Energy tech, Ozempic & regular people

I have some concerns...

Happy Monday from spring in NYC, a tulip-festooned set of a romantic comedy with a bunch of gray gutter puddles. Gutter Puddles could be a band related to Steve Albini, who died last week and made me feel double old when I thought, “but he was only 61!” (It would have sounded acceptable in my 20s.)

As a dude, Albini seemed like the punk-snob/no-fun type who makes you feel bad about everything you like because it’s not dark or obscure enough. He would have shit on this watercolor by my 6-year old. ☝️

As an artist, he produced Pixies Surfer Rosa, Breeders Pod and PJ Harvey Rid of Me, which will surely shoot him straight to heaven. But he would hate it there because it’s not punk enough, so, I love you Steve Albini and hope you burn in hell?

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Catching up on Energy Tech:

These house batteries for Texan blackouts and a solar-farm-to-underwater-cable project in Australia illustrate another move toward total private ownership of public goods, which won’t be good for the public. (I keep thinking of Connor Roy bragging about his aquifer in Ep. 1 of Succession: “One day, water will be more precious than gold and people will be killing each other for that water!”)

It’s a small relief that someone is trying to fix big infrastructure problems and mitigate climate change if the government won’t. They’re Big Time someones in these cases: Michael Dell’s son and the billionaire co-founder of Atlassian, respectively.

But these PR-engineered business profiles gloss over what the founders’ vision of the future looks like for non-rich households and countries.

In Texas, you have a decaying, deregulated energy grid that’s no longer subject to government standards of quality and safety. If a household has an extra $2K (most Americans don’t have an extra $400) for a big battery to keep its food cold and devices running, it won’t be effected by the state’s endemic blackouts. If you’re poor, you’re left in the dark.

The Australian solar farm/underwater cable model, logistically batshit as it sounds, could be a wider operating plan for the planet post-climate change. If it scales, the global south would be covered in panels to power the air conditioning and never-ending energy needs of the north, especially now that our worldwide boner for AI requires more massive data centers that hoover up electricity.

Leaving poor people behind in waves of innovation is nothing new, but when venture capital and private equity step in to solve public problems, it’s also bad for governments. Starlink, a technology that should have been borne out of an increasingly budget-strapped NASA, is run by Elon Musk. Ukraine relies on Starlink in its war with Russia, which means the Pentagon relies on Elon to stay on its side and help its allies.

As with data, privacy, and the dissemination of information, there’s too much power left unchecked in a few tech founders’ hands. Of course they’re not all ketamine-snorting edgelords, but gutted American institutions should not be a white space for new business, now matter how well-meaning the founders.

Before you think you’ve read enough about Ozempic

A new book about Ozempic by Johann Hari takes closer aim at Big Food than his last one about the cross-functional assault on our attention spans. His guest essay in the Times describes a study where lab rats’ appetites and brains changed after their food went from quality to garbage, and they barely recognized real food after subsisting on Snickers and bacon.

If nothing else, the visual of rats hurling themselves into cheesecake will be something I think of every time I hurl myself into a cheesecake.

In a conversation with Elise Loehnen about the book, Hari attempts the new calculus of talking about obesity and its known health risks vs. body positivity. They also touch on the morality of celebrities keeping Ozempic and surgeries a secret while presenting themselves to the public as ideal images of feminine beauty. It was well-timed with the Met Gala and the Kim Kardashian Korset discourse: This Dazed article is an interesting dive into the new callout culture around women’s bodies.

Loehnen and Hari also briefly touched on access: Ozempic and its brand-name counterparts are essentially an antidote to a broken food system, and no one has suffered more from cheap, fast, ultra-processed food than low-income Americans. But the Upper East Side had more Ozempic prescriptions in 2023 than parts of Brooklyn with the highest rates of diabetes in the city.

I hope somewhere in Carnegie Hill there’s a Gen Z Cher Horowitz raiding her mom’s medicine cabinet for her school’s semaglutide charity drive.

Food & mood

As a middle-aged mom who’s given up on being skinny (and wealthy, and a young up-and-comer in any world), Ozempic and ultra-processed foods interest me less for their effects on weight and more for their connection to mental health.

For the past 20 years, Chris Palmer, an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, studied the connection between mental disorders and “metabolic health.”

I’ll save you 320 pages of his book Brain Energy: he believes a ketogenic diet (i.e., no sugar, low carbs) is an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia — all the heavy hitters.

Of course, eating vegetables and lean protein exclusively is inconvenient in most parts of the country and expensive everywhere. If our brains and appetites have been rewired by packaged food, it’s impossible to maintain that kind of diet on willpower alone.

Binge eating is a known coping mechanism for trauma. Hari mentions that patients who can no longer engage in that numbing behavior after taking Ozempic felt like their trauma came roaring back and they had no defense against it. New coping behaviors pop up like a whack-a-mole. (During my first week of keto, I had a cigarette craving for the first time in 15 years.) So, Ozempic will make you thin, but it won’t necessarily make you happy.

As someone who’s hoped for a “magic pill” to reach peak, uninterrupted happiness — whether it’s a diet, a job, a book, a support group, a gym, shoes, a new notebook, a person, a TV show, actual pills, etc. — I’ve decided to be practical and settle on avoiding unhappiness instead.

See you back here soon!