Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, online, in person, and on the go.

Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

All right, here we are. We're all. We're a new science. the Heelerman Lab. And the He is a professor at Duke, an author of the Age of Grievens for a Bruny, and he's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His book is called America's Cultural Revolution, Christopher Rufo. Okay, here are the questions from the people out there. What do you think, Andrew, of the rise of OZempic? How has it changed the way we think about health? Oh, that's a great question. What is your take on OZempic? OZempic has made one thing very clear that people debated for a long time, which is the reason that so many Americans are obese is because they eat more than they burn. Remember, that was a debate not long ago. It's still a debate. I still read it. I still read like it's a mystery. Well, it absolutely, I mean, this is the laws of thermodynamics. If you take in more calories than you burn, you're going to put on weight over time. Some people burn more at rest, and so they don't need to move around as much, but people have been eating too much, in particular, these highly processed foods, et cetera. We can talk about those. The interesting thing about OZempic that bothers a lot of people is that it is very expensive, and if you go off it, you gain the weight back, unless you do something like resistance training, aka weight training,

to keep the muscle that you have, because muscle is a highly metabolically active tissue.

So if people want to go on it or take less or go off it,

they're going to need to do something to offset the reduction in metabolism.

The other thing that's happening now...

Is it... the drug itself?

Yeah.

Do you think it's unhealthy?

Well, it raises these JLP levels,

this natural peptide that limits appetite,

by thousandfold,

excuse me, increases by thousandfold over what it normally is.

It's extremely effective.

And I would say for getting a lot of weight off of people who really need that, I think it's a great first pass, especially if they're unwilling to exercise. I think any time a pharmaceutical is on the table is, okay, should somebody take an SSRI? Should they not? The real question is, what are they willing to do instead? If they're willing to exercise, resistance train, and eat well, we then probably don't need OZemB. But they say OZMPIC has other functions, too, that it could be

valuable. What I always want to know when they come up with something, and then somebody says, well,

it's effective at what we designed it for. I'm like, I'm never arguing with that. I want to know is

what happens downstream? Because, again, just as the

layman, common sense is when you block one thing in the body, usually it has some other

...