn over both their data retention and their content moderation, meaning censorship decisions, to the United States government.
And TikTok repeatedly boasted about this in its brief.
It said, quote, as part of this engagement, meaning this engagement that it's been in with the Biden administration, TikTok has voluntarily invested more than $2 billion to build a system of technological and governance protection, sometimes referred to as Project Texas, to help safeguard U.S.
user data and the integrity of the U.S.
TikTok platform against foreign government influence.
Petitioners have also made extraordinary additional commitments in a 90-page draft national security agreement developed through negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, including to agreeing to a, quote, shutdown option that would give the government the authority to suspend TikTok in the United States if they violated certain obligations under the agreement.
Quote, Congress must abide by the dictates of the Constitution, even when it claims to be protecting against national security risk.
I think this is so important.
Even if you're somebody who believes that TikTok on balance is a toxic or a negative influence in American public life, even if that's what you believe.
And even if you believe that there's national security grounds for wanting this platform out of the United States, and neither of those is a demonstrable or evidence-based belief, but let's assume that they're true, it still doesn't justify an extraordinary act of censorship of telling 160 million Americans you're not allowed to use this app that you love and want to use.
All kinds of speech is harmful.
Hate speech is quite harmful.
But it's protected by the Constitution, and if you're somebody who's willing to be convinced that as long as a platform on the Internet or a news site on the Internet or speech on the Internet causes harm, therefore the government can and should ban it, you've essentially relinquished the First Amendment to all the government having to do is raise national security claims and they can do whatever they want.
And here's TikTok citing a Supreme Court case that says, quote, against those dangers of censorship as against others, the principle of the right to free speech is always the same, quoting Abrams versus the United States in 1919.
Congress failed to do so here and the act should be enjoined.
Now one of the ways that this Fairmont campaign has been constructed is the claim that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is a Chinese government company run by the CCP, by the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore is just an arm of Beijing to influence American youth.
And as we've said, this is just not the case.
TikTok itself has a huge number of American executives running TikTok in the United States, and ByteDance does too.
Quote, TikTok Inc.' 's ultimate parent company is ByteDance Ltd., a Cayman Islands Incorporated equity holding company Today, approximately 58% of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors, such as BlackRock, General Atlantic, and Saskahana International Group.
21% is owned by the company's founder, a Chinese national who lives in Singapore, and 21% is owned by employees, including approximately 7,000 Americans.
So this idea that this is some government owned company, even if true, you know, we've talked a lot about how right after the Russians invaded Ukraine, the EU implemented into law a prohibition on any platform giving citizens of the EU the right to hear RT and other Russian state media.
And I think most Americans agreed, wow, that's so draconian.
That's such an obvious violation of free speech.
If Americans want to hear what the Russians are saying, who is the government to tell them they're not allowed to read it or hear it?
And it was the demands of the French government that Rumble remove RT and Sputnik and other Russian state media from the platform, and then Rumble's refusal to do so on the ground said, Americans have every right to hear these news outlets if they want.
That caused Rumble to no longer be available in France.
So, this is what's at stake.
Even if this were a Chinese government app controlled by the Chinese government, you have the absolute right to go read and hear what the Chinese are saying.
And again, this claim that this is a Chinese government app has been spread for years and yet a huge portion of the population 35 or 40% are choosing to use the platform often as their primary means of communication.
That's whose First Amendment rights are being abridged here.
The American citizens who are using this app.
Then the brief goes on, quote, the Chinese government has made clear, and this is something that a lot of people who are proponents of this TikTok ban are citing to say, ah, look, this really is proof that it's the CCP that runs this company.
It's a complete misunderstanding of what is happening here.
So they say, quote, the Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine The algorithm engine that is a key to the success of TikTok in the United States.
So I saw a bunch of people today who support this ban saying, aha, this proves that China won't allow the sale and therefore that means that they control the company.
The problem for this argument is it completely misunderstands Chinese law.
And the brief explains, quote, just like the United States does.
China regulates the export of certain technologies operating there.
China's export control rules cover, quote, information processing technologies such as, quote, personal interactive data algorithms.
China's official news agency has reported that under these rules, any sale of recommendation algorithms developed by engineers employed by ByteDance subsidiaries in China, including for TikTok, would require a government license.
And when proving that the United States does this all the time, the brief said, quote, "For example, the U.S. Department of Commerce in the United States has issued restrictions on the export to China of advanced chips that can be used to train artificial intelligence models." So if you had a company in the United States and you were an American and you wanted to sell it to the Chinese or to any other foreign country, the U.S. company would sell it to the Chinese.
Commerce Department would step in and say, no, we don't allow the export of this technology to other countries.
That's what China is doing here.
It doesn't prove China runs the company.
It proves the Chinese government runs China, just like the United States runs the United States.
And it's one of the reasons why a sale of TikTok, in terms of the actual value of the company, namely these algorithmic recommendations, would require the company to turn over very sensitive source code to presumably Americans who would take it over and have a close relationship with the U.S. government.
And Chinese law, just like American law, bans that sort of export.
And that's what makes it very difficult to sell, one of the reasons.
The brief goes on, quote, By banning all online platforms and software applications offered by TikTok and all ByteDance subsidiaries, Congress has made a law curtailing massive amounts of protective speech.
Unlike broadcast television and radio stations, which do require a government license to operate because they use the public airways, the government cannot, consistent with the First Amendment, dictate the ownership of newspapers, websites, online platforms, and other privately created speech forums.
Do you think of the United States government Adopted a law like the EU did saying it shall be illegal to allow Americans to access on the internet any Chinese-run newspaper or to hear the message of any Chinese-run agency?
Don't you think that would be a massive violation of the First Amendment rights of Americans to gather and obtain information that they want to obtain?
Do you think it's a good idea for the American public to be completely subject exclusively to The flow of information that the American government controls, or companies that the American government feels like they control, don't you want to know what the Russian government, what the Iranian government, what the Chinese government, what governments around the world are saying as well, so that you can escape only an American-controlled flow of information?
That's what's at stake is the rights of American citizens.
The brief goes on, quote, as the U.S.
government itself has knowledge, quote, when social media platforms decide which third party content to present and how to present it, they engage in expressive activity protected by the First Amendment because they are creating expressive compilations of speech.
And in order to ban it, the government, quote, must demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, and that the regulation will, in fact, alleviate these harms in a direct and material way.
Congress itself has offered nothing to suggest that the TikTok platform poses the types of risks to data security or the spread of foreign propaganda that could conceivably justify the act.
Now remember, early on after October 7th, a bunch of young people Who had been fed the neocon fairytale about 9-11.
That we were attacked by evil extremists who hate us for our freedom.
They discovered that there was a letter from Osama Bin Laden explaining to the American public why there was so much anti-American sentiment in the Middle East.
And it cited, unbeknownst to all these young Americans who did not understand or know about this history until they found this letter, and it began being discussed on TikTok, All of the actual policy grievances that people in the Middle East have as cited by Osama Bin Laden, including the placement of American troops on what they consider to be sacred Saudi soil, the imposition of a sanctions regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children by cutting them off from medical supplies and food, and
The American supply of weapons and bombs to the Israelis that they used to attack civilian populations in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Those were their grievances.
And so obviously you don't have to agree with the Osama bin Laden letter, although I think you go to the Middle East or you look at pulling down the Middle East and you will see immediately that those are real grievances that people have as to why they hate the United States.
It's the reason we impose so many dictators in that region to prevent democratically elected governments from serving the actual views of the populations there, which overwhelmingly to be anti-Israeli and anti-American.
That's why we keep dictators so firmly entrenched in those regions.
And obviously, if the circulation of this bin Laden letter had been able to continue, and of course Americans have the right to read a document of that historical import, it could change their views of America's role and of course Americans have the right to read a document of that And as a result, the government, both political parties, began demanding that TikTok censor that letter.
And TikTok immediately did.
They eliminated the hashtag to the Bin Laden letter.
They eliminated the link to the Bin Laden letter.
The Guardian, who had hosted the site where the Bin Laden letter was located, removed the document from their site because they didn't want young Americans to read it.
This is the kind of information control that is at stake here.
Do you want the U.S.
government to be able to block young Americans or any Americans from accessing information that the U.S.
government doesn't think they should be able to read?
The attack on our basic speech rights there is manifest and glaring.
And that is what is absolutely at stake here.
And the fact that TikTok did immediately comply with these requests to ban the Bin Laden letter shows that TikTok has increasingly, in a desperate attempt to stay in the United States, a very lucrative market for it, has been willing to censor at the direction of the U.S.
government.
That's why they banned the TikTok letter.
Now this has been going on for years where TikTok has been handing over control of their platform, their data privacy and retention, and their content moderation to the U.S.
government.
From Reuters in December of 2022, quote, exclusive TikTok steps up efforts to clinch A U.S.
security deal.
Quote, TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S.
government, including an agreement for Oracle Corporation to store the data of the app's users in the United States and a U.S., a United States data security division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions.
That is what TikTok offered for the Oracle Corporation to store the data and for a United States data security unit Division to oversee data content and content moderation decisions.
So they were basically telling the US government, we're not here to ideologically propagandize the public.
We'll censor whatever material you tell us to censor.
We just want to stay because we want to profit off a service that Americans love to use.
This is why the TikTok bill couldn't pass was because TikTok was making all these concessions to appease the security state.
The real reason TikTok finally, the TikTok ban or forced divestiture, which is the pretext for the ban, finally got passed, and we've shown you this reporting repeatedly, the admissions of the sponsor of the bill, yesterday's admission by Mitt Romney when he was sitting with Secretary Blinken at the McCain Institute, the Church of Bipartisan Consensus on Foreign Policy.
The reason that they finally got passed was because members of Congress became convinced That there was too much criticism of Israel being permitted to circulate on that platform.
That's why they decided to either force a sale to a company they could control or to ban it entirely because they didn't want criticism of US foreign policy being permitted.
To describe that is to describe a perfectly illustrative attack on free speech.
Now, I realize that there's been a lot of propaganda about why this is important and I just think it's extremely important that we all have the discipline Not to allow the government to seize some extraordinary power every time it convinces us that there's some threat to speech or political speech or some problem that we're disturbed by.
And then we say, yeah, go ahead and ban that.
because each time you do that, the precedent is strengthened that the American government has the right to control the speech we can express ourselves with and the information to which that we can access.
Now, as we have been repeatedly talking about, Oh, okay, we're gonna do a quick ad, and then we will get back to that second segment.
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So one of the things we have been trying to emphasize is that so many of these recent appreciations
Abridgements of free speech and civil liberties is accompanied by a fear-mongering campaign trying to institute a moral panic in the United States, which is based on the idea that there is now a minority group in the United States that is in grave danger, that has no safety any longer in the United States, that is vulnerable to all kinds of attacks, namely American Jews.
Now, this narrative Of minority groups being endangered by systemic bigotry in the United States, by unsafe rhetoric that's inciting violence against them, by the desire of people to attack black people or trans people, is one that has provoked the scorn of almost everybody on the right when offered by literally any other group.
And now suddenly that same narrative that has received so much contempt from so many people on the American right, virtually everybody, is being offered, but this time in defense of a minority group that a lot of people on the American right feel an empathy toward or a connection to.
And now suddenly all of this victimhood narrative, this safetyism narrative, this need for special protections for a minority group, the same script.
That the right has been scorning for a decade now suddenly is being accepted in almost every establishment faction in Washington.
Here was Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who, along with Joe Biden, went to the Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony.
and here is what he said about the alleged rise of this epidemic of anti-Semitism in the United States.
...were suddenly expelled. Where these like those at Stroudsburg were at the heart of renaissance and intellectual life. But it was at those same elite centers of learning where Jewish faculty and students were It's so offensive when you think about it.
Do you understand what Mike Johnson is saying here?
It's so offensive when you think about it, both in terms of its intellectual dishonesty, but also its moral offense.
He's speaking at a Holocaust memorial ceremony, and he's talking about the Nazi attack on Jewish students and Jewish professors, and he's trying to equate that to what's taking place in the United States today.
There are no Jewish students being expelled.
There are no Jewish members of the faculty being expelled.
There are no Jewish students being violently attacked.
In fact, he cites one example, which you're about to hear, That is a complete hoax, and the fact that the only example he can cite of supposedly having Jewish students attack violently on American campuses is a hoax, that that's the only example he has, just proves the entire narrative that both he and, as you'll see, Joe Biden are both trying to push.
But to equate what's happening on American campuses, where American students are exercising their First Amendment right to protest against their own government and the Israeli government's war policies, And trying to tell American Jews that they face a second holocaust in the United States, and therefore the government has to step in with all these special protections and abridgements of free speech, is obnoxious and dangerous and deceitful.
We're suddenly expelled where anti-Jewish courses were introduced and where professors performed horrific pseudoscience experiments on Jewish people brought from nearby concentration camps.
We remember what happened then, and now today.
We are witnessing American universities quickly, quickly becoming hostile places for Jewish students and faculty.
The very campuses where once the envy of the International Academy have succumbed to an anti-Semitic virus.
Students who were known for producing academic papers are now known for stabbing their Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags.
Okay, that is an absolute lie out of Mike Johnson's mouth.
First of all, he used the plural.
Jewish students are being stabbed in the eye with the Palestinian flag.
There's one instance where that claim was made.
And once people saw the video, they realized it was a total hoax perpetrated by Barry Weiss's Free Press and by the claims of the student.
We showed you the Matt Orfalea video where he compiled all the different media accounts where they were just mindlessly reciting this claim.
She was appearing on media.
There was nothing wrong with her eye, nothing wrong with her face.
She wasn't even remotely injured.
In fact, she herself said the only symptom she had was a dull headache.
And the video showed that she was standing there to counter protest the protesters and they were marching by and they were waving Palestine flags or free Palestine flags and one of them accidentally brushed her and she began screeching, he stabbed me in the eye!
And this language that there are Jewish students being stabbed in the eye is designed to evoke a hoax, a hate crime hoax.
That there are pro-Palestinian protesters walking around taking flags and stabbing Jewish students in the eye.
Why would you make up a hoax at a Holocaust memorial ceremony?
And that transition of saying, oh, remember in the late 1930s and the 1940s what was done to American Jews in Nazi Germany?
And he said, and then today we're seeing similar things.
Do you see the level of this moral panic, this attempt to fabricate an anti-Semitism epidemic in the United States where none exists?
And the fact that he has to grab onto a hoax, one claim that turned out to be debunked in a lie and turn it into some kind of common occurrence on American campuses where Jewish students are being routinely violently attacked is a lie.
It is false.
Joe Biden is reading from the same script as you're about to see.
And with our survivors before us, If you close your eyes in the quietness of your own heart, you can almost hear the glass of Jewish storefronts shattered by stormtroopers.
This is disgusting.
This is just absolutely revolting.
Impulsive.
You in the United States, if you're a Jew, can basically hear the sound of Nazi stormtroopers smashing the windows of Jewish stores.
Where is he getting that from?
Is there a second Holocaust coming in the United States?
Is the United States systematically bigoted against American Jews?
Are there Nazi gangs roving the streets, attacking Jewish businesses, expelling Jews from faculty?
None of this is happening.
This is a sick fabrication that he is spreading and affirming in part for political reasons, obviously, but also to justify all of the repressive measures that he, leading the Congress, has adopted, including that attack on free speech that I began this show by talking about.
You could see fathers being executed at point blank in the ghettos.
You can feel a brother's hand slipping out of his sister's, as men in uniforms separate them into lines and they can only mouth to one another, everything will be okay, hoping that it would be.
You can hear screams coming from the gas chambers.
And it's in these troubling times we must look to this audience, to the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants, to help us remember and to bear witness Several weeks ago, I am very proud to report to you that the United States Congress overwhelmingly passed security assistance to Israel to help protect its borders.
That's right.
And we kept our promise that we made decades ago.
Never again. - All right, so that's the kind of script being disseminated.
Like I said, this is the same script that has come from every other minority group over the last decade at least.
The United States is systematically bigoted toward this minority group.
We can't allow speech on American campuses because it incites hatred against this group.
It makes them dangerous and vulnerable and unsafe to attack.
And the American right has hated that script, has mocked it and scorned it.
The idea that black people are unsafe in the United States, or trans people are unsafe in the United States, or immigrants or Muslims are unsafe in the United States.
It's self-victimizing, petulant, whining, designed to get special favors from themselves.
What is this?
This is the same thing, but for a much more politically more powerful group, and for one that a lot of American politicians, for religious, cultural, and political reasons, have a strong affinity towards.
And therefore they're not only accepting but peddling the very script that for every other group they claim was un-American and false.
Here is Joe Biden, as always, sounding exactly like Mike Johnson, when he spoke at the same event.
Germany, 1933.
Hitler and his Nazi party rise to power by rekindling one of the world's oldest forms of prejudice and hate, anti-Semitism.
His rule didn't begin with mass murder.
It started slowly across economic, political, social, and cultural life.
Propaganda demonizing Jews.
Boycotts of Jewish businesses.
Synagogues defaced with swastikas.
Harassment of Jews in the street and in the schools.
Anti-Semitic demonstrations.
Pogroms.
Organized riots.
With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror.
Now, here we are.
Not 75 years later, but just seven and a half months later.
Do you see the same thing?
He talked about the Holocaust, the extermination of Jews, the systemic exclusion of Jews from life in Germany, and then made that same transition that Mike Johnson did to suggest that the American Jews are facing the same dangers today.
We had Batye Omer Sargon on our show last night, who is a very vocal and longstanding supporter of Israel and a Jewish American activist.
And she heaps scorn on this attempt to convince American Jews that they should be neurotic and be afraid to leave their homes, that the United States has become systematically hostile to them, that they need censorship protection and a bunch of other protections.
The Jewish Journal Tablet, as we said last week, editorialized against it as well, saying, don't exploit the needs of our minority group to usher in a bunch of authoritarian measures supposedly designed to protect us.
We don't need this protection.
But so many people are wrapped up in this moral panic coming from our leaders that basically American Jews are facing a second Holocaust, that anti-war students are running around stabbing Jewish students in the eye with a Palestinian flag, basically poking their eyes out, rendering them blind, all based on a single incident that was a complete hoax.
Do you see how Mike Johnson and Joe Biden are reading from exactly the same script?
Because this is all coming from both political parties.
I'm forgetting.
We're already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror.
It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis.
It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages.
I have not forgotten, nor have you.
And we will not forget.
We've seen a ferocious surge of anti-Semitism in America and around the world.
Suspicious propaganda on social media.
Jews forced to keep their hides or keepers under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts.
On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.
Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic posters, slogans, We're calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world's only Jewish state.
But there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for anti-Semitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.
Now at least Joe Biden is being consistent in the sense that Democrats have been saying this for more than a decade, that we need more censorship and speech regulation on campus to prevent hate speech and various forms of bigotry.
It's Republicans who have been saying that this is an authoritarian hoax.
Until they finally found a group with which they have some connection for which they have some empathy and suddenly they jumped on this same narrative that the Democrats have been using for a decade to perpetuate censorship and to create moral panics over bigotry and minorities being unsafe.
And this is not just rhetoric.
We have seen a large number.
of attacks on free speech, the banning of pro-Palestinian groups on American campuses, the attempt to enact into federal law prohibitions on expressing a whole range of views that are critical of Israel or American Jews that you can say about any other country or any other group.
And as always, the foundation for it is this fear-mongering campaign that benefits politicians who want to impose those kind of measures And yet, depends upon feeding American citizens, absolute lies about the state of Jewish Americans in the United States.
The British journalist and writer Johann Hari has become one of the West's most prolific authors, having written three provocative books over the last decade about some of the most consequential social and cultural questions, including His 2015 book that revolutionized how addiction, substance abuse is understood.
His 2018 book Lost Connections that documented the root spiritual causes of growing mental health pathologies in the West.
And his 2022 examination of how modern society is destroying our ability To concentrate, Johan has a new book out entitled, quote, "Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs," which, among other things, interviews a wide range of scientists and physicians to understand both the safety and efficacy of the Ozempic craze and similar drugs, but also the risks and dangers interviews a wide range of scientists and physicians to understand both the Johan, it is great to see you.
Thank you so much for coming on our show and taking the time to talk to me.
I'm thrilled to see you.
Oh, it's so great to talk to you, Glenn.
So I know a secret that your listeners don't know, which is that Glenn can do an uncannily good British accent, and one day I'm going to persuade you to interview me entirely in British.
You know, but the problem is I can only do that in private.
I choke in public.
I once went to, when I was on TV, to do a mocking imitation of Andrew Sullivan, and what came out of my mouth was nothing resembling the British accent.
Even though I was so good at it in private, mocking Andrew, when I tried to do it in public, it just all collapsed.
All right, let's talk about your book, because I have so many things I want to ask you about.
One of the things you do in your books, and you do here as well, is you often talk about how your personal experience in life has made you not only interested in that certain topic, but motivated to go around the world interviewing experts to understand it.
And you've done that in almost all of your books, I think all your books, and you do it here as well.
You talk about your own struggles with weight loss throughout the years, how you gained weight during the COVID pandemic, and then ultimately your decision to take Ozempic Which, to me, seemed like a kind of spur-of-the-moment decision.
So, I want to ask you, describe your personal experience with those Empik and talk about how those personal experiences affected your perception of what it is that you set out to study.
Yeah, I remember from the moment I learned about the existence of these drugs, I felt so conflicted.
I don't remember a subject I felt so intensely divided on so quickly.
I remember exactly how it began.
It was the winter of 2022.
And it was the end of the pandemic.
And I got invited to a party that was thrown by an Oscar winning actor.
I'm not just saying that to name drop, there's a reason why I mentioned it.
And in the Uber on the way there, I was feeling really self conscious.
Like you say, I'd Actually quite fat at the start of the pandemic.
You're too nice to say that.
But I gained quite a lot of weight on top of that.
I was feeling a bit schlubby.
And then I suddenly thought, this is going to be really interesting because loads of people I know gained weight during the pandemic.
I guess loads of them will have, so it's going to be fascinating to see these Hollywood actors with a bit of chub on them, right?
And I arrived and it was the weirdest thing.
Not only had they not gained weight, everyone was gaunt, right?
Everyone looked like their own Snapchat filter.
They were like sharper and tighter and I was kind of thrown and I was wandering around.
I bumped into a friend of mine on the edge of the dance floor and I said, Wow, looks like everyone really did take up Pilates during lockdown, and she laughed.
And I didn't know why she was laughing, and that's when she showed me a photo of an Ozempic pen.
And I learned that we now have a new kind of weight loss drug, which works in a completely new way, which reduces your body weight on average by 15%.
And for the next class of these drugs, it reduces your body weight by 24%.
And immediately I thought, Okay, I can see the benefits of this, right?
I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be because he died at the age of 44 of a heart attack.
Loads of the men in my family, including my dad, have terrible heart problems.
I knew that obesity makes an extraordinary array of illnesses much more likely.
So I thought, wow, if you can reverse or reduce obesity, I'm guessing there would be some health benefits there.
But I also thought, well, hang on a minute.
I've seen this story before.
Every 20 years or so, some miracle new weight loss drug is announced.
We're told it's going to save us all.
Loads of people take it.
And we always discover it causes some kind of catastrophic side effect that means it gets pulled from the market, leaving a trail of devastated people in its wake.
And I was worried about all sorts of things in relation to these drugs.
So like you say, I took it for a year.
I went on this big journey all over the world from Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo to interview the leading experts.
And it's a bit weird, Glenn.
It's slightly different to the previous books.
We've talked about, I know so much more than I knew before about the extraordinary benefits of these drugs, about the 12 big risks, about how it's going to transform the culture in really complicated ways.
47% of Americans now want to take these drugs.
But At the end of all that, I'm still quite divided.
Like, there's a lot of evidence on both sides.
As you know, I'm not by temperament an even-handed, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand kind of person.
But this really is a complicated picture, and I think anyone who's either, yay, the drugs are going to save us, or boo, the drugs are the devil, I think is missing the much more complicated picture where we all have to weigh the risks and benefits for ourselves.
Yeah, you know, that was one of the things that was surprising when I read your book is that I think the easiest way to market a book like this would be to either champion the drug and say, oh, everybody should take it, it's a miracle drug, stop the concerns about it, or to do the alternative and say, We need to...this is way too early.
This is a dangerous drug.
It's bad psychologically.
It's bad spiritually.
And yet, as the title of your book suggests, and as you say often, that you don't either necessarily champion or reject it because you feel like there's complexities throughout the debate.
One of the things though that you referenced, like we always have had obesity with us.
I mean, you mentioned your grandfather, other people in your family.
And yet at the same time, there's clearly an increase in Western culture in obesity.
Every, all data shows that.
I remember when I moved to Brazil in 2005, one of the first perceptions I had was, oh wow, there's almost no obese people here.
Like everybody's in shape.
I'd come from the United States.
And I remember when I took my Brazilian husband, David, to the United States for the first time, the first thing he said after we got out of the airport, he said, oh my God, Americans are so fat.
And now though, Brazilians having imported a lot of fast food chains and adopted a lot of American eating habits have become, have had obesity as a problem.
And we see this all throughout the West as well.
And with that comes this kind of discourse, this social pressure about how to judge fat people, how to understand people who are obese or overweight.
And obviously part of that pressure, that criticism that of fat people is part of why people are taking pills.
So how do you explain the increase in this obesity and also what has changed in terms of the way society talks about people who are overweight?
So for a long time, I thought I was researching two different questions.
The really important question you've just asked, why did obesity blow up?
And how do the drugs work?
How do these new drugs work?
But actually, crucially, the answer lies in the same word.
And that word is satiety.
It's the feeling of having had enough and not wanting any more.
And you're totally right, Glenn.
If you look at the history of obesity, it's almost unbelievable.
So I would urge everyone, just Google, stop for a moment and Google photographs of beaches in the United States, public beaches in the year I was born, 1979.
You look at them, there's pictures all over the web.
They look really weird to us, because pretty much everyone is what we would call skinny or jacked, right?
Almost everyone.
You think this is really weird.
Was it like a skinny person convention on the beach that day?
And then you look at the figures.
We basically had 300,000 years of obesity existing, but being exceptionally rare.
And then literally in my lifetime, it has Blown up.
Between the year I was born and the year I turned 21, obesity more than doubled in the US, and in the next 20 years, severe obesity doubled again, right?
You think, why?
That's really strange.
What happened?
And we know this change happens in every country that makes one big transformation.
It's not where people lose willpower or suddenly become greedy or any of those things.
It's very simple.
It's where, and it's exactly what's happening in Brazil now, as we've talked about in Rio, it's where When it's when people move from eating a diet that mostly consists of fresh whole foods they prepared on the day to eating a diet that mostly consists of processed and ultra processed foods which are constructed in factories out of chemicals.
And it turns out this new kind of food affects us in a very different way.
It profoundly undermines our satiety, our ability to ever feel full.
And there's an experiment that was done here in New York that really nailed this for me, right?
I've nicknamed it Cheesecake Park.
That's not the official title.
It's very simple.
It's done by a brilliant scientist called Professor Paul Kenny up the road.
He's the head of neuroscience in Mount Sinai.
And it's a very simple experiment.
He got a load of rats and raised them in a cage and all they had to eat was the kind of natural healthy food that rats evolved to eat over thousands of years.
And when they've got that food, the rats will eat when they're hungry and then they just stop when they're full.
They never become overweight or obese.
Their kind of natural nutritional wisdom kicks in and they're like, I've had enough now.
Then Professor Kenny introduced these rats to the American diet.
He bought a load of Snickers bars, he fried up some bacon, and he bought a load of cheesecake.
And he put it in alongside the option of the healthy food.
And the rats went crazy for the American diet.
They would literally dive into the cheesecake and eat their way out and emerge just completely covered in the cheesecake.
And the way Professor Kenny put it to me, was within a couple of days they were different animals.
This restraint they had understood when they had their natural food vanished, and they all became obese.
In fact, severely obese and quite sick.
Then Professor Kenny tweaked the experiment again.
He took, in a way that feels quite cruel to me as a former KFC addict, he took away all this American diet and left them with the healthy food again.
And he was sure he knew what would happen, that they would eat more of the healthy food than they had in the past, and this would prove that junk food expands your diet.
That is not what happened.
What happened was much weirder.
Once they'd had the American food and it was taken away, they refused to eat the healthy food at all.
It was like they no longer recognised it as food.
It was only when they were starving that they went back to it.
And this is happening to us, right?
We all live in Cheesecake Park now.
Processed food, for seven reasons that I go through in Magic Pill, profoundly undermines our ability to know when to stop eating.
And what these drugs do, In a admittedly risky way, is they give you back your sense of satiety, they give you back your sense of fullness.
I can explain how they do that.
But it's, it's a bizarre feeling.
It relates to the very first question you asked me, Glenn, how does it feel when you take the drugs?
I'll never forget.
Two days after I started taking Ozempic, I woke up and I was lying in bed.
And I thought, oh, I feel something weird.
What is it?
And I couldn't locate what the feeling was.
And it took me about five minutes to realize I had woken up and I wasn't hungry, right?
That had never happened to me before.
And I went to this diner just up the street from where I live, and I went in and I ordered what I used to order every morning, which was a huge chicken roll with loads of mayo in it.
And I had like three or four mouthfuls and I felt full.
I couldn't eat the rest of it.
This is what happens when you take these drugs.
It's like shutters come down on your appetite.
You feel really full really fast.
I can explain more about how they do that but that's why of course I've lost like 42 pounds and had this big physical transformation while also experiencing some of the risks associated with these drugs.
So I want to get to the risks in a second and some of the unknowns.
But before we get there, I want to ask you, because obviously the change in our diet is something that is a major factor, but I think also the change in modern life, how sedentary we are, how much we rely on cars, how much we just sit in front of screens.
There's no physical or manual labor that we're doing because technology frees us from all of that.
We sit in offices and the like.
Obviously that sedentary lifestyle is a major part of it as well.
I remember one time I was visiting my brother who lives in a suburb in Florida, and there was some kind of shopping mall about a 25-minute walk away but a five-minute drive by car.
And I said, oh, I want to walk.
It was like a nice day out in Florida.
And twice, maybe three times as I was walking, cars stopped and said, oh, are you okay?
Is everything okay?
Do you need a ride?
Because nobody walks in the suburbs, and when you see someone walking, you think they must be in distress.
And I guess that is one of the concerns that a lot of people have about these drug laws.
These weight loss drugs is that it kind of fixes the symptom of being overweight, but it doesn't give any motivation to actually change your lifestyle to make it healthier.
It doesn't...you might eat less, but you have no pressure to say, do the kinds of things that you would do if you didn't have these weight loss drugs like eat healthier or exercise more.
It's just kind of a...
chemical doing it for you, but it's not really making your lifestyle healthier because now you rely on this medicinal crutch.
What do you think about that critique of Ozempic and these other drugs?
I think it's an important critique.
And we know that exercise boosts health, both physical and mental health, massively, just even independent of weight loss, right?
So even if you have two skinny people and one of them exercises a lot, they'll be physically and mentally healthier on average.
So you're right, there's a lot of concerns about these drugs.
I mean, some other people say it boosts exercise because a lot of people, when they're very overweight, feel very self-conscious about exercising, it's embarrassing, or they actually find it physically quite painful.
And when they lose this weight, they actually find it easier to exercise.
So I think there's arguments on both sides on that.
But I think you're essentially right.
You can also eat smaller portions of the same old shit, right?
Now, it's better to eat smaller portions of KFC than larger portions.
But yeah, it's not getting you to the nutritional place you want to get to.
It doesn't solve all the problems.
But I think with these drugs, you really have to do actually a very difficult calculation.
Because you have to look at the benefits of the drugs against the risks of the drugs in the middle of a moving picture where a lot is just becoming clear even now.
And I think there's an analogy or a parallel area of science that really helped me to think about this.
So up to now, it's been extremely hard to lose lots of weight and keep it off.
Some people can do it just by calorie restriction, but actually that's surprisingly rare.
90% of diets fail, about 10% succeed.
Up to now, the most effective strategy for losing lots of weight and keeping it off and having a very good chance of that has been bariatric surgery, things like stomach stapling.
So looking at the evidence from that, because these weight loss drugs have only been used for a couple of years, looking at the evidence from bariatric surgery I think can help us to see, first of all, some of the incredible benefits of these drugs, right?
Absolutely.
So if you have bariatric surgery, what do we know?
We know it's a horrible form of surgery.
It's really gruelling.
One in a thousand people dies in the surgery.
It's no joke.
But the reason people put themselves through that is because of the staggering benefits that follow in terms of health.
If you have bariatric surgery, In the seven years that follow, you are 56% less likely to die of a heart attack.
You're 60% less likely to die of cancer.
You're 92% less likely to die of diabetes-related causes.
In fact, it's so good for you, you're 40% less likely to die at all in that seven-year period, right?
And we know these drugs, on many factors, are moving people in the same direction.
If you take these drugs and you start with a BMI higher than 27, you're 20% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke in the next few years.
And that's a cause very close to my own heart, right?
But I also think when we look at bariatric surgery, we begin to see some of the risks.
So most people at bariatric surgery are glad they did it.
But your suicide risk quadruples after you have bariatric surgery, which seems really odd.
Why would that be?
I think some of it is probably the onerous physical effects of the surgery, but I think a lot more of it is something I actually experienced.
I didn't feel suicidal, but I had a real epiphany about this.
I was in Vegas, and I was, as you know, I've been researching for ages a book about a series of crimes that's happening in Vegas, a nonfiction book, and I was researching the murder of someone that I knew and loved, so it was very, Painful, a bit like the work you did on Marielle.
And I felt terrible.
And I went to a branch of KFC on West Sahara that I've been to a thousand times.
And I went in and I ordered what I would have ordered a month before.
This was like seven months into taking the drugs.
I ordered what I would have ordered a month before.
I ordered a bucket of fried chicken, right?
This is the way I learned to soothe myself from being very young.
And I had one chicken drumstick and I just couldn't eat any more.
I was thinking, I thought, oh, You're just going to have to feel bad, right?
It's like Kendall Sanders was looking at me from the wall like, hey, what happened to my best customer?
And I think one of the things that happens with these drugs and with bariatric surgery is they radically interrupt your eating patterns.
You can't eat the way you did before.
Like if I had tried to eat that whole bucket, I would have vomited, right?
I suppose it is helpful that it's a bucket at least.
So, what it does, what it can do for many people, is it can bring to the surface many of the deep underlying psychological reasons why they ate.
I go through five psychological drivers of eating in the book.
Now that can be a good thing.
It can bring it to the surface so you can deal with it in a better way than drowning it in saturated fats and killed chickens, but that is a painful process.
It seems to be why some people seem to develop depression on the drugs, or even there are some doctors, although this is contested, who are concerned that it's causing suicidal thoughts.
That's one of the 12 risks that I talk about in the book.
Yeah, I mean, so let me ask you about the risk, delve into this a little bit because I think there has been a great loss in the drug approval process in the West and I think...I'll just give you a couple of examples.
Obviously, one of the concerns is that pharmaceutical companies are incredibly profitable, it's an incredibly profitable industry.
I assume Ozempic and these weight loss drugs are making a ton of money and will make a ton of money more.
And oftentimes they commandeer the regulatory process because they're so powerful and all of these capitals, like a lot of other industries are, the oil industry, big tech, etc., that they basically can force drugs through the regulatory process without evidence that they're safe.
I think a lot of people feel like the dangers of the COVID vaccine were Understated.
I think there's a lot of evidence that that was true.
You can debate how true that is, how much it was understated, but it was totally taboo to talk about the dangers of the COVID vaccine during the epidemic.
You were accused of being an anti-vaxxer, and yet now just the New York Times last week published a study or talked about a study showing that there's a lot more injury from these vaccines than previously had been admitted.
I think that eroded a lot of public trust, but I'll give you another example that I think is so interesting.
And it's a polarizing example, so I don't mean to ask you to delve into this, but just to illustrate the point I'm trying to make about these other drugs that you wrote about.
The places where gender-affirming treatments, like the use of puberty blockers, for example, were pioneered were the most progressive, culturally permissive societies, like in Holland, in Denmark, in Norway, Northern Europe, basically, in Scandinavia, even in the UK.
And now almost all of those countries have completely reversed themselves and rethought whether these puberty blocking drugs should be available to youth because they have concluded that there's really no evidence of their safety over the long term and there's more evidence of the dangers or risks or harms in terms of bone density and other problems that they can And so you can't accuse these countries of being transphobic.
They're the ones who pioneered, after all, the idea of gender-affirming surgeries and care.
But the problem was that they were rushed to market, perhaps for social reasons or political reasons.
And it turned out there wasn't much study that had been done on the long-term effects.
And a lot of people probably took these medications, deceived about their safety.
When it comes to Ozempic and these other new weight loss drugs, having gone around the world and talked to all these experts, is there a consensus about, A, the short-term safety of these pills, and then the long-term safety as well?
Yeah, I actually don't think we even need to look at those two examples you just gave.
I mean, I think they're Fertile to think about, but I actually think, just think about the most popular diet drug in history until Ozempic.
So in the mid-90s, there was a diet drug called Fen-Phen.
Massively popular.
It was a combination of an appetite suppressant and an amphetamine.
Talked about in exactly the same way that Ozempic is talked about now.
The front page of Time Magazine was the new miracle weight loss drug, right?
18 million Fen-Phen prescriptions were written in 1995.
It was then discovered that, in fact, just a group of doctors in Fargo in North Dakota noticed, wow, loads of our patients who take this drug can't breathe very well.
What's going on?
So they raised a safety signal.
It was discovered this drug caused a horrific condition called primary pulmonary hypertension, which is where the blood vessels in your lungs radically contract and you can't breathe.
It kills you if you don't live on oxygen.
Awful.
Obviously, it got withdrawn from the market, led to the biggest compensation payout in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.
And we discovered that drug companies had known all along, indeed, even the FDA had been alerted to this.
There was an incredibly, one of the civil cases, there was an email, it wouldn't have been an email then, it was a letter or an internal document, From someone who worked at the company that made it saying, God, am I going to have to spend my retirement writing checks for a bunch of stupid fat women who can't breathe?
Ha ha ha.
I mean, it's shocking.
So you're absolutely right.
We want to be very vigilant about this.
When we think about safety in relation to these drugs, when you speak to the experts, some of whom are paid by the drug companies, and you're right, they're making a huge amount of money.
Novo Nordisk can make, Ozempic is now the most profitable company in the whole of Europe.
The entire Danish economy has had a big GDP boost just from Novo Nordisk.
When you talk to experts who work for them, but also, crucially, independent experts who don't, generally what they say is, actually, in the short to medium term, we've got quite a lot of evidence on these drugs.
Diabetics have been taking these drugs for 18 years now.
For people who don't know, in addition to having this effect on your appetite, these drugs stimulate the creation of insulin, so diabetics take them.
So, I'm putting it a bit more crudely than the experts would, but basically they say, look, if the drugs made you grow horns, the diabetics would have horns by now, right?
And that's a good and important point, and that should give us some reassurance in the medium term.
But some other experts say, Well, hang on a minute.
If we're going to base our sense of confidence in these drugs on the diabetics, let's really dig into the diabetics.
So, for example, there's a professor called Jean-Luc Fayy at the University Hospital in Montpellier in France, who I interviewed, who was commissioned by the French Medicines Agency to look into the safety of these drugs.
So he looked at first at what's called the preclinical literature that experiments on animals and was quite taken aback that when you give semaglutide, the active component in these drugs, to rats they are way more likely to get thyroid cancer.
So, he started to do some more digging, and what he compared was, he looked at a huge French medical database, analysed it with his colleagues, and he looked at people who'd been taking these drugs, diabetics, between, I think it was 2006 and 2012, and compared them to an almost identical group of diabetics who were not given these drugs.
And if he's right, and this is highly contested, what he found was these drugs increased your thyroid cancer risk by between 50 to 75%.
Now, it's important to understand what that doesn't mean.
It doesn't mean if you take the drug, your risk of getting thyroid cancer is 50-75%.
If that was the case, we'd be having bonfires of Ozempic all over the world.
What it means, if he's right, is that whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start, it will go up by 50-75%.
Now, thyroid cancer is relatively rare.
1.2% of people get it in their lifetime.
84% survive.
Nonetheless, it's a big increase, right?
Now, against that, and it gives you a sense again, at every stage, you've got to be weighing complexity.
Against that, a lot of experts said to me, even if that's right, if that's one of the 12 risks, You've got to weigh that against the cancer risk just from being obese.
I mean, obesity is one of the biggest causes of cancer in the world.
As Cancer Research UK, the biggest British group, explain, if you carry excess weight in your body, it doesn't just sit there.
It's not inert.
It's active.
It doesn't even have to be that much excess weight.
And what it does, that excess weight sends signals throughout your body.
And one of the signals it sends is for cells to divide more rapidly, which can cause cancer.
It's why it's such a big driver of cancer.
So at every stage, if you just look at the risk of the drugs, you think, well, you'd have to be a maniac to take these drugs.
But for someone like me, realistically, the choice was, you know, I had tried dieting many times, right?
I tried exercise many times.
I always ended up fatter than I was at the start.
Realistically, I was facing a choice between The risks of obesity and the risks of these drugs.
I am not sure I've made the right choice, particularly when you think about the long term risk, which no one knows anything about because no one has been taking these.
And there's a I can talk more about that if you like.
But realistically, that was the choice.
And I mean, this is such a deep and complex and rich and interesting topic.
down the risk of the list of obesity that I describe in the book, the 12 big risks, the bigger worries about the culture, and really game it out for themselves.
I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all piece of advice for that.
Yeah, I mean, this is such a deep and complex and rich and interesting topic.
It has a lot to do as well with the kind of attempt to normalize obesity or to prevent people from depicting it.
How do we How do we depict it?
Do we tell people, oh, obesity is totally fine, there's no reason to consider it a negative, like fat shaming, as it's called?
Or do we want to tell people, no, actually, obesity is a major health risk that you should prioritize fixing?
So there's a lot of interesting sociological and cultural debates as well.
We're unfortunately out of time, but one of the things that I think is true about all your books, your first three books and this one, is that they're all, I think, designed to, but certainly, ultimately, they do.
They provoke a lot of debate, a lot of thought.
You don't have to agree with all of your perspectives.
And as you say, there's a lot of conflict among scientists and the like, so there's no way to definitively resolve it.
All of your books, and including this one, I think, really inform the public debate.
I hope people who are interested in this topic will pick it up and get it.
I'm sure they will end up thinking about things in a different way, which ultimately is the point of a book.
Congratulations on writing it, and again, the name of the book is Magic Pill, the Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs.
Johan, it's always fantastic to see you.
I'm super appreciative any time you come on.
Congratulations on the book, and we'll talk to you again shortly.
I'm really moved by what you just said, Glenn.
Thanks so much.
I now forgive you.
Glenn once made me watch a three-hour documentary about tennis in French, when he was in London, about John McEnroe.
And I now, because you've been so lovely, I finally forgive you.
Thank you.
I finally got forgiveness for that, for subjecting you to that.
Thank you, Johan.
I'm really, really pleased to hear that.
All right.
Bye.
Good night.
Cheers.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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