Like smartphones and internet use, GLP-1 medicines are rapidly being adopted in the U.S.

As usage increases, GLP-1 driven changes will scale from the individual to the broader society.

GLP-1 medicines will impact society from young to old, across physical, mental, social, and cultural areas.

Rosa stood at the jeweler's counter and held out her hand for the second time in three years.

"Same ring?" the jeweler asked, though he already knew the answer. He'd resized it for her once before, 18 months into her GLP-1 journey, when it had started slipping past her knuckle at the grocery store. Now it was loose again. "Business has never been better," he said, almost apologetically, sliding it onto the sizing mandrel. He didn't have to explain what he meant. Half his appointments these days were some version of this.

Rosa didn't think much of it at the time. But it was also a sign that something was happening. Something much larger than her own hand.

The Coming GLP-1 Tsunami

In 2024, about 3 percent of U.S. adults were taking a GLP-1 medication for weight loss. Two years later, that number soared to 11 percent, with 15 percent (almost 1 in 6 people) reporting having used one at some point. Some projections put usage at 13 percent to 21 percent of U.S. adults within the next several years—somewhere between 30 and 50 million people. Whatever the exact figure turns out to be, the direction is not in question.1

GLP-1 medicines affect more than waistlines. For many, their psychosocial effects are equally profound: food noise, mental health, relationships, the very sense of who someone is becoming. But as these individual transformations scale into the collective population, it's worth asking: If a single brain can be changed this much, what happens when tens of millions of brains change in the same direction?

Consider this question the way you might think of a piece written in 1995 called "America on the Internet." Nobody in 1995 correctly predicted everything. Nobody guessed Amazon, or Zoom, or a smartphone in every pocket. Some of what follows will look obvious in hindsight. Some of it will look a little ridiculous. That's the nature of reading the tea leaves this early. We're writing it anyway, because the fun is in the forecasting, not in getting every detail right.

On her way home, Rosa stopped at the store she's shopped at for 20 years. It didn't look like it used to. The produce section had expanded, the dairy case had grown, and an entire new refrigerated wall was devoted to preportioned lean proteins that hadn't existed the last time........

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