 Just some depressing statistics on life expectancy. I was going to do a whole show about this and maybe I still will because it's an important issue. I mean, life expectancy at both is a crucial measure of well-being. It is a sign of a culture that is advancing or regressing. It is a sign of progress. And the reality is that since 2014, life expectancy in the United States has been in decline and you can't blame Biden for this. You can't blame Trump for this. This is an ongoing real existential challenge. The fact is that if you're born in America today, now granted, this is just an aggregate statistics that doesn't apply to any particular person and it certainly doesn't represent you as an individual and what your life expectancy can be. But it's kind of sad when you look at a country and you see the average life expectancy in the 21st century actually going down. And again, this year in 2021 to 2022 and into 2023, life expectancy at both is down. It's down significantly from its 2014 level. It's down more than a year. And it is somewhat bewildering, although the explanations are pretty clear. The first data to come out of this about the decline in life expectancy in 2014 was published by a couple of economists. And they basically identified the source of this as what they called at the time, deaths of despair. Most of the decline in life expectancy was occurring among middle-aged white working class males. And that it was a consequence of drug overdose, alcohol abuse, kidney failure, liver failure resulting from alcohol abuse and a result of suicide. And this was so prevalent that it actually had an impact on the aggregate statistics for the entire country. Over the last few years, that has expanded to other groups, suicide among young people, drug overdoses, but also just the obesity crisis, the fact that people are obese and don't take care of themselves, a lack of individuals taking their health seriously, a personal neglect of themselves. And fentanyl plays a role here, but it's not the only role. And now you're seeing younger people, just middle-aged white people in other age groups. You can see them also dying at young ages, driving the average life expectancy down. I mean, this is a real challenge. And it's a cultural phenomena. It's something we have to think about and we have to address. And I will do a longer show about this whole concept of deaths and despair and what's driving that. I think it's a direct consequence of a mixed economy and a morality that provides no values and a country that is split apart and is in dramatic disunity. And yeah, a dramatic loss of value. And when people don't have values, when people don't have a purpose, when people don't have meaning in their life, then they do stupid things like take fentanyl. They do stupid things like abuse alcohol. And this is connected with loneliness. And but again, loneliness that I think is the negation of the pursuit of values. And I think ultimately, obesity is a rejection of, for most people, certainly there is medical, some people obese for medical reasons, but some of this obesity is related to low self-esteem. It's related to just the disregard for one's own life. And therefore, a diminishing of one's own values and you're seeing that across the country. Another thing that's really interesting about this life expectancy is that it's very, very driven by geography. This is very much a not a phenomena that is uniform across the country. So I wanna show you a map. This is a map of life expectancy across the United States. Whoops, wrong screen. That's green. And red is not Republican, although it could be given where you're seeing the red. Red is low life expectancy and blue is indeed high life expectancy. And what might upset many of you is that the blue life expectancy tends to be in, tends to be not uniformly, but tends to be in more democratic areas. It tends to be in the blue states and the red tends to be in the red states. That's kind of interesting. Now there is a life expectancy gap that is color skin related and has to do with all kinds of things. Again, we can get into it another time, but that doesn't justify this particular range. This range somewhat has to do with poverty, but this range also has to do with, look at it. I mean, parts of the country, the Southeast in particular, has a far lower life expectancy, a life expectancy very similar to some second world countries. Then the coasts, particularly the Northeast and particularly the coast of California, which have a coast of California, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, which have very high life expectancies. So there's something here as well to be talked about and discussed. I mean, some areas is pretty clear. You get very low life expectancy in Indian reservations. There's a massive problem of alcoholism and drug abuse among Indian reservations, and that explains some of the low life expectancy in Arizona and certainly in the Dakotas and places like that. But much of this is a phenomenon of the South and I think is linked to those deaths of despair of working class folks who lose meaning and purpose in life. And who are taking their own life. But this is something people should pay attention to. This is an interesting map. The highest life expectancy for those interested is in a county in Colorado, a fairly wealthy county in Colorado. The lowest life expectancy is I think in South Dakota in one of the Indian reservations. But in Alaska is low life expectancy. That I guess doesn't surprise me given the cold. But look at Minnesota and Wisconsin. And that's the Scandinavians who live long in Sweden but also live long in the United States. So some of this might be genetic. And as I said, there is a skin color issue. Certainly black Americans live about I think three years on average less than white Americans do. But there's more than that going on. And it is interesting. Violence is another one. So life expectancy in certain cities is actually lower, particularly for young people if they're engaged in gang violence and things like that. So anyway, an interesting map I think. You can imagine that the left loves a map like this and it comes to all the wrong conclusions I think about it. But it is a map worth addressing because there is something going on in America that is unhealthy, really unhealthy. In a sense, it's killing us. It's killing Americans. But if you wanna live long, from this map at least, it looks like you wanna live in coastal California and in Massachusetts and in some of the more heavily populated areas in the Northeast. It's an oil in the North of the Midwest, not in the Midwest, but in the North, in Minnesota, Wisconsin, places like that where, I don't know, something to think about, right? To think about and something to consider and something to consider about the people because I think a lot of this is determined by self-respect, by self-esteem, by people taking care of themselves and one must ask oneself, why is it that people on the coast of California take care of themselves more than people in Mississippi or Alabama or Texas for that matter, most of Texas? Again, these are important questions to ask and I don't think you can quite understand America and understand the broad swath of America and what's going on in America and the tribalism in America and the politics of America without understanding these kind of issues and the kind of what's going on in the lives of people and why is this happening and this kind of real, obviously this real despair that is going on that is raising levels of either explicit suicide or slow suicide that people are engaged in. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Brook show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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