If you track the news at all, you’ve probably heard of a revolutionary new weight-loss drug called Ozempic.

The very idea of a novel miracle weight-loss drug might provoke eye rolls because this is the kind of thing we’ve seen before. Often, it’s a drug like ephedra, which was all the rage in the ’90s and 2000s. Ephedra did help people lose weight, but it was eventually pulled from the shelves because of its links to heart attacks, strokes, and seizures.

Ozempic, however, appears to be different, not just pharmacologically but also in terms of its broader potential impact. I’m not a physician, obviously, and I’m not an expert on weight-loss drugs, but I wanted to learn more about what’s happening here and what makes Ozempic unique.

So I invited journalist Johann Hari on The Gray Area to talk about his new book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. It’s an eye-opening read, to say the least, in part because Hari both experimented with Ozempic himself and spent an enormous amount of time talking to the researchers developing and studying these drugs.

Hari and I discuss what we know (and don’t know) about Ozempic and all the ways this drug could change our world. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

We’ve seen “miracle” weight-loss drugs before. What makes Ozempic different?

Johann Hari

Lots of things. So the first is that it works on a completely new mechanism. If you eat something now, your gut will produce a hormone called GLP-1, and we now know that’s part of your body’s natural signals telling you that you’ve had enough. But natural GLP-1 only stays in your system for a few minutes. What these drugs do is inject into you an artificial copy of GLP-1, but instead of lasting for a few minutes, it stays in your system for a whole week.

It has this bizarre effect, I’ll never forget the second day I took it to research it for the book. I was lying in bed. I woke up and I had this really strange sensation, and I couldn’t locate in my body what it was that I was feeling. And then I realized I wasn’t hungry.

I had woken up and I wasn’t hungry. I don’t remember that ever happening before. And I went to this diner near where I live and I ordered what I used to order every day, which was a huge brown roll with loads of chicken and mayo in it. I had like three or four mouthfuls and I couldn’t eat anymore. I felt full.

One of the things that’s different is we know that these drugs produce a feeling of satiety that lasts. The feeling of being full and having had enough. And we know that they produce sustained weight loss over a significant period of time.

Sean Illing

How confident are we in some of these early results, which are admittedly pretty startling?

Johann Hari

Well, there’s an extremely high level of confidence that it produces significant amounts of weight loss. There’s been........

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