Ep. 1785 - How Healthmaxxing Is Destroying Men

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Now in the early 1900s, for example, a man named Horace Fletcher came up with the idea that if you wanted to avoid alcoholism, appendicitis, insanity, and a host of other illnesses, then you needed to chew your food obsessively hundreds of times to the point that it lost all of its taste before swallowing. He once chewed a green onion more than 700 times just to make sure that it was totally liquefied. And appropriately enough, Fletcher became known as the great Masticator. Not to be confused with the title claimed by Jeffrey Tubin on a Zoom call. This is Masticator. Fletcher quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of followers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, John Rockefeller, and the author Upton Sinclair. In fact, Sinclair reportedly wrote the catchphrase of the movement, which was, and I quote, Nature will castigate those who don't masticate. Johnny Cochran himself could not have invented a better slogan. Now in every case, when fads like this catch on, it's a sign of a deeper sickness that needs to be addressed. Fletcher was successful because at the time the United States was transitioning from an agrarian society to an industrial one. People began eating more processed foods and living more sedentary lifestyles. So indigestion became more common among other health issues. There was also a widespread fixation on efficiency and it became fashionable to see the human body as a kind of machine that could be optimized. Fletcher took advantage of the new health challenges and angst that the Industrial Revolution brought. The fact that his solution was nonsense didn't bother many people. They were terrified and they wanted to extend their lifespans at any cost. Now today we're seeing a very noticeable return of this kind of thinking. The health consciousness stuff, the health maxing as it's called, has gone massively overboard, as you've probably noticed. People are walking around with bracelets, tracking their vital signs every second of the day like their astronauts on the ISS. They're monitoring their heart rates, getting daily reports on their sleep habits, treating alcohol or sugar like it'll kill them if they look at it, counting their steps. It's now widely believed that it's impossible to live a healthy life without being an obsessive paranoid lunatic. Never mind the fact that you're eventually going to die either way. Just like the great Masticator taught, people increasingly believe that they need to make life miserable in order to prolong it. Now I feel it necessary here to issue what should be an entirely unnecessary disclaimer, which is that I'm obviously not saying that it's bad to try to live a healthy lifestyle. Of course, that's not bad. That indeed is very good. You should generally eat healthy and exercise. I lift four or five days a week. I run three or four days a week. Not exactly an Olympic athlete style training regimen, and I'm not exactly an Olympic athlete. But the point is that I'm saying all this is someone who gets a considerably above average amount of exercise. So this is not an anti-fitness, anti-health message. This is more of an anti-paranoia, anti-panic, anti-fragile OCD obsessiveness message. Now no small part of the panic I'm talking about is driven by podcasts that are going out of their way for one reason or another to turn people into weird hypochondriacs. And so here, for example, is footage from one of the biggest podcasts in the world. And it's a clip that you may have seen in which Stephen Bartlett, speaking to Chris Williamson, describes the allegedly catastrophic effect of drinking a few glasses of wine. Watch. It's one of those areas where you don't understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while. And I think about my own relationship with drinking and I stopped drinking at 30 years old, I'm now 33. And I had just drank because I just drank. I'd never ran the experiment of just giving it up for a while. And then like, maybe I was at 31, I thought, you know, I'll have a drink again because now I could really A.B. test it. I had a year of not drinking, decided I'd have a drink again. It ruined three days of my life. I had a couple of glasses of wine. It didn't get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused. So it meant that I got worse sleep that night. And then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. That's a real answer. And then I podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym the day after that day or the day after because of that because I felt really bad. I then slept worse and I could track all of this on my week. Hashtag, add, hashtag, sponsor, hashtag, invest, whatever. Yeah. And I was like, oh my God, there's three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with for my whole life. I drank two glasses of wine and then I podcasted worse. That might be the most pathetic sentence ever uttered by a male of the human species. And it somehow gets worse. His whole week was ruined. His little armband told him he was naughty. I mean, how do you get to the point where you voluntarily say all these things out loud without any hint of shame or self-awareness? And more importantly, how do we get to the point where this interview has millions of views mostly from people who appear to believe that they're getting serious genuine advice on how to improve their lives? Now, first of all, the idea that you can't podcast effectively after having consumed alcoholic beverages the night before is belied by, first of all, my own personal experience. And at any rate, podcasting is not the kind of thing that seems to require clear-headed sobriety anyway. Now, I've certainly never podcasted drunk, but it seems like a lot of my peers in this space are drunk or high on something every time they turn on the camera, at least judging based on the content. If you conducted a field sobriety test on 100 podcasters in the middle of their shows, maybe five of them would pass. And you could debate whether that's a good thing or not, but let's not pretend that podcasters of all people need to be in peak physical and mental condition in order to do their jobs. The more inebriated and insane they are, the more popular they seem to become. And yet, all that aside, you know, it's the podcasting industry that's driving a lot of this, in particular the anti-alcohol hysteria, which has now spiraled out of control. I mean, it's the worst and the gayest of the 90s anti-smoking propaganda all over again. Okay, give up alcohol if you want. I'm not trying to stop you, but the stuff is not battery acid. Okay, a sip will not send you to the hospital. A glass of wine ruined three days of your life. When did it become normal and acceptable for men to brag about their weak constitutions? It's very strange. And I have no problem with anyone giving up alcohol. I don't care. Drink it or don't. Who cares? That's entirely up to you. But many in the health conscious health maxing community now talk about a glass of wine like it's literally cyanide. Which is strange because that means that all of our grandparents were drinking cyanide basically every day of their lives and their life expectancy as adults, taking out child mortality, which was higher back then, was not that much lower than ours is today. It's as low as you'd expect for people who consumed a regular diet of poison. Okay, it's the hysteria and the gross exaggerations. That's the issue. You want to make a health choice for yourself, fine. But it's poison will ruin your life one sip. Calm down. Calm down. Now, in any case, to be clear, I'm not accusing Steven Bartlett of lying. He's making a very important point, although he clearly doesn't realize it. What he's really acknowledging is that if you obsessively try to optimize and calibrate your health every second of the day, then your body will be hit extremely hard whenever you find yourself in a less than optimal situation. You know, it's like washing your hands is obviously a good idea. But if you wash your hands 100 times a day, then you'll never expose yourself to any germs and your immune system will suffer as a result. And something similar has obviously happened to Steven Bartlett. I mean, his preoccupation with optimization has made him so fragile that he physically can't handle a drink that your 85-year-old grandmother could metabolize without any problem whatsoever. How is that an improvement? Even if you don't want to drink, how has your health improved? If something as mild and innocuous as a glass of wine can destroy you, being healthy should not be synonymous with fragility and brittleness, and yet that's what's happened. The wearable health trackers are, of course, a big part of the problem. Hundreds of millions of adults wear these things now. And in a vacuum, wearing a bracelet that gives you second-by-second data on your health doesn't seem to be necessarily a bad thing. It's a little weird, but not necessarily a bad thing. And certainly if you have a specific health condition that needs to be monitored that closely, then technology can literally be a lifesaver. But for a young and healthy person, I think there's good reason to believe that they do more harm than good. And just take Bartlett's story as a case study. He claims that he was nearly incapacitated for half the week after consuming a very moderate amount of alcohol. How did he know he was incapacitated? Well, because he was monitoring it on his whoop, which I guess is one of the bracelets. So was he really that bad off or did he convince himself that his health had been ruined because the bracelet told himself? And then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, how many people wake up every day, particularly when it comes to sleep tracking, how many people wake up every day feeling relatively rested and refreshed and then feel suddenly worse when their sleep tracker informs them that in fact their sleep was suboptimal? Like if you wake up feeling fine, then what's the point of checking your sleep score? These people that check a sleep score every day, do you feel fine when you wake up? Why check it? Oh, I feel fine, but it feels like everything's fine, but should I check? Oh, no, it's not fine. And then what do you do with that information? Okay, anxiously obsessing over the quality of your sleep seems to be the number one best way to guarantee that you don't get quality sleep. And that even when you do get quality sleep, you still feel like you didn't. But if you want a popular podcast, then you're not supposed to point this out. Instead, you're supposed to do what Brian Johnson is doing. Again, he's a popular influencer. And here's one of his recent takes, quote, Now, not that anyone cares anymore, but what he's saying here is mostly not true. One drink does not in fact accelerate aging or shrink hippocampal volume. He's taking studies that look at the effects of long term drinking, and he's implying that one drink has the same effect. There is no reliable data showing that one drink does most of the things that he just mentioned there in any kind of permanent, measurable, meaningful way. Okay, the idea that one beer, one single solitary beer, that would accelerate aging is ridiculous on its face and not supported by any reliable studies whatsoever. So it's a lie in other words, but it's the kind of lie that people feel justified in telling because it's for a good cause. Anybody who points out that it is a lie, like I'm doing right now, can simply be disregarded as someone encouraging alcoholism or some such nonsense, as I surely will be. And people have been using health hysteria to push lies and propaganda for a long time. And even though they all have something to sell, by the way, that's the other part of this, every single one of these people, they all are selling things to you. All of, I mean, the clip with Bartlett was the most, he literally holds the thing up, he's selling that to you. So it's not that, it's not, much of the propaganda is not that hard to understand, they're selling you something. And, you know, when it comes to people lying about health related issues, we lived through the most extreme example of it a few years ago. You'd think we'd have become more generally skeptical of this kind of thing, but for a lot of people, the opposite has happened. I mean, you'd think we'd be at a point now where everybody just naturally, when you hear a claim like one beer accelerates aging, measurably, you'd think everyone is now just programmed to go like, wait a second, wait a second. That's not what's happened. In fact, a lot of people are more susceptible to absurd health related lies than ever. But the bigger issue here is that as Brian Johnson himself would probably concede, everything you do could have some negative effect on your body, right? Or could at least put you, could carry some kind of risk going outside, means that you're exposed to the sun. Means that, you know, you could get skin cancer. Does that mean everybody should stay inside? Does that mean that everyone should carry a canopy wherever they go to ensure that no UV rays touch their skin? Well, apparently that is indeed what Brian Johnson believes. And here's Brian Johnson doing everything you can to avoid exposure to any possible hazards at all. Watch. Why are you holding an umbrella? 90% of visible skin aging is from the sun. So this is a UV umbrella protecting me from the sun. Even though UV index is two, that's right, you got it. I may need to get an umbrella. Oh my goodness. Now, not to be too technical here, but when you're using an umbrella that's designed to shield you from the sun, it's technically called a parasol. And I know that because whenever I leave my house for any reason, I always bring my parasol with me, along with my pastel pink Stanley, my Ebola proof hazmat suit, my Hello Kitty fanny pack. Might seem extreme, but then again, you know, I wouldn't want to expose my body to anything that might reduce my lifespan by a fraction of a second. Now, actually, in reality, and I don't mean to, I mean, I'm saying that we shouldn't engage in exaggeration hyperbole, so I don't mean this as exaggeration. I would rather die a thousand times than walk around like that. Hiding away from the sun with your little umbrella like a scrawny, gay vampire. Now, what we're seeing from these podcasters and many others like them is the product of two independent problems that are now an epidemic in this country. The first problem is that people have no idea how to interpret data or statistics anymore. Second problem is much more serious than this, and we'll come back to that later. Consider this claim by Andrew Huberman, who also hosts one of the most popular podcasts on the planet. This is from a video with nearly 8 million views. And again, I know we're not supposed to correct things like this because it's not really true, but it's for a good cause. So let's just pretend it is, but I can't help myself. So here it is. Watch. For every 10 grams of alcohol consumed, so that's one beer in the U.S., maybe a little bit more than one beer in Japan, or basically a third of a drink in Russia, there's a 4 to 13% increase in risk of cancer. That's pretty outrageous, right? And you might think, wait, how could it be that, you know, this stuff is even legal? Well, look, it's, as I described before, it's a toxin. It's also a toxin that people enjoy the effects of because of the serious nature of what we're talking about and because I would hate to be confusing or misleading to anybody. I want to just emphasize that this statistic that there is a 4 to 13%, depending on which study you look at, a 4 to 13% increase in the risk of cancer and particular breast cancer for every 10 grams of alcohol consumed, that's 10 grams per day. So that's one drink per day. But I do want to emphasize that if that equates to seven drinks per week and all those seven drinks are being consumed on Friday and Saturday, it still averages to 10 grams per day. Okay, so he doubles back at the end there and clarifies that he's talking about one beer per day, not one beer. And all the same, his claim is probably very surprising for most people. The idea that if you drink just one beer per day, you might be increasing your cancer risk of by 13%. Of course, a lot of people average much more alcohol consumption than that. And as a result, we can assume that of the 8 million people who saw that video, many of them walked away convinced that alcohol is effectively a death sentence. For everybody. After all, 13% sounds like a lot, especially when you're talking about your odds of getting cancer. Now, like if I told you you had a 13% chance of getting struck by lightning if you play golf today, you're probably going to stay inside. But the statistic is deliberately misleading in this case. The sleight of hand, which Andrew Hewman never explains, has to do with the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. And understand the distinction. Imagine that somebody tells you that because of your lifelong habits, you've increased your risk of getting lung cancer by 50%. Now, to most people, that sounds horrifying. But it becomes a lot less horrifying when you realize that your baseline risk of getting lung cancer as a non-smoker was only 0.5%. So a 50% increase on 0.5% when you do the math means that your risk is now 0.75%. So your risk is not 50%. It sounds like what we're saying is your risk is 50%. Actually, your risk is 0.75%. Pretty big difference. It's still overwhelmingly likely, more than 99% likely in fact, that you'll never get lung cancer in your entire life. And the same principle applies to what Hewman is saying. According to the studies I saw, a typical woman has around a 12% chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime. That's the baseline. Now, if Hewman is right and drinking one beer a day increases the risk of breast cancer by 13%, which is the very high end of his range. Remember, he said like 5% to 30%, which is a big range. That's like 5% or more than triple that, right? But let's take 30%, worst case scenario. Then the beer drinking woman now has a 14% chance of getting breast cancer in her lifetime. Okay, that's what we're talking about. Her relative risk, her relative risk has increased by 13%, but her absolute risk of getting breast cancer has increased by a little over 1%. Okay, because we're going from the baseline, it's actually 1%. So again, if you want to swear off alcohol to avoid that 1% increased risk, totally fine. I respect it. What I'm trying to do is introduce some reality into the hysteria here. And you could do with it whatever you wish. Now, virtually all the propaganda that you read about cancer rates uses the same tactic. This is from a website called Our Cancer Stories and see what you notice. Quote, sodium nitrate is a chemical salt that is commonly used in bacon, ham, and deli meats. The study showed that it was associated with a 32% increase in the risk of prostate cancer. Potassium nitrate, closely related to sodium nitrate, was found to cause 13% increased risk of overall cancer and 22% increased risk of breast cancer. Sorbates, especially potassium sorbate, are typically used in wine, baked goods, cheeses, and sauces to prevent molds, yeast, and some bacteria. They were found to increase overall cancer risk by 14% and breast cancer risk by 26%. Potassium metabusulfite, which is also used in wine making, was linked with a 20% increase in breast cancer, 11% higher risk of all cancers. Acetates are used in foods such as meat, sauce, bread, and cheese. They were associated with a 25% higher risk of breast cancer and 15% increase in cancer risk in general. Now, what do you notice there? Aside from the fact that they're listing like every food, everything gives you cancer, apparently, which, you know, might be sort of true. But the problem here is that in every single one of these examples, they're using rates of relative risk. It's very scary to be told that your relative risk of prostate cancer goes up by 32% when you eat bacon and deli meats, but that information by itself is irrelevant unless you know your baseline risk of prostate cancer. It's a bit like saying, you know, if you go outside, then you raise your risk of skin cancer by 200%. Well, 200% compared to what? If I told you that it was 200% when someone, you know, when compared to someone who stays inside all day, like Desmond and Lost, and that your absolute risk only increased by 1%, then you probably wouldn't care at all. I would think. I mean, you keep going outside like a normal person. Here's another way of looking at it. Imagine I said that if you get in your car and drive every day, you're increasing your risk of a car accident by 100,000%. Sounds terrifying if you're stupid enough to take it seriously. It's also technically true with a massive caveat. Your risk of an accident goes up by 100,000% when compared to someone who drives only 10 miles a year. So if you imagine that a person who drives every day will end up driving 10 to 15,000 miles a year on average, give or take. Then his relative risk compared to someone who only drives 10 miles a year has increased by around 100,000%, if not considerably more than that. And if you compare a person who drives every day with someone who never gets in a car at all, then his relative risk has gone up by infinity percent. And yet still, the actual risk that you will get into an accident, particularly a fatal accident, the absolute risk remains extremely low. It's not zero, but it's low. It's a risk that you take every time you drive anywhere without even thinking about it. When you get in your car and drive to Target, you are technically risking your life just to go to Target. Is it worth risking your life just to go to Target? Well, yeah, it is. I mean, provided the absolute risk is low, if it's a really low risk, then yeah, but it's not zero. And it's worth the non-zero risk because the other option is to inconvenience yourself and forego doing normal things just for the sake of avoiding an extremely unlikely outcome. But here's the thing, you just don't think of driving to Target that way. In both cases, we're talking about risk. And again, it's technically true that running your errand to Target is putting your life at risk. That is undeniably true. But you don't think of it that way. And you don't think of most things that way because the more you think of things that way, the more incapacitated you are. You can't function as a person anymore. And when it comes to driving, you for the most part don't run the risk calculation at all. And that's because when it comes to driving, you have a healthy and sane perspective, probably. People are losing this perspective when it comes to many other aspects of life. And here's the important point. If somebody ran up to you right as you were getting into your car and said, don't go to Target, you're risking your life. Well, they'd be saying something that's technically, statistically true. But they're also being extremely misleading and emotionally manipulative. You know, they're saying something technically true in the most dramatic, hysterical and ominous way possible in order to persuade you to massively overestimate the risk. And then if it turns out that also that person happens to be selling, you know, a grocery delivery service to you. Well, not only do you know that they're exaggerating and they're misleading you, but you know that they're doing it for the most cynical, greedy reason possible. And that's basically what's happening with a huge amount of the conversation around health on the internet right now. It's impossible to overstate how widespread these kinds of misconceptions have become. You see it everywhere. This is a popular video on TikTok with thousands of outraged comments. Just for example, watch this. Now, like I said, this kind of stuff is all over the place. It's just, and TikTok again, just being a bane on everyone's existence with this sort of thing. As if a 30-second TikTok video is anywhere near enough time to have any kind of actually informative conversation about that. Now, it's true that processed meats, including ham, have been classified as a group one carcinogen by the World Health Organization, which is maybe the least trustworthy organization on the planet as we all learned six years ago, but never mind that. And it's true that in this same category, they include asbestos, plutonium, and cigarettes. But it's completely false to suggest that, therefore, ham is just as dangerous as cigarettes. The label of group one carcinogen simply means that there is conclusive evidence that the substance is capable, theoretically, of causing cancer in some people. It doesn't tell you the odds that the substance will cause cancer or the risk of the illness. And all these conversations are meaningless unless you get down to the actual odds, the absolute risk. What are we really talking about? None of these conversations can just like the example with Target. You're risking your life. Well, but to what degree? Because that means everything here. If there's a 50% chance I'm going to die of the way to Target, I'm not going. But are you saying it's like 0.1%? In which case, it doesn't mean anything. And effectively, the risk for all intents and purposes doesn't matter. Now, with the carcinogen thing, if researchers find that eating string cheese increases your odds of getting cancer by 0.001%, then they can label it a group one carcinogen, which podcasters can then use to convince you that eating string cheese is fundamentally the same as eating asbestos like it's cotton candy. And what's happened in this video, once again, is that the person is confused relative risk with absolute risk. And it's true that according to the World Health Organization, eating 50 grams of processed meat every day, the equivalent of two slices of ham, will increase your relative risk of colon cancer by roughly 18%. But again, that's the relative risk. In absolute terms, your risk of getting colon cancer would increase from around 5% to like 6%. That's what we're actually talking about. It's miniscule. You go from someone with a very low chance of getting colon cancer to someone who also has a very low chance of getting colon cancer. On the other hand, if you smoke every day, then your lifetime risk of getting lung cancer increases dramatically from less than 1% to roughly 18%. That's the absolute number. That is not the relative number. Your relative percentage goes up like 2000%. In other words, the person in that video is comparing the relative risk of eating ham with the absolute risk of smoking cigarettes. So it is apples and oranges, or in this case, ham and cigarettes. It is incoherent. But if you're not paying attention, it might sound convincing enough. The truth is, for many years now, this kind of deception has been commonplace. About a decade ago, a scientist who worked on classifying different carcinogens according to a period on BBC and explained that people are misunderstanding what this term means. Watch. But to say that it's comparable to diesel fumes, asbestos, tobacco smoke, that's pretty scary. No one has done that. That is a distortion. Those are specific carcinogens. The best characterization of this is that eating red meat increases the risk of cancer, but it's a distortion to classify red meat as a carcinogen. We don't know what the carcinogens are. What we're in a position to do is to provide the community with a clear basis for public health policy in relation to diet. And that doesn't involve labelling anything like a carcinogen or prohibiting anything. It involves a sensible intake of red meat and processed meat to minimize any risk of cancer. So this is the common sense advice that you've probably heard from your parents. Everything in moderation. Don't drink Texas. Don't eat anything Texas. And you'll probably be okay until you die, which you will also die along with the rest of us. But in the meantime, that's all you can do. It's not that complicated. But if you're told the truth, then it's much harder to sell expensive app subscriptions and diet plans. And therefore, many of the so-called diet apps only contribute to the confusion here. They prey on the fact that people are more neurotic than they've ever been when it comes to food and don't understand statistical... Most people just do not understand how statistics work at all. One of the great failures of the school system of many is we've got a whole... We have generations of people now who have no clue how to read statistical information and are manipulated all day long by everyone because of it. But here's a study from the UC San Diego released a few years ago. Quote, few researchers have studied how these apps affect women with eating disorders in university and college settings. This research investigates the unintended negative consequences of engaging with these tools. Participants reported that diet and fitness apps trigger an exacerbate symptoms by focusing heavily on quantification, promoting overuse and providing certain types of feedback. Eight themes of negative consequence emerged. Fixation on numbers, rigid diet, obsession, app dependency, high sense of achievement, extreme negative emotions, motivation from negative messages, and excess competition. Some of the words diet and fitness apps cause more problems than they solved in many cases. And even when they're functioning as designed, these apps aren't making people happier or more motivated. And very often the apps don't even work. They're based on junk science. Somebody named Austin Lieberman just posted these two screenshots from the Oasis Health app, which supposedly will tell you if you're eating unhealthy food. And as you can see there, the app ranks Fairlife Protein Milk as having three harmful substances and it receives a rating of 14 out of 100. Not great, especially for protein milk, which you'd expect to be somewhat healthy. And meanwhile, you pull up Jim Beam Bourbon on the app and you're told that it contains no harmful substances at all. And it receives a generous 85 out of 100 rating, which the app translates as good. So I guess the message is that instead of drinking protein milk, you're better off with whiskey, which, you know, sounds good to me, frankly. I'll take you up on that. Actually, when you think about it for a second, the app might be correct. Maybe Oasis Health app is onto something here. After all, every single one of us is descended from people who drink alcohol literally all day every day. So the idea that it's now poison akin to chugging gasoline straight from the pump and we can't even have a glass of the stuff without destroying our bodies is insane. I mean, if that were true, humanity would not exist right now. But here's the point. Even if all the podcasters were on the right track from a statistical point of view, which they're not really, then we should still ignore most of what they're saying. And that's because longevity, despite what godless neurotic podcasters and liberal women will tell you, is not the single most important goal in life. No sane society would trade Alexander Hamilton, who died before his 50th birthday for all the cat ladies and HR gargoyles in Brooklyn who think they're going to live to 100 years old. You know, if our founding fathers were afraid of the sun or even alcohol, it's likely we wouldn't have a country today. We certainly wouldn't have the same writings or insights from the founders. Certainly if they were the kind of guys who would walk around with umbrellas because they're afraid of the sun, or the kind of guys with such weak institutions that one glass of wine would nearly put them in the hospital, then we wouldn't have a country. We just wouldn't. When Ben Franklin was being carried away from Independence Hall following the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him what the men inside had created, a monarchy or something else. And Franklin, of course, famously replied, a republic if you can keep it. At the time, Franklin was suffering from gallant, which historians suspect may have been related to his wine habit. It isn't something you hear about very often in school, but indeed Franklin may have been slightly buzzed when he uttered that famous quote. And while we're at it, the Sons of Liberty met at their usual tavern before launching the Boston Tea Party. In fact, on a Friday night in September of 1787, the founders ran up a legendary bar tab after putting the finishing touches on the country's new constitution. They met at City Tavern, which was their usual watering hole, just a few blocks from Independence Hall. And on this occasion, the founders were greeted by the light horse of Philadelphia, Cavalry Corps, that crossed the Delaware with Washington and served as his personal bodyguard. The light horse also fought in several major battles of the war, including Trenton and Germantown. And so began the massive bender that started this country, according to the final bill, which was recreated in the 1950s, as you're seeing right now. The founding fathers drank, quote, 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of Claret, 8 bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of porter, 8 bottles of hard cider, 12 bottles of beer, and 7 large bowls of alcoholic punch. Now there were only 55 attendees, which means that every guest was afforded several shots, a few cups of punch, and two bottles of wine, roughly a gallon of booze per person. The musicians and waiters reportedly got a separate liquor bill accounting for 21 bottles of wine, which the soldiers paid for. Now it's quite possible that by participating in this night of drinking, everybody involved raised his lifetime risk of cancer by 1%. It's even possible that some of these men may have affected their REM sleep cycles or caused a cortisol spike. Worst of all, some of these guys may not have been able to podcast for three, four days afterward. But all things considered, it was probably worth it. And we should all be grateful that they didn't lock themselves in a basement and refuse to go outside for any reason because they might increase their risk of death. And if they'd done that, we'd be British subjects to this day. And speaking of the British, for centuries, sailors in the British Navy were issued a half pint of 109 proof rum every day, which is like four or five shots every day for months or years while working in the most extreme and dangerous environments imaginable. And you might say, well, they should have done that. Their Fitbits would have been yelling at them nonstop. But if that's your attitude, then you need to simply answer this question. The Royal Navy stopped the daily rum ration in 1970. Was the Royal Navy a more fearsome and effective fighting force before or after 1970? Before the rum ban, the Royal Navy contributed to the birth of the Empire and the rise of the British naval supremacy. After 1970, they're lucky if they can find the keys to their aircraft carriers. They only have two of them, which they never use. The British Empire no longer exists. The entire country has been emasculated. And the point is not that the British Empire collapsed because sailors stopped getting hammered every day. I'm not alleging a direct causal connection here, although it's not crazy to think there might be some kind of connection to some degree. That's not the point though. The point is that today you have men claiming they cannot function for a week after sipping a glass of wine with their Sunday dinner. Not that long ago, men were literally conquering the world while drinking whiskey-like water and having in every way what the modern podcaster would call suboptimal health habits. There is again an unmistakable fragility and like neediness in all of this. And the hysterical claims about a sip of beer or a trip to McDonald's destroying you physically are revealed as absurd against a historical backdrop where men did much worse than that to their bodies and yet also achieved much more than you or I ever will. And that's your ancestral story, no matter where your family comes from. We are descendants of men who slept for four hours on a bed of straw, woke up, drank wine and stormed castles. And we are losing that vitality completely. We're focusing on the wrong kind of longevity, the longevity of lifespan rather than legacy and bloodline. And it's not that we have to choose between the two necessarily, but the latter should be much more a priority than the former. There aren't many examples of great men who achieved great things and lived perfectly healthy and optimized lifestyles. In fact, I can't think of any examples. I'm not saying there aren't any, but I can't. Can you? Off the top of your head. It seems that, you know, greatness usually requires a certain looseness, a certain lack of care for your physical health, not recklessness, not like being suicidal and certainly not being a glutton, but just an openness to risk that terrifies the health optimizers with their little bracelets. A resume only tells you so much, which means hiring the right person can be very difficult. Most people's resumes say they're motivated or a hard worker. Everybody is apparently a dynamic team player. None of that means anything anymore. What actually matters is whether somebody genuinely wants the role. And you can usually tell pretty quickly some candidates sent out 200 applications that morning and barely remember what position they applied for. Other people show up prepared. They look into the company. They ask thoughtful questions. They sound interested in the work itself. And the difference matters because when somebody actually wants to be there, they tend to care more. They pay attention. They learn faster. They fit better into the culture you're trying to build. Well, if you're hiring, you want a candidate who's passionate about your role, but you can't get that insight from a resume unless you post your job on Zippercruiter. Now, you can try it for free at zippercruiter.com slash wall. Zippercruiter's powerful metric technology helps you find qualified candidates quickly. You also have a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first so you can spend more time talking to the right people instead of digging through stacks of applications that clearly aren't serious fits. Candidates can also tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job, which is important because hiring isn't just about checking boxes on a resume. You know, you want people who understand the role and want the opportunity. Zippercruiter helps surface those candidates faster. Find candidates who really want your job on Zippercruiter. Four to five employers who post on Zippercruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at zippercruiter.com slash wall. That's zippercruiter.com slash wall. Meet your match on Zippercruiter. Now, it's not every day that I cite Harvard on this show, but this study bears mentioning because it began long before Harvard and the rest of higher education in this country went completely insane. There's something called the Harvard Study of Adult Development and it's described as the longest study of human life that's ever been done. Mass General studied three generations of families across thousands of people for 85 years and they began this study in the 1930s. And here's the top line conclusion after all that time. Quote, the people who are happiest, who stayed healthiest as they grow old and who lived the longest were the people who had the warmest connections with other people. So even if you're tempted by the neurotic perspective on this, it still doesn't matter. I mean, in the end, it all comes out in the wash. Eat bacon if you want. The most important thing you could do, according to the experts themselves, is to do exactly what I'm saying. Don't focus exclusively on extending your life. Focus on doing something significant. And when I made this point on social media, I was expected a lot of people attacked me, called me a troglodyte, etc., which fine, maybe so. But then they told me about their diet apps and their heart rate monitors and their vegan diets and so on. You know, my response to these people is pretty simple. You, maybe with all of that stuff, you optimizing your health to that degree, well, I'm not doing all that, although I am doing, I think, reasonable things. Maybe you outlive me by a few years, or maybe not. But who cares? Like, I have six kids, I have four sons, my bloodline and my name will live on. I could die tomorrow and I still win. So the problem with the HealthMaxers is they only care about extending their own lives by every minute possible. They don't think about bloodline. They don't think about legacy. And that's the kind of longevity that matters. That's the kind of longevity that lasts a thousand years. You know, that's why we have a republic today. Now increasingly, this health optimization obsession has become a desperate and doomed quest for actual immortality. Brian Johnson's motto is don't die, which has all the scientific seriousness of trying to sell a course on how to harness telekinetic powers, which is something that TikTok influencers are actually doing, by the way. That's a conversation for another time. A self-described engineering physicist responded to that video of Johnson hiding under an umbrella with this, quote, avoiding sun is being extremely bearish on the longevity biotech thesis. Assume we will have peptides for everything. Retroviral DNA upgrades, nanobot healing glands. Nature wants us dead at 35. Science will have us live to see the stars burn out. That again is just the hysterical fear in these people. Nature wants us dead at 35. And you're supposed to nod sort of solemnly at those kinds of pronouncements. Oh, yes, that's true. What are you talking about? What the hell are you talking about? Nature wants it. Where are you getting that? You're just making it up. But it's all for good cause. What's the good cause again? Oh, making you terrified, paranoid, and again, selling you things. But anyway, sorry to inform you. That's not how it will work or can work. You're going to die. Absolutely. Very soon, actually, in the grand scheme of things. You have several decades at most. In 80 or 90 years, tops, nobody listening to these words right now will be alive. And most of them won't even be remembered. Like, it'll be like they never existed as far as the world's concerned. And this fact is so terrifying to some people that they live every second in denial, clinging to the insane hope that somehow science will come along and rescue them from mortality. And even if it could, which it definitely can't, then what? You live to watch all your friends and loved ones die, and even their tombstones decay while you linger on, trembling in fear, grasping desperately onto a life that no matter how long it lasts, you're wasting anyway. And then you get to see the earth decay around you and the sun burn out. So you can live on in total darkness and decay. Well, sounds like a lot of fun, but no thanks. I don't need to live for a billion years. I just want the time I have, however long or short it might be, to be meaningful. But they don't sell any bracelets that will track your progress towards living a meaningful life. There are no supplements or peptides for that. Science and technology can do a lot of things. It can even extend your life by a little bit. But however long a life it gives you, it can't make that time actually mean something. And that should be the part that matters most. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed. Were his true aims a colorblind society or something far more radical? Who bankrolled him? What unfolded behind the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963? Was civil disobedience actually peaceful? We wanted to show you a clip of the I Have a Dream speech, but according to our lawyers, we can't. In fact, King's family has made a lot of money suing media outlets. They want to silence critics like us. What they're doing makes it very difficult to judge Martin Luther King Jr. not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. Is America today stronger, more unified, and racially equal than before King's rise? These questions demand answers, and as Americans, we are entitled to a full accounting of the Civil Rights Movement and its consequences. King's movement fundamentally transformed our country and our system of government. I speak as a citizen of the world. Each day the war goes on, but hatred increases, though the cause of evil prosper. The first part of our two-part special on the Civil Rights Movement, a new Constitution, available now on Daily Wire+.