Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The official audio version of Astral Codex Ten, with an archive of posts from Slate Star Codex. It's just me reading Scott Alexander's blog posts.
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The Claude Bliss Attractor
06/18/2025
The Claude Bliss Attractor
This is where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the : Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly. I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist ), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.
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"But" vs. "Yes, But"
06/18/2025
"But" vs. "Yes, But"
This is another heuristic from the same place as . If someone proves you are absolutely, 100% wrong about something, it’s polite to say “Oh, I guess I was wrong, sorry” before launching into your next argument. That is, instead of:
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If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
06/14/2025
If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
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P-Zombies Would Report Qualia
06/14/2025
P-Zombies Would Report Qualia
There’s a long-running philosophical argument about the conceivability of otherwise-normal people who are not conscious, aka . This has spawned a shorter-running (only fifteen years!) rationalist sub-argument on the topic. The last time I checked its status was , which says: 1. Both Yudkowsky and Chalmers agree that humans possess “qualia”. 2. Chalmers argues that a superintelligent being which somewhow knew the positions of all particles in a large region of the Universe would need to be told as an additional fact that any humans (or other minds possessing qualia) in this region of space possess qualia – it could not deduce this from mere perfect physical knowledge of their constituent particles. Therefore, qualia are in some sense extra-physical. 3. Yudkowsky argues that such a being would notice that humans discuss at length the fact that they possess qualia, and their internal narratives also represent this fact. It is extraordinarily improbable that beings would behave in this manner if they did not actually possess qualia. Therefore an omniscient being would conclude that it is extremely likely that humans possess qualia. Therefore, qualia are not extra-physical. I want to re-open this (sorry!) by disagreeing with the bolded sentence. I think beings would talk about qualia - the “mysterious redness of red” and all that - even if we start by assuming they don’t have it. I realize this is a surprising claim, but that’s why it’s interesting enough to re-open the argument over.
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Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025
06/14/2025
Choose Nonbook Review Finalists 2025
It's time to narrow the 141 entries in the to about a dozen finalists. I can't read 141 reviews alone, so I need your help. Please pick as many as you have time for, read them, and rate them . Don’t read them in order! If you read them in order, I’ll have 1,000 votes on the first review, 500 on the second, and so on to none in the second half. Either pick a random review (thanks to Taymon for making a random-review-chooser script ) or scroll through the titles until you find one that catches your interest - you can see individual entries here (thanks to a reader for collating them): Again, the rating form is . Thanks! You have until June 20, when I’ll count the votes and announce the finalists.
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Bayes For Everyone
06/14/2025
Bayes For Everyone
A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson [Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at and will be at this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.] I began my of a couple years back with a rather simple question: Could a new kind of school make the world rational? What followed, however, was a sprawling distillation of one scholar’s answer that I believe still qualifies as “the longest thing anyone has submitted for an ACX contest”. Since then I’ve been diving into particulars, exploring how we use the insights I learned while writing it to start re-enchanting all the academic subjects from kindergarten to high school. But in the fun of all that, I fear I’ve lost touch with that original question. How, even in theory, could a method of education help all students become rational? It probably won’t surprise you that I think part of the answer is Bayes’ theorem. But the equation is famously prickly and off-putting:
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Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
06/14/2025
Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my . Going through piece by piece, slightly out of order: Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio’s claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio’s as if we were saying the same thing. My very next words (“I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…”) show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed, and makes that clearer yet at greater length. Scott is simply misrepresenting me here. The full post is in the image below:
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Moments Of Awakening
06/05/2025
Moments Of Awakening
Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, . Still, new stuff occasionally turns up. I assume is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar):
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Contra MR On Charity Regrants
06/05/2025
Contra MR On Charity Regrants
I often disagree with Marginal Revolution, but made me a new level of angry:
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The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID
06/05/2025
The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID
Many commenters responded to by challenging the claim that 1.2 million Americans died of COVID...
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The Other COVID Reckoning
06/05/2025
The Other COVID Reckoning
Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things. The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.
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Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
06/03/2025
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
Bryan Caplan’s is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through? But when you’re going through a rough patch in your life, sometimes it helps to pick up a Bible and look for pearls of forgotten wisdom. That’s where I am now. Having twins is a lot of work. My wife does most of it. My nanny does most of what’s left. Even so, the remaining few hours a day leave me exhausted. I decided to read the canonical book on how having kids is easier and more fun than you think, to see if maybe I was overdoing something. After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . .
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In Search Of /r/petfree
06/03/2025
In Search Of /r/petfree
, and a few names always come up. and are unpopular, but if I read them with an open mind, I always end up sympathetic - neither lifestyle is persecuted in my particular corner of society, but the Redditors there have usually been through some crazy stuff, and I don’t begrudge them a place to vent. The one that really floors me is . The denizens of /r/petfree don’t like pets. Their particular complaints vary, but most common are: Some stores either allow pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are pets go in those stores, and they are dirty and annoying. Some parks either allow off-leash pets or don’t enforce bans on them, and then there are off-leash pets in those parks, and they are dirty and annoying. Sometimes pets attack people. Sometimes inconsiderate people get pets they can’t take care of and offload some of the burden onto you. Sometimes people are cringe about their pets, in an “AWWWWW MY PRECIOUS WITTLE FUR BABY” way. Sometimes people barge into spaces that are about something else and talk about their pets instead. These are all valid complaints. But the people on /r/petfree go a little far:
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Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
06/03/2025
Highlights From The Comments On AI Geoguessr
Thanks to everyone who commented on .
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Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
05/23/2025
Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius
Some of the more unhinged writing on superintelligence pictures AI doing things that seem like magic. Crossing air gaps to escape its data center. Building nanomachines from simple components. Plowing through physical bottlenecks to revolutionize the economy in months. More sober thinkers point out that these things might be physically impossible. You can’t do physically impossible things, even if you’re very smart. No, say the speculators, you don’t understand. Everything is physically impossible when you’re 800 IQ points too dumb to figure it out. A chimp might feel secure that humans couldn’t reach him if he climbed a tree; he could never predict arrows, ladders, chainsaws, or helicopters. What superintelligent strategies lie as far outside our solution set as “use a helicopter” is outside a chimp’s?
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Moldbug Sold Out
05/23/2025
Moldbug Sold Out
Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled , it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance". Yarvin’s fans counter that if you look deeper, he has good responses to Young’s objections: Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal. Then in the late 2010s, he caught his first whiff of actual power and dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos.
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The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs
05/23/2025
The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs
President Trump’s approval rating to near-historic lows. With economic disruption from the tariffs likely to hit next month, his numbers will probably get even worse; this administration could reach unprecedented levels of unpopularity. If I were a far-right populist, I would be thinking hard about a strategy to prevent the blowback from crippling the movement. Such a strategy is easy to come by. Anger over DOGE and deportations has a natural floor. If Trump’s base starts abandoning him, it will be because of the tariffs. But tariffs aren’t a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform. Other right-populist leaders like Orban, Bukele, and Modi show no interest in them. They seem an idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s, a cost that the rest of the movement pays to keep him around. So, (our hypothetical populist strategist might start thinking after Trump’s approval hits the ocean trenches and starts drilling) - whatever. MAGA minus Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies can remain a viable platform. You don’t even have to exert any effort to make it happen. Trump will retire in 2028 and pass the torch to Vance. And although Vance supports tariffs now, that’s only because he’s a spineless toady. After Trump leaves the picture, Vance will gain thirty IQ points, make an eloquent speech about how tariffs were the right tool for the mid-2020s but no longer, and the problem will solve itself. Right? Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology.
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AI Futures: Blogging And AMA
05/23/2025
AI Futures: Blogging And AMA
AI Futures Project is the group behind . I’ve been helping them with . Posts written or co-written by me include: - what’s behind that METR result showing that AI time horizons double every seven months? And is it really every seven months? Might it be faster? - a look at some of the response to AI 2027, with links to some of the best objections and the team’s responses. - why we predict that America will stay ahead of China on AI in the near future, and what could change this. I will probably be shifting most of my AI blogging there for a while to take advantage of access to the team’s expertise. There’s also , and we hope to eventually host writing by other team members as well.
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Links For April 2025
05/22/2025
Links For April 2025
[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]
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Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
05/22/2025
Highlights From The Comments On POSIWID
(original post: ) … Thanks to everyone who commented on this controversial post. Many people argued that the phrase had some valuable insight, but disagreed on what it was. The most popular meaning was something like “if a system consistently fails at its stated purpose, but people don’t change it, consider that the stated purpose is less important than some actual, hidden purpose, at which it is succeeding”. I agree you should consider this, but I still object to the original phrase, for several reasons.
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Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
04/14/2025
Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
(see Wikipedia: ) Consider the following claims The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia. The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all. The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion tons of carbon dioxide. These are obviously false.
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My Takeaways From AI 2027
04/14/2025
My Takeaways From AI 2027
Here’s a list of things I updated on after working on . Some of these are discussed in more detail in the supplements, including the , , , , and . I’m highlighting these because it seems like a lot of people missed their existence, and they’re what transforms the scenario from cool story to research-backed debate contribution. These are my opinions only, and not necessarily endorsed by the rest of the team.
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AI 2027 (Full Recording with Footnotes and Text Boxes)
04/14/2025
AI 2027 (Full Recording with Footnotes and Text Boxes)
We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes. (A condensed two-hour version with footnotes and text boxes removed is available at the above link.)
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Introducing AI 2027
04/14/2025
Introducing AI 2027
Or maybe 2028, it's complicated In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next. He got it all right. Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed. Nobody except researchers and a few hobbyists had ever talked to an AI. In fact, talking to AI was a misnomer. There was no way to make them continue the conversation; they would free associate based on your prompt, maybe turning it into a paragraph-length short story. If you pulled out all the stops, you could make an AI add single digit numbers and get the right answer more than 50% of the time. Yet if you read Daniel’s blog post without checking the publication date, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a somewhat garbled but basically reasonable history of the last four years. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly. “What 2026 Looks Like” promised a sequel about 2027 and beyond, but it never materialized. Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel, including: Eli Lifland, a superforecaster who is ranked first on RAND’s Forecasting initiative. You can read more about him and his forecasting team . He cofounded and advises and co-created , an adversarial attack framework for language models. Jonas Vollmer, a VC at Macroscopic Ventures, which has done its own, more practical form of successful AI forecasting: they made an early stage investment in Anthropic, now worth $60 billion. Thomas Larsen, the former executive director of the Center for AI Policy, a group which advises policymakers on both sides of the aisle. Romeo Dean, a leader of Harvard’s AI Safety Student Team and budding expert in AI hardware. …and me! Since October, I’ve been volunteering part-time, doing some writing and publicity work. I can’t take credit for the forecast itself - or even for the lion’s share of the writing and publicity - but it’s been an immense privilege to work alongside some of the smartest and most epistemically virtuous people I know, trying to absorb their worldview on a level deep enough to do it justice. We have no illusions that we’ll get as lucky as last time, but we still think it’s a valuable contribution to the discussion.
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The Colors Of Her Coat
04/14/2025
The Colors Of Her Coat
In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary: Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. Why the colors of her coat? The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights. Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine. Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? After you arrive, climb 7,000 feet in the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to produce a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world. Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from." Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications. In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat.
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"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk
04/03/2025
"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk
invited me to participate in their “Weird” themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves. As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I’d sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile place, where all of these novel mythemes about aliens, psychics, and lost civilizations were hitting a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew. This made them easy prey not just for grifters like Hubbard, but also for random schizophrenics who could write about their hallucinations convincingly. …but I didn’t think of that framing in time, so instead you get several sections of why it’s evil cave dwarves in particular, and why that theme seems to recur throughout all lands and ages:
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More Drowning Children
03/28/2025
More Drowning Children
People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it’s obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people’s cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail.
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Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity
03/28/2025
Misophonia: Beyond Sensory Sensitivity
Jake Eaton has in Asterisk. Misophonia is a condition in which people can’t tolerate certain noises (classically chewing). Nobody loves chewing noises, but misophoniacs go above and beyond, sometimes ending relationships, shutting themselves indoors, or even deliberately trying to deafen themselves in an attempt to escape. So it’s a sensory hypersensitivity, right? Maybe not. There’s increasing evidence - which I learned about from Jake, but which didn’t make it into the article - that misophonia is less about sound than it seems. Misophoniacs who go deaf report that . Now they get triggered if they see someone chewing. It’s the same with other noises. Someone who gets triggered by the sound of forks scraping against a table will eventually get triggered by the sight of the scraping fork. Someone triggered by music will eventually get triggered by someone playing a music video on mute. Maybe this isn’t surprising?
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OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
03/21/2025
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Last month, I for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI’s forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider. Mistakes are mine alone. Why Was OpenAI A Nonprofit In The First Place? In the early 2010s, the AI companies hadn’t yet discovered scaling laws, and so underestimated the amount of compute (and therefore money) it would take to build AI. DeepMind was the first victim; originally founded on high ideals of prioritizing safety and responsible stewardship of the Singularity, it hit a financial barrier and sold to Google. This scared Elon Musk, who didn’t trust Google (or any corporate sponsor) with AGI. He teamed up with Sam Altman and others, and OpenAI was born. To avoid duplicating DeepMind’s failure, they founded it as a nonprofit with a mission to “build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity”. But like DeepMind, OpenAI needed money. At first, they scraped by with personal donations from Musk and other idealists, but as the full impact of scaling laws became clearer, Altman wanted to form a forprofit arm and seek investment. Musk and Altman disagree on what happened next: Musk said he objected to the profit focus, Altman says Musk agreed but wanted to be in charge. In any case, Musk left, Altman took full control, and OpenAI founded a forprofit subsidiary. This subsidary was supposedly a “capped forprofit”, meaning that their investors were capped at 100x return - if someone invested $1 million, they could get a max of $100 million back, no matter how big OpenAI became - this ensured that the majority of gains from a Singularity would go to humanity rather than investors. But a capped forprofit isn’t a real kind of corporate structure; in real life OpenAI handles this through Profit Participation Units, a sort of weird stock/bond hybrid which does what OpenAI claims the capped forprofit model is doing.
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The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh
03/21/2025
The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh
Sorry, you can only get drugs when there's a drug shortage. Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States: Semaglutide (Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Rybelsus®) Tirzepatide (Mounjaro®, Zepbound®) Liraglutide (Victoza®, Saxenda®) …but liraglutide is noticeably worse than the others, and most people prefer either semaglutide or tirzepatide. These cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans. …if you buy them from the pharma companies, like a chump. For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online. So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. But there was always a looming question - what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them? Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but last month the FDA its decision was final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies will no longer be able to sell cheap GLP-1 drugs. Let’s take a second to think of the real victims here: telehealth company stockholders.
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