 So this is the idea, clearly, we're most concerned about opportunity, right? If you're in this room, it's because you wanna make the best of your life. You're not really concerned with, hey, how do I not have a complete disaster of a life? But nevertheless, we are concerned with what happens in the worst case scenario, right? What happens if I reach a certain age and I just can't work, I can't support myself, what's gonna happen to me? And the whole idea behind social security is, all right, you have a platform of supporting yourself. Now, this is kind of a weird notion of economic security, first of all. So economic security in any rational world, so the way that it's usually treated is, how do you guarantee that you have resources even if you haven't produced or saved for them? That's the idea behind this idea of economic security, but that's not a realistic idea of economic security because the fact is the government can't guarantee economic security. It can't guarantee that those resources are there. It can only guarantee that, hey, if people produce them, we're gonna take enough from them to guarantee that you'll have some floor of protection. Any rational idea, any rational conception of economic security is really going to be that if you do create something, if you do invest it, if you do save, nobody can come and arbitrarily take it away. Now, that kind of conception of economic security doesn't really pretend well for the welfare state because of course the basic idea there is the government gets to say, hey, whatever we wanna take from you, if we think it's in the public interest, we're gonna do it. I mean, how economically secured do we feel knowing that we're $205 trillion in debt, which by the way, does anybody have $205 trillion on them? Because if you do, let's go out for drinks after this. No, it's more wealth than exists in the entire world, so that's kind of a problem. But let's look even deeper. You might say that's kind of nice wordplay, Don, but what happens if I'm old and I can't support myself? Support myself. So the kind of argument that's usually given is that if we don't have something like Social Security and Medicare, the elderly will starve in the streets. Now, there's an interesting test case for this. What happens when people don't have old age welfare programs? And it's called America for every year until 1935, which by the way, if you can do the math, is longer than we've had Social Security since 1935. Now, did the elderly starve in the streets? And it turns out that amazingly no. Amazingly, people figured out a way to live without handouts for over 100 years, and it's pretty fantastic when you think about it. They were very entrepreneurial in their whole approach to life. And so I'm just gonna go through some of the mechanisms that they took in order to not, as they say, starve in the streets. So first of all, people worked. It's kind of funny today where we think of like, ah, work's a real burden. But actually, the people pushing for a welfare state complained for many years because the elderly, those darned people refused to retire. The fact is that they found their lives more meaningful, more meaningful, more valuable, more enjoyable with work than without it. And they saved. Who has a savings of more than 0%? If you do, you are the 1% because most Americans don't. People at that era saved between 1 eighth and 1 ninth of their income, which is, I mean, that's impressive. Credit, obviously, if you couldn't support yourself, various forms of credit were available. Turning to friends, family, community, informal ways of helping people, the number one, does anybody know what the number one thing people did? So first of all, before industrialization, before people were really dealing with retirement, what was the number one retirement plan? Anybody know? Close, that comes later. The first retirement plan was actually death. We worked and then you died and then you didn't have a retirement plan. But now we have industrialization, people are living longer and yeah, that's exactly what they did. The number one thing people did is they lived with their kids. And when you think about it, social security is in effect like an indirect way of us all taking care of other people's grandparents. Like it's in effect, the government wheels over, somebody else's grandma shoves her into our lawn and says, here, you watch her for a while. But no, what most people did is they took care of their own parents if they needed it. There were also things called mutual aid societies. Now, anybody heard of like an elk's lodge or a moose lodge or something? I'd love to see these re-emerge, they're kind of cool. But these are in effect the descendants of mutual aid societies. And these were community groups in effect where you would pay your monthly membership due and you would be entitled to certain kinds of then support from the club. And it might be things like unemployment insurance. It might be things like private health care. You'd have a lodge doctor, you could see. Or it could be a retirement thing. They had often very, they had retirement homes where if you couldn't support yourself, you would go and you'd be able to stay at the society's retirement lodge. And finally, there was a charity, private charity, which in this era was abundant. Again, we're talking about pre-1935. And people per capita were giving more to charity than they did today. And so what were the results of this? Was it people starving in the streets? No, the fact is that what was happening with immigration were people fleeing the shores of America, trying to get away from this wretched area where people were starving in the streets and going to those countries that had welfare programs. Anybody know what was going on with immigration at this time? This is the biggest wave of immigration to America. Indeed, the people pushing for welfare state programs, which they started doing really in the 1880s, model after Bismarck's Germany, they said, well, we don't have to worry about old people in America. They're doing just fine. We have to worry about poor people. So they spent 30 years trying to create welfare programs for poor people. And then they realized, oh, Americans don't care about poor people. Let's focus on old people because most of us one day aspire to being old. So let's do that. And then they eventually succeeded in 1935, as we talked about. But the best statistics we have in terms of what's going on then, and we don't have great statistics, so take these with a bit grain of salt. But the best ones we have tell us that by 1935, only 8% of the elderly need any form of formal charity, whether it's private or whether it's the kind of minuscule government level programs going on. And we're taking a different look of something that we've been diving into in the last couple of years. Now, we have Don Watkins right here. How social security is sabotaging the land of self-reliance. Bring it on home. Good stuff, man. Thanks, man. Yeah, you got it. By the way, if you can do the math, it's longer than we've had social security since 1935. Now, did the elderly starve in the streets? And it turns out that amazingly no. Amazingly, people figured out a way to live without handouts for over 100 years, and it's pretty fantastic when you think about it. They were very entrepreneurial in their whole approach to life. And so I'm just gonna go through some of the mechanisms that they took in order to not, as they say, starve in the streets. So first of all, people worked. It's kind of funny today where we think of like, ah, work's a real burden. But actually, the people pushing for a welfare state complained for many years because the elderly, those darned people refused to retire. The fact is that they found their lives more meaningful, more meaningful, more valuable, more enjoyable with work than without it. So the first reason, I think, is what I call the collectivist premise. And this is looking at the welfare of the group rather than the well-being of the individual, and says, what's good for, quote, society as a whole? How should we distribute society's resources in a fair way? I think the better way, the more rational way to think about political issues is to focus on the individual. And I think if you think about what's good for the individual, you come to a very different conclusion. So the two essentials in my judgment of what makes us happy and successful life, and I think this came through in all the talks today, is thought and effort. This is Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. It's...