Baywatch, Yes, But Also Weed and Burnout
You watch the bay, I'll eye up the breakthroughs
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Alexandra Paul and Dr. Cynthia Bulik on the pod
It’s Eating Disorder Awareness Week and we are ready. This week’s podcast brings a really intriguing story about how bulimia unfolded in the life of a TV and movie star and a report on how scientists are resetting what we know about how eating disorders operate.
First, Alexandra Paul was one of the stars of Baywatch, also starring in Dragnet with Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd. She tells me about how she grew up in a household that severely restricted sugar and how eventually she craved it, moving up from surreptitious bowls of cereal in the middle of the night to full-blown binging and purging in boarding school and on to her modeling and acting career. It’s an interview we first aired a few years ago and I’ve always been impressed by how Alexandra lays out the internal logic of this mental disorder. She understands why she was doing the things she did, she talks about how she was able to live with this habit for many years, and explains how and why things eventually broke down. After the interview, I share an update from Alexandra about how recent time spent caring for her mother threatened to reignite a lot of the habits again and what she did about that.
Then, I’m honored to talk with Dr. Cynthia Bulik, one of the leading experts in eating disorders in the world today. For the past decade she has been splitting her time between the University of North Carolina and Sweden, running multiple institutes on this very topic. Dr. Bulik explains that her research has pointed to much stronger genetic evidence for eating disorders than we’ve ever had before. So it’s not strictly a matter of peer pressure or pop culture imagery or moms. Scientists are identifying genetic material that makes a person predisposed to things like anorexia nervosa or bulimia. She says for most people, when you burn more calories than you consume, your body signals distress. But for people with these conditions, the body loves it, it’s like heroin and, yeah, addictive and dangerous.
Strong link between teen weed use and adult psychosis
If you listen to the show, you might have heard me use the analogy of the chicken and the egg. It comes up a lot when talking about two phenomena that appear close together. Which causes which?
Well, here we are again with reports of a really strong link between teenagers who consume a lot of marijuana and people encountering psychosis later in life.
They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn’t use cannabis.
Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.
What we don’t know - and I’m not sure we can know it - is whether the conditions that existed for psychosis later on led the teens to medicate through weed or make weed pleasurable OR if the weed caused them to become psychotic.
I’ll be honest, when legal recreational marijuana was being debated, I was a bit nervous. I grew up around a LOT of people who smoked a LOT of weed. Like daily and in huge amounts. And a disproportionate number of those people had some severe mental health problems later on so the idea of it being more readily available made me nervous. This was anecdotal, of course, but I saw a link then. Still: chicken or egg?
Are we really overdiagnosing mental illness, though?
So here’s how it went down so far:
1. Mental illness exists for centuries and people don’t talk much about it or if they do it’s in the massive taboo way.
2. A few years ago, people decide to talk about it a lot more and be more open. We push back.
3. Even more recently, there’s a pushback. People wonder if we’ve gone too far the other way and overdiagnosed it. Not every problem you have is a mental illness, they say, some shit’s just difficult and you need to deal with it. We push back on the push back.
Then there is the important possibility that things really might be getting worse, especially for young people. Mental illness is often triggered or exacerbated by stressful lives, and there’s plenty of evidence that life over the last 15 years has been hard. There has been a rise in financial insecurity, major geopolitical and environmental events, and the lingering impact of Covid. Services that might once have been protective against mental health problems, like youth community provision, have been stripped of funding. Smartphones and social media have also become a big part of most people’s lives. That alone cannot explain the change we are seeing and should not be used as a scapegoat, but it is likely part of the picture.
Let’s stay with the young people here. They’re BURNED OUT.
The BBC has a story on the massive burnout happening in England, which is a lot like the United States.
The charity Mental Health UK reports that two in five (39%) of young workers aged 18 to 24 took time off due to poor mental health caused by stress in 2025.
“This group is facing pressures both inside and outside work, alongside an uncertain job market where AI is increasingly seen as a threat to some entry-level roles,” says the charity’s chief executive Brian Dow.
“For many, the social contract that rewarded previous generations for hard work is breaking down,” he adds.
Younger workers aged 18 to 24 were second most likely to report stress due to money worries (64%), behind 65% of those aged 25 to 34, who agreed.
Checking in on your employees all the time except they’re all AI agents.
Well, this is fucking horrifying:
A friend left a party at 9:30 on a Saturday. Not tired. Not sick. He wanted to get back to his agents.
Nobody questions it anymore. Half the room is thinking the same thing. The other half are probably checking the progress of their agents. At a party.
All the parties are sober now. Young people don’t drink because they’re going back to work after. Not inspired by Bryan Johnson, although that’s probably a factor. The buzz they want now runs on tokens per day.
I’m not even sure what “token” and “agent” mean here but I get the terrible gist.
Waking up and checking what your agents produced overnight is the first thing now. Before coffee. Before texts. You open your laptop and grade homework you assigned in your sleep. Some of it is good. Most needs rework. But you start shipping a plan before you sleep just so you can wake up to more code written overnight. Saturdays became uninterrupted build windows. No meetings, no Slack, twelve hours of you and your agents. Sunday morning X is all terminal screenshots and shipping receipts. “What’d you ship this weekend?” replaced “what’d you do this weekend?”
The anxiety is rational, which is why it sticks. Every week some new benchmark drops that makes last month’s workflow feel prehistoric. Codex ships overnight processing. Opus gets faster. Context windows double. None of it reduces the pressure. It multiplies it. You can do more now. And someone already is. The window to be first at anything feels like it’s shrinking by the day. Literally, by the day.
Simeon Lipman from Antiques Roadshow on Sleeping with Celebrities
Aw yeah, bring on the PBS voice to get you to sleep. We even talk about the Billy Ripken “Fuck Face” card.
We’re hundreds of episodes into Sleeping with Celebrities but we’re just now getting a PBS voice on? I know. We’re so sorry. But this will make up for it. The brilliant, engaging, and funny Simeon Lipman from Antiques Roadshow knows more about baseball cards and, actually, punk rock memorabilia than most people will ever know about anything. And his knowledge includes a whole lot of arcane data. Let him regale with tales of Jimmy Claxton and of Simeon’s long quest to acquire that one Billy Ripken card. You know the one I’m talking about. Yes, baseball can be exciting, and, yes, punk rock even more so, but we promise you that the dulcet tones of Simeon Lipman (current PBS voice) and John Moe (former public radio voice) will zonk you out faster than a fastball to the head and with much less pain.
I love you, John Moe! Mainly because of your efforts to help with mental health. I have been a faithful listener for about 5 years. Yes, I do donate monthly, not a whole lot, but what I can afford.
I couldn’t care less about baseball, but even I want that baseball card!