Today we're going to talk about the fascinating world of prescription drugs and their intersection with culture and society.

And for that, we're going to be joined by science journalist Thomas Gets.

Medications are some of the most consequential advancements of modern life, but their stories

are often quite nuanced and complicated. What if some of our most common diseases are design

flaws of modern life? In other words, we always need to be asking when we're treating biological illnesses

and when we're medicating our way around the world that we've built. Also, does it matter if we are

fixing a root cause versus just circumventing it? If a pill can quiet hunger or pain or anxiety, is that cheating? Do cures ever

create the next crisis? So today we're going to talk about the larger stories of social

ills and public health.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sailed deeply into our three-pound universe to better understand the world around us.

Okay. around us. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.

Generally, when we think about medicine, we picture a simple story, which is a disease appears,

science identifies the cause, and a drug fixes the problem.

But biology is sufficiently complicated, that it rarely cooperates with stories that are that clean.

Your body is trying to regulate hunger and mood and pain and sleep and anxiety.

It balances internal signals against the outside world.

But the fact is, that world has changed faster than our biology

ever could. And we now live in environments saturated with calories and stimulation and stress

and chemical shortcuts. And much of the world that we've built is designed explicitly to capture our attention

and to override satiety and to make us feel better fast. So it's no surprise that many of the

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