Charlie Kirk is worked up. “The world is in flames, and Bidenomics is a complete and total disaster,” the conservative influencer said during a recent episode of his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show. “But it can’t and won’t ruin my day,” he continued. “Why? ’Cause I start my day with a hot America First cup of Blackout Coffee.” Liberals have brought about economic Armageddon, but first, coffee.

Listening to Kirk’s show—which is among the most popular podcasts on the right—can be unsettling, even if you are a conservative. In the past year, the founder of Turning Point USA has uploaded episodes with titles such as “The Great Replacement Isn’t Theory, It’s Reality” and “The Doctors Plotting to Mutilate Your Kids.” He has also conducted friendly interviews with a blogger who once described slavery as “a natural human relationship,” and discussed crime stats with the white supremacist Steve Sailer in a way that veered toward race science. (Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Kirk, declined to comment for this story.)

But the advertisements Kirk reads are sometimes more dire and polemical than what he and his guests talk about during the show. “Rest assured knowing that you’re ready for whatever the globalists throw at us next,” Kirk said at the end of one ad for medical-emergency kits. These ads espouse conservative values and talking points, mostly in service of promoting brands such as Blackout Coffee, which sells a “2nd Amendment” medium-roast blend and “Covert Op Cold Brew.” The commercial breaks sounded like something from an alternate universe. The more I listened to them, the more I came to understand that that was the point.

Some brands, of course, speak the language of Democrats, touting their climate commitments and diversity efforts. But when I listened to left-of-center podcasts, including Pod Save America, Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, and MSNBC’s Prosecuting Donald Trump, I mostly heard ads from an assortment of nonpartisan brands such as Ford, Jefferson’s Ocean Aged at Sea Bourbon, eHarmony, and SimpliSafe. The closest equivalent I found was Cariuma, a sustainable shoe brand that sponsors Pod Save America.

The right, meanwhile, has long hawked products that you don’t typically see advertised on mainstream outlets and shows. In 2007, the historian Rick Perlstein chronicled a far-fetched investment opportunity involving stem cells and placentas advertised on the far-right website Newsmax. Supplements and gold have become part of conservative-advertising canon, as the writer Sam Kriss summed up in his recent essay on the ads that appear in National Review’s print magazine: “The same apocalyptic note [ran] through all these ads. The hospitals will shut down, the planet will freeze over, you personally are getting old and dying—and now your money might be worthless if you haven’t put it all in gold.”

Some of Kirk’s ads hit the same beats. At times, they sound a little jarring: “You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply.com. Yet as the world of right-wing-coded products has expanded, so has the weirdness of ads for them. “For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America’s only Christian-conservative wireless provider,” started another ad. Switching to Patriot Mobile, Kirk explained, would mean that “you’re sending the message that you support free speech, religious liberty, the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, our military veterans and first-responder heroes” while getting “the same coverage you’ve been accustomed to without funding the left.” How? By renting access to “all three major networks” via a business deal with T-Mobile, a company that has positioned itself as at least nominally left of center on some issues.

If listeners are feeling charitable, Kirk has options for them too. “Hey, everybody, exciting news. Very, very important. Uh, we are saving babies with PreBorn,” Kirk opened up a dollar-matching promo for a group raising money for ultrasounds, apparently having managed to quantify the precise dollar amount it would take to stop a woman from having an abortion. “For a one-time, $15,000 gift, you’ll provide not just one ultrasound machine, but two, saving thousands of babies for years to come; $280 saves 10 babies; $28 a month saves a baby a month, for less than a dollar a day.”

Conservative podcasts have become mega popular in recent years, and are some of the most trusted sources of news on the right: Kirk’s show ranks as the 12th-most-popular “news” podcast on Spotify right now. The show is also syndicated on radio stations across the country and posted on YouTube, where Kirk has 1.7 million subscribers. And although conservative influencers including Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, and Jack Posobiec also promote gold or supplements (or both) on their own shows, Kirk’s ads were the most varied of the conservative-podcast ads I listened to. Some conservatives, however, want no part of these kinds of ads. Earlier this month, the right-wing YouTuber Steven Crowder made fun of his contemporaries for hawking “shitty supplements.” Most of it is “selling you crap you don’t need from people who don’t care about you!” Crowder yelled at the end of a four-minute rant on the matter.

The ads reflect the new paradigm of advertising. In previous decades, ads had to appeal to whole segments of the population—and products were made with that in mind. That some readers of Vanity Fair might want a Givenchy handbag, and some readers of Sports Illustrated might want Callaway golf clubs, was as targeted as ads could get. Now the country has fractured into partisan subgroups, and companies have access to reams of analytics that enable them to target ever more precise demographics. Through shows like Kirk’s, brands such as Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile can reach their relatively niche audiences more easily than ever. (Blackout Coffee and Patriot Mobile did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But something else is happening too. Kirk and the rest of the conservative-podcast ecosystem aren’t just selling wares. The ads, with some exceptions, are not like ads for beer or pickup trucks that detract from the action while one watches, say, a football game. Rather, conservative ads are constitutive. They enhance and reinforce the arguments that Kirk and others are already making on their podcasts—that Black people are prone to crime, whiteness is getting excised, abortion is murder, and the United States is unstable and on the verge of collapse. The commercial breaks are the final screws needed to construct a self-contained conservative chamber. Kirk has ensconced himself in a world in which he’ll likely never face external pressures to self-moderate in the way that, say, Rush Limbaugh occasionally did when he went too far beyond the tastes of mainstream advertisers.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t read this if you were a Rush Limbaugh fan]

When you’re listening to Kirk talk about Blackout Coffee, you can also look down and see the steam coming off your own cup of Blackout Coffee, and relax while its caffeine helps you “be awake not woke.” You can open a new browser tab and check in on your portfolio, whose wealth managers are endorsed by Kirk, and then look at the price of gold and think about your own supply procured from a company that Kirk himself vetted “from top to bottom.” You can even stop listening to Kirk, go out to your backyard, and make a call, knowing that you’re doing so as a freedom-loving conservative with your Patriot Mobile phone plan.

On The Charlie Kirk Show, there is no longer a gap between the real world and what is playing inside listeners’ headphones. Kirk’s fans can make fewer and fewer compromises on their views and burrow themselves more deeply in the womb of reactionary politics. And with the coupon code “Charlie,” listeners can get a discount to buy something else that will allow them to further immerse themselves inside of it.

When patients start on the latest obesity drugs, they find that their food cravings drop away, and then the pounds do too. But when patients go off the drugs, the gears shift into reverse: The food cravings creep back, and then the pounds do too. Within a year of stopping semaglutide—better known by its brand names Wegovy or Ozempic—people regain, on average, two-thirds of the weight they lost. Tirzepatide, also known as Zepbound or Mounjaro, follows a similar pattern. And so the conventional medical wisdom now holds that these obesity drugs are meant to be taken indefinitely, possibly for a lifetime.

To pharmaceutical companies selling the blockbuster drugs—known collectively as GLP-1 drugs, after the natural hormone they mimic—that might be a pretty good proposition. To patients paying more than $1,000 a month out of pocket, not so much. Most Americans simply cannot afford the cost month after month after month.

This has forced some doctors to get creative, devising regimens to sub in cheaper, if less well-known, alternatives. GLP-1 drugs do work remarkably well, inducing more weight loss more quickly than any other obesity medication on the market, but some doctors now wonder whether patients need to be on GLP-1 drugs, specifically, forever. “​​What if we do a short-term investment, use it for six months to a year to get 50 pounds off?” asks Sarah Ro, an obesity-medicine doctor and the director of the University of North Carolina Physicians Network Weight Management Program. Then, as she and other doctors are now exploring, patients might transition to older, less expensive alternatives for long-term weight maintenance.

In fact, Ro has already helped patients—she estimates hundreds—make the switch out of financial necessity. Few of her patients in rural North Carolina have insurance that covers the new obesity drugs, and few can afford to continually pay out of pocket. In April, many also lost coverage when North Carolina’s health insurance for state employees abruptly cut off GLP-1 drugs for obesity. Ro switched her patients to older drugs such as topiramate, phentermine, metformin, and bupropion/naltrexone, plus lifestyle counseling. It’s not exactly an ideal solution, as these medications are generally considered less effective—they lead to about half as much weight loss as GLP-1 drugs do—but it is a far less expensive one. When prescribed as generics, Ro told me, a month’s supply of one of these drugs might cost as little as $10.

Jamy Ard, an obesity-medicine doctor at Wake Forest University, has also switched regimens for patients who lost coverage of GLP-1 drugs after retiring and getting on Medicare, which currently does not pay for any drugs to treat obesity. (Like many researchers in the field, Ard has received grants and consulting fees from companies behind obesity drugs.) Doctors I spoke with didn’t know of any studies about switching from GLP-1 drugs to older ones, but Ard says this research is a practical necessity in the United States. With GLP-1 medications exploding in popularity, more and more patients taking them will suddenly lose coverage when they hit retirement age and go on Medicare. “Now I’ve got to figure out, well, how do I treat them?” he told me.

Long-term data on the older drugs themselves are, in fact, pretty sparse, despite the drugs having been available for years and years. Until Ozempic came along, obesity drugs were not a lucrative market, so companies weren’t interested in funding the long and very expensive trials that follow patients for several years. “Studies like that cost a fortune,” Louis Aronne, an obesity-medicine doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me. Some of the longest-term follow-up data about these drugs come from patients at his practice in Manhattan—not a representative population, he admits—which he published in a five-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health. (Aronne has also received grants and consulting fees from the makers of obesity drugs.)

How patients do after switching from GLP-1 to older drugs is entirely anecdotal, but so far outcomes do seem to vary quite a bit. A small minority of patients who stop GLP-1 injections are actually able to maintain their weight on diet and exercise, without any additional medications. Others may find that the older pills are simply not effective for them. In Ro’s experience, about 50 to 60 percent of her patients have so far successfully kept the weight off using one or more older drugs, on top of lifestyle changes such as cutting out fast food and sugary sodas.

The best drug to switch to may also depend on the patient. Each of the older medications works differently, hitting different biological pathways. The combination of naltrexone and bupropion, for example, makes food less pleasurable and seems to work especially well in people with a tendency toward emotional eating, Ard said. Topiramate, meanwhile, makes carbonated drinks unpleasant, which could help patients who drink a lot of soda. The older drugs also have different side effects. Aronne rattled off for me a list of health risks that might rule out a particular drug for a particular patient: seizures for bupropion, or glaucoma for topiramate. Finding the most effective and best-tolerated drug for a patient may take some trial and error.

Doctors are now discovering that some patients can maintain the weight they lost on lower or less frequent doses of GLP-1 drugs. “For the first time in my career, we’re lowering the dose of medicines,” Aronne said. Just reducing the dose doesn’t save money, though, as lower-dose injection pens cost the same as those with higher doses. However, by instead extending the time between doses from the standard seven days to a longer 10-day interval, doctors told me, some patients have been able to stretch their supplies.

But tapering off obesity medications entirely, GLP-1 or otherwise, will probably not be possible for most patients. Weight loss tends to trigger a powerful set of compensatory mechanisms in the body, which evolved long ago to protect us from starvation. The more weight we lose, the more the body fights back. The fight never quite goes away, and most patients will likely require some kind of continued intervention just to stay at a lower weight. Long-term weight maintenance has always been the “holy grail” of obesity treatment, Susan Yanovski, a co-director of the ​​Office of Obesity Research at the National Institutes of Health told me. The best maintenance strategy—whether it involves GLP-1 drugs, and at what dose—may ultimately be pretty individual. What works best and for whom still needs to be studied. “These are really good research questions,” Yanovski said. But they are not necessarily the questions that pharmaceutical companies focused on developing new meds are most keen to answer.

In time, the current crop of GLP-1 drugs will eventually become available as generics, too, and cost may no longer drive patients to seek out cheaper alternatives. But for now, it very much does.

Even if a highly anticipated agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia never comes to fruition, its rumored announcement seems sure to do at least one thing: further isolate Israel within the international community.

Over the past few years, the Biden administration has been working with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, on a wide-ranging deal to strengthen ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia as part of a broader agreement in which Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel.

Saudi Arabia is asking for a closer defense relationship with the United States and access to Washington’s most advanced weapons systems, but it wants more than that. It wants the U.S. to help it develop a civilian nuclear-power program, relax scrutiny of the transfer of sensitive technologies, and expedite the review of Saudi investments in U.S. technology firms and crucial infrastructure.

Based on conversations with senior Saudi and U.S. officials over the past several weeks, and bearing in mind that none of us has yet seen the details of the prospective deal, I am not yet convinced that a deal would be in America’s interest—or even necessary, given the already deepening commercial links between the two countries.

[Read: The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one]

But I am also not convinced that any senior Saudi decision maker—not least the one who really counts, the crown prince—believes a deal is possible. The Saudis I have spoken with have made clear they will recognize Israel only if Israel consents to creating irreversible momentum toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Those same Saudis, meanwhile, are impressively clear-eyed about Israeli politics at the moment. They understand that few, if any, Israelis are in a mood to consider the creation of a Palestinian state, and they understand that Israeli-government policies over the past three decades might have made such a state impossible in the West Bank, anyway.

So on the one hand, the Saudis deserve some credit for doing what would have been unthinkable a decade ago: making a desire to eventually normalize ties with Israel the de facto policy of the kingdom. But on the other hand, there is no real, immediate cost to the Saudis for doing so—not when they know that Israel will not accept their one condition.

This deal is setting Israel up to be the fall guy. The United States and Saudi Arabia are likely going to herald a potentially transformative agreement that Israel appears almost certain to reject—in front of a global audience that has lost patience with that country’s policies toward and treatment of the Palestinians.  

The Saudis will likely not be overly disappointed, or surprised, by Israel’s rejection of their terms. They might even enjoy it. Indeed, 50 years after Israel’s then–Foreign Minister Abba Eban lamented that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” the Saudis and other Arabs will delight in throwing that famous quote back at Israel.  

Even in the best of times, Israeli political debates can be maddeningly solipsistic. Henry Kissinger quipped that Israel “doesn’t do foreign policy—only domestic politics.” But these are not the best of times. In the seven months since the horrific attacks of October 7, the gulf between how Israel defines its security needs and how the world defines those same needs has grown like never before. My conversations with Israeli friends—almost all of whom believe that their country has basically done the right thing in Gaza, even as they now demand a strategy for concluding the campaign—are invariably tense. Israel is waging a war of punishment against the people of Gaza, and Israelis have been largely shielded from the images of the suffering and destruction that the rest of us see.

When the Biden administration made the relatively modest decision to condition some military aid to Israel in advance of an assault on Rafah, Israeli leaders responded with defiance, hurling abuse at the American president—“Hamas ❤️ Biden,” one right-wing minister tweeted—and boasting that Israel would “stand alone” if necessary.

But Israel has not stood alone for a very long time. For years, Israelis might have told themselves, and Americans, that they can provide for their own security—if only the United States would help arm them. But the Jordanian and Egyptian armies have long defended Israel’s southern and eastern flanks, while the United States provides roughly a quarter of Israel’s defense budget and has elaborate and well-rehearsed contingency plans to defend Israel in an emergency.  

That U.S. troops would someday be called upon to defend Israel in a regional war has seemed inevitable. That moment arrived in April, when the United States led a coalition of nations—including Jordan, France, and the United Kingdom—in repelling an Iranian aerial assault on Israel. A precedent had been shattered: American men and women were in the line of fire, protecting Israel from its enemies.

They did so, of course, because Israel does not, in fact, stand alone, nor is Israel an island unto itself: It is part of the international community and a broader regional security system. Its decisions affect not only its own citizens but millions of people across the region, and billions of dollars in international trade. And the United States and its allies have no interest in either Israel or Iran dragging them into a wider conflagration that will affect those lives, or that commerce.

The Saudis and the Biden administration both seem determined to teach Israel this lesson. If Israel, as expected, rejects a deal, the Saudis will quickly pivot, telling Biden’s negotiators that the same long-term bilateral agreement that made sense within the context of a deal with Israel would surely make sense on its own. Riyadh’s point about Israel and its place in the region will have been made, and the Biden administration will have helped make it.