News and Statistical Updates On Health and Wellness – Episode Recaps-Part Three-
Self-awareness should be a daily practice. Sort of like, living in the now, taking stock in your values, and researching the latest information about consciousness and mental health. So, here's some bonus, brain-stretching facts, updates, and corrections to some of our favorite past episodes. It's our pleasure to bring them to your ears.
Berry Gordy and Creative Competition
Joe: For our updates today, can we dig into celebrities? I want to get gossip columny. Can we do a little bit about Berry Gordy and Motown?
Todd: Berry Gordy, the co-founder of Motown along with Smokey Robinson - worth about 400 million dollars and creating a whole genre of music. So, yes!
Joe: Listening to Motown's catalog during this episode. I was like, holy heck, they defined culture for us for an entire generation.
Todd: What this episode was about was can you have creative competition. What's your take on that?
Joe: You need creative competition. You need to look across the table and have somebody you're competing against in a very friendly way. You don't want to crush them, but you want them to help point out your flaws.
Todd: Berry took this one step further. He worked at the Ford motor plan and said for creating music, we're going to run it just like the Ford plan. Writers will write, musicians will play music, and singers will sing. Everyone is going to just do what they're good at. If it didn’t work for one artist, it would just get passed along to the next.
Joe: That’s why you can hear so many Motown songs covered by so many Motown artists. It just kept pushing until it got to the magic combination.
Todd: They got more and more creative competition going, and they were manufacturing hit after hit that all the other record companies who been at it longer couldn't catch up.
So, our news today is that Berry Gordy is being honored. Berry Gordy is being honored at the Kennedy Center Honors and alongside great people like Bette Midler and Lorne Michaels. His name is up on the board now.
Eminem and Celebrity Insulation
Eminem was in the news recently, and we had an entire episode on how Eminem never heard of internet porn. This came from our episode #35, which was about Eminem and celebrity insulation. And the episode posited that once celebrities get enough money and fame, they don't have to talk to the public and pull a Zuckerberg where they buy up a neighborhood. They didn't have to shop at malls anymore or really experience real-world things going on in the public. Their lives are nothing like ours. That all equates to being insulated and becoming calloused. Harkened back to episodes about wealth and calluses, it means that you don't even process information and social cues the same way. You no longer see other people's values as being valuable.
It was such a high-opening episode. I think at the end, we mentioned how the hell are we taking these people's advice on Twitter about what we should vote on? Because all these celebrities weigh in on like politics. But these are people who haven't paid medical bills in a long time, or they have but the doctor comes to them. They don't buy their own food. Many don’t even pay for their own clothes; They had it given to them by the most expensive designers. We found an article during that episode that talked about how rich and famous people get so much free stuff.
With that being said, there are updates to this. Eminem opened a shop. He opened his own restaurant called Mom's Spaghetti and he worked the drive-through. He looks miserable to my eyes, but then I realize it's probably just him playing the part. But yeah, he is serving spaghetti out a drive-through restaurant window. So, when we talk about celebrity insulation on the grander scale, CNN had a fantastic article come out that really backed up what we talked about. The New York Post put out an article as well on what 2020 taught us, and one thing they mentioned was that celebrities are meaningless. Gwyneth Paltrow was selling anti-covid garbage from her shop, Nicki Minaj started posting about how the vaccine made a cousin's testicles become large and sterile, amongst others.
Everything celebrities tweeted this year about covid-19 was nonsense. This is an article by Maureen Callahan, and she says the exact same thing. Madonna whining about covid-19 from her rose pedaled bathtub, Ellen DeGeneres broadcasting from her gorgeous estate, and others complaining that quarantine was like being in jail. I didn’t want a plague to vindicate that episode we did to make us feel like we were dead on, but we were actually dead on. I'm sure we swung and missed sometimes, but we hit the points well on that one.
Evel Knievel and Self Promotion
Self-help, self-promotion, and being your best self. We did it. We did an episode on the biggest, most shameless self-promoter ever – Evel Knievel. This man was willing to break every bone in his body for fame and fortune. And this is someone who we can learn from. I think now in the community of careers we have to promote ourselves. You almost have to have your own brand on LinkedIn or have your own YouTube videos to promote yourself in a given field. And if you're good at it or if people assume you're good at something, that's enough for you to get paid and to get recognized.
Knievel landed his motorcycle on jumps more often than the best Wall Street pickers picked successful stocks and more often than the best shooters in the NBA. He was so accurate and so good, yet most of his career was around promoting that precision. His promotion from self-promotion was grand and often BS. For example, he pretended to be in a coma when he wasn't. But on the promotion thing, I think men are more boastful. This Forbes article entitled The soul-crushing Truth About Women and Self-Promotion states that women were less likely to brag about their actual accomplishments. Studies also found women were more accurate while working as an individual or independent Brokers on Wall Street. Their predictions were better, and they had a better track record. If you're just talking gender differences, their stats were better in the money business. However, they also found that their hiring was worse because they did not promote themselves as much. They didn't want to brag. They didn't want to aggrandize or mythologize their accomplishments. Women feel like they have to hit 90-100% of the checks on the job description, whereas men feel like it should be about 30%.
Overall, men find key things they align with and will learn the rest as they go. This article goes on and gives studies and quotes and talks about the importance of self-promotion. But the most important takeaway here is truthful self-promotion is important for everybody. Truthful self-promotion separates you from the rest of the pack, especially when it comes to hiring practices. If you want to get hired, be honest and be willing to say that you took a role in the team that succeeded. But specifically, this study talks about how amazingly women do in higher fields when they self-promote in an honest and meaningful way. This article is a nice cherry on top of that past episode, and it's a really good read.
Ildefonso and Emotional Granularity
Do you remember our episode about emotional granularity? This one was useful for combating feelings of being overemotional, acting or lashing out before processing and digesting what is happening. When you get granular emotionally, you ask why you are angry or feel a certain way. It's easy to get mad fast, and this level of awareness can help remediate that. It is identifying your exact emotion in words. All the studies have found that one of the greatest tools for emotional health is possibly a fix to psychology.
Across the board, touching several disciplines is identifying how you feel and then working with it from there. There's something called the emotional wheel or the emotional color wheel. If you look it up, it touches on the five basic feelings, which is where most people stop. If you say, I'm angry, that is not enough to get granular. Using this emotional wheel, you can narrow it down better with subsections. I'm disappointed. Why are you disappointed? I'm hurt because somebody disappointed me. The more granular you get, the better you can identify the exact emotion and make a good plan to address it.
Our brains are built to form a plan from a goal. So, the moment you figure out exactly why you're feeling bad or good, you'll have a plan. This comes from a study supported by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute from Northeastern University. This is in partial fulfillment to a doctorate in Philosophy degree in Psychology awarded to Katie Holman. This was a great study that came out this year. Basically, it talks about how granularity was positively correlated with the number of clusters of cardiorespiratory physiological activity. To put that in another term, that means if you go out and get your circulatory moving, people who did the study were able to identify their own emotions quicker, easier, and more effectively. So, literally, if you're having trouble figuring out exactly how you feel and that emotional color wheel isn't working, go take a brisk walk.
Bee Gees and Recognizing Our Prime
Todd: We did an episode about a disco fad and the biggest disco band of all time - The Bee Gees. The episode is about recognizing our prime. Do you remember that episode?
Joe: That is one of my absolute favorite episodes.
We found great information from The Washington Post and Nobel prizes, which stated that everybody is well into their late 30s and mid-40s before they become creatively successful. Even with sportspeople, unless you're in a very highly specific sport that you have to peak early, like gymnastics, everybody else gets better and more efficient with age. We did manage to find articles from insurance companies and brokerages saying that young people do not have their finances together and that people generally don't hit their financial prime until way later in life. I initially thought we were supposed to move out and be independent at age 21 or right after college. We thought your prime is when you're still young and powerful, and your early 30s was when your income goes up, but that is simply not true.
Well, there is a new article out on recognizing your prime, and it's a CNBC article that found you don't really get any net worth as an American until you're 45 to 54. If I'm looking at this graph correctly, they give the average net worth and the median net worth. I'll give an example of the median. If you put up a business in Seattle, you do so based on the median. But if there are a couple of Microsoft billionaires in that zip code that didn't even live there, it was actually a poverty area. The point is, if I'm under 35, what is my median net worth? How much am I supposed to be worth before I'm “successful”?
I almost don't want to share this news with people that have been working probably for at least 15 years. From this graph, the wealth prime is anywhere from 65 to 74, so basically retirement. From 35 to 44, your median worth is supposed to be about $91K and turns up more as you get older and establish careers. So, our peak net worth is about the same as a house in the Portland area. Your total net worth will probably, as an American, not exceed the cost of a house.
I was listening to a great presentation by somebody who was giving a speech for the Royal Institute. And he was saying that Britain is having the same problem: Baby Boomers have arrived at their pensioner years. Most of them buy second houses instead of having the millennial generation buy their first house. Generational money is hoarding up the houses and renting them to the millennials who couldn't get them in time. The presenter said that the way we solve this is to have a tax gift to millennials. Once anyone reaches a certain age, we just give them $10,000. It doesn't seem like much, but it means everything to a millennial. And now that I'm looking at this graph, seeing that the median net worth of somebody younger than 35 is $13,000, that almost doubles their median. That is the start of their savings to buy a house.
Let’s get into news about Amazon, one of our favorite subjects – wage theft. We did a double episode about Amazon and wage theft and got feedback from people saying that they couldn't believe that Amazon workers in some factories have higher injury rates than steel millers. Some people got out of prison who'd rather go back to prison than work for Amazon. Pregnant women weren't allowed to go to the bathroom because there just wasn't time. People who want 15-minute breaks have to rest on the conveyor belt because it takes 20 minutes to walk back to the break room.
Well, do you want to hear how it's gotten slightly worse for Amazon since we did that episode? Upon looking at their factory of people they're treating like robots and looking at how they have these tags on their wrist or these personal computers that tell them when they shouldn't be acting human, they extended it even more. So, there was an article that came out last week from CNBC. It states that Amazon now has an app that tracks and disciplines delivery drivers specifically for looking away from the camera when other people cut them off or have to take a bathroom break. They get in trouble because and they lose their end-of-week bonuses if they don't act without humanity.
In that Amazon episode, we talked about how Amazon set the standard for the wage that would keep people locked into their job. They found out the perfect sweet spot and it was algorithm found. Basically, it was $15 an hour plus benefits. It means that they wouldn't lose their labor force, and they specifically set up warehouses in impoverished areas so they have a labor force willing to work in that range. This month, Business Insider had an article about this, but this has been all over the news prior.
During the lockdown, where everybody was getting desperate, Amazon used this desperation to finance what they're setting up now called Factory Towns. Business Insider calls their rapid expansion a chance to create a better economy for working-class Americans. They said they opened an additional 125K jobs in September alone and brought up their minimum hiring wage from $15 to $18. Now they're treating this like they're inventing something new - like Amazon is doing something that has not been tried since the Ford. Even more, when that industry leaves, it never leaves those towns intact - just look at Detroit. It sounds like Pennsylvania, where they're going to force you to work for a lower wage to just live.
To get on a slightly lighter subject, we had an episode (number 48) all about love. Now, this episode can't possibly be an update on the extremely old couple that the story was based on, but there is a new thing on love, and it is love coaching. Even more, the number one buying customer is 30-something women in search of a partner. Some of these coaches just came out of messy divorces and some of them don't have a significant other. But even when they can’t guarantee love, the simple act of hiring a coach is making these women happier.
I guess this is a silly question, but why do thirtysomething educated women need a coach to motivate them to find men? There's a lot of moving parts on this and what's happening is a lot of men are not going to college. There's less inventory per se and less fun because of toxic social dating between Instagram, Facebook, and all the dating sites. It all makes it very hard for someone to find a person who is serious about a relationship. And guess what? These one-on-one dating coaches charge an average of $8K a month per person. I was reading about some of the seminar-leading coaches, and this is a billion-dollar industry where many of them went through a messy, very public divorce. They then use that as a way to motivate others to keep pushing forward as they did.
They basically say they did the same thing and know the answers on how to help you. It’s a great promotional tool. Many also do have certifications, but the connection factor is what tends to drive them to success. We had a self-help episode where we talked about self-help gurus and how toxic they can be. But the thing we did find was that there are some coaching federations where you can get certifications to become a vetted coach. That's not to say all self-help coaching is bunk; we just assume it's bunk until somebody shows us their paperwork.
General Grant and Compassion Fatigue
Compassion fatigue and being calloused. We're watching hospitals fill up and certain people being sent away because they can’t give you a bed. When we first wrote this episode, we did not know covid would be as big as it is or that it was on the horizon. We originally wrote an episode called General Grant and Compassion Fatigue and it was all about how the brutal war general was punishing generals who came from wealthy families.
He showed up to the table to negotiate with Robert E. Lee in a muddy uniform. This man had every reason not to have compassion for the enemy. And then we compared the level of compassion he showed to how much compassion our political parties had for each other. About a year ago when we wrote this episode, there were people on the political spectrum running out of compassion for all these heartbreaking things going on. We had people getting sick. We had people put in cages. We had people that needed assistance from the government because they were out of money.
To recap how compassion fatigue works, if the number of people in a story exceeds one, you start running out of compassion. Stories work best when it is one person being affected and you can sympathize with them. When you start getting to bigger numbers, the larger the number, the less we have compassion for it. When you talk about a hundred thousand dead people somewhere, my compassion needle goes to zero. It seems like it should be the opposite, but that is not the case.
According to new articles that came out like the CNBC one called Covid Is Driving An Exodus Among Healthcare Workers, 16 to 39% of nurses have fatigue about covid patients. Before Covid, we needed health care workers dearly because there are more Boomers than there is any other Generation by numbers. People are getting older, and we have a lopsided population. Meanwhile, doctors who were already limited to seeing each patient for less than 20 minutes now only have less than 10 minutes. There's a pandemic that they have to deal with, and not only that, but we have also politicized the event. So now those doctors who were already burning out, who are already becoming disillusioned with how many people they have to see per day, now have to deal with an epidemic where half the people who come in to get treated didn't believe in the thing they're getting treated for.
In April, a study found that in the healthcare marketplace, 4 in 10 nurses were going to leave in 2021. It's higher among ICU workers, coming un at 48%. So, half of the workers working in emergency medicine are planning to leave, and the same thing is happening in Britain based on a recent report by the British Medical Association. It all boils down to physical and emotional exhaustion. I'm going to leave you with this. People ask how the hell are medical bills so high, yet hospitals are underfunded. Believe it or not, health insurance companies are doing so well right now. As in, they have literally been doubling profit this last year. I don't know if you know this, but they're only allowed to make so much money because of the way Obamacare was structured.
The idea was everyone was mandated to buy in and every insurance company was limited on how much they could make. If all of the public simultaneously pays you for health insurance and if you make more than what you should in a year, you kick that back to either the hospital or the public like a rebate. Guess what? They haven't done it yet. Some of them are quadrupling their profits after they were being mandated that everyone have insurance. The New York Times had an article from last year that talks about how the insurance profits are quadrupled depending on the company, and none of them have given rebates.
What makes it even more infuriating is with all this burnout among clinicians and nurses, some of them started the pandemic by saying they will cover Covid care costs for patients who get sick, even though it's not strictly worded that way. However, a lot of them are revoking that. So not only had they made double and quadruple profits last year and owe us rebates, but many are also revoking the good grace coverage they would extend for covid. A lot more are now saying, no…we want the money still.