The You ProjectAccording to David Gillespie (and some very reliable research studies), good old-fashioned Paracetamol (Panamax, Panadol, Tylenol) can create the interesting 'side effect' of making people temporarily less empathetic or as DG suggests, “temporary psychopaths!” We also chat about why (and how) Al might soon make 'The You Project' (or at least, the host) redundant. As always this was super interesting.
I'll get a team. Welcome to another installing the show.
It's Jumbo, it's Tiff, It's Galspo, high bloody Glesspo.
On the same time. Hi mate, Sorry, how about you same time again?
Oh I'm good. I'm glad to be doing it at a reasonable time.
Yeah, well it's probably a little bit more suitable for you. It's not middle of the afternoon. TIF, how are you.
I'm fabulous, Thanks for asking.
Yeah, no, we care, David and I care. Ie. No, there's a lot of love.
We were talking before we went live about to how two of us need makeup to look any good and you're not one of them, so that's flattering.
It's already wear makeup arts just a little week will be the miscura.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've got this very annoying thing going on at the moment, which Gillispo just told me to try some garlic. So I have this blocked ear that it just I don't know. It's not water, it's not wax. It's just like every now and then my ear just blocks like this air bubble or something.
And it's happening right down right now. So if I look down like I'm doing now'll probably take me off the mic.
If you'd just take Mike with you, that'll be fine.
I could just take my mic with me.
Yep, and David, we're talking tonight about paracetamol, which has a particular I don't know what would we call it side effect or panadole as we call it in Australia, or panadine or pana max. I think like there's a million names for it, but it's all the same thing, paracetamol, and it has an interesting would we call it side effect?
What would we call it?
Yeah?
I mean it's definitely wasn't intended, so I guess the side effect. But you know, there's some really interesting things about this drug that range from that to just some of the things that we think we know about it that probably aren't true too, like the fact that it's a good pain killer. So we're going to dig into that a bit.
We are a little bit. If you take panadole, do you take any hankillers?
I did the other day, but very very rarely.
Yeah, me too. I'm not a big fan.
I don't like panadine fort because they make you not poo for about a week. Canadine thoughts no good. If you ever want to clog yourself up forever, Chuck a few of those down your gob take away your headache, and I'll take away your pooing power.
I don't want to do that, because I just bought a squatty potty and that's quite a novelty in this house right there.
How good are they when you change the old angle of the dangle?
Then hey, when you suck.
Around with the biomechanics, if you're hipped and your coal and shit, does it make a difference?
Yeah, I love it.
I love it.
Someone use my tool the other day and then later on they go, plastic thing in your toilet.
That's a squatty potty, bro, That's that's going to revolutionize your life.
Build them.
They weren't in doesn't. I have no idea what you're talking about.
So a squatty potty is a thing that wraps around that. We'll get to the topic at hand in a moment. Fucking hell, we had this big preamble about what we're going to talk about. We're doing none of it. It's like it's almost like a little plastic wrap around footstool for your bog and we sit down and you put your feet on it, and I think there's like one fifty meal which is six inch, two hundred mil which is eight inch, and it elevates your feet so your knees come up, so it's almost like you're squatting. So it only puts your body, your pelvis, your spine, your legs in a position where it's more efficient.
Let's just say that, why why would you want to do that? Because a lot of people get constipated.
Well, then you need to stop eating fiber. We've talked about this before, Craig, stop eating fiber.
They'll be fine.
Oh dear, I don't know that you and the Australia that you and the AMAC eye on that.
No, but one of us is right.
Anyway, squatty potty, if you're unless giving up other than giving up fiber, everyone, if you want to try this, squatty potty, I've done I think two episodes on twoing over the years, so you can look up those now. Before we do a deep dive, we've got we're going to talk about paracetamol and one of the interesting effects of it, I guess. But there's also something interesting I'm not going to say too much other than there's some audio that TIFF's going to edit in with the magic of her fingers. I don't know how she's going to do that. Neither is David or David definitely does I don't. So let's have a listen to that.
So we've all got that bottle in our medicine cabinet, right, you know, the one we reach for without even thinking headache, fever, general, eggs and pans.
Yeah, that little white pill, lasitam minifin, paracetamol tail and all panell Well.
So many names, right, same stuff though, just depends on well, I guess where you are in the world. But it's so common, so familiar. But is there more to this simple pain reliever than meets the eye?
That's what we're diving into today. And you know, even just that difference in meming acetamnafin here in the US and paracetamol everywhere else, it's kind of fascinating, same chemical, different name. It hints that I don't know a story behind this everyday.
Thing, definitely, And we tend to think of it as the safer option, right, I mean compared to asprin or iberprofit like we've been told for years and in always it is. But there's always that if use correctly caveat.
Exactly, and I think that's where we should start a seedamnifin might be over the counter and in everyone's home, but it actually has what's called a narrow therapeutic window.
Neuro therapeutic window. Huh im, Sure I've heard that one before.
All right, there we go. So what was that, David? Those two very smooth professional people talking about paracetamol? Who were they and what were we just listening to?
They were your replacements. So that's the latest innovation in AI, which is that you can take any document, including this article, which is the one I use to create that, and shove it into an AI. In this case, it's the Google Gemini AI, and it will automatically create a podcast type conversation between two people about the contents of the article. So the reason I included it when I posted this article is some people just prefer to get their information that way. Some people don't like reading a two and a half thousand word article, and I suspect I may be talking to one of them, and an easier way for them to get that information is just to hear people do what we're doing, which is chat about it and I found it amazing because when you listen to that all the way through, which people can do by just going to the article on my substack and it's there as part of it is when you listen to it all the way through, it doesn't miss anything. It picks up everything that we're about to talk about. It does it in a really engaging way in a conversation between two people. Admittedly annoying American accent to people, but it does a great conversation, does a great job of talking about the article. And it'll be interesting to hear what your listeners think. Do you and I do a better job talking about this article or do they because I actually found it really quite engaging.
Well, if you and I do a better job, then Google needs have a good look at themselves, because definitely we are not the high watermark.
But so are you saying that.
You just put this written article into a program and with what instruction?
So just turn this into a podcast?
No, I just asked it to give me an audio summary and that's what it produced.
Wow, that is because when I mean, I didn't know that, Like you said, I've been busy all done, and you said, have you listened to the audio and I went no, and then I just listened to ninety seconds. I went, well, this is interesting and they are good. Who are they? And you went essentially, they're robots. So this could be the home straight for the U project.
Let's be honest, Well, the next step might be the end.
The next step, as I mentioned to you off air, is at the moment you don't get a choice about the voices it uses. They're just that bloken and that woman who are American. But you could easily imagine the next step there is going to be that you could supply a voice, so you could say, speak a certain sentence in and then it could create the same thing but using your voice.
And then the Tiff and I like, we could plug in our voices and I could sit in the bean bag and watch bloody Netflix while I'm doing a podcast.
That's right.
I could send you an article you could feed it in and that'd be done.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wonder if they could incorporate swearing, just to make it, you know, believable.
Sure they could.
Yeah, all right, so give us the skinny. Hey, I'm let me just tell you. The article is called the empty Pill Paracetamol Surprising side effect.
And for some of you who are going I think I've heard something.
About this, well done you. We did have a brief chat about it, but I reckon it was probably a good three years ago, and I think we have a very bigger and different audience to them. But for the few of you who have heard some of this before, just call it revision off you go.
Champion, well and just you know, a check that we still get it right. So I think parasito wal is a really interesting painkiller, mostly because it doesn't really work. It's, you know, which is surprising given that you know, twenty five billion pills are downed by Americans every year. You know. In Australia, I think it's something like more than sixty percent of us by it at least once a month. It's it's one of the world's most heavily consumed medicines and consumed for just about anything pain or fever related. Now we're not talking about the anti fever of the anti inflammatory effects of parasitamal today. What we're talking about is the painkilling aspects, and quite a few large recent studies have suggested that it really doesn't do much and it's the kind of thing that can be studied quite well because it's easy to give someone a placebo and give them some paracetamol, and so, unlike many of the things we talk about where you know the thing you're trying to prove might kill someone if you do it, this is easy to study. So and a lot of those studies and then the most recent one is one that came out on back pain just a week or so ago, massive study really well conducted multiple control arms where people are being given placebos and paracetamol, not just that they're testing lots of things for back pain. I mean, we could talk about this another day, but what they found in that study is essentially there's not much that works for back pain. And I'm talking about low back pain. A lot of people have low back pain. Almost nothing works, including paracetamol. It turns out, so and essentially what a lot of the studies are arriving at with paracetamol is any effect that is perceived to have occurred is usually just a placeivedle effect where the person feels better because they believe they've taken something for it. And that's not to discount that that is a real effect, or as they often say, in the studies that the effect is statistically significant yet clinically minimal, meaning a statistician might find it interesting, but the person suffering the pain probably doesn't. There are some kinds of pain where it can be effective, so it's been found to be modestly helpful for some types of headache and also some sorts of physical pain caused by over exercise and things like that. But it's overall not a great pain killer. But it doesn't has a stop just taking it by the truckload, and it's easily the most sold pain killer in the Western world. But its history of getting to there is quite interesting too. It really only got there from the start of this century onwards because aspirin had a bit of a problem. So last century, the big, the big painkiller was aspirin. You know, that was what everyone talk that was what everyone trusted. And it was because some concerns were raised about paracetamol being used in children who were suffering from certain viral conditions that they could get a condition called raise ariy es, which is a brain swelling thing, quite dangerous and nasty. And when that started to become clear, a bit of a panic started about using as sorry not paracetamol. Doing aspirin did that, and how a bit of a panic started about using aspirin, and paracetamol jumped. The makers of paracenamole jumped on that market opportunity and have really come to own the market since. So you get the picture. Everybody takes it all the time. It's massive, huge market, not particularly effective, but that doesn't seem to bother at anyone. It's what we all take. By the way, people are wondering what they should be taking. Thes NSAIDs are probably a better choice, that's overprofen, but they have their own concerns. You've got to watch out for overdosing there. Overdosing, by the way, is a real problem for paracetamol. It is the primary cause of acute liver failure in both Britain, Australia and the United States every year. So overdosing paracetamol, either intentionally or accidentally, and people might say, what about it? Why would anyone be doing it intentionally? Because it's a preferred form of suicide in some places, and so although it's a bit hard to disentangle whether it was intentional or not when people are overdosing, but one hundred. There are one hundred thousand overdoses a year in the United States from paracetamol, and that's because it's got a fairly thin line between effective painkilling capability and just a bit too much, because it and just a bit too much can wreckt the liver, which can result in very dangerous acute overdoses, which can often be lethal. So we've got this thing which is potentially quite dangerous, is taken by billions, well certainly hundreds of millions of US, and taken in quantities of billions, and yet it doesn't really isn't all that effective against the things that we think it is. But the interesting bit I found was that there were some studies done in the last five or six years that have talked that have looked at does parasnamol have an effect other than on pain, and in fact, does it affect what I would call social pain? So that is whether you feel socially left out of a group, So if there's a group activity going on, and whether you feel social harm from So, say you're in a group with three or four people and everyone else in the group is talking to each other and ignoring you, do you feel upset by that do you feel you know, harm from that, And there's really some quite convincing studies that show yes. And these are placebo controlled studies once again, where they are giving people parasnamol and they're giving others percebo, and they're measuring the degree to which people say they feel disaffected by certain behaviors that they're putting through testing. They're finding yes, in fact, they do the people who are taking the paracetamol feel the pain less, They don't.
Care subjects of psychometric testing. That sounds like psychology.
It does.
But I, of course did then go and look at the extended armor of that study that put them in a functional MRI machine. Otherwise otherwise I would have discounted it entirely. But yes, even when they jammed them into an MRI machine and had them play a virtual game that excluded them, they saw the bits of the brain that are associated with social acceptance being affected in the people that were on paracetamol. So what I was doing was turning down their sensitivity to oxytocin induced acceptance. Meaning when people left you out or mean to you, you didn't feel it as much. You didn't care for women. It meant they became males in essence, because males are much less sensitive to oxytocin any way, and for males it means they became psychopaths. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit, but it's the same effect, which is that, in essence, you lose empathy. So what it was doing was affecting empathy. And to extend that study, a whole different group of researchers said, does this work the other way? Does it affect positive empathy? So we don't just have negative empathy where we feel others pain or we feel pain because of the way people treat us. We also have positive empathy where something good happens for somebody and we feel good too. Yes, and psychopaths listening won't know what I'm talking about, but take it from me. Normal humans feel that when good things happen to other people, they feel good too.
Psychopaths, that's right.
I just need to you know, it's like having subtitles. You need to stand that one in twenty of your listeners are psychopaths and they have no idea what we're talking about. So you got to pull.
Those people right now, going, fuck you, we are not you're a psychopath now the people, the people who were saying, I don't know what he's talking about.
Ah, the cycles. So anyway, so that experiment once again quality can really high quality study. And they did the same thing, gave some people paracetamoal, gave others pacebo to see what happened, and once again tested it again with functional MRI to make sure that they weren't just imagining this stuff, and same thing was happening, same parts of the brain non activating and coordinating with what people were reporting about what they felt. So they were genuinely not feeling as good about someone. They knew that something good was happening, and they could see that something good was happening for the other person, but they didn't care. So that's interesting. What that tells us is that parasnomol has an effect on the parts of the brain that are involved in empathy, the exact same parts of the brain that do not work in psychopaths. So what we are saying here is that you've got a temporary empathy pill or psychopath pill here is that when you take this stuff that doesn't really work very well, what you're actually doing is dulling down your empathy. You're turning yourself into a psychopath. You become less caring, you call, you are less concerned about the welfare of others for the time that you were on the dose of this pill. The other thing the studies found is that it was only for the duration of the pill. So you know, if it says on the pack this will last four hours, then that's how long it lasts, so that we're back to normal after four hours. But it was only while you were taking it. So don't ask someone for a favor or assistance or to care about you if they've just taken a paracetamol. Is to take away from that, because they're temporary psychopaths.
That's the name of the show.
What about the converse of that, where we have to go and do something that might be really emotionally confronting and psychologically confronting, something that's very difficult.
Might be a good idea.
I take a couple of pan and dole, do that thing that's really emotionally confronting and difficult.
Yeah, if you're going to have.
Like that sounds like not the worst strategy, Like I need to go and have these very difficult emotional conversations or deal with this thing that's confronting for me. So I'll just turn myself into a mild psychopath between now and dinner.
Yeah, look, there's no reason why that wouldn't work. That This science is pretty solid. It's it's been well verified. The other interesting study that I came is one where they noticed that there's been a definitive lack or decline in empathy in college students in the United States. So there's a study that's done every year where they get the same age of child every year, so a first year college student, and they've been doing it since the nineteen seventies where they just go through every year and they ask the same set of questions about how they feel about other people and other things and all that sort of thing, and they chart that as an empathy score, if you like. And that empathy score has been pretty much the same up until about the early two thousands when it was started dropping like a stone. So empathy is off about forty percent on that study since the start of the century in the same age of college student. And the study authors said, we don't know what's causing this. This is weird, right, Why have empathy gone out the window? And I don't know coincidence. The takeoff of paracetamol as a mass drug used in the billions in the population happened at about the same time that people throughout the population have lost empathy. Yeah, you know, it's a big look. Correlation is not causation, but it's not. I don't think it's a long way to go there. We suddenly are taking this thing in the bindins and it has a demonstrated, proven effect on empathy. It's not a big reach to say it's making the population in general less empathetic. So if you think people are ruder and careless now than in the olden days, maybe it isn't just kids these days. Maybe it's just that they're taking a pill that destroys empathy.
And so you were saying before that typically women are more empathetic than men.
More sensitive to oxytocin.
Yes, do you think there's a you know, there's a testosterone link to that, Like the more testosterone we have, the less empathetic we are.
Or vice versa.
Yes, yeah, yeah, so testosterone interferes with the action of oxytocin, So testosterone impairs oxytocin. Now, there's probably pretty good evolutionary reasons for this the reason why women invented men in the first place, you know, I mean, the Bible kind of got it wrong because from a biological perspective, the human race were female, and then they created a subset from an evolutionary perspective which was designed to be dispensable and more rugged and hard wearing, dispensable because it doesn't actually carry the children. So you know, you can have as many males as you like, it doesn't you know, it's irrelevant the important ones, the ones carrying the children.
Do you look at t smiling like aier cap.
This is a favorite part of any podcast. Ever, Well, no, it's by design.
You make the four wheel drive version, you're going to lose a few, but they're therefore doing the rugged stuff, you know, and it doesn't affect the ability to reproduce because you only really need one that's capable of reproduction and it's all good. So you know, that is the biological history of males, so disappointing as it is. Where the four wheel drive off road version of females that they created to do the stuff that didn't matter if you lost a few. And part of that, yeah, and part of that, which is of course why male injury and death rates are much much higher than female ones because part of testosterone's action is that we have lower impulse control, which means we're more likely to do dangerous things than a female is. And one of the things it interferes with is the reception of oxytocin, which is the communal feeling between humans, which is that we are concerned about what others think and the welfare of others. And if you don't, it's also a good idea to turn that down a bit if you're expecting people to go out and risk their lives for you.
Yeah, wow, so bloody interesting.
Kind of went off topic there a bit, but yeah, the history of males for you.
Yeah, no, I love it.
So the article on Substack by David is called the empathy Pill paracetamol paracetamol surprising side effect? Is there any Is there a little bow you want to put on that at the end.
I think it's important to know these things, particularly in I mean, I think this is the second highest drug on the PBS. So the Australians spend vast amounts of money on this drug every year and a lot of us are taking a lot of it and it's important to know. Hey, a side effect of this thing is that you care less about those around you while you're on it.
Oh dear, that's a good thing. I don't take it. I already don't care. That's not true, is it, Tiff, That's not true. I'm a big softy.
Yeah.
Just always check if he's taken some parasnamoor before you ask him for a pay, right, Yeah, just just gonna have a chat. But I just want to check have you taken any parasitamile in the last hour or so.
It's save everybody some time and just don't ask. So mate, we appreciate what say. Goodbye fair but as always we appreciate you. Thanks for coming to hang out, you
Know, pleasure Jack, Thanks buddy, see ya.
