Tom's Blog on Life and Livingness
I heard a doctor describe much medical practice as a game of ‘match up’ – “You give me your symptoms, I’ll give you some drugs to suppress those systems.”
The broken system profits from your illness — not your health. Doctors get paid for repeat visits for prescriptions while you stay sick.
What if Doctors didn’t get paid until the patient was healed?
Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRtOFKpvXOA
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to reshape global politics, economist Jeffrey Sachs’ 2025 speech at the European Parliament has resurfaced and is once again drawing international attention.
In this address, Sachs warned Western leaders against provoking Russia, criticized NATO’s eastward expansion, and argued that decades of Western foreign policy had increased tensions with Moscow. He also discussed the concept of “Finlandization,” using Finland as an example of how neutrality once helped maintain stability.
This is archival footage from 2025. The views expressed are those of Jeffrey Sachs at the time.
Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNcrTk-6He0
Just watched Steven Bartlett get absolutely SCHOOLED by Dr. Boz in 6 minutes that will probably age-reversing-pilled half of the internet today
She looked him dead in the eye and said:
“I’ve been practicing 25 years.
Parkinson’s only wins when you let the trash pile up in your brain for decades… and then act shocked when the diagnosis hits.”
Her exact words:
“The slow death of your brain doesn’t announce itself.
It starts with:
– the belly fat that won’t shift
– joints that ache “for no reason”
– brain fog at 3 pm
– joy slowly draining from life
– waking up tired even after 8 hours”
That’s not “getting old”.
That’s trash in your brain you still have time to take out.
Then she roasted Steven’s eating pattern live on air:
“Pasta + late dinner?
One bite after 6 pm costs you like TEN bites at breakfast when you’re over 40.
Your insulin is still screaming at 3 am.
That’s how you age in fast-forward.”
Her fix?
Dead simple:
– Finish eating by 6-7 pm (non-negotiable as you age)
– Give your body 16+ hours without food regularly
– Trigger autophagy = your brain’s trash disposal service
– Watch mood, energy, focus, and waistline transform in months
She ended with this line that gave me chills:
“At 54 I want to be as sharp, energetic and alive as Steven is right now.
Most people are decaying.
I want to be accelerating.”
If you only watch ONE health clip this year, make it these 6 minutes.
Your 54-year-old self is begging you to hit play.
Who’s committing to their last bite before 7 pm tonight?
(No medical advice, just sharing a public conversation between Steven Bartlett & Dr. Annette Bosworth, MD.)
Click to view the video: https://x.com/Bitcoin_Teddy/status/2077740281768882261?s=20
(Tom: One of the daily email newsletters I read is the Daily Reckoning from Paradigm Press Group. I don’t ever see myself investing in American stocks or investigating which third world country would be the safest haven in a global apocalypse but the newsletters provide a window for me into a whole other world. This one was a corker so I am sharing it whole with you.)
July 16, 2026
Sean Ring
Dear Reader,
Michel de Montaigne once said he’d rather keep company with peasants than professors.
Montaigne said the peasants had not been “educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
He wasn’t in awe of ignorance. He was diagnosing something worse: a kind of education that trains sharp minds to be wrong with great confidence, at great length, and in great comfort.
You already suspect this about the experts running your country. Montaigne just gave you the receipts he wrote 450 years ago.
The Original Anti-Expert
In Montaigne’s France, “education” meant years of Latin drills, logic puzzles, and formal debate. A young man could leave that system able to argue any side of any question. He could quote Aquinas, Cicero, or Augustine at dinner and win the room.
But he often couldn’t grow a potato. (As a Gen Xer, I sympathize. I couldn’t build anything without IKEA instructions before I owned a house.)
Montaigne thought this was backward. He argued learning should build judgment, not just vocabulary. An education that produces confident talkers without sound judgment is a dangerous failure. (If only he could see today’s Federal Reserve Board!)
Plain ignorance is easy to fix. Polished error isn’t, because it comes wrapped in credentials, initials, and a job title.
The peasants around him weren’t wiser men. They were simply men whose mistakes cost them something immediately. Misjudge the weather, lose the crop. Misjudge the soil, go hungry. Their thinking received immediate, brutal, random feedback.
The scholars in their robes got applause instead.
Why Some Reasoning Gets Corrected, and Some Doesn’t
As Thomas Sowell once said, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” My God, that man is a national treasure.
The great British conservative statesman Edmund Burke lamented, “But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Luckily, old Edmund didn’t live long enough to see what British, French, and German politicians are doing to their countries.
Though they, and Montaigne, lived hundreds of years apart, all of them are talking about the Consequence Gap. That’s simply the difference between where someone makes a decision and the cost of being wrong. Close the gap, and bad reasoning gets punished fast. Widen it, and bad reasoning can survive indefinitely, dressed up as expertise.
The farmer has no Consequence Gap. A trader has none (unless he’s The Donald’s buddy, of course). The small-business owner, pricing inventory amid an inflationary mess, has none either. Their P&L is the teacher, and it doesn’t grade on a curve.
Now look at the people setting your monetary policy, health guidance, or economic statistics. Their Consequence Gap is enormous. When they’re wrong, they don’t go hungry. They go on television and explain that the shock was “unprecedented.”
In March 2021, the Fed said inflation would peak near 2.4% and fade quietly. By June 2022, it hit a 40-year high of 9.1%. No one at the Fed took a pay cut, let alone got tarred and feathered.
When the Ruler Becomes the Target
There’s a second trick hiding inside the first, and it’s one every reader of this newsletter has felt in their grocery bill.
Economists invented the CPI to approximate a real thing: the general debasement of money. But once CPI became the official target, officials began managing the number rather than the underlying reality. A war spikes oil prices, and suddenly that’s labeled “inflation,” even though no one printed a dollar to cause it. GDP works the same way. Government spends on a bridge to nowhere, GDP rises, and somebody calls it “growth.”
The ruler stopped measuring the terrain and became the terrain. The people managing the statistics never have to live with what the statistics hide.
A Very Old Word for the Cure
Thomas Aquinas called the solution to this problem “prudence.” He defined it as the virtue of applying right reason to actual choices, not just winning an abstract argument. Aquinas deliberately separated prudence from cleverness. A man can be clever and still choose badly. Prudence is what closes the gap between knowing and doing well.
Montaigne’s scholars had cleverness. Whatever their limits, his peasant friends had something closer to prudence, because reality forced it on them daily.
If there’s no consequence, there’s no correction. No iteration. It’s the same idea in three different centuries and three different vocabularies, and all three point at the same truth.
Watch the Hips, Not the Lips
Before you believe a forecast, ask what the forecaster will pay if he’s wrong. If the answer is “nothing,” discount it heavily. Listen to people whose own money and reputation are on the line.
Watch what insiders and institutions actually do with their capital, not what they say in a press conference. As an old trader friend of mine once told me, “Watch the hips, not the lips.”
And keep your own decisions sized so that if you’re wrong, you feel it fast enough to learn from it. That discomfort is the whole point. Master that discomfort. It’s what keeps your reasoning honest.
Wrap Up
Montaigne’s peasants never held a press conference explaining an “impossible choice.” They didn’t need to. Reality graded their homework the same week they turned it in.
Our modern experts are educated enough to reason beautifully and wrong enough to keep doing it, because the bill never lands on their desk. It lands on yours, in your grocery bill, your savings account, and your retirement statement.
You already sensed the credentials were a smokescreen. Now you’ve got 450 years of philosophy, a Catholic saint, and modern traders all agreeing with you.
That’s not cynicism. That’s just paying attention.
All the best,
Sean Ring
Sean Ring
Contributing Editor, The Morning Reckoning
feedback@dailyreckoning.com
X (formerly Twitter): @seaniechaos
Bret Weinstein said something that won’t leave my head:
For the first time in 300,000 years of human evolution, we removed the cost from the single biggest reward nature ever invented — sex and pair-bonding.
Reliable birth control + abortion = you can now cash the evolutionary lottery ticket without paying the 20-year mortgage of pregnancy, diapers, sleepless nights, and college funds.
Result? An entire generation of 18–35-year-olds walking around with the energy, libido, hormones, and protective instincts that evolution spent millions of years calibrating for child-rearing… but with zero actual children. That energy didn’t disappear. It got redirected.
Heather Heying’s observation is brutal: young women especially began treating ideologies the exact way evolution wired them to treat babies. Climate change, social justice, whatever the cause of the month is — it gets defended with literal mama-bear ferocity, the same neurochemistry that once guarded a toddler from predators now guards an abstract idea from wrong think.
And now Elon is promising the second shoe is about to drop: AI-driven abundance will make money as “free” as sex became in the 1970s. Both of evolution’s primary carrots — mating and resource acquisition suddenly cost almost nothing.
Weinstein’s ice-cold question: When producing and protecting actual children is no longer the central organizing principle of adult life… and when creating wealth is no longer required for status, security, or attracting a mate…What is left to give a human life direction, meaning, and structure?
Are we about to become a species that invents bigger and bigger dragons to slay just to feel alive? Or do we drift into total listlessness? This 3:52 clip is genuinely haunting.
Watch it all the way through, then tell me — honestly — does this explain the absolute intensity we’re seeing in culture right now, or is Bret completely missing something?
View the video: https://x.com/Bitcoin_Teddy/status/2077512782430486720?s=20
Just listened to a story. It had the following lines:
His daughter had once asked him why people should clean up messes they did not make.
He told her, “Because the world gets better when someone chooses to.”
(I usually pick up a dozen or more pieces of rubbish to and from the park when I do my endurance workouts so this really struck home with me as it perfectly mirrors my take on the subject.)
And if you want the basic philosophical principle, check out www.bringorder.info )
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
Aesop – Author (620 – 560 BC)
