0:00 - Introduction
4:21 - The Ongoing Opioid Crisis
9:48 - Historical Context of Opioid Use
19:05 - Financial Judgments in Recent Years
25:23 - The Future's Documentation of Present Actions
35:02 - Quality in Society
39:26 - Retirement Savings Crisis
49:49 - Incentives in Healthcare
1:05:53 - Sleep Practices and Medical Field Evolution
1:16:36 - The Evolution of Health Insurance Systems and Society
1:26:20 - Gender Roles and Societal Impact on Health
Stefan starts the episode by engaging the audience and sharing intriguing articles before delving into a discussion on the opioid crisis. He reveals shocking facts about its history and impact, pointing out deceptive practices of pharmaceutical companies and the devastating consequences of widespread addiction. The conversation transitions to the importance of physical health, stressing the significance of movement and exercise in preventing health issues. Stefan welcomes audience feedback, shares insights on organ donations related to drug overdose deaths, and reflects on personal health experiences, emphasizing the complexity of the opioid crisis and the need to prioritize well-being.
The focus shifts as I delve into a thought-provoking discussion on the correlation between age and weight, sharing personal experiences and engaging with a caller's story on lower back pain. We then explore the costs associated with living the American dream in the current economic climate, discussing inflation's impact on savings and the concept of fiat currency. The importance of learning from historical events and maintaining standards in the pursuit of freedom is highlighted, drawing on examples from literature and art. The conversation concludes with a philosophical reflection on the value of a good conscience.
Continuing the discussion, I emphasize the significance of accountability and the enforcement of rules within society, advocating for voluntarism to foster a more logical and morally consistent community. Examples from industries like restaurants and healthcare demonstrate the importance of voluntary customer support in upholding quality standards. We touch on retirees' financial planning challenges, stressing the need for improved retirement savings strategies and the economic incentives within the healthcare system, underscoring the importance of preventive care. The call for deeper understanding of societal issues and proactive solutions remains a key focus.
Reflecting on past experiences in healthcare, I highlight the importance of incentivizing doctors to prioritize preventive care over treating illnesses, aligning their interests with overall societal well-being. A proposed model suggests compensating doctors based on patients' health outcomes to promote wellness-focused practices. Emphasizing the economic rewards of maintaining good health through proper sleep, exercise, and diet, a rational healthcare system should prioritize prevention and healthy behaviors. The aim is to create a positive cycle of well-being and reduce healthcare costs in the long run.
Stefan returns to discuss the financial burdens of exercise, advocating for a system that financially rewards healthy practices and emphasizes prevention in healthcare. Critiquing the stress-filled nature of contemporary society, he advocates for a shift towards voluntary stresses rather than imposed ones. The profit-driven healthcare system's lack of incentives for avoiding diseases like diabetes is highlighted, along with the impact of health insurance tied to employment on individuals' job freedom. Stefan calls for a society that rewards good health practices and shifts the focus towards prevention rather than treatment to promote overall well-being.
Concluding the episode, the conversation delves into the influence of health insurance and societal changes on healthcare, addressing how regulations against denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions impacted premium costs. The discussion extends to topics of women's empowerment, beauty standards, and societal roles throughout history, exploring how incentives shape behaviors. Reflecting on the availability of health and nutritional information juxtaposed with declining health trends, engagement with the audience is encouraged to contribute to the show's growth and upkeep.
[0:00] All right, yeah, I just wanted to drop by, say hi, hope you're all doing well, and if you have things on your mind, I am more than thrilled above to hear all about them, and of course I've read some interesting stuff today, which I'm happy to share with you, but I turn this over, if you, you know, you might be muted, you might want to unmute, but I'm all ears if you have something you want to talk about. it.
[0:25] Well, I found some interesting articles today that I wanted to talk about. The opiate crisis, boy, did you know, did you know, I didn't know this at all. Did you know that one out of 10 Americans has a family member who died from the opioid, like died from opioid poison? Isn't that wild? One out of ten Americans has a family member who's died from opiates. And it was an article I was reading about a guy who was told as a doctor, he said, he was told, oh, you know, it's not that addictive. Opioids aren't that addictive. And he's like, well, what about the Civil War veterans? Which is something I didn't know about. I mean, it kind of makes sense in hindsight, of course, right? It kind of makes sense in hindsight, but this is from Zero Hedge. And he says, When the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, both sides demobilized a weary horde of chronically ill and wounded. Some soldiers had contracted tuberculosis or a lingering pneumonia in the days before antibiotics. Others had suffered field amputations with handheld sores. But whether the question was chronic coughing or terrible pain, and the answer was morphine. The newly invented hypodermic needle allowed for fast-acting injections. Veterans everywhere got hooked to the point where addiction was called the soldier's disease. Soon morphine moved beyond the battlefield and was in use for everything from menstrual cramps to teething.
[1:55] And did you know that heroin was actually a trade name? It's not actually the name of the substance. When heroin arrived, it was welcomed as an improvement because things were so bad. Chemists had discovered it decades earlier, but in 1898, the pharmaceutical company Bayer started selling it as Heroisch, German for heroic. Heroin was a trade name. It was heroin trademark brought to you by Bayer. And doctors, of course, wanted stuff that was safer than morphine. And we're told, and I guess it's pretty easy to convince yourself, that this new drug wasn't addictive. And what was it? The same thing with cocaine. Freud was a huge advocate of cocaine and tried to get his friends who were hooked on opiates onto cocaine to make them better. It was just appalling. He was basically a drug dealer as far as I can see it.
[2:48] So, the philanthropic St. James Society even mounted a campaign to mail free heroin samples to morphine addicts to help them break the habit, and it was just, just appalling. In 1906, America established the Federal Food and Drug Administration because Mom wanted to know if various cure-alls had heroin. There was a morphine and alcohol-based Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup for fussy babies, and it did quiet them, but of course, thousands probably never woke up again from such medicine, and it's really, really wild. It's tragic, horrifying, fascinating, of course.
[3:33] And this constant search for something to take away the pain, right? This constant search for something to take away the pain. Now, the peak opioid crisis sort of first round, 2007. And the Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma. And they pleaded guilty to a deception campaign that was really aimed at getting massive amounts of opioids prescribed. And as punishment, the company had to shell out $600 million and three top executives got multi-million dollar fines and 400 hours of community service. You know, it really is sad and just tells you about the power structures. Like you look what happens to the J6ers, right? And then you look at what happens to people who, you know, hand out this kind of poison like candy or promote it and so on.
[4:21] It's pretty wild $600 million fine yeah sounds impressive, but they cut the government a check to the tune of less than 5% of the cash rolling in and in the 17 years since everything has gotten worse, back in 2007 it was considered catastrophic when 20,000 people a year died, but for the past 3 years about 80,000 people every year take an opioid stop breathing and die.
[4:52] And this is up from 50,000 in 2017. Now, that's about the death count of Vietnam, like Vietnam per year. And it is, of course, it's a physical attack. It feels like a physical attack. And it also feels like or is an economic attack because the amount of money that goes into people who are addicted to treating them, to trying to manage their health symptoms. And the criminality that's involved is just absolutely massive. Absolutely massive. So, back then, Purdue Pharma had to pay $600 million. That was big news. Now, judgments are handed down for billions. Not much comment, not much public excitement. So, what happened? $17.3 billion from CVS, Walmart and Walgreens, $5 billion from J&J, $21 billion from opioid distribution companies McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen, Allergan, $4.25 billion from Teva Pharmaceuticals, $2 billion from Allergan. It's just wild.
[6:01] Well, and in a more modern context, the whole fentanyl issue. I mean, it's in the art of war is to weaken your enemy. Fifth generation warfare and all that. So that's a terrible issue.
[6:14] You well and i mean the the taliban cracked down on the poppy fields in a way that the american government either didn't want to or or couldn't so in 2011 j and j backed an organization called imagine the possibilities pain coalition and uh they uh they brainstormed targeting elementary school students so there's a powerpoint presentation from this group that noted I should start marketing opioids to kids via respective channels, e.g. coaches. And aiming at the kids. It's wild. Johnson & Johnson also quietly funded the 2013 launch of Growing Pains, a new social networking site for young people with pain. This effort to market opioids to teenagers aged 13 and up was shut down only as of 2021. 21. So, yeah, nearly every tenth adult has lost a family member to an opioid. All major candidates for president have tapped into the anger, this is from the article, which however they have chosen to direct at Chinese and Mexican cartels.
[7:24] Now, the challenge, of course, is that as long as people's childhoods remain hell, these addictions are going to be, it's going to be playing whack-a-mole. People are, and of course, this is in my new Peaceful Parenting book, Peaceful Parenting book, which, you know, if you haven't, you should definitely get a hold of. If you are a subscriber, then you get the Peaceful Parenting book just as part of your subscription. If you're not, you can get a copy, and you're free to share it if you like. Like the copy you can get, just donate at freedomain.com slash donate, freedomain.com slash donate, and you can get the book. And for the people who are asking, will there be a hard copy? Almost certainly yes. Almost certainly yes. And there's just some creation and distribution issues and so on. But I'm sure that will be the case. Of course, if you have questions, you can type them into the chat, and so on. Somebody says, I've seen that a lot of people who die from ODing on opioids have their organs harvested. Is that right? Because I would think that if you died of opiate overdose, that your organs would be less valuable. Again, what am I? I'm no doctor and all of that, but it does seem odd.
[8:41] But, you know, it's just a basic principle that whatever is surrounded by coercion turns out the opposite of its dated goal, right? So you've got a health care system that is designed to help people stay healthy. But the only way, there's only one way that a health care system can reliably make money and keep people healthy, and that is to pay for people's health rather than their sickness. If you have a health care system, and that's all the health care systems out there at the moment, public, private, doesn't really matter. If you have a health, well, with some exceptions, if there's some robust insurance companies, but when you have...
[9:21] A healthcare system that makes money off treatment and cures and not prevention, then you will end up with a financial incentive for people to become ill. And the financial incentive for people to become ill is all over the place, and it's embedded everywhere. And we can look for all the heroes that we want, but fundamentally people are going to follow their economic interest in a moral standpoint.
[9:49] All right. so somebody has given me an article here, from freep.com sounds like a frightened vice president freep.com why is it not letting me open that oh there we go so let's see this is from 2018, an unexpected consequence of the opioid crisis the increase in drug overdose deaths is resulting in more organ donations a new hope for transportations in Michigan and across the nation in Michigan almost 16% of the 320 donors, whose life organs were harvested last year died from drug overdose. Wow. And that's up from 5.5% in 2012. Well, I stand corrected, and I really do appreciate the information. It goes to show that you shouldn't get any medical thoughts from a philosopher. But let's see here. This is from healthleadersmedia.com. What do they have to say? Let us see.
[10:47] Why are they so slow to load? I don't know. Still, it's better than being on a 300-board modem trying to get a website to load or something like that.
[10:59] Why is no loading? I don't know. Well, we'll come back to that later. Yeah, it's rough, man. If you still have these wretched childhoods, then it's inevitable that you're going to end up with a huge demand for painkillers. And the other thing, too, there was a great statement. I don't know who made it. I think it was a nutritionist or probably an exercise coach, and said, if you stop moving, well, then you stop moving, right? And I was sort of explaining to my daughter, and again, it's not any kind of medical advice. It's just my, you know, idiot amateur opinion. But I remember, you know, when you get older, you see all the people around you who aren't quite as into exercise beginning to fall apart.
[11:41] You know, it's pretty wild when you see, you've seen these Chinese gymnasts in their 80s and 90s. Even Mick Jagger is like 80 or something and still practicing his dance moves because he's got this you know tiny cockroach body but when you get older and you start to see you know people around you sort of dropping dropping health bits you know just falling apart like some robot that's having bits shaken off it and for me it sort of is important to start to do the research a while ago just on like how to maintain things and so on people get hit in the legs which I think mostly means the knees. Of course, it's the back issues. And the big one is neck and shoulders, right? Big one is neck and shoulders. And neck and shoulders are tough. And I mean, for me, a massage gun, massage, stretching, exercise, all helps. And so far, so good. Knee problems. I did crunch a knee on a disco floor when I was about 20 and managed to get it back. Then I I whacked my knee falling in St. Louis when I was giving a speech.
[12:40] At the sort of Phyllis Schlafly group many years ago and crunched that. And that took a long time. I went to all this rehab and nobody helped me a bit. And I finally found a weird spot. Like the thing with the body is like, whatever hurts, if you've pulled something or something's tense or whatever, for me, whatever hurts is like half a world away. It's like completely, seems to be completely unrelated, but it ends up working to release it. And knees in particular, you know, big, big challenge. And it's funny because when you work with physical things, like you work with computers, you work with cars and lawnmowers and so on, then the more you use them, the more they wear down, right? It's kind of a, it's a strange mindset for me to get into, right? Because I'm just used to, you know, I've worked a lot with mechanical stuff and in particular computers and stuff. And the more you use it, the more it wears down. But that's not the thing with the body, right? With the body, you know, as far as I understand it, to maintain your cartilage, you got to keep walking to maintain your bones and you've got to work them, right? They work better the more you work them, which is the opposite of every mechanical thing, which wears out faster the more you use it. So getting that kind of reversal thing that's going on, like I think with people's knees, I think what happens is, you know, you sort of think of the typical thing where somebody is.
[13:52] You know, they get up in the morning, they drive to work and they're sitting for an hour and then they get to their desk and then they sit off and on for eight hours and maybe they walk down the hall to a meeting and then they sit in their car for another hour, drive home and then they sit to eat dinner and then they sit on the couch and it's just sit sit sit and i think then you know when it comes time to want to use their cartilage or to use their knee stuff it's not particularly good and i don't think it wears away in that way i think from what i've read the more you walk the better your cartilage is right it's not like you're um you know if you brush your teeth too much your gums recede and, Don't come back kind of thing. But yeah, it's rough, man. It's rough. So I think that's another reason, you know, the number of Americans in particular, like, you know, between a third and a half, sort of chronic pain every day. And I think 20, 25% of Americans have been dealing with chronic pain for 13 years or more. And this constant, you know, manage the symptoms, manage the symptoms, manage the symptoms is brutal on the body. And I would say, you know, other than that little cancer dip. I've been very lucky with my health over my life. And, you know, I mean, some of it's, I think, good genes. Some of it, of course, I do exercise.
[15:07] I'm just a shade under six foot and weigh 187 pounds and so on. And I actually, I mean, like a 30, size 32 waist. So not too bad. Not too bad. I'm no skinny beninny, but not too bad. Because, you know, it's one of the things you notice when you age or, you know, maybe if you had grandparents or whatever, you know, there are no, there are almost no obese people over like 75 or 80. You know, the people you see, he's 90, he's 95. They're all skinny as rails, right? It just seems to be the way things go. Yeah, so I've got more stuff to talk about. Again, this could be your chat, your call, your feedback, your questions, your comments. Did get a very interesting question about copyrights and patents, which would be interesting to talk about. But I'll just give a pause here in case anybody has any questions, comments, issues, or, you know, just anything you want to share. Whatever might be on your mind. I am perfectly thrilled. To hear, as I'm sure will be, others. I'll just pause here for a sec.
[16:06] I guess I'll just throw in there anecdotally, like I've, I came out of the army in my early twenties with a lower back pain. I was diagnosed as degenerative dyspnea and my back hurts me far less. The, the more active I am generally, if I'm having a pretty long sedentary period, my back will start bugging me much, much more.
[16:31] Yeah, it does complain. It's like, you know, I think the body's like a dog. If you don't take it for a walk, it starts to whine and complain quite a bit. So, what else did I get? Oh, yeah. I got something else that I sort of noticed that I was reading today. I had a little bit of time to read today. So, helping out somebody with a little musical thing. Okay, so what does it cost to live the American dream under three years of Joe Biden? This is more economics than politics, but I just find this really, really, really, really interesting. So, according to a new report just released, again, this is from Zero Hedge, now takes over $100,000 a year for the typical family to live the American dream in all 50 states. And in 29 of those states, it actually takes over $150,000 a year. And so, Illinois was ranked 26th on that list. Pretty good snapshot of what the average U.S. household is facing right now. Median home price, $255,278. Annual child care costs. Of course, I wrote about this in my novel, The Present, which is why it will never get made into a movie in my lifetime, because there's just too much pain. There's too much pain around the question of child care. People would lose their shit.
[17:55] I mean, if this was made into a movie, women would be, and men, they would throw up, they would be running out of the theater, it would be that intense. You know, when you get people to betray their kids, right, and I can understand some situations where in child care is, you know, really necessary. If uh you know let's say the mother gets ill or something sort of really bad has happened then i can understand that you might there's sort of emergency situations there aren't grandparents around or something like that but for a lot of.
[18:33] For all our parents uh it's it's not that it's right it's just vanity it's it's just habit it's like well you know you got to go back to work because i mean maybe people are so economically astronomically illiterate that they don't understand how much they're taking home after all the expenses. But I went through the entire math in my novel, The Present, which I know sounds like the least exciting spreadsheet fiction known to man, but it's in a very dramatic and exciting way. So what does it mean? What does it mean to actually have a job when you have a couple of kids?
[19:06] Well, it means that you're working for a couple of bucks an hour after all's said and done. And then you can take those couple of bucks an hour and use it to fund therapy for your kids later on, because they're going to need it or you're going to need it.
[19:27] But the second cost, annual child care cost, $24,174. Annual mortgage cost, $21,401. Car cost, $8,709. Grocery cost, $8,143. Health care cost, $7,000. Utilities, $5,200. Education, $2,400. Pet cost, $1,100. So, full cost of the American dream, $156,739. Oh the pillaging is just appalling the pillaging is just appalling the pillaging you know the pillaging of inflation right the secret hidden most regressive tax known to man and usually not one person in a hundred can tell you what's going on and not one person in ten thousand can tell you the structure of this entirely predatory system called fiat currency the fiat currency is uh.
[20:27] It's like mosquitoes, right? It's like a swarm of mosquitoes. You can't get them all. And you've got to sleep sometime, and you just get drained. You just get drained. Every little tiny ghost finger in your wallet, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing, right? I mean, my daughter saved up a little bit of money, and I had to tell her, like, you know, in a couple of years, like the last couple of years, it's down 15%. Like, I'm sorry. It's just the way that it is. Isn't it incredible, right? Isn't it an incredible system? It was an incredible thing to be able to steal from people without entering their house, without touching anything that they have, to just be able to steal from people. When they're sleeping, to be able to steal from people when you're sleeping as the printing press goes brrrr. It's just the most staggeringly efficient, predatory, invisible, and toxic.
[21:22] Kind of theft. And because it's relatively risk-free, I mean, it really is risk-free, right? You know, if you want to go break into somebody's house, they could have a guard dog. They could have, I don't know, a bear trap. They could be armed. They could, you know, like you could get in serious trouble, right? Don't want to do that. Nerd theft is the name of the game, nerd theft. And fiat currency is nerd theft. Well, I don't want to take you on. I'm too small. So I'm just going to inflate the currency and steal from you that way. And once you have that kind of power, I mean, what can you do? There's nothing you can do. Once you have that kind of power, it just has to go to crash.
[22:05] And, you know, it certainly is my hope. Here's my hope. My hope about the present. You know, like, how do I say not so blackmailed? Well, my hope about the present is something like this.
[22:18] The present is so well recorded that we are in the process of inoculating the future against just these kinds of disasters. It's so well documented. And it's going to be so vivid. You know, you look at these old-timey photos and paintings and, you know, that sort of wobbly, flickery film, and it just seems odd and dissociated. And imagine if you had like perfect 4K, 60 frames a second window on the fall of Rome and everything that was going on.
[22:53] So, I've mentioned this before, there's a great Steve Martin bit about, you know, getting older means you learn how to close doors. Just a whole series of doors slamming shut. Like down a hallway, boom, boom, boom. And somebody's like, hey, let's go camping. Sorry, we're closed. and this is, the present is documenting all of the crazy, evil, vicious stuff that happens when you have crazy, evil, vicious beliefs. When you allow the government to educate your children they are rendered defenseless against predation. They are open to the skies. Tied down lambs with barrel-chested hawks swooping low. And all, all the craziness. In the future, people are going to be like, hey, let's try X. Sorry, we've seen that before and we know. Like, we are documenting the slippery slope so avidly in such great and powerful detail that the slippery slope argument is, will no longer be a fallacy. Will no longer be a fallacy.
[24:15] And all of the evils that come from contradictory, immoral thoughts parading as virtue, all of this is so well detailed, all of this is so well documented. We have a living, powerful, worldwide record from here to eternity about all the bad decisions that are being made and all of the evasions that are being made.
[24:39] And because it's all so vividly documented every nook scrap and alley videoed i mean if we make it to any kind of place of freedom and i think we will might take a while but i think we will, we get to a place of freedom and people are like well you know we should try this And we're like, no, no, we have a billion hours of exactly what happens, all documented, video, audio, text, you name it. We have a billion hours of documentation about exactly what happens when you try this.
[25:23] So how about we don't? How about not? art. And there is nobody who advocates a return to slavery. And in the future, the enslavement of the mind that produces such dismal effects in the world of the present will be so obvious to everyone that...
[25:49] It won't be tempting. It'll be like, I don't know if you've ever had that friend. You ever had that friend? The guy who is so much fun. You know, every time he comes to town, you go out and you have these crazy times and you're up for two days straight. And, you know, you can't remember what happened, but you're sure it was a huge blast. And maybe you wake up with a tattoo on your inner thigh or something like that. The guy who comes to town, right? And then at some point, you're like, this guy is like a sociopathic loser who's sucking away months of my life. And sooner or later, it's going to go really bad. And you kind of wake up from that hypnotic, super fun kind of days, right? And it's sorted, right? It's like the walk of shame that women talk about, like they go and sleep with some guy they just met, and then they've got to walk home the next day, in their wobbly heels with their short mascara and what seemed glamorous and cool the night before is just sordid, gritty and gross. In the sandy-eyed morning light of a hazy city street. Gross.
[27:09] It's waking up to the effects of the release from reality. Like, the release from reality stuff, is really tempting. We don't have to be real, we don't have to be constrained, we don't have to be rational, we don't have to be moral. Let our freak flag fly. A Macy Gray song, right? And it's really tempting. It's really tempting. And then, as the effects begin to sink in, the sordidness and grotesqueness of it all. You know, I remember being in a literature class in university when I did a couple of years of an English literature degree. And then I left to pursue theatre school. And I remember the professor, I still remember his name actually. My professor handed out a book to look at i ended up i used to be quite a sketch artist back of the day or actually it's not really sketching it was like a painstaking, bit by bit drawing kind of stuff um soft soft pencil soft lead pencil and.
[28:31] I remember he handed out a book which was a play about antigone and the people were mostly naked it. And it was some, I think it was 70s or maybe early 80s, just some super underground avant-garde New York art scene, you know, where it's like, oh, everybody's so out of the box and they're all living communally. And, you know, there is a sort of dark hypnosis to it. And I remember looking at that book, flipping through it, and I ended up drawing one of the guys because I found his face quite fascinating and why should there be clothes on stage what's with all this bourgeois restraint and you know let's get natural and and all like just this this was kind of like a 60s thing too right why should we have all of these constraints why should we be constrained by my perspective and lights and color and depth and proportion. Why shouldn't we paint what we feel, what strikes us as cool, rather than slavishly photographing with paint what is merely there? And this, I want to be free of all constraint. I want to be free to be outside of language, to be outside of grammar.
[29:56] The Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When I had my original Twitter account back in the day, my daughter and I used to tweet because we would read this. I was reading this book to her and she found it absolutely hilarious, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And to be free of the need for comprehensibility, to provide deep impressions rather than clear communication. The Dadaist movement, right? Where you had plays with gibberish, and I sort of mocked one of these plays. I wrote my novel, Almost, when Tom goes to Berlin in the late 1930s and goes to an avant-garde play. I wrote one of these insane plays.
[30:41] Almost always involving fratricide. That was the big theme in the 1930s German theater. To be free of all restraint. Why not? Why, you know? And then you just portray all of the people who have standards as sort of stodgy, upright, restrained. Cecil versus George in Room with a View, right? They're all so uptight and constrained. Ned Flanders. I mean, at least they gave him a buff body, right? But you're uptight and constrained and naive and all of the cool people are edgy and dangerous like the guy in The Crow who died, Brendan Lee. Brendan Lee? Just make them all cool and attractive and give them a little bit of mascara. This is the pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, Johnny Depp character. Some of them are kind of cool and they're unfazed by any standards and they never seem to have jobs. And they're cool and free, like five easy pieces, you know. Now he can play piano, but he goes and works on an oil rig because he's free. Easy rider. They have no rules, no standards. They're free. And they just made the outlaw, no rules life so cool. And of course, the Bible warned us about all of this. To be free of rules is to leave the paradise of a good conscience.
[32:02] The Garden of Eden, to me, is a good conscience.
[32:09] And it's all been so meticulously documented now, the aftereffects are bad thinking. The idea that we need people subject to no No rules to enforce all of society's rules. Isn't that wild, right? This is fundamental belief. This is one of the reasons why voluntarism is so logically consistent and morally beautiful. We need people subject to no rules to enforce all of society's rules. Well, if rules needs to be enforced, who enforces the rules on the enforcers, right? You know, the old thing, the police have investigated themselves and found themselves to be free of any wrongdoing, right? So, and nobody, this should be the central question of political science. Like, I took a whole political science full year course at McGill, and I remember virtually nothing. I'm sure I could dig up my notes, you know, 30 years, 35 years later, 25 years later, and nothing. Nothing. Because that's the fundamental question is if, rules in society need to be enforced who enforces the rules on the enforcers and you can't say a bill of rights it's just a piece of paper can't enforce anything.
[33:36] And.
[33:41] The consequence of failing to answer that question in a creative and imaginary and morally virtuous way, the failure to answer that question.
[33:52] Who enforces the rules on those who enforce the rules? There's only one answer to that. There's only one answer as to who enforces the rules on those who enforce the rules. A statism has no answer for that, any more than monarchy has an answer to that, or any dictatorship. Who enforces the rules on those who enforce the rules? And the only answer is the voluntary customer. The voluntary customer. Like, if you were forced to eat at your neighborhood restaurant, then the need for quality from the neighborhood restaurant would be very low. Be very low. Very low indeed. We know this from sort of the Soviet example, right? The restaurant stayed a business no matter how well or badly they did. So you're forced to eat at your local restaurant. They could just serve any old slop. It could have crap in it. It could taste terrible. It doesn't really matter. They get paid either way, and it's a lot easier to produce low quality than to produce high quality.
[35:02] So what is it that keeps the quality going in a restaurant that nobody has to eat there? It's voluntary customer service.
[35:15] And as people have weirder and weirder jobs enforced by more and more rules, service goes down. Like, just this month, I've had to wait at home twice for people who said they were going to come by, and they never came by. And you call them, oh, yeah, yeah, well, something came up. You can't call. Like, it's bizarre to me. It gets very, very, very far from the quality that I grew up with and expected and provided and try to provide, obviously, still. But the only people who can enforce rules on those who enforce the rules are the voluntary customers. If whoever's enforcing the rules is doing a bad, expensive, inefficient, or corrupt job, you stop paying them and start paying someone who's doing better. Or you start your own company to enforce the rules. The only answer as to who enforces the rules on those who enforce the rules is the voluntary customer and or competitor. That's the only answer. There's no other answer. There's no other answer.
[36:24] And yet, we are so far from understanding the nature of our society that nobody's even really asking the question. And you can see in these various political persecutions that are going on now that there really is the opposite of an answer in the present world. Very sad. Very sad. So, yeah, the amount of money you need these days. There is another thing that I read, and I'll just pause here for a second in case anybody has any comments, questions. Things to share.
[37:01] All right, let's go for another couple of minutes. So, what percentage of retirees at the moment say that they are very happy? They're like living the dream, right? They're living the dream. Because, you know, you work, right? 25 to 65, you're 40 years. 40 years, you work and you work and you work. 40 years, you work and you work and you work. And then you retire and you're supposed to live the dream if you make it, right? If you make it. So in America only 4% of today's retirees said they are living the dream. Just as many, 4% said they are living the nightmare. So 44% said they're comfortable 34% they're not great but not bad 15% said they are struggling.
[38:01] So, the top concern, cited by 89% of respondents, is inflation lessening the value of their assets. That's followed by higher than expected healthcare costs, with 85%. A major market downturn that makes significant really reduce their assets, 76%, not knowing how best to draw down income, 69%, and outliving their assets, 68%. I'll tell you this, my friends, it's a pretty bad thing to get to the end of your life and not know if you can make it to the end of your life, right? It's pretty bad if you get to the end of your life and you don't know if you can make it, right? Can I afford this? Can I afford that? Can I do this trip? Can I eat out? What if I live too long? What if I get sick? What if? What if? What if? That's a nightmare. Americans may face a shortfall. Again, this is CNBC. Americans may face a shortfall in their golden years as many workers still lack access to employer retirement savings plans and typical retirement savings are short of matching workers' pre-retirement standard of living.
[39:26] Today's retirees are more likely to use their own pension plan or a spouse's pension plan for income rather than their own workplace savings account, and it's all awful, Americans think they need 1.46 million on average to retire comfortably, one third of workers who calculated how much money they will leave in retirement estimated 1.5 million or more, yet a third of workers so they know they need 1.46 million, 1.5 million yet a third of workers have less than $50,000 in savings and investments, and 14% of workers have less than $1,000, isn't that wild.
[40:20] And, of course, new projections just came out this week, confirmed Social Security and Medicare's trust funds are still on the brink of insolvency within the next decade. It's not going to work. Less than half the respondents in the survey, 44% said they saved enough for retirement, 32% said they don't have enough saved, and 24% are unsure. They're unsure. Don't even know. Don't even know. Don't even know. They have no idea. No clue. clue how could they possibly know right really tragic and yeah the amount i mean to me just the amount of financial irresponsibility is just it's really quite shocking and you know i again i was raised poor so uh you know for learning how to stretch a dollar learning how to save a dollar was was pretty important to me it's pretty powerful for me and uh man it's rough, seeing the number of people who just don't have the savings and don't even really seem to know, you know, whether they have enough, whether they don't have enough, anything like that. It's absolutely wild.
[41:37] And tragic. And of course the really sad thing is that these are people who probably put their kids in daycare. So if and when they run out of money, what's going to happen? Are they going to be able to lean on their kids? Probably not. All right. Sorry, there are a few questions that I missaid because I was in the wrong one. I can't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude at hearing a large percentage. Abumas are facing homelessness. Just do your own thing, man. See where that got them. Well, yes, there is that for sure. There is that for sure. And you can see why they need to, it's one of the reasons why immigration is such a hot topic, because they need to prop up the value of housing. Right? They need to prop up the value of housing. The founding fathers, somebody said, the founding fathers really tried to avoid the mistakes the Romans made. The next equivalent will hopefully be keen to do the same. Yeah.
[42:40] Uh, somebody says plus one for knees over toes guy. Oh, is that a, uh, a health guy? Knees over toes guy is an excellent resource for knee rehabilitation. All right. Uh, apologies for being late, but would you mind diving more deeply into the incentives regarding healthcare? I believe I've heard you say before that in China you pay the doctor while you're healthy and then they pay for you or your expenses when you're sick. Well, yeah, so the money to be made in healthcare is in prevention. But prevention accrues value to no doctor, right? Do you pay your doctor every year if your knees are good? You don't, right? I mean, the way that the market generally works is you have a doctor, and your doctor is on standby. And maybe you go, if you're married and your wife sets it up, but maybe you go every year and you get your checkup and you get your blood work. And so you just check, you know, see, right? But you wait for something to go wrong. And then when something goes wrong, you go to your doctor and pay your doctor a lot of money.
[43:56] How does your doctor make money if you're well? I mean, this is foundational to healthcare, whether it's public, private, doesn't really matter. How does your doctor make money if you're well?
[44:13] It's an inverse of the economic incentives that are there, right? And this is all pretty obvious. I think we all understand this, right? You have a doctor and, you know, you wake up and you've got an ache and a pain and so on, and it doesn't go away. You call your doctor and it's like, oh, you've got to come in and have a look at this. You've got to have a look at that. You've got to have a look at the other, right? So, you know, when I was younger, I would occasionally get these sort of cysts on my scalp and I'd have to go and get them opened and drained and so on, like just some infection in the hair follicle. I can't remember exactly. But, you know, every couple of years I'd have to go and get one of those things dealt with, right? And I remember this is one of the first times I had one that had kind of just stuck on my head in the back. And, you know, it wouldn't have mattered that much if I'd had hair, but, you know, you could see this little lump. And I remember I went to my doctor. I went to my doctor and I said, listen, I want to get this removed. This is in my late 20s, I think. I want to get this removed, right? And my doctor said, well, you know, I'm not really going to do that because, you know, I'm not going to do that in... Occasionally, I'd have a doctor who would do it in the office, but he'd say, I'm not going to do that. So, he said, you're going to have to get it done in a hospital.
[45:27] So, you know, I wasn't such a big advocate for myself earlier, you know, when you're younger, at least, I don't know, I don't want to speak for you guys, but when I was younger, It's like when you're in your 20s and the guy in the white lab coat says, you have to get this done in a hospital. I was like, okay, I guess I have to get it done in a hospital. And I think one of the reasons for that, I don't know if anybody gets any money for referrals, but it's more time consuming, right? The doctors get paid by the patient. So what do you want? You want a patient who comes in, right? And as you know, the research is pretty clear that doctors listen to your symptoms for about 18 seconds before they interrupt, right? Because, hey, man, you got to keep things moving. you know like i remember when i was uh when i would go to bars when i was younger i'd go to listen to music live music love listening to bands always love listening to bands i don't care if they're you know professional or or some uh monster band or whatever i could just like going to i'm going to see a band they're like we'll play any song you want except house of the rising sun we don't do that anymore we don't do that song anymore and i remember i i was there and I ordered my coke and I sat and nursed it for a while. And, you know, the waiter would come by and say, you want a drink? I'd be like, no, we're good. And I'm like, man, you got to order something. You're not paying for the band.
[46:51] I was like, oh, you know, it's just these tiny little lessons in economics that you kind of have to pick up from the planet as a whole. It's like, you got to order a drink, man. Well, you're not paying for that. So I'm like, okay, yeah, that's right. You know, there was no cover for the band. I'm not paying for the band, right? Right. So how am I paying for the band? Well, I'm paying for the band by buying drinks. And, you know, because I was underage, I wasn't ordering alcohol. I don't think I was even supposed to be in the bar, but I was not ordering alcohol. So I was supposed to, so you, you know, and when you're a waiter, you've got to keep the tables moving, right? This is why they come by, which are going to give you a bill. This is why they clean up the plates, right? Like I remember when I was younger, like, why the hell do they want to keep cleaning up the plates? Like I'm still here. Well, they want to clean up the plates. So you'll get the hell out and they can get another table set down because they got to pay for that. And I remember there was a coffee shop, Tim Hortons, like sometimes says you, you can't be here more than 20 minutes. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
[47:51] So, yeah, doctors got to keep you moving. They got to get you the hell out of their office, which is another reason why you go to the doctor, and a lot of times they'll just, oh, yeah, write your script, write your script. Just write your script, get you to the pharmacist, get out, get out.
[48:08] I mean, I remember having a doctor once, trying to talk to them about something. Yeah, uh-huh, yep, yep, uh-huh, yep, yep. Just like rushing you along, rushing you along. You're on this like mad conveyor belt. It's like, bro, this is my health we're talking about here. Don't fucking rush me. It's my health. Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah, mm-hmm, ah, yeah, yeah, mm-hmm, right? Just keep you moving. Don't you feel like this is like conveyor belt, you're going at this high speed through the doctor's office. So I think that while some of the older doctors, once or twice I would have these cysts sort of drained, like cut open and drained and stitched up in the office, right? Because they're used to doing stuff that's helpful and all of that. But if, you know, let's say that takes them half an hour, soup to nuts, right? Well, in half an hour, they could see a whole bunch of people and write a whole bunch of antibiotics prescriptions or some painkillers or, you know, here's your barbiturates or, you know, whatever it is. Just here you go, here you go, here you go, here you go. Conveyor belt, conveyor belt, conveyor belt. No prevention. What money do they make from prevention? They might say to you, you probably need to lose some weight or something like that, but they don't make any money from that. They make money from your ailments.
[49:23] Now, society, and this is an asymmetrical cost, right? Society loses money from your ailments. Doctors make money from your ailments, right? Your boss loses money. You lose money. Society as a whole loses money. The economy loses money when you get sick. but you pay the doctor. The doctor makes money from you getting ill.
[49:50] So that's just the nature of healthcare. Now, what is the solution to this? Well, the solution to this would be quite simple. And it would take about 10 to 15 seconds to implement in a free economy. The solution to this is... That the doctor gets paid for the patients he's not seeing.
[50:19] So if you have a doctor, then the doctor gets paid if you don't come to see him. And the doctor gets paid if your blood work is good. And the doctor gets paid if your knees are good, and your neck is good, and your shoulders are good, and your back is good. And the doctor gets paid if your weight is good. And if your cholesterol is the right amount, and I know that's sort of controversial, you know, I'm just talking about general health markers. And if your testosterone is in the right level, and if you have enough vitamin D, and the doctor gets paid if you're healthy.
[50:56] Now, I understand that creates an incentive for the doctor to not see you when you're ill, right? And, you know, but that's just sort of baked in, right? The doctor can't refuse you if you want to come in. But the doctor is paid for your health, right? So 70 to 80% of health issues are lifestyle related, which is sort of a nice way of saying people choose to get ill. People choose to get ill, right? I mean, as I've gotten older, I'm spending less and less time in the studio. Like I'll do my six hours of studio time on Wednesday nights, Friday nights, and Sunday mornings. But right now, I'm not in the studio. Right now, I've worked quite hard to get a setup where I can walk around. It's better for my brain. It's better for the show. It's better for my health. And I'm not entirely sure that people spend two and a half hours watching me on video. I don't think I'm quite that fascinating or animated or interesting, right? It's just talking head me. I think people listen a lot, and even if there is video, they'll just listen. I don't think people sit there with popcorn watching me for two and a half hours, and I'd rather walk. And it's better for me.
[52:16] So, in a rational healthcare system, your doctor takes you on, can't dump you, right? Because otherwise, if you started gaining weight, your doctor would dump you, right? So, your doctor takes you on, can't dump you, has to see you when you're sick.
[52:39] And your doctor is paid. Obviously, your doctor is paid when you are sick, right? So if you come in and you have a problem, then the doctor is paid to treat that, but you would want to balance the incentives so the doctor makes the most money when his patients are the healthiest.
[52:58] It's just like rationality 101. And that aligns the doctor's incentives with what's best for society as a whole. And if you come in and you're unhealthy then the doctor gets paid more as you get healthier and healthier right so as your weight goes down as your vo2 max goes up as your flexibility increases to some degree or at least stops decreasing as your bones get stronger you know so the doctor is going to be very positive towards you being on an exercise program now also Also, how much money do people save by losing weight and exercising? Well, you know, they save money on food if they're losing weight, although sometimes the healthier food can be expensive, right, if they're shifting from frozen crap to fresh meat. And, of course, they have to buy a new wardrobe and so on, right? And if they're losing a lot of weight, then they have to buy a whole set of new wardrobes as they lose weight. It's quite expensive. So, but if you go from being sedentary to moving around, right, you go from being sedentary to moving around, who pays you? I mean, society's benefiting.
[54:13] I mean, society's benefiting because you're, it's not, it's not just whether you're sick or not. It's like the general level of energy. I don't know if you've ever had to claw your way through some day where you're half dead from tiredness. I remember being at a, like leading a corporate R&D retreat in Whistler many, many years ago, back in my software days. I led a R&D retreat where we were coming up with great new ideas for software. And I don't know if it was a time change or you know if I'd had a couple of handfuls of M&Ms at lunch or something like that but mid-afternoon man I was just dying it's like who do I have to blow to catch a 20-minute nap here because I'll do it man and it was rough and so it's not just you know are you sick or are you healthy it's like how creative are you how attentive are you how alert are you how energetic are you because you know tired people are grumpy tired people People make mistakes. Tired people aren't creative. Tired people are drag on everyone's energy.
[55:14] So it's a whole energy thing. If you're healthy, you have a lot of energy. And often you'll have more emotional balance. You'll be more even-tempered. And people will want to work with you more. It's just amazing how productive you are when you have energy. And I think, you know, I'm not speaking out of turn here when I say we've all had those days where we're dragging our asses around like a couple of dead donkeys. And it's rough. It's tough to get anything done that's productive. And it's tough to be enthusiastic. And it's tough to be creative. And it's tough to really problem solve and dig your mental fangs into some problem and tear it to shreds. So it's not just, are you homesick? Or it's like, how much energy do you have? How much energy do you have?
[56:02] So, your doctor and your healthcare system, if you go to the gym, you start walking, you exercise, you say, okay, well, how do you know? Well, you know, now we have, of course, watches that can beam your steps, right? It's kind of crazy, right? But I mean, even if you didn't have that kind of stuff, you can tell the effects of walking, right? You measure the cartilage, you can measure the bone density, and lots of kind of stuff, right? And so if you go from sitting around like a slowly deep-fried Cheeto to moving around, you know, it could be volleyball, it could be pickleball, it could be just walking, it could be running, it could be, you know, you join a hockey league or whatever, right? Now you're moving around.
[56:45] So how do you make money from that? It would be nice if you did, right? Because right now, sickness is profitable and health is expensive. Sickness is profitable and health is expensive. So whenever something's expensive, we generally get less of it. Whenever something is profitable, we get more of it. So we get less movement, we get less healthy practices, and we get more treatment. And think of the money that a doctor makes managing diabetes as opposed to you never getting it in the first place. Now, again, there are a lot of doctors who will definitely nag you to lose weight. You don't want to get diabetes. And so, there's a lot of honorable doctors, absolutely. But the general trends, you know, they were hard workers in the Soviet Union under communism. That doesn't mean that that's the generally productive environment for people as a whole.
[57:36] So you want to make money when you become healthy. So how do you do that? Well, of course, in a private sort of free market environment, health insurance is the cheapest when your risk factors are the lowest, right? So if you don't smoke, I mean, I remember when I was being insured, you know, as an executive, when I was at corporations, as an executive for my own corporation, you want to be insured, right? And in fact, I got so quote valuable to the shareholders and the board that I was not allowed to fly with other people because if two of us went down, the company would be toast. So we had to fly separately after a while. And I remember I had to come in and they drew blood from me and they ran it through all kinds of tests to figure out whether they wanted to invest in the company. right? Did I have alcohol in my system? Was there nicotine in my system? They just ran a whole battery of tests to see how healthy I was to figure out if they wanted to invest and buy the company or invest in the company as a whole. And.
[58:44] If you don't smoke, if you maintain a healthy weight, if you're active and you eat well, right? Because eating well and maintaining a healthy weight are not always the same thing. They're overlapping circles but they're not the same. Like you can maintain a healthy weight and eat like garbage, right? You just don't eat much of it, and, you know, calories are calories, right? So, are you getting enough sunlight? Are you getting enough sleep? And again, with these smartwatches, you can really track this kind of stuff. And, I mean, here's a funny thing. You don't get paid for going to bed on time. Don't you always have this thing? Like, especially when you have a really busy day. Like, for me, my days are generally quite busy. So when you have a really busy day, you get to bed.
[59:34] And, you know, it's like, oh, it's some quiet time. I can watch something. I can just read something, you know. And there's this, like, da-da-da, like this siren, like this dance of the seven veils, except it's, like, sleep leaving in the middle, but shaking distance. Like, it's so seductive to stay up a little longer. So nobody pays you for going to bed on time. Nobody pays you for getting your morning sun. Right? But in a free society, you would get paid for these things. Right? You would. You'd get paid for these things. Because if you get good sleep, your health is better. Poor sleep is linked to a wide variety of health issues. And again, nothing I'm saying is any kind of medical advice or nutritional advice or anything like that. This is, you know, all look it up for yourself. Consult your doctor, blah, blah, blah. Right? right? It's just my opinions and stuff that I've read about, but it doesn't mean anything and nothing's true about it. It's all nonsense. So just be aware of all of that, right? I'm just a philosophy guy. I don't know anything about these things in any professional sense, but sleep is important for health. You know, like testosterone levels are dose dependent on sleep. More sleep, more testosterone. More testosterone is less anxiety and overall well-being and so on, right? And anxiety is tough on the system for a long period of time. So who pays you for not ordering dessert? But you should get paid for these things. Why? Because they're economically valuable. And you want to have a system where you get paid for.
[1:01:01] For making good health decisions. Nobody pays you right now for making good health decisions. In fact, they charge you. Society charges you for making good health decisions.
[1:01:10] Because often the healthy food is a little more expensive and you have a gym membership and you're not getting paid for any of the good health decisions in general. Ah, well, well-being and all of that. I get all of that for sure. And even in communism, though, there was some people like, I just want to do a good job. I want to get that job satisfaction. satisfaction true and there's some people the outliers who will do a good job no matter what.
[1:01:36] But nobody pays you for making good health decisions and you should get paid now how do you get paid well you pay for access to a doctor and the people you're paying don't want you to have to access that doctor other than regular preventive maintenance right or preventive testing right so they don't want things to creep up so they'll pay you for having an annual check up and and getting your blood panels done they'll pay you for all of that because they want to catch things early and they want to prevent they don't they don't make money from curing they make money from prevention the less sick you are the more money they make now when i say they pay you i don't mean of course that they write you a check i mean that they reduce your premiums your healthcare premiums are reduced if you are healthy. So if you get good sleep, your healthcare premiums are reduced. If you maintain a healthy weight, if you eat well, if your blood work is good, if you exercise, if you move, right? I mean, I worked out for 40 minutes before doing this show. I had a nice game of Catan and did my exercises.
[1:02:46] And nobody paid me for that. Nobody paid me for that. In fact it kind of cost me exercise costs you because when you're exercising you're not usually doing things that can make you any kind of money so exercise you got to buy the equipment you got to buy the membership you've got to buy uh the workout gear you've got to buy the gloves you've got to buy the weight belt if that's what you're using you've got to buy you know the the sports equipment if they cost you a lot of money even though what you're doing is beneficial to society and the economy and everything, right? It costs you money. So why would you charge people for healthy stuff and then why would people massively profit when you got sick? That's the exact opposite incentives that you would need. So in a free society... Every step you take towards health is something that you get paid for in the form of reduced. And you get these early warning signals, right, in the form of reduced payments for your healthcare premiums, reduced premiums. And so if you drift into risk categories, you immediately get the feedback, right? So, I don't know, let's say you stop moving and start smoking. Well, that's going to show up real quick. And then your premiums are going to double.
[1:04:04] And if you quit they'll go back down right so you get this sort of immediate feedback, so i mean that that's the system that you want where people are paid for healthy practices, and less money is made from sickness that way we're looking at prevention and we're looking at as cheap a treatment as humanly possible right i mean this is sort of back to the controversies around things like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and so on, the controversies around those with regards to COVID. There was much more money to be made from the newly patented vaccines than there was from open-source generic drugs. So this is sort of a very key example, right? A very key example. Some of the optional surgeries floating around now can be $80,000 to $100,000, and if you have to pay for them yourself, people will probably make slightly different decisions than if they can offload those costs onto others. So I hope that's not too lengthy a discussion, and of course there's a lot to talk about, but I think that's my sort of first run at the idea. But no, honestly, I'd like to get paid for staying in good shape. I'd like to get paid for that. That would be excellent.
[1:05:17] Sleep has been at the center of virtually all my problems. As someone who's had a foot worse, you don't wreck your feet. Thank you for your explanation and answering that. A very great thread to bring up. James says, Jared can attest to my level of energy change as a result of my weight loss. Is that right, James? Do you want to drop on and jump in and tell people what it's been like for you in your sort of health journey? I don't know if you even have a microphone or not, but yeah, feel free to jump in. But yeah, I'd like to get paid, and it bothers me. It bothers me.
[1:05:53] Somebody says I do direct primary care 75 bucks a month no insurance run around really great one practitioner gets to know you and focus on prevention and make appointments just make appointments with them when you need them had a solid hour recently of just going, things one on one I could tell she was interested and engaged yeah yeah, yeah I mean that's the Oklahoma surgery Oklahoma surgery center as well, so let's see here what are your thoughts thoughts on AI potentially replacing a massive portion of the medical field, perhaps that addresses prevention in a satisfactory way for the consumer.
[1:06:33] Am I familiar with crowd health? I'm not. Oh, James doesn't have a good mic. That's all right. No worries. But yeah, certainly that is important. I mean, I had one time of insomnia over the course of my life before I went into therapy. Oh, no, was it? No, during therapy. During therapy when I was just going through all this massive turmoil. And it's rough. And, you know, I have a friend of mine, a very talented and creative lady who has just Just brutal insomnia. And it's tough, man. Just drag your ass through the day. Just drag your ass through the day. And it's really no fun at all. So, all right. Sorry, there was a question here that I was about to kick into, which I have completely forgotten. There we go. What have we got here?
[1:07:24] Footwear. Yeah, I think footwear is important. But, yeah, if you can get you good sleep, that's pretty foundational. And everybody has their own little tips and tricks. I have a mask. I have a sleep mask, you know, gossip girl style. I have a total sleep mask, and any time there's a show on TV where it's a girl who wears a sleep mask, I cringe a little, but then I have a good night's sleep. And I have an elephant's ass weighted blanket, like the kind of weighted blanket that turns you into an inhabitant of Flatland. Like, it turns me literally two-dimensional. It's fantastic. I'm like one of these cartoon cats after the steamroller goes over in the morning. I have to pop myself back into 3D. Love it. Love it. Keep the room a little cool. Get myself under the womb-like embrace of the heavy blanket. Put my... I will have to listen to a fairly dull show. Never mind. Too much yelling. When I'm going to sleep. And it's great. It's great. Now, I'm in my 50s, so I'll have to usually get up at least once a night. Well, it's funny. like I wake up and I kind of have to pee kind of don't have to pee but if I sit there and wait it usually doesn't work out well so I get up and pee and go back to bed go back to sleep so it's really really great uh although I will say this you know it's a really tragic thing, it's a really tragic thing um.
[1:08:48] There's been twice in my life, I remember these days vividly, there have been twice in my life where I've woken up, ah, fully rested, right? I just, I woke up fully rested and everything was great. Everything was great. And I wake up, I'm like coming back from the dead. That's just the way it is. Right, wrong, good, bad. Do you have to manage extra warmth generated by the blanket? I don't. No, I don't. Uh zimp says i've been getting good consistent sleep for the past month and change and my quality of life it's pretty much every metric has improved yeah yeah i mean you'd want a uh, see you want a society this is sort of what you want as a whole in your society and i really tried to get this across in my novel the future which you should totally get it's free you really should get it boy talk about something inspiring it certainly was for me but in my novel, called The Future, one of the things I tried to get across for most of the citizenry.
[1:09:49] Was how stress-chosen the society was. Stress-chosen. Now, I don't say stress-free because I don't think a stress-free life is a good thing. We are sort of built for struggle. We're built for striving. But they should all be voluntary. Your stresses should be chosen. It's sort of like, it's one thing to be a boxer. It's another thing to be jumped by five guys and beaten to a pulp in the middle of an alley somewhere, right? So, you know, it's one thing to be a hockey player. It's another thing to just be checked by some 230-pound guy when you're trying to do some recreational skating, right? It so i think i really wanted to show a non-stress society and again that doesn't mean there's no stress for anyone but it means your stresses should be chosen and the one thing that i mean there's a lot of that i dislike about contemporary society but one of the things i'm i really hate about contemporary society is how much society works to stress out the average person oh there's There's war, oh, there's this deadly disease, oh, there's bird flu, oh, there's this, and just global climate change and, you know, terrorism, and just fear, fear, fear.
[1:11:11] I mean, we live in a stressocracy. And because people who are generally morally sensitive and empathetic and so on experience the stress more, the reason I say it's a stressocracy is that those who, usually for reasons of being without conscience and kind of sociopathic, who don't really experience stress because they don't experience any empathy, those who don't really experience stress rise to the top. It's a stressocracy because the people at the top are selected out of the stressors of society to be those without a conscience, because those with a conscience tend to be kind of worried about things. So there's this constant parade of terrors unleashed on the population as a whole, starting from early childhood, right? Starting from daycare and, you know, you get into the primary school and it's all about climate change and, you know, the stressors and systemic this and racism that and phobia the other. And it's just a monstrous and this tragic pile of slithering stressors jammed into the eyeballs like parasites into kids. And it just goes on and on and on.
[1:12:27] And stress, of course, is pretty terrible for your health over a long period of time, as far as I understand it. So I really dislike the stress-based nature of society as a whole. And, of course, the politicians benefit from stress because it keeps people nervous and jumpy, and doctors benefit from stress because you come in and they're like, here's some benzodiazepine, whatever they're going to give you or whatever, right? They can just keep you rolling, and psychiatrists benefit from stress and all of that. So, yeah, I mean, a society where your stresses are chosen, like, can you imagine such a thing? Can you imagine such a thing? If you choose to have a stress-free life, you can achieve that, and nobody's profiting, either politically or monetarily, from your stress. Oof. Yeah, it's crazy. Very crazy.
[1:13:21] Somebody said, oh, Tim says, I listen to shows when I'm going to sleep, too. if it's any compliment. I never listen to your show when I go to bed because it keeps me up too interesting. Yeah, thanks. I found the future to be very inspiring as well. Yeah, can you imagine? Imagine a society where the only stresses you had were the ones you chose. Isn't that wild?
[1:13:39] That it was not, there was no profit in inflicting stress. I mean, the media as a whole massively profits from inflicting endless stress on you, right? That's just, I mean, the media as a whole, right? Because people get kind of addicted to stress, right? And sort of the doom scrolling, you know, breaking news, another disaster, you know, and it's rough. Well, of course, what happens is people get stressed about the things that they can't control. And they don't get stressed enough about the things that they can't control. And families do this too, right? I was reading a couple of weeks or a month or two ago about the problems of having highly dysfunctional family members that are just crashing from massive problem to massive problem. Oh, I got fired. Oh, my roommate stole my stuff. Oh, I got pregnant. Oh, I'm back on drugs. Oh, I'm drinking too much. Oh, I've got this health ailment. Or just crashing from disaster to disaster and just stressing the hell out of everyone.
[1:14:33] Because stressed people tend to replicate that stress in other people. But I think it's fairly important to have fairly mellow people in your life. And people who are stressed a lot tend to spread that, right? I can sort of see them like there's this shimmer aura around them, and it's like, oh, good luck with all of that, but that's not my gig. That's not my life. And it's really not a lot of fun. So yeah, if your cortisol levels are low, if you're managing your stress well, then you should get paid for that too. And you should get paid for everything you do that keeps you healthy.
[1:15:09] And that's just not the way things work at all. There's no money in prevention.
[1:15:18] There's only money in treatment. There isn't even that much money in cure. Right? And you think, what was it? Like, it's a crazy number, and I'm sorry, this is off the top of my head, but I think it's like 10% of American healthcare spending goes just to diabetes. Now, of course, some diabetes you're born with and massive sympathy for that, but a lot of diabetes is chosen, right? It's bad health decisions. And what was it? Was it, oh gosh, the actor, geez, I should know his name. Tom Hanks. Yeah, Tom Hanks, you know, he was obviously very lean for that really bad movie with the football, the volleyball in the water. Wilson, that was just terrible. Oh my God. Except for the plane crash was cool, but the rest of it was just garbage. but he got overweight and and they said hey you're gonna get diabetes he's like yeah i'd rather eat right so how much money do people make from not getting diabetes and not being pre-diabetic and not being overweight and not having you know all the crazy stuff that goes on that there are markets for pre-diabetes, right? How many people make money.
[1:16:33] From avoiding diabetes?
[1:16:37] Well, not many. And of course, I mean, I talked about this many years ago on the show, many, many years ago now, which is, And everybody, when they've made bad health decisions, right, one of the reasons why Obamacare had to come in, right, because, I mean, it's a very, very brief history for those who haven't heard it, like, why is it your employer pays for your health insurance? He doesn't pay for your mortgage, doesn't pay for your car insurance, right? Why does he pay for your health insurance? Because in the Second World War, there was a directive from the government that you couldn't give people raises. Raises and so companies still wanted to attract talent so they offered to pay for health insurance instead right but then what happens is your health insurance is tied to your job and it's tough to change so the employers started offering health insurance benefits payments right as in lieu of raises and then of course it just kind of stuck and it became a sort of benefit that was kind of people got used to but then of course you you you then are stuck at your job employers like it if they're paying your health care because especially if you've got a family you're less likely to quit so they can pay you less they can treat you worse because you're less likely to quit because, right so let's say you quit you're unemployed for a while you get a new job with new health insurance well what if you get sick at the interim and of course there are all these people who.
[1:17:54] Save money by not getting health insurance and then they get sick with some bad disease and you know the difference between men and women uh men are like well that was stupid and women are like, but we must help, right? We have to help. We've got to save these people. They're sick and they're unwell and we got to do whatever we can to get them healthcare. And right. So, you know, when the women get the vote, uh, consequences be damned, right? Because the, and you know, I love the fact that women are so sympathetic. It's just, it's not, not good when it's combined with politics. Right. And I love the fact that men can be aggressive, but it's not good when combined with politics. Right. So you get the warfare welfare state, the warfare state is male aggression plus politics. And the welfare state is female sympathy plus politics. And it's a a pretty pretty toxic combo to put it mildly so people you know they lobbied for these rules it says insurance companies can't deny you insurance for pre-existing conditions right so if you say you know i have really bad diabetes then most insurance companies don't want to take you and then of course people are sad and they go to the women voters and the women voters are sad and so So you get this rule which says you can't deny people for pre-existing conditions.
[1:19:09] Well, then what happens? Well, the entirely predictable consequence happens, which is why men's coldness about this kind of stuff is kind of important because it's just accuracy. So all that happens is then if insurance companies can't deny you for pre-existing conditions, then all the people do is they wait until they get sick and then they apply for health insurance, which of course destroys the entire healthcare industry, right? It's like, if you...
[1:19:38] Only, if you're allowed to buy fire insurance after your house burns down, then there's no such thing as insurance, right? Insurance is a risk game, right? So, certainties, that doesn't work, right? And this is particularly true for young people, because young people usually don't, at least in the past, maybe it's not the case now, but young people don't have much to worry about when it comes to healthcare. They don't have much to worry about in terms of the cost of healthcare. Care so when there's all this stuff that gets jammed into insurance companies because everybody wants their pet illness forced into health insurance right health insurance should be for the major stuff right cancer heart disease uh you know the sort of the major stuff big injuries or or stuff that's going to disable you i guess that's workman's compensation too or uh sort of work insurance but it should be for the big things right like you don't have you don't have car car insurance for changing the oil, right? Or regular maintenance. It's for the big things, right?
[1:20:40] So everybody who's got a relatively obscure ailment wants to force insurance companies to cover that ailment because their costs go way down, right? So, I mean, if you think about fertility treatments, do you want to pay for the risks of being infertile? well, do you want to pay for that when you're 18 and you're a long way from getting married? No. Do you want to pay for that when you're 45 to 85 and you're past the age of having kids? Well, no.
[1:21:13] But the people who have fertility issues, they would have to pay a lot for it if it was just them paying for that insurance. But if they can force everyone to pay for fertility treatments, their costs go down by like 80, 90%. I mean, that's a conservative guess, but it's something like that. So everybody wants to jam their own relatively obscure ailments and force everyone to be covered by them because that way the costs for them go way down right so you end up with all of this crazy stuff that people would never want to pay for or very few people would ever want to pay for, and all of that so young people especially when like when they look and they say they're forced What's the pay for stuff that's old people diseases? How many people who are 23 want to pay insurance for heart disease? Well, again, I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure heart disease is going to strike people in their 70s and 80s a whole lot more than it's going to strike people in their early 20s. So...
[1:22:15] What happened was, as more and more obscure ailments got piled onto the insurance schemes, then the value, particularly to the young people, just went down and down and down.
[1:22:28] And especially when insurance companies could not deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions, then people just waited until they got sick, and then they would apply for insurance. They couldn't be refused. And so the premiums went through the roof. And the whole system would have collapsed in relatively short order and obamacare had to force everyone to buy health insurance because health insurance had become unviable for a significant portion of the population as a combo of everybody piling their ailments onto health insurance and also because people were waiting until they got sick before applying for health insurance which you know you could say it's not the most moral thing in the known universe but it's a pretty predictable outcome, when you have these kinds of incentives at play. So that's why you have this mess. You know, one stupid rule leads to another stupid rule leads to tyranny. I may have fast-forwarded a little, but not by much. But not by much. So, yeah, that's just the way the system works at the moment, and it's wretched, and it's terrible. And we can see this, right? We can see this when, you know, it's a funny thing, right? Because as the internet, and I'm not saying it's causal, but it's interesting correlate. So as use of the internet has spread wider and wider and wider, people have gotten fatter and fatter and fatter and less and less healthy.
[1:23:58] Now that's interesting, right? So you could say, well, but people are sitting on the internet rather than being out walking about and so on. It's like, yeah, but you know, you can be out walking about out and listen to a podcast or you know there's lots of apps that you can get that will read the website to you so you can be walking about no need to sit but what's interesting to me is that this goes back to the argument i made a month or two ago about infinite human knowledge being available right i mean an infinity of knowledge is available to everyone all the time uh and with you know google translate for the most part and fairly accurate and it's in their own language so everyone has access to everything in their own language and.
[1:24:39] More health information, more nutritional information, more exercise information is available to people than has ever been available to people in the past. Literally, in your expanding ass is an infinite number of recipes to reduce your expanding ass, right? It's pretty wild, right? So this is the old thing, well, you know, if people had more knowledge, they'd be better. It's like, well, everybody has infinite knowledge about health and nutrition. Like you have nutritionists recording videos you have uh you have an infinity of, exercise information and examples available to you i used to do this workout uh with um my wife and daughter uh it was this woman it was like a good 25 minute workout burpees and stretches and lunges and all kinds of cool stuff and it was just free it's like you just boot it it up and and do the exercise and it was a great deal of fun although you know burpees are.
[1:25:38] Like if satan was cracking a walnut and throwing it into his armpit and that walnut was you that would be pretty close to burpees but uh you know i had all chapter in upp on burpees like ultimate evil but uh i decided to exercise good judgment uh for once you know for once and i did I did take it out, but it's probably available somewhere in hell itself. So people have as much information as they need to eat well and exercise, and people are eating worse and exercising more and more poorly. And it's really tragic. These disincentives are just wrecking people's lives, and it's awful, just awful. All right.
[1:26:20] Well that's I have more but I ought to save something for tomorrow night let's see here what do you think about Pearlie saying men are more nurturing than women she says she has the data but I think the data should be broken up depending on race, maybe how is it still insurance if they can't deny you yeah it's not.
[1:26:40] So, yeah, so Poorly Things is saying that men are more nurturing than women. So, it's, you know, I don't think that men are more nurturing than women as a whole, but I do think that women have been highly corrupted by power. So i mean this is an argument comes out of the manosphere and i'm obviously butchering it to some degree but hopefully adding a little bit of frosting to it and it's the last thing i mentioned tonight i pretty appreciate everyone's time tonight so women's youth and beauty is so powerful that it used to be constrained by marriage and consequences right so a woman's beauty would be like from you know 17 to 21 or 22 like you'd get married within a year or two of reaching sexual maturity and then you'd your marriage your beauty would be you know like a very brief flower you know like this those uh flies that only live for like eight minutes so your sort of youthful beauty would be a fairly temporary thing a very short-lived thing and then it would be scrubbed away with sort of labor and babies and all that and work and all that kind of stuff, right? So, a female beauty is incandescent because it's designed to be short-lived.
[1:28:00] And now, because of propaganda, because of the welfare state, because of abortion, and because of old age pensions, and because all these sort of various state interventions, women, and not just that, but also, you know, equal pay for work of equal value, which is, you know, just socialism. And, you know, the massive amount of, you've got to hire women, you've got to hire women, you've got to hire women stuff, which drives up women's wages far above where they would normally be. So because of all of this.
[1:28:42] Women can live, they can live like men, but with the additional power, of youthful sexuality and beauty. Right? So men, you know, young men like to, you know, horny, like to sleep around. No problem with that, right? It's just the nature of the beast. And the reason for that is because most men can't do it. Most men can't just go sleep around. but most women can even women who are not conventionally attractive even if they're overweight and so on they can always find some guy to sleep with them.
[1:29:20] So, men's desire to sleep around is highly limited by the fact that men can't do it. And, you know, you've heard of all of these studies where, you know, there's an attractive woman at a bar and she's paid and she goes up to some guy and says, you know, let's go upstairs. Here's my hotel room key and so on. And, you know, a significant proportion of the time men are like, let's go, right? Was no matter how attractive the man, the woman won't go with him to his hotel room and have sex, or at least that's what she thinks is going to happen. And that's just the nature of the beast.
[1:29:56] So men want to sleep around but can't.
[1:30:02] And, you know, when the marriage gets opened up, right, the woman sleeps around with everyone, the man can't really get dates and gets depressed and then ends up with some woman he leaves the sleeping around woman for. wife. So, what prevented women from sleeping around in the past? Well, what prevented women from sleeping around in the past were fundamentally two things. One, pregnancy, and two, unmarriageability. And if a woman couldn't get married, she'd have a tough time supporting herself. She would have a tough time getting by in life and you know tennessee williams has characters write about this in a variety of his plays particularly in the glass menagerie where, you know these these tragic women who just live in some attic at their some relative's house and you know barely tolerated and you've got to move on and right they're just like mice in the corner not saying anything, trying to be helpful, and pretty sad and tragic, right? So why wouldn't women sleep around? Because they'd get pregnant, and because if they got a reputation for being loose, men wouldn't marry them. So women, because the restrictions on women's sexuality were deep and profound...
[1:31:26] Women could blaze as attractive as humanly possible because they couldn't sleep around. Now, women can blaze as seductive and attractive as humanly possible. They can keep it up for 20 plus years, right? From like 18 to 40, 22 years, 18 to mid 40s, even late 40s in terms of just like just being physically attractive, right? They can work out or they can use these various creams, right? Made from the foreskins of Korean babies and other vile substances that should be out of the crucible rather than any pharmacy. But they can just... So now they have, you know, massive peak quarter century plus beauty and sexiness and attractiveness. They have the government to pay for them or to force other people to pay for them, to give them artificially high wages. To give them free healthcare, to give them abortions, to replace the state, right? Sorry, to replace the husband, right? The state replaces the husband.
[1:32:32] And if women do screw up, they still get welfare, they still get old age pensions, all this kind of stuff, right? Free healthcare. And particularly if they work for the government. And, you know, a massive number of women either start or end up working for the government. I mean, it's crazy. Particularly when they become moms, they just want a government job. Because, you know, it's 9 to 4.30, weekends off, no nights, no travel, usually.
[1:33:02] And, I mean, yeah, because, I mean, some years ago, I was just curious about some of the women I used to work for, or work with, or had professional relationships with, and I just tacked up on a couple of them. Every single one of them was working for the government. Like, and this is from entrepreneurial lives back in the day, or working for the government. And the only time I really worked for the government was in one government department in the educational sector and yeah it's all full of women and they gossiped a lot and they chatted a lot and we took very long lunches and I mean that was a attempt so it was, fine for me I guess but it was just like did you guys do anything really? It's kind of strange right? so.
[1:33:45] Women have still, we've inherited the sort of evolutionary aspect of male lust and women's beauty, women's sexiness. And now you combine this with, you know, Instagram and social media as a whole, a beautiful woman. Her job used to be to produce children for rich, intelligent men, right? So beautiful women, their job used to be to produce children for rich, intelligent men. And that's not their job anymore. I mean, whether it's all the way through butt-widening OnlyFans, or just in terms of being an influencer, or being on Instagram, being a fitness model, or whatever. So now, beautiful women, their job is to take money from unattractive men and produce no children whatsoever.
[1:34:41] So it used to be their job to produce children for rich, intelligent men and be mothers themselves and be a stalwart part of their community and charitable and run all these kinds of cool things and help out neighbors and all this great stuff. So the job of beautiful women used to be to produce children for rich, intelligent men, which helps the intelligence spread and so on. And now for a lot of beautiful women, their job is to take money from unattractive men and produce nothing of substance and no children at all. And that's not the fault of women. I mean, obviously they have cause and responsibility and so on. But again, I mean, it just comes down to incentives. It just comes down to incentives. And that's where things are, right? So a woman can make a lot of money.
[1:35:33] Uh even if she's not doing nudes or anything like that woman can make a lot of money just being pretty on the internet and she'll find some guy to marry her and even if she doesn't she'll be fine get money from the government get health care from the government get pensions from the government so it's not to me that it's something to do with human nature you know as i've sort of made the case many times in this show as a whole we don't know what human nature is looking around the world, any more than we'd be able to study what wolf nature is by studying wolves in a zoo, or studying wolves currently being experimented upon medically. You couldn't study the nature of rats by looking at rats in a maze being experimented on by perverse and possibly sadistic psychologists. All you'd know is about traumatized, experimented upon mice. You wouldn't know anything about mice in the wild. You wouldn't know anything about Mice nature, you'd only know about the effects of torture on mice nature, mouse nature. And it's the same thing, right, with the world that we have. We don't know much about female nature at the moment because the incentives are so perverse.
[1:36:45] That, and, you know, I mean, much though I like and respect Pearl, I hate to say, well, she wouldn't have the deep background. But I think that she's looking at women and thinking this is something to do with female nature. And it doesn't it doesn't i think female nature is absolutely beautiful, in the same way that i view male nature is beautiful as well but you know you get all these weird incentives and things go very strange very quickly and stay that way until, the last utopia ends and there's a big ass reset all right let's see if there are any other last questions or comments appreciate you guys dropping by tonight it was really nice to have have this chat while i have my walkie walk and let's see here.
[1:37:37] All right well listen guys thank you so much for dropping today uh dropping by tonight a great pleasure to chat i hope you have a wonderful evening and thank you for your support of course if you drop by freedomain.com slash donate freedomain.com slash donate this month you get, the book you don't have to subscribe although that wouldn't be the end of the world you can You can subscribe at freedomain.locals.com or subscribestarter.com slash freedomain. But if you go to freedomain.com slash donate, you can help out the show. I really do appreciate it. And what a lovely chat this evening. Appreciate everyone's time and attention. Thank you for your support. Allow me to do these wonderful things and this great book that's out now. And lots of love from my peer. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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