 speaker. Really excited to introduce this man. One of the most viewed speeches in all of the 21 convention history. I've watched it multiple times. I think this was a speech back in, uh, was it Orlando a couple years ago? So without further ado, I want to bring up Dr. Doug McGuff. He's a returning speaker to the 21 convention. He's an emergency room medical doctor in Seneca, South Carolina. And he's the founder and owner of ultimate exercise and co-author of body by science and the body by science question and answer book. Can't wait to hear what he has to say. Help me welcome Dr. Doug. Thank you, Robbie. Appreciate it. Normally I talk about exercise and diet, but there's not anything that I can tell you about exercise that you're going to remember that Schuyler did not cover beautifully yesterday in his lecture. So if you're watching this on video, go watch Schuyler's talk. You will need to, you'll have everything you need to know about exercise in that talk. Likewise, with regard to diet, there is nothing that I could tell you today that you're going to remember that wasn't beautifully covered by Jolly or Dave Asprey in their talks today. So I would reference those for you. So instead of, like in 2010, me telling you the how of the paleo diet and the how of exercise, I want to tell you why. And I want to do that from a very unique perspective. And that perspective is 23 years practicing in the epicenter of the implosion of the American health care system. If you care about your liberty and preserving it, you need to care about your health. Now, everyone that's sitting on an aisle seat on this side of the room, please raise your hand. Everyone look around. For those of you that are younger than 35 years old in this room, statistically speaking, this is the number of you who will be dead before you're 35. Keep your hands up. Everyone on this side of the room raise their hands. Okay. That is the number of people, statistically speaking, that is going to have a serious life threatening health condition or injury before they reach age 35. That's why this is important. That's why I want to talk to you about fitness, health and liberty, preserving personal freedom by staying out of the belly of the beast. Now, one theme that I want to make reference to as we go through all this is remember it every step of the way in this story that I'm going to tell you. When we made a mistake or did something wrong, we never go back on that mistake. This is true of individuals, but it's particularly true of bureaucracies and government. If they make a mistake, if it did not work out well, they never go back on it. They always double down and do even more of it. So medical care, what is it? What should it be versus what it is? What medical care should be is a free market exchange, a fiduciary relationship between the provider of a service and a consumer. The moment that you engage me as a physician, I should have a fiduciary relationship to you to take your best interest in heart. But what is it actually today? What it is, a third party relationship where the provider is coerced to place the needs of a collective over the needs of an individual. Now, in a proper circumstance, when you engage me as a physician, we would be discussing both the price and the extent of the care that would be provided up front. As it stands nowadays, if the patients coming through an ER, even with something as simple as a laceration, and they ask me, Doc, what's this going to cost me? I have no idea what to tell the patient. If you get admitted to a hospital, you have no real means of negotiating what your extent of treatment is going to be. In most cases, the extent of what's provided to you would be way beyond what you would normally negotiate under a correct provider recipient relationship. The other thing that happens is instead of you getting to decide what you want, what you don't want, whether you want a statin or not want a statin, you kind of get a take it or leave it attitude because the system is now protocol driven. If you don't fit into the protocol, you don't accept the protocol. You know, there's no negotiation. It's all or nothing. So who's to blame for all this mess? Doctors. This is an important point for all of you. Whenever anything is screwed up in your life, I want you to say four words. It is all my fault. Five words? It's all my fault. Assume responsibility for everything that screwed up in your life. Doctors did this to ourselves. Okay? The doctors that did it, did it with short term gain, short term gain in mind. And they probably knew that the consequences of this would not be born in their lifetime, but in the lifetime of future physicians and future patients. But they sought the help of the government for a short term gain. And they set into motion the long term unintended consequences that has resulted in our ultimate enslavement. So what'd they do? You ever heard of Blue Cross and Blue Shield? Okay? This came about in the Great Depression. Now before the onslaught of everything that we currently have, a lot of physicians provided a very large mass of charity care. And during the Great Depression, a calamitous economic event triggered by government regulation, not many patients were paying for their services. This is where you heard about doctors being paid and chickens and eggs and milk and whatnot, because it's all people had to exchange with. The medium of exchange had gone down to that. What they devised was an insurance system whereby they were, I'm sorry, they were guaranteed to receive a payment for their services, but they bastardize what insurance actually is. What insurance should be is you pay a premium along with a lot of other people that goes into a kitty that will pay you should you encounter some catastrophic unforeseen event. But the insurance structure that they made was something to pay for everything. Routine office visits, medications, screening tests, the whole nine yards come to the office with an earache or a sore throat. It was under the umbrella of this insurance that you paid premiums for. Furthermore, they sought a tax exempt status. Okay, what they wanted to happen was people that were buying their insurance plan was for them to be buying that with pre tax dollars. Okay? Normally when you buy insurance when you buy your automobile insurance, or you buy your life insurance, you buy it with post tax dollars. That means if you made $100, government takes $40 and leaves you with $60 and you buy your premiums with that. When something is allowed to be purchased on a pre tax basis, you get to buy it with the hundred dollars you originally made. Okay? So in a sense, in essence, you're buying it a 40% discount. Well, the government said, okay, we'll do that. But what we want in exchange for that is a community rating. Does anyone know what a community rating is? Basically, that says anyone within a geographic catchment area pays the same premium regardless of their preexisting health status. Okay? So that's created layers of what are called moral hazard. So what's moral hazard? Okay? Well, moral hazard just has to do with what your behavior is under different circumstances. Okay? Let's string a tightrope up on the top floor of this building across the street to the other building. Well, moral hazard is the difference in the way you behave on that tightrope when there's a safety net eight feet below you versus when there isn't. Okay? So people's behavior was changed by the fact that they were covered for everything. The consequences of not washing your hands or eating something that sat out for too long were now much smaller. You didn't have to pay if you got sick even for the most minor of illnesses. More importantly, you felt as if you were going to be taken care of if even you got a more major illness that occurred as a result of your behavior over time. So this was great for the doctors at the beginning of the medical Ponzi scheme, but not so great for those of us down the line. So what happens next? Well, remember, this is occurring in a medical market where different providers are competing within that market. So commercial insurers try to compete. Okay? People that aren't Blue Cross Blue Shield, that don't have the pre-tax benefit and lack of, you know, they have a lack of tax exempt status, they're forced to compete by offering a similar product. So what happens then is the concept of third party payment for medical services becomes entrenched. This essentially becomes prepaid medical care. This makes comparison shopping near impossible because you're not comparing price as you would in an open free market. It's premiums. And it creates another moral hazard that's called Friedman's Quadrants. And it refers to Milton Friedman. And I wanted to have a whiteboard up here to draw up for you. But to spare us all the rigmarole of trying to get that thing up here, let's just divide this screen into quadrants. Okay? And on one side, what we're going to have is your money. And then below is going to be someone else's money. That's the y axis. Guys, don't bother, don't worry about. So on the y axis, we're going to have your money and someone else's money. On the x axis, we're going to have yourself and someone else. So when a person spends their money on themselves, they're going to worry very much about the price. And they're going to worry about the quality of what's supplied. Okay? That is where the most conservative economic calculation occurs. Now, if you're going to spend your money on someone else, you're still very concerned about price. But you're not quite so concerned about quality. You're buying a birthday present for someone you're like, eh, I think they'll like it. Maybe they'll hate it. I'll never know. But I don't really care that much.