Ozempic: Weight Loss Risks and Benefits and What We Miss About Analog
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Today on Something You Should Know, if you use cooking spray in your kitchen, you need to hear something. Then, weight loss drugs like Ozempic. Yeah, they're effective, but there are concerns, and it's quite a debate.

"Anyone who's just saying boo, they're the devil, or rah-rah, they're the magical solution, I think is missing the more interesting debate because the real choice is what are the risks of these drugs versus what are the risks of continuing to be obese. Probably the thing that most shocked me is just how bad for you being obese is." Also, why do people say "ow" when they get hurt? And we live in a digital world, but the convenience of digital has a price. Like the smartphone.

If you think about it, the smartphone took away the need for all those categories of things we once valued. A camera, a map, a bookstore, a record store. All those things disappeared and turned into these slippery pixels. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Hi, what a treat that you've decided to spend part of your day today listening to Something You Should Know.

I've mentioned several times before on this podcast that I like to cook. And one thing I've always wondered about, and I bet you have too, it's about cooking sprays. Most cooking sprays, if you look at the can, it'll say zero or no calories. Well, how could that be? How could cooking spray have no calories?

Well, it turns out it does have calories. You see, the problem is calorie counts are calculated by the serving. And a serving of cooking spray is usually listed as one quarter or even sometimes one eighth of a second. Well, try coating your frying pan with that.

It's estimated that the average spray is closer to two seconds, which is more like eight to 16 servings in one shot. And that could be anywhere from 15 to 30 calories. Still, that's fewer calories than if you were to use butter or canola oil and poured that in the pan to coat the pan. But butter and oil do add flavor and cooking sprays add very little. And that is something you should know. Music

There has been a lot of buzz and talk in the media about the weight loss drug Ozempic. Apparently, it's very successful in helping people lose weight. But there are a lot of concerns about it. So how does it work? Why is it seemingly so effective? And what are these concerns?

Do you have to take it forever to keep the weight off? What are the health risks of taking it? What are the health risks of not taking it if you're seriously overweight and can't seem to lose it any other way?

After all, most diets fail, and people who take Ozempic seem to consistently lose a lot of weight. So it's a topic a lot of people are talking about, and so we're going to talk about it too. And we're going to talk about it with Johan Hari. Over a year ago, Johan began injecting himself with Ozempic once a week, while also researching the topic for a new book.

Johan is a writer and journalist who has written for the New York Times, The Guardian and other newspapers. His TED Talks have been viewed over 70 million times and he has written several best-selling books. His latest book is called Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs. Hi Johan, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey Mike, really excited to be with you.

So let's start, because it's an interesting story. Let's start with how you got interested in Ozempic. You know, I remember the exact moment I learned about the existence of these drugs. And I've never felt so divided about any topic. I don't remember for a long time. So it was the winter of 2022. And it was that moment when the world was opening up again after everything we've been through.

And I was invited to a party. And for the first time in nearly two years, I said, yes, it was a party being thrown by an Oscar winning actor. I'm not saying that just a name drop. There's a reason why it's significant. And on the way there, I was feeling kind of self-conscious because I'd gained a lot of weight during lockdown, like a lot of people. And I remember suddenly thinking,

this is going to be really funny because, okay, I've gained a lot of weight, but everyone's gained weight. All these Hollywood stars are going to have gained weight. It's going to be kind of interesting to see them looking a bit podgier than normal. And I arrived at the party and I was walking around and I immediately just had this weird sensation because it's not just that they hadn't gained weight. They were gone. They look like their own Snapchat filters. They looked kind of

cleaner and sharper. And it wasn't just the actors, it was their kids, it was their partners, it was their agents. Everyone looked significantly thinner. And I bumped into a friend of mine on the dance floor and I said to her, "Wow, I guess everyone really did take up Pilates during lockdown." And she laughed and I didn't understand why she was laughing and I must've looked at her blankly and she said, "Well, Johan, you know it's not Pilates, right?" And I had no idea what she was talking about. And she pulled up on her phone an image of an ozempic pen.

And over the next few days, I learned the basic facts about this, which is that we now have a new generation of weight loss drugs working in a totally new way that delivers massive weight loss. A Zempik Wigovi, the average user loses 15% of their body weight within a year. With Munjaro, which is the next generation of the same class of drugs, the average person loses 21% of their body weight. And for Triple G, which is the next one to come down the pike, it'll be available next year. The average person loses 24% of their body weight.

And I immediately felt incredibly conflicted.

I could immediately see the benefits. I'm older now than my grandfather ever got to be because he died of a heart attack when he was 44. The men in my family have heart attacks. My uncle died of one. And I obviously knew the evidence that obesity makes it much more, sadly, makes it much more likely that you'll develop heart problems and in fact, over 200 other diseases and complications. So I could immediately see a drug that reduces obesity would be massively beneficial for health, including my own.

But I could also immediately think, well, I've seen this story before. Every 20 years or so, going back to the First World War, every 20 years, a new miracle diet drug is announced. And it's taken by huge numbers of people. And then it's always discovered it has some horrendous physical effect. And it's withdrawn from the market, leaving a trail of damaged people in its wake.

So to investigate this, I ended up going on a big journey all over the world. I took these drugs for a year and I went from Reykjavik in Iceland to Minneapolis to Tokyo. I interviewed over a hundred of the leading experts and I learned a huge amount. And these drugs, the way they work is that you just eat less because you don't want to eat so much. I mean, what's the mechanism that triggers the weight loss? There isn't actually an agreement on the answer to that question. So

Here's what they thought initially. If you ate something now, Mike, after a little while, your pancreas would produce a hormone called GLP-1. And we now know that that's part of the natural signals in your body that just say, stop eating, Mike, you've had enough, right? But natural GLP-1 washes out of your gut within a couple of minutes. It's gone from your system. So, you know, it's a signal saying stop eating, but it doesn't last that long. What these drugs do is they inject you with an artificial copy of GLP-1.

But instead of lasting for just a few minutes, they stay in your system for a whole week, which means that you feel fuller much faster. So I'll never forget the second day I was taking the drugs, waking up and lying in bed and having this really strange sensation. I was lying there. I thought, I feel something weird. What is it? And I couldn't locate what it was in my body. And it took me about five minutes to realize that I had woken up and I wasn't hungry.

I couldn't remember any time in my life when that had been the case, when I'd woken up like that before. And I went to this diner near where I live and I had what I ordered, what I ordered every day, which was a big kind of bread roll with loads of chicken and mayo in it.

And I had like three or four mouthfuls and I was full. I didn't want any more. It was like the shutters had come down on my appetite. It's increasingly clear, or most scientists now believe, that these drugs predominantly work not by affecting your gut, but by affecting your brain and by changing what you want.

So talk about the risks, because we hear that people are very concerned about these drugs. Well, what is the concern? Well, there's a huge debate about the safety of these drugs. And I learned that there's in fact 12 really significant risks associated with these drugs. And they range quite widely, but I'll give you an example of one. When people talk about safety, so the people who defend these drugs say,

You should have a high level of confidence that they're safe because diabetics have been taking them for 18 years. And look, diabetics haven't grown horns. You know, people who don't know, they also these drugs also stimulate the creation of insulin, which diabetics need. And look, diabetics haven't grown horns. If there was some disastrous effect associated with the drug, we would know by now. 18 years is quite a long time. But actually,

Some scientists then did say, okay, well, let's really dig into the evidence around the diabetics. So for example, a scientist I interviewed called Professor Jean-Luc Fayyé, who's at the University Hospital in Montpellier in France,

did compare a group of diabetics who'd been taking the drugs with a group of diabetics who'd not. And he argued, this is contested, that in fact the drugs increase your risk of developing thyroid cancer by between 50 to 75%. Now, he stresses it's important to not misunderstand that. That doesn't mean that if you take the drugs you've got a 50 to 75% chance of getting thyroid cancer. What it means is whatever your thyroid cancer risk was at the start,

It will, if he's correct, increase by between 50 to 75%. Thyroid cancer is rare. 1.2% of people get it. 82% of people who get it survive it. So it's a big increase in a small risk. But against that, defenders of drug, and this is one of the things I found so fascinating looking at every layer of the debate about these drugs, is that it's really fascinatingly complex.

Anyone who's just saying boo, they're the devil or rah, rah, they're the magical solution I think is missing the more interesting debate because the real comparison I think you have to make for someone like me is the choices. What are the risks of these drugs versus what are the risks of continuing to be obese? And of all the things I learned, probably the thing that most shocked me

is just how bad for you being obese is. When you look at the best medical evidence, for example, diabetes, I've known since I was a kid, if you're obese, you're more likely to become diabetic. But I thought, okay, if you've got health insurance, if you get insulin,

you're fine, right? Diabetic, you'll be okay. Diabetes knocks 15 years off your life on average. One of the leading doctors in Britain said to me, if you had a choice between becoming diabetic and becoming HIV positive, there is no choice. Choose to become HIV positive. Diabetes is catastrophic for your health and that's just one of many effects for obesity. And we know that these drugs hugely reduce, we know that weight loss and these drugs hugely reduce your chances of developing all sorts of health problems.

But there is another choice, and that is to just eat less on your own. And we've talked about this so many times on this podcast about how previous generations, you know, if you look back at pictures of people back in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, they weren't so heavy and they weren't all taking Ozempic. So it is possible to eat less and keep the weight off.

So I spent a lot of time talking to some of the leading diet experts in the world, academics who've studied diets. There's a fascinating woman called Professor Tracey Mann who's at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where I interviewed her. She began researching these drugs in the year 2000 and at that time the evidence was very clear. There were thousands of scientific studies that showed diets work. If you diet, you'll lose weight. But Professor Mann noticed that

These studies were almost always looking at dieters for three months. If you go on a diet for three months, you lose a lot of weight and then it ends and the study sort of assumes while you magically remain at that lower level forever. So she began to look for studies that had looked not for three months, but for two years. And when you look at a two year timeframe, the evidence is very different. After two years, most dieters are two pounds lighter than they were at the start. So it's not nothing, but it's a really small effect. She wanted to figure out why that would be. And what we know is,

is that let's say, Mike, you gained three stone. Now you gain, you know, 60 pounds, right?

Your brain would then fight very hard to keep you at that higher weight. When you try to lose weight, it would slow your metabolism down so you burn calories more slowly. It would make you more lethargic so you wouldn't want to exercise. It would make you crave more sugary and fatty foods. There's lots of evidence for this. Your body fights to retain a higher weight. This explains why most diets fail. Not all. Everyone listening will know someone who's lost a lot of weight and kept it off, but

But it's actually very rare. It's at best 10% of the people who go on diets. So for the rest of us, there's something else going on, partly the biological changes that happen as you gain weight, particularly in an environment where we're overwhelmingly eating processed and ultra-processed foods. And some people argue there's a big debate about what these drugs do to your brain,

But some scientists argue, and it's largely speculative, the brain debate at the moment, but some of them argue that what it does is it resets your brain. It stops your brain fighting to hold on to that excess weight. It's almost, to put it very crudely, like resetting your iPhone to the factory settings when it comes to your brain and weight. Now, that's contested, but that's one way of thinking about it.

We're talking about the pros and cons of these new weight loss drugs like Ozempic, and my guest is Johan Hari. He is author of the book Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs.

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So, Johan, when people take Ozempic and lose weight, and then they stop taking Ozempic,

What happens? Does the weight come back? Do they keep it off? What? The vast majority of people regain the weight within a year. So it's a bit like statins or blood pressure medication that it works while you're taking it. And when you're not taking it, it doesn't work. Now there's a debate about, we know with dieting can harm your metabolism. If you yo-yo diet, it can actually slow your metabolism down so much that you end up more overweight than you would have been at the start.

there's a big debate about will these drugs have that effect if you come off and come on them no one knows at the moment one of the strange things about this is that so many of the kind of obvious questions relating to these drugs we don't have answers yet you know the the it's like looking at a picture that's just coming into view we do know a fair bit about the 12 risks we do know a lot increasingly about the health benefits one of the best ways of thinking about the effects of these drugs

is actually to compare it to something that has been around for a while, bariatric surgery. Up to now, through diet and exercise, it's been very hard to lose huge amounts of weight and keep it off. But the closest analogy we actually have is bariatric surgery, you know, stomach stapling, all those different interventions. And there's a few things we know about bariatric surgery which are increasingly becoming clear to be equally true about these drugs. First is that it just massively boosts your health. Bariatric surgery is a horrible operation. One in a thousand people die in the operation. It's grim.

But if you survive, the effects on your health are staggering. If you have bariatric surgery over the next seven years, you are 56% less likely to die of a heart attack, you are 60% less likely to die of cancer, and you are 92% less likely to die of diabetes-related causes. In fact, it's so good for your health that you're 40% less likely to die of any cause at all, right? There's also a downside to bariatric surgery that is becoming increasingly clear for some people with these drugs.

So we know, for example, that bariatric surgery quadruples your risk of committing suicide. And at first that might seem really weird. Why would you be more likely to kill yourself after you've lost loads of weight? But I thought about this a lot because when I was taking the drugs, you know, my friend Danielle was pregnant at the time. And every time we ran into each other, it was like we were going in opposite directions, like she was getting bigger and I was shrinking.

I remember saying to her one day, "This is really weird. I'm getting what I want, but I don't actually feel better. If anything, my emotions felt rather muted." And we know there's a warning some doctors have been warning

that these drugs may be causing depression or even suicidal feelings in some people. Now that wasn't true of me, but I did feel muted. And there's a debate about whether that's due to brain effects or actually I think for me it was related to a psychological effect. Because these foods so profoundly disrupt your eating patterns, what they do is they bring to the surface some of the underlying psychological issues that lay behind your eating. So if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is the best thing is to never gain weight in the first place, but once you do,

statistically, it's very unlikely for you to lose weight and keep it off unless you either take these drugs or have bariatric surgery or some more radical intervention because trying to diet is so hard and so difficult because your body fights you and will continue to fight you if you try to lose that weight.

I think it's going a bit too far, but I think that's more true than we would like it to be. And I think it's really worth understanding why that's happened because it's also densely related to how these drugs work. It's in our lifetimes that obesity has exploded. So I was born in 1979 when obesity was very low in Britain, in the United States, everywhere in the world.

Between the year I was born and the year I turned 21, obesity more than doubled in the United States. And then in the next 20 years, severe obesity more than doubled again.

So we have lived through a staggering explosion in obesity. The average American has gained more than 30 pounds since 1960, right? It's just a staggering increase in weight, explosion in obesity and particularly childhood obesity. And this happened in every country in the world where a specific change happened. It was not where people became greedy or lacked willpower. It was where the kind of food,

that was given to people by the food industry completely transformed. It was when we moved from eating mostly whole foods that were cooked fresh on the day to overwhelmingly eating processed and ultra-processed foods, which are assembled out of chemicals in factories in a process that isn't even called cooking, it's called manufacturing. As Gerald Mand, a professor at Harvard who designed the nutritional label on all American food said to me,

There's something about the food that we're eating that is undermining our ability to know when to stop. But when you see it in this context, you begin to see, as Professor Michael Lowe, a brilliant expert at Drexel University, put it to me, these drugs are an artificial solution to an artificial problem. Processed and ultra-processed foods, which make up 78% of all the calories that an average American child eats in a day,

have totally undermined our satiety. That's not our fault. We didn't design this food. So you see this kind of bizarre trap that we've been led into, to which these drugs are presented as a kind of complex and risky solution. It's why 47% of Americans now want to take these drugs. And I feel, I think you can tell from my voice, very conflicted about that. Well, given what you said, I mean, you've really presented a dilemma for people because you

The drugs will help you lose weight, which will help eliminate the risks of obesity, but the drugs themselves have risks. So what's a person to do? Dr. Shauna Levy is an obesity expert at the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans said to me, we don't know the long-term risks of these drugs, but we do know the long-term risks of obesity and they're very serious. These drugs have given us a set of options. So clearly what we should do

in the medium to long term is we should make sure our kids don't face this difficult choice. We should do what they did in Japan, what they did in the Netherlands, in many other places. We should challenge the food system and not allow our kids to be screwed up by the food industry and have their appetites so distorted. But that doesn't help you and me in the immediate present day, right? So I interviewed a guy called Jeff Parker, lovely guy, 66-year-old retired lighting engineer,

who was hugely overweight in a really bad way. He had gout, he had kidney problems, liver problems. He's taking fistfuls of pills a day. He was losing the ability to walk. And he started to take Moonjaro, one of these new weight loss drugs. And all his health problems have gone into reverse. He's almost off the pills. And now he walks his dog every day over the Golden Gate Bridge. And he said to me, I'm 100% in favor of changing the food environment. Sign me up for that campaign. But I've got to tell you, by the time you achieve that, I'll be dead.

and I want to live, right? So for people who are stuck in this trap, I would say what I would recommend to them in the short to medium term, obviously try diet and exercise first, but I doubt there's a single obese person listening who hasn't tried diet and exercise at any given time. 17% of Americans are on a diet. And really we need to think through in a complicated way, these issues, both for us as individuals and for the wider culture, right? Because this is going to have huge cultural effects. Barclays Bank,

commissioned a very sober-minded financial analyst called Emily Field to look into these drugs and the science around them so they could, to guide their investment decisions going forward. And she came back and said, if you want a comparison for how big an effect this is going to have, you've got to think about the invention of the smartphone, right? This is going to be huge.

Already Krispy Kreme stocks are down. There was just a big report by a financial agency to the airline saying they're going to save a lot of money on jet fuel pretty soon because they're

So much of the population is going to become thinner and it costs less money to fly thinner people. There's a whole array of things that are going to hit us. There'll be people listening. You think, well, I'm not interested in these weight loss drugs, but you know, if we've been talking on 2007, the day Steve jobs unveiled the iPhone, you might say, well, I'm not interested in these iPhones, but,

But the iPhones are going to transform the world around you, whether you're interested in them or not. And we would not have been able to game out that day. You know, TikTok, Uber Eats, all sorts of things that have completely changed our lives and the way we live. And these drugs are going to transform the lives of everyone listening to this show one way or another in some positive ways, in some negative ways. It's really complicated. And we've got to really reckon with this. And the stakes are really high.

Whether we get this right or not will determine whether huge numbers of people live or die. So we've really got to be alert to the risks on all sides here. Well, this is really eye-opening because I think it's easy to look at these drugs and think, well, because there are risks, because there are concerns, you're better off leaving them alone and just losing the weight on your own. But as you point out, that is so hard and chances are you will fail eventually.

And you will lose weight most likely on these drugs. So, yeah, what's the... There's quite a balance there. I've been speaking with Johan Hari, who began his journey with Ozempic about a year or so ago. He's author of a book called Magic Pill, The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs.

And if you'd like to read that book, there is a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Johan, for shining a different light on a topic that I hadn't considered and I think is really fascinating. Hooray! Thanks so much, Mike. I really enjoyed this.

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We live in a digital world. Things move fast, things are efficient, things are smaller. You can find out anything and contact just about anyone from that little device in your hand. Yes, our digital world is significantly different than the analog world of just a few decades ago.

Now this is not a segment longing for the good old days of analog. It's more about how things have changed and what got us here to our digital world and what's worth noting and reflecting on from our analog past.

Here to discuss this is Dejan Sujic. He's Director Emeritus of the Design Museum in London and Professor of Design Studies at the University of Lancaster. He's author of a book called The World of Analog, A Visual Guide. Hi Dejan, welcome to Something You Should Know. Michael, it's good to be here.

So obviously the change from an analog world to a digital world is gradual, it takes place over time. But for our discussion, when do you think the big moment in time where things really changed, when was that?

So much changed back in 2007 when Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone. It kind of ushered in what I sometimes call the age of mass extinctions of objects. If you think about it, the smartphone took away the need for all those categories of things we once valued. A camera, a means of communication, a map, a bookstore, a record store. All those things disappeared and turned into these

slippery pixels. Of course it was great at first, but it made us start to think about why don't some things last? Those things that we used to buy like a wristwatch to measure out time passing or things that grew old gracefully or just things that stayed like an album, a record album. You know, something on Spotify, just we don't own it in the same way. So I think that's a lot to do with what analog seems to offer us still.

Isn't that just progress? That's just we do it differently now because time marches on and that's just the way it is. We do do it differently, but sometimes we could have gone on doing things in old ways that were still interesting and creative ways. And if you think about certain filmmakers, for example, movie makers, some still use film because it actually offers...

creative things that the digital world doesn't. Someone like Christopher Nolan or Wes Anderson still use film because they think that there's something antiseptic and cold and dark about the digital world. Or of course the vinyl record has been the first major comeback, in the UK at least,

vinyl is now selling more than dvds of course it's not going to match streaming but it gives us something to hold on to something to keep yeah well so i've heard that same thing about how vinyl is coming back and more people are buying music on vinyl than on cd but that is due in large part to the fact that no one's buying cds anymore either that that it isn't just this big surge in vinyl everybody's

streaming and downloading. It's not, it's just not a physical world like that anymore. But there's something about that album, which it's an art form. It is. If you think about the great, the great albums from the sixties and seventies, they were defined by technology. Of course, um, they, you know, a vinyl disc could actually be handled six tracks per side of around three minutes to each.

And bands in those days carefully composed a listening experience with a sequence and an order. And if you're streaming randomly, that's kind of lost.

And there was a not-so-minor art form for what you actually put on the album cover as well. If you think about it, some really great artists worked on those covers. Andy Warhol worked for the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones. So the object itself was a beautiful thing. And the way that you listened to the music was also defined in a way that the artist wanted. The digital world's taken all that away. But vinyl scratches, skips, warps...

Doesn't sound good after a while. Kind of wears out. And digital... Yeah, so do we. Human beings have the same tendencies. That's right. But that's not necessarily... We love our blue jeans that show the passing of time. We love... In the old days, a camera that used film...

grew old gracefully you know a black nikon i still have shows the dents and of passing time each one leaves a little memory of it the digital world has no chance of doing that but i remember i'm not trying to argue with you and i want to get into some of these things but you know i'm old enough to remember and and work in the radio business where we had to edit

magnetic tape. And if I had to do this podcast on magnetic tape and edit it with a razor blade and splicing tape, it would take me 10 times longer than it takes me now. So, you know, and the sound is better. You know, analog tape sounds analog-y and it

wears out. If you make too many generations, it starts to sound horrible. So there's progress that even someone like me who loves old tape recorders and things, I'm really glad we are where we are.

Well, I'm not insisting that everyone actually has to use analog stuff. I'm just trying to look at some of the things that we've lost and why in some areas there's still lessons to learn from the technology that was once current, which once seemed to represent the future, which no longer always does. Well, take something like photography. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that you had to use a camera on film, then take your film to the store, wait for it to be developed.

You had to pay for every picture that was developed, whether it was any good or not, versus today where you can use your phone and take all the pictures you want. It doesn't cost any more money. The fact that you can capture so many things on film and on video that you couldn't before because it was so costly and so burdensome, pretty amazing.

And yet some of the great photographs that we think about were taken in the 20th century using film. And because there were so few of them, each one of those images kind of had an impact that's much greater than single images now.

The wristwatch is one that doesn't seem to... I have an analog wristwatch, and I like it. I mean, and you go to any jewelry store, you'll see plenty of them. They're not just all digital display watches. There does seem to be some longing for a clock that looks like a clock. I think there is. There's something about wearing a wristwatch. It's become...

a rite of passage to be given one when you're passing an exam or passing 18. I think some of it has actually been the self-preservation of the Swiss watch industry who set out when cheap digital watches became a thing to try and change the wristwatch from utility

to something that was about luxury or about a collector's item. I mean, the way that Rolex are marketed, for example, isn't about the simple idea of precision. It's about something which lasts, something which says something about you.

And I think one of the reasons that actually the wristwatch has survived is Apple's decision to make a wearable computer, not in the form of the Google Glass, which never worked because it didn't feel natural, but to put its personal computer on your wrist. And the fact that there is such a thing as an iWatch, I think, has sort of made Apple

watches, analog watches still seem like part of the present day world, not just about nostalgia in the way that so many things do. The typewriter, for example, Tom Hanks writes very engagingly about why he collects old typewriters. He talks about the sound that they make and the sense that you're actually doing something important when you press the keys and listen to the noise that they make. And you just don't get that in the bloodless experience of a keyboard.

Well, one of the things that becomes very clear when you look inside your book is all of the analog, different kinds of analog cameras that there used to be that now seemingly you can do all of that inside your phone. But there were so many manufacturers, designers, different methods, you know, Polaroids. And I mean, it was quite an industry that basically collapsed.

It's really fascinating to look at the early history of photography. George Eastman, the man who founded Kodak, in some ways did for photography what Jobs did for computing. In the old days, in the late 19th century, photography was like conducting a scientific experiment. You had to use glass plates, you had to expose them one at a time, you had to instantly develop them, otherwise it wouldn't work.

And Eastman turned that into something that anyone could do and made it into a pastime for everyone. And that was a huge transformation. The one thing that or the other thing that really jumps out at you when you look at the photographs in your book is how so many of the analog things like television sets and radios and things were used.

were designed almost as works of art or as furniture or as something in and of itself to display, rather than today, you go buy a television set, it's just a rectangle box, it's a black box, you put it on your wall, but there's nothing about the television you notice, it's just how great the resolution of the screen is. The whole art of the thing being beautiful is gone.

Well, a television set has vanished, really. We're talking about completely flat screens, things that have almost disappeared and yet somehow never quite do disappear enough because there's always a cable hanging down somewhere or some other distraction. But yes, in the early days of TV sets, there will be one in the whole house and it will be camouflaged like a piece of furniture with a huge mahogany case and maybe covered when it wasn't in use with a kind of linen tablecloth.

It took the place of a fireplace within the house. The family would gather around and there'd only be one thing to watch, which of course completely changed when TV sets became more reliable, cheaper, more portable. So suddenly they atomized and there was one in every room in the house. But the same thing is true for so many things is that it wasn't just TVs, but even, you know, telephones and radios and things had style. They had style.

The telephone was a fascinating thing. Of course, in Europe, it was a government monopoly in the early days and you weren't actually allowed to own one. You rented it from the post office or the state. In America, it was more like an AT&T monopoly and there was only one style. And then it turned into a consumer item later on.

So the early days in Europe, the standard foam was made by ITT and it was designed in the late 1920s, early 30s, styled by a Norwegian painter called Jean Heiberg, who'd been one of Matisse's students in Paris. So yes, it did look like a work of art. Well, it just seems that in the analog days, that things changed.

had importance or that they gave importance to something. You know what I mean? Like items were manufactured to...

look important, to be important. They use colour to turn what might be a grey piece of office equipment into something more interesting, like making typewriters bright red, another trick that Steve Jobs did with the iMac back in the day. Or they might flatter people into thinking that they're buying a serious piece of equipment.

making objects out black is the way to do that with lots of business-like looking buttons and dials, which suggests that you're doing something difficult or clever or precise, even if it's only trying to tune in to your local radio station. Is there an analog something that even though digital forms have come to try to replace it, that the analog way is still the way?

The easiest way sometimes to leave a message is to use a pencil, and that's a very, very analog way of communicating. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's one that can't go away. You have to be able to put a pencil to a piece of paper and write whatever, a shopping list, a note. The thing is that digital technology means storing information fast.

don't last very long. So sometimes records are best kept on paper, which might actually last longer than storing some things on computer tape, which does actually deteriorate over time, or on a server. We never know quite what's going to happen to that. So those technologies do change. And for the really important records, sometimes paper is the way to keep them.

In the analog days, there was a connection to things, I think. You know, I remember the TV set in our living room, and I remember my first radio, and I remember a couple of my radios. I remember the telephones we used to have in the house. And people don't remember those things anymore because there isn't much to remember. I mean, a big screen TV is a rectangle with a screen on it.

There's not that connection to the things. I think it's kind of cool to remember and be connected to those things that we don't have anymore. It's also thinking about how we behave, how we communicate with each other, what things mean to us. And that's something that every technology really should think about.

How we interact with the screen or how we interact with an object it's asking the same kind of questions because in the end people Want to feel in control they want to feel some kind of relationship with the things that they have at home or in the workplace and those characteristics are are Applicable to any kind of technology. You know what I was thinking about and I think this is pretty cool that in

The digital age really started with the computer, right? And the computer, the way into a computer, and so the way into digital everything, is the keyboard. And the keyboard for your computer is the same keyboard, the same letter layout, as the old mechanical analog typewriter. I think the whole question about why...

the typewriter, which was invented more or less by an American called Christopher Latham Scholes and was made by Remington, was why he chose to put the letters on the keyboard

in the sequence Q-W-E-R-T-Y, the QWERTY keyboard, which we still have on our laptops now. And it was the way to communicate then, and it's now the way that we actually open ourselves to the digital world. There was an early myth that actually he placed the letters in that sequence

to try and slow down the process of typing because the first machines were quite fragile and he was worried that they might break the machine if you actually struck keys too close to each other. But it wasn't that. It seems like he took a creative decision and yet we're still, we use that as the way into the world. It's one of those ways that technologies still mark the next episode of the way things are.

One technology that's clearly analog, but kind of sort of bridged the gap from analog to digital, was the Polaroid camera. And it did that because it created that appetite for, wow, look, we can see a picture fast. And, you know, digital photography, you can see it instantly. This, you know, took a minute or two to develop, but

But what is that story? The guy who invented that camera, Land, I don't remember his first name. Why did he come up with this idea to, instead of having to wait to develop your pictures, we'll have it develop right in front of your eyes?

Because his five-year-old daughter asked him, why does it take so long to see a picture? Because in those days, if you took a picture with a Kodak, you had to send it off to be processed, and then the print would come back maybe 10 days later. So Lans set out to try and make the Polaroid camera, which could do it as instantly as possible. And I particularly love the Polaroid SX-70. The company went bankrupt. It's now come back from the brink. People are now manufacturing instant cameras.

film again, but there was something about the SX-70. It was a beautiful object. It's designed to look like almost like an old style cigar case with a kind of leather cover. And it had the ability to become almost instant. Press the button, out shot the film, and you could see the image take shape in your hand. A wonderful moment, the closest analog ever got to digital.

Well, I like that there are analog things that are resistant to this kind of digital change. As you say, the Polaroid camera is coming back, the instant camera.

And even books. I mean, yeah, there's Kindles and, you know, you can read a book on your iPad and whatnot. But people like books. They like to turn the page. And that's about as analog as you can get. And I also see sometimes there are stores that sell this analog stuff. You know, I know of stores that, you know, sell old radios, iPads.

I actually knew a store that used to sell old antique telephones, and that's all they sold. Because there is kind of a longing for, well, I guess it's longing for the good old days.

but it's more interesting than that. I've been speaking with Dan Sudjic. He is Director Emeritus of the Design Museum in London, Professor of Design Studies at the University of Lancaster in the UK, and author of the book, The World of Analog, A Visual Guide. And there's a link to his book, and it has some absolutely beautiful pictures in it. There's a link to it in the show notes. Appreciate it, Dan. Thank you.

Mike, thank you so much. It's been fantastic talking about all this great stuff. This is pretty interesting. Regardless of what language you speak, in pretty much every language around the world,

When someone hurts themselves, we all make a similar sound. Ouch, ow, ah, whichever one you like. Take your pick. Why do we do it? Apparently because making that sound is a natural painkiller. According to Jonathan Goldman, author of The Seven Secrets to Sound Healing, he says that making long, unrestricted vowel sounds is a natural reflex that triggers the release of opiates in the brain.

Music therapists call this toning. Some people can even master the reflex to tone their way through dental or other medical procedures without anesthetic. Though I'm not recommending that. And that is something you should know.

You know, the best way we have found to find new listeners to this podcast is the old-fashioned way, word of mouth. People like you telling people you know to try this podcast, give it a listen, and see what they think. I'd appreciate it if you would share a link to an episode and let your friends give a listen and see what they think. I'll bet they like it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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