This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. We're joined by a great friend of ours, Dr. Mary Ruert. I'm sure many of you know her, are familiar with her work. She is a PhD in biophysics, not an econ or something on the social science side. She has been involved for years with the Libertarian Party and once ran for their nomination for president. She spent, I think, a couple of decades in the business of pharmaceutical research at Upjohn, a company I'm sure many of you know. And for our purposes today, she is the author of several books, but also most recently, Death by Regulation, how we were robbed of a golden age of health and how we can reclaim it. You can find that on Amazon under her name. So with that mouthful, Mary, welcome, good morning. Well, thanks, it's great to be here. Mary, we tend to think that all of the funding for science comes from government, either from universities or CDC or NIH or something. Is that actually the case? Well, actually, that's probably no longer true. Most of the research is actually happening. At least the research that leads to treatment for disease is actually funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And NIH and the other government agencies mostly fund academic research. And I think what the ratio is is about 90% of the funding that the drug companies put in actually end up resulting to a product. And yet, if you look at the government-funded grants that come out, maybe 10% go that direction. So I guess it just depends. Obviously, basic research helps fund the treatment research as well. But I've sat on the boards that decide who gets a grant from some of these funding agencies. And I can tell you that there's some gamemanship involved. And if your theory is very new and different, it's very unlikely to get funded. So that's unfortunate. Whereas in the pharmaceutical industry, especially with the startup biotechs, they usually have a truly new idea. So that's the difference in how the funding goes. Right, but I think we aren't necessarily sure of how much research is sort of mainstream. In other words, if you want to get the money, you don't necessarily want to come up with a proposal that is totally outside the bounds of the research as it currently exists. That's right, that's right.  Whereas in a pharmaceutical company, you're there and you can actually do hands-on persuasion, so to speak. So it really helps. But within the world of scientific research, that's pretty broad. There are sort of the Alex Joneses of scientific research, right? I'm sure some of our listeners remember there is the Linus Pauling Institute, and they, for example, have come up with some theories about what mega doses of vitamin C might do, even intravenous. Those theories may be crazy, I don't know. I'm not equipped to say. But I don't want to live in a world where they can't come out and talk about their theories. And I feel like we do live in that world. We do, because the FDA, which really controls what you can say about your product, has said that if you make a health claim for a food or a nutrient, that it becomes a drug. And then it has to go through the 12 to 14 years of regulatory hoop jumping if you actually want to make that claim. So give us your quick and short definition or view of regulatory capture, what it is and how it happens. Sure, well, what happens is, especially in highly regulated industry, the industry is survival, and I'm using the pharmaceutical example here, often depends on capturing the goodwill or maybe the funding of the regulatory agency itself. And that's happened by the prescription drug user fee act that was passed in 1992. It started out as a user fee that the drug companies could pay about $100,000 to speed up the approval process. The FDA's review of this 12 to 14 years of data. And the FDA generally takes a year or two to do that. It was about two years and 92. But it's morphed into funding most of the FDA's section that approves new drugs. The numbers I've seen say as much as 70% of the salaries of the people who approve drugs now come from these user fees, which at the last time I saw them were $2 million, which is huge. So they've captured the, getting back to your definition. So they've captured the regulators to such an extent that when Vioxx was being debated at the FDA, whether they should approve it or not, one of the persons, David Graham, who objected to its approval was told that the FDA's client was the pharmaceutical industry, not the American people, not Congress, but the pharmaceutical industry. So that's a great example of regulatory capture. Well, we tend to think, or most people tend to think that the FDA, for example, helps keep us safe from dangerous drugs. That's a joke among us, but here's the thing is it's not just a safety issue. When the FDA, let's say tests and bans a certain drug because it causes heart seizures or something like that, people can see that, that seems tangible, and they can say, well, thank goodness for the FDA protecting me. But it calls to mind, you know, Bastiat's idea of the seen and the unseen. What we can't see is all the things that might have been, all the innovative treatments and procedures that might have been if the FDA were not in the way. Yes, but with the pharmaceutical industry, we have studies that actually show that impact to a large degree. In 1962, the Keith Hoffer Harris amendments to the Food and Drug Act were passed. And this really gave FDA almost unlimited power over the pharmaceutical industry. And the time it took to get a drug from the lab bench to the marketplace went from four years to 14 years by the 1980s because the FDA didn't want Congress to come down on them if there was a side effect for a drug and all drugs have side effects. So they would keep asking for more and more studies. And because we know roughly how many lives each drug that's on the market today saves, you can actually calculate the number of people who have died waiting for new drugs because of these amendments. It's about 15 million people through 2009, I believe the number is. And then we also have studies that show loss of innovation in late stage development. So for example, after the companies maybe spent 10 years working on a drug, about 50% of them are dropped not because they don't work, not because they aren't safe but they're dropped for what we call economic reasons that the manufacturer realizes that it probably won't recover its cost or make enough profit for it to be worthwhile to continue. If we're only losing half of our innovations and we estimate that maybe either 25% is effective as the drugs we have on the market today, that's another 26.7 million people who have lost their lives to loss of innovation. And a lot of innovation actually gets lost before development even begins. I had the FDA actually call me up one day and say, Dr. Ruart, we understand you have this patent now that you've applied for for the treatment of liver disease with prostaglandins, which by the way are a natural substance and every cell in our body makes. And I said, yes, that's true. And the examiner said, well, we're very excited at the FDA about this. 100,000 people die every year from liver disease and we can only recommend bed rest. So we want to let you know that we're here to help you get this drug to market. But the problem is when you have a truly new drug, you don't know how many times a day you have to give it. You don't know what dose you need to give. And for a long-term disease like liver disease, you don't know how long you need to treat. So you don't know how many people you need in your study. And if you guess wrong on any of this and you do an effectiveness study, which takes years and you don't get the statistical significance that the FDA wants, you have to start over. And up John management figured out that if we did have to start over, our patent would be gone and we would never be able to recover costs. And I'm not a big believer in patents, but when you have this much regulation, there's no hope for recovering your costs unless of course you have some type of monopoly protection in this case, patents. So I suspect that many, many drugs, probably just as many as drop out in late stage are never developed because the company can estimate that it's just not going to make them any money. So there's a lot of innovation that's lost. So my numbers are very conservative. And if you crank through these numbers, what you realize is that probably every one of us has lost five years of our lives to these regulations that were passed in 62. The good news on that is the regulators are losing five years too. And so is Congress. So maybe, maybe we get this changed. But when you talk about a drug taking 15 years perhaps to get to market, what you're essentially saying is that small or startup pharmaceutical companies almost can't exist. You have to be big and rich. That's right. What happens is today, a lot of small companies start up and they just do the initial studies of what we call maybe phase one safety testing in people to get to that stage so then they can hand off their product to one of the big pharma companies that has enough money and to take a big hit. Because it costs about $2.5 billion these days to get a drug to market. So if it's the last moment you pull the drug or the FDA won't approve it, obviously you lose a lot of money and small companies can't take that hit. When they hand it off to a pharmaceutical firm, a big firm that can take the hit, of course they lose a lot of their potential profit. Sometimes the drugs that don't make it for economic reasons as you point out, aren't they sometimes sold to companies in other countries who are not under the FDA's jurisdiction who can use them for off-label uses or continue the research and they can be prescribed immediately because in a sense some of these other countries are freer. Yes and that used to be even much more common than it is today. We used to actually do our initial studies overseas and probably market the drug overseas first but what's happening is there is a drive towards what they call harmonization which means that they want to make all the countries the same and the standard they use of course is our FDA. This is done through Codex Alimentarius and if you go to the National Health Federation's website which I believe is nhf.org you can learn more about that. Well that's interesting because when I worked for Dr. Paul in the early 2000s he was very involved in the health freedom issue and in supplements freedom and trying to keep duchet as the law of the land. Talk a little bit about though how as Americans we actually have a fair bit more freedom than people in some countries. Yes well one of the things that Codex wants to do is limit how much you know the amount of vitamins you can get over the counter. So for example in Germany when they pass this initially you could only get like 100 milligrams of vitamin C. I mean I take about 2,000 milligrams a day so that kind of gives you an idea of how horrible that is if you want to take large quantities of vitamin C. My understanding is the Germans have relaxed that requirement they probably got a lot of complaints so that's good but there is definitely a move to limit the amount of supplements you can take and there's a lot of little twists in the law for example if a drug company decides it wants to develop either the nutrient or an analog of the nutrient then the FDA claims that it cannot be sold here in the US as a supplement. So there's a big there's a lot of big fighting going on around that. The FDA does not believe that commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment and that's why you'll see that there's a big difference in what different supplement companies can say. The Life Extension Foundation LEF.org is a really great company was founded by a couple libertarians and when the FDA tried to prosecute them the attorneys that the Life Extension Foundation founders had said you better settle and you better go to prison because you know you really can't beat the FDA. Well they said no way and they did beat the FDA so the Life Extension Foundation I think has a little bit more liberty than some of the other ones because the FDA won't take them on again and unfortunately the FDA tends to go after the little guy the ones that don't have enough money to really fight them and that's very sad. Well it is sad and this false designation of so-called commercial speech as a subset of less than free speech is troubling and we saw this sort of thing with Irwin Schiff talking about the Internal Revenue Code now we see it with alternative health providers talking about the FDA so but I wanted to go a little farther here this definition is so critical to the freedom of supplement companies if the FDA sort of upgrades what they sell to a food or nutrient all of a sudden it becomes a drug of sorts that they can regulate versus a health food supplement so it can be the end the death knelt now for a supplement company. Exactly, exactly in fact Jonathan Emoid who was the attorney in many of the cases landmark cases really against the FDA has basically written in his blog on his website that the way everything's been structured now and the regulations that the FDA has put out because it actually keeps putting out more and more regulations he said that at any time the supplement industry probably could be shut down and that's very scary because the studies show that supplements can really really help people and in some cases they substitute for drugs in some cases if you have to take a drug they protect you from the side effects so you know that's a big big problem. But I just I want to get back to this though Deshae is still good law in the United States correct and that and as a result there is a pretty broad range of supplements you and I can go by freely right now. That's right right now we're in pretty good shape. And I don't think people understand the extent to which a lot of European countries of course they've tried to have harmonization among the EU under the rubric of Codex alimentaries that the supplements are really limited and regulated in Europe more than they are here you can't just go by the same let's say milligram of vitamin C. In some countries and other countries it's a little freer it just depends on the country. And you know that goes for herbal medicines too. You know there are some things we can't get here that they have and vice versa. You know I wonder though whether just the size and scope of the baby boom generation we're so into health and vitality in the U.S. in our later years that they don't have some generational pull to keep supplements free simply because seniors or baby boomers are taking so many of them. Well yes and it's not just baby boomers Congress had two instances when it was trying to pass the D'Shea Act where it got more male from the American people than on any other issue. So you know people are very feel very strongly about having access to their supplements and again when you think about it and all the information that's coming out that's how helpful they are. I think maybe Congress would see things a little differently today if they're in the group to take supplements and I think more and more of them are. Right. Well the other thing I wonder since we've had a couple of decades now since D'Shea was implemented people get used to taking the supplements they become maybe physically or mentally dependent on them. I think there'd be a black market. Yes I'm sure there would be. Imagine bodybuilders buying creatine you know covertly at the gym like they purchase steroids now not unthinkable. That's very true. I think if they tried to shut down the supplement industry today Congress would again get more male or in this case emails than it ever has before. Well so I wanna talk a little bit more about pharmaceutical companies themselves. You worked up John for a long time. Yes. There's an inertia in other words they tend to want to treat diseases rather than cure them. There's a lot of diabetics in America who take insulin every day of their lives and it becomes a self perpetuating industry. This doesn't mean that they're evil people or bad people. I don't believe that but it means they have a self interest in sort of perpetuating the status quo instead of radically coming along and let's say curing diabetes. Well you see that's I don't think they are against curing diabetes by any means. I think it's that they because of the regulations they need to do it in a certain way. It has to justify that two and a half billion dollars. And that really ties their hands. Let me kind of give you an example from real life here. I was on the airplane with someone who had heard that the up John company was developing a series of compounds that we called the Lazaroids after Lazarus rising from the dead because it did so much. And so he wanted some of these. I went to the project manager and said is there any chance that this gentleman could get some. And he said no not at this point in the development process. He said but just tell him to take a lot of vitamin E it'll do the same thing. So why are we developing. And up John actually was one of the companies that had a special process for making vitamin E right. So I mean we would love to have sold it and marketed for some of these indications but we can't without jumping through all these hoops. So if we're going to jump through 12 to 14 years of regulatory hoops and put up two and a half billion dollars you know obviously we need to be able to have a patent protection of some sort. And this is why it's rare for a natural substance to actually be developed by a company. Now there were two companies that said hey fish oil is so great we want to develop it. So what they did is they put an extra chemical group on the active ingredient of fish oil that your body would take off when she ingested it. And so those companies can go to doctors and say hey you know our fish oil is great you know get it by prescription does this that and the other thing but of course it costs a lot of money. My sister you know would be eligible for a prescription fish oil. So she went and checked out the pricing. Well it turned out that she was getting the highest quality over the counter fish oil that there was for about the same price that her copay would have been. So you know we're paying a lot of money for this.  And the person who has the highest grade fish oil that I'm aware of has it's a high grade because they've taken out many more of the PCBs which are toxic chemical that's found in fish oil that it's actually I think I'm not sure I'm gonna give you exactly the right number but I think it's only 20% of what's in the prescription fish oil. But it's against the law for him to go to doctors and say you know my fish oil is better because of this. Well one of the thing about any regulatory agency but the FDA in particular is it gives us sort of this false sense of security. Just like the SEC makes you think if you're dabbling in Fortune 500 public stocks you're probably not gonna lose your shirt. People tend to think that FDA approved drugs are safe and we become over reliant on other people's judgment and the judgment of our doctors. That's right in fact I actually have a screenshot from a 2005 FDA website that said drugs have to be proven safe and effective before we'll approve them. Well that's simply wrong because no drug is perfectly safe. Every single one has a side effect and no drug is completely ineffective because there's always the placebo effect. So every drug is effective to some extent.  In fact if a drug company tried to advertise that their drug was safe and effective the FDA would probably sent you them. So it's really crazy. But would you agree that we're over medicated as a society in other words we have this regulatory landscape now that approves drugs but we tend to take a lot more prescription medicines than let's say our grandparents did. And it's not only that we take them for a lifetime. You see this is what's happening now because it's getting more and more expensive every year. It's exponential to develop a drug. What's happening is that pharmaceutical companies are finding that the only way they can hopefully recover their cost is to have a drug that you're going to take for years, decades or a lifetime. Well you know your body's pretty clever. It can detoxify these things to be taken for two weeks but if you're taking them for decades you deplete really essential minerals and essential vitamins, cofactors, things like this. And so it makes you much more susceptible to adding that one more drug to your system because the drugs interact too. So there's all kinds of problems with the way we have it set up today. I think if we hadn't passed those 1962 amendments we would still be looking for and able to get to the market drugs that you take for a short time. And what's happening for example now that we have a lot of bacteria and viruses that are resistant to our antibiotics. What's happening is manufacturers aren't working on those anymore. They can't recover costs. So more and more companies are dropping out of making antibiotics and this could be very serious because if we don't get new antibiotics then I'm sorry pathogens that are resistant our current antibiotics can really spread quickly and kill a lot of people. And we're not just talking about the elderly. High schoolers are dying from infections that they get because the bugs are totally resistant to everything we have. So this is really a distortion of the market of what would have happened had we not had these amendments. So do you think MRSA and other super germs are a result of government failure? Could very well be. Because one of the things they did when they passed the amendments is they turned over to the National Science Academy the chore of looking at all the drugs that were currently on the market and trying to figure out if they worked or not. And that group actually added another group a combination antibiotics. They didn't like them. And so they wanted to get rid of them unless putting those two antibiotics together would give you a much greater effect than simply combining them would be expected to.  And that's what we're seeing in HIV treatments.  That way the virus can't adapt and can't become resistant as easily. So in 1962, by really taking the combination antibiotics off the market, they gave a signal to healthcare providers that hey, it might be unethical to give multiple antibiotics at one time. And that certainly didn't help. And in fact, the Uptjahn company was the one who fought this in court and lost unfortunately. Because they had already seen in the laboratory that they could prevent a lot of resistance by using two drugs in the same capsule. And of course, if a doctor would prescribe two drugs it would cost the patient so much more money. And there would be a compliance problem because now they have to swallow two capsules instead of one. So for some people that would be a real deterrent. Here's the thing though disease in our body since there's so many factors, diet, environment, genetics, it's so multifaceted. And of course holistic and alternative practitioners naturopaths, homeopathic, et cetera have attempted to go at things from a multifaceted approach. But since they don't have that FDA stamp of approval on their work or their methods, that's kind of viewed as quackery. And as a result, I think libertarians have gotten some pushback and saying, oh, you guys are promoting health supplement quackery.  And there's no science there. But we're not talking about science, we're talking about freedom. That's right. But you know, there is quite a bit of science to back up alternative methods. I remember it used to be the AMA fought acupuncture coming in, fought chiropractic. Really? Yes, chiropractic groups actually sued the American Medical Association under the antitrust laws in one. And that's the only reason we have chiropractic today because what would happen is the AMA, which controls the licensing boards, basically said it's unethical to associate with chiropractors will gank your license if you do. If you recommend them, if you refer patients to them, even if you practice in the same building sometimes. So they really rock to destroy chiropractic, which for me would have been a real problem because I've really needed chiropractic care and I'm so grateful to have gotten it. Well, you mentioned patents earlier, given this sort of regulatory stranglehold we're in, do you think we're stuck with pharmaceutical patents? Is there any way we could ever imagine a more libertarian approach to drug development? If the costs are so high, a skeptic would say, well, no one's gonna develop these drugs if they can't recoup their investment over 20 years with a patent. Well, when I joined the Upjohn Company in the mid-70s, we were still developing some drugs that didn't have patents because the full force of this 12 to 14 years hadn't quite kicked in yet. That wasn't until the 80s. But a couple of years after I joined, management said no more drugs will be developed without patents and that's because of course the costs were rising and they could easily see that there were gonna be problems and costs recovered. So I think if we didn't have all these regulations, we'd see a lot more drug development of natural products or things that didn't have patents. So Upjohn, when you were in the process of developing a drug, were you going back and forth on the phone frequently with the FDA or would you do several years work and then sort of present it and see what they had to say? Well, when I started, we weren't as in touch with the FDA as we were down the road because we had to sort of second guess the FDA. I remember one pathologist told us that he was recommending that we do these special studies that the FDA wanted for the amount of drug that we were giving them. Now, when you do these types of studies in animals, normally you're giving them huge, huge doses. So if you're off by 2%, it's not a big deal, right? Because you're giving horrendously high doses. But the FDA wanted us to have what they call a validated assay or they were starting to propose it and what the pathologist was telling us is we should repeat all of our toxicology because by the time we actually were trying to get our drugs and people, the FDA would probably be demanding this. Now, when you have a quote validated assay in each step of the way, you have to make sure your instruments are calibrated correctly. You have to take extensive notes on this to make sure everything's perfect. Now, when you're giving a drug to people, obviously you wanna make sure you do that because you wanna make sure people are getting the exact dose that they're supposed to. But when you're overdosing the animals by a factor of 10 or even 100, that really doesn't make much difference. But because only one out of 50 drugs will actually ever be given to people. We have to pay for those 49 validated assays that are never going to be used for people. And that's part of the 2 1⁄2 billion dollars because most drugs don't make it. So I think the rule of thumb is something like a third of that cost is due to failures, drugs that we tried to work on and they didn't pan out. So there's a big failure cost there in that price tag. And you can see how that price tag keeps growing if the FDA keeps demanding all of this extra work up front. Did you find FDA people to be technically competent, reasonable human beings? Do you think the FDA is inherently evil? I think most of the people there are trying to do the job that the American people expect them to do, which is try to make sure that safe and effective drugs are the only ones that get to market. But there are some people that truly don't belong there. I remember one time we got a letter from the FDA saying we had sent in our protocol to test to see if our prostaglandins could heal ulcers. So obviously we wanted to do studies and people with ulcers. They wrote back and said that they wanted us to do the study in normal people. So we had to write back very carefully and say, well, it's kind of hard to find out if our drug will treat ulcers if we don't do it and ulcer patients. So you get the whole spectrum. So did you have libertarian instincts as a young person getting a hard science PhD or did you develop those instincts as a result of seeing what you've seen? No, in college I became a libertarian. So I was cognizant of the fact that regulations were growing. What I didn't realize even back then is how much they were growing because we didn't really have the studies back then. We had instincts, we knew we were having to do more work for the regulators than ever before. In fact, a joke we had in my lab and it was kind of gallows humor was, we spent so much time fulfilling the requirements that the FDA had that we didn't have any time to discover new drugs. Well, that sounds about right. What would you say to a young person today who asked you if they should get a PhD in some scientific domain and because they're interested in research and clinical work? Well, again, it depends where they wanna go. A lot of young people want to do research in academia because they think they can do what they want, but that isn't how it works because you have to get grant money to do it. And again, even if you have really novel ideas, in fact, if you have novel ideas, they might not be funded just because they're different. Remember the people who are deciding if you get a grant are the very people who have developed the current theories. So they're not going to take kindly to funding something that would discredit all their work. So that needs to be considered. Of course, on the other end, if you go into the pharmaceutical industry, it can be tough because again, you have to do a lot of regulatory work. I was very fortunate. I had a lot of freedom in my position to work on what I wanted and that was very good. That was not true throughout the entire company. So it's really a difficult choice. It's a very hard choice because in addition to having these artificial barriers that I just talked about, you also have a lot of competition from people who are coming in from overseas. And we have really, if you're a gifted life here, we can have a lot of leisure time over there. They work hard every day. And so they come in to the labs and in many cases, they're going to outperform their American counterparts. So there's also competition from people who are willing to work a lot harder than most American students. You have to really love your work. And if you do love your work, you're willing to put that time in. And that's kind of the position I was in. So I was very fortunate. I'm going to take that as a maybe you should get a PhD. We'll talk that up. Yeah, depends on the person. It really depends how much passion you have.  Okay, okay. Well, talk a little bit about your book. It does have a happy subtitle how we can reclaim it. So what was the genesis of your book? What were you trying to accomplish? Well, I used to give talks about the regulations and how they were, you know, how they were harming people. And I'm not the first one to have done that. After the amendments were passed, Sam Petzelman and Dalek Greninger, they both did some studies which showed these amendments were probably maybe four times as deadly in terms of comparing the number of people the amendments saved and the number of people the amendments killed. But today we have so much more information. You know, I could actually get an estimate of how many people were actually killed by these regulations, for example. And that's why I wrote the book. There's not, just because of my experience and because of my libertarian leanings and my knowledge about how regulations really work in real life, I was able to put something together that probably, oh, you know, a small group of people might have been able to write this book. I mean, there's not many people in the world who could have written it. So I decided I would take it on. And I have to say it was a challenge. But the good news about it, the good news about it is we're all affected because before we're regulators, pharmaceutical executives, congressional representatives, before we're a patient or a doctor, you know, we are human beings and we're all affected by this. And in most cases, regulations don't really affect everybody in the same way. Most people who are wealthy, for example, can, they're happy to pay for the extra regulation. It doesn't bother them. Whereas the people on the low end of the totem pole, when they pay that extra for the regulation, they're really hurt. In this case, we're all affected. And that's why I have hope that we can reverse this because I think once it becomes apparent that the amendments are so deadly, I think that there will be a big drive to get rid of them. But don't you notice how much more emotional people get in the debate over, let's say, single payer healthcare? Because they feel it so viscerally that it really touches their lives on a personal level. How are they're going to go to the doctor and pay for it if they get sick?  So maybe that should give us hope for that there's a more libertarian approach to health freedom just because people want it for themselves. Oh yes, oh yes. Well, and you saw this with right to try. When I talked to the Goldwater Institute, the people who were pushing right to try, they said they really didn't do much lobbying for right to try because what happened as soon as they put it out there, the people wanted it. So they actually did most of the lobbying and the radio shows and things like that. And right to try passed, I think most of the states that it passed, it was 90 to 95% of the legislatures passed it. Everybody wanted it. The thing that they don't realize about right to try, which allows a terminally ill patients to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical company to get drugs that have safety testing in humans but not effectiveness testing is that most companies are gonna be afraid of the FDA.  And the FDA can punish companies very severely without any repercussions really. And they can do it subtly or they can do it overtly. It doesn't matter. The courts have ruled that a drug company cannot sue the FDA because it refuses to approve a drug. Well, tell us about how people can follow you and keep up with you on social media or otherwise. Okay, well, you can go to my website at ruart.com, R-U-W-A-R-T.com. And there you can find links to my Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. So that's probably the best way to do it. And you can sign up for my newsletter. And when you do that, you get access to my free library. And I've got a lot of my work in the free library as well as other things that people would be interested in. So it's really a good deal. Well, we appreciate that. We thank you for your time. Thank you for writing this book. If we don't have our physical and mental health, we really don't have anything as liberty-minded people. So it's great talking to you. And ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on mises.org and YouTube.


It's a pleasure to be here. What I want to do today is try to put things together a little bit from the context of the intersection of technology and economic policy, which is where I work. And a lot of the issues that you talked about here today, it's going to be impossible to cover even a snapshot of what was covered there. And I want to begin by opening up in a way that I think is a little bit challenging for those of us who are used to doing sort of a hard-nosed economic analysis. And that is, when you think about the metrics that we have to measure economic policy, particularly economic policy in an era of tremendous technological development, you look to something like measured labor productivity growth, and the conventional wisdom should be that more technology, we're more productive, it's growing faster than ever, and that's somehow tied to wealth generation. That's sort of a conventional superficial wisdom that the economists in the back are shaking their heads. I don't know, that's not exactly it. And if you look at the period 1948 to 2005, you had an average of about 2.5 percent average measured labor productivity growth, which sounds pretty good. And so you'd think that, of course, as the digital revolution continued, as it got more and more profound, that that number would increase. And yet actually since 2005, that productivity has slowed to 1.2 percent on average. And what that shows us is, first of all, I think it's a really awkward fact that we have to confront. We have to recognize that one of two things are true. There are ability to recognize what the conventional wisdom regards as productivity and development in the workforce and in the economy. Those metrics are either out of whack, and we don't have all the right ways of accounting for the sort of growth and innovation that's taking place, or there may be a tremendous number that are being left behind, some of whom include workers. And what I want to talk about today is to challenge a little bit this notion that we're coming up on a major anniversary of John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of the Internet, most of you know about this, right? And one of the key lines goes something like this, you know, governments, you have no place here. And then it says a lot of really much more unpleasant things about government. And the conventional wisdom has for decades been that governments have a minimal, if not an unexistent role to play in the development of technology and the development of the technological economy. And what I'd like to take a moment to challenge today are a few areas, a few limited areas, where government intervention, if we want to say it non-pejoratively, is probably going to be essential, not just in continuing the blistering pace of innovation and economic growth that we've seen, but actually in ensuring that the benefits of that growth are going to be more widely shared. And this is something that, you know, someone who grew up in the Bay Area could not be more salient right now. And as we look at some of the challenges that we have in things like wage growth across this economy are true well beyond just the technological space. And so let me cover four briefly. First, research and development. Second, infrastructure and access. Third, skills and participation. And then finally, what I want to call the breaks in the tracks, the things that I think could derail in a big way some of the benefits and development of our information economy. So first, let me talk about investments in R&D that underlies a lot of this. One of the least sexy topics that could possibly exist, particularly because a lot of the way we're used to thinking about research and development, of course, is focused on the sheer numbers. How much government's investing? How much the private sector is investing? And just looking at that as a sort of superficial baseline metric. Obviously, we have some strong numbers to post. In 2015, American business devoted 1.8% of GDP to R&D, which is the highest share on record. That's a good percentage. And yet, at the same time, while business investment is crucial here, a huge amount of this investment is business. We also have to recognize that not all R&D is created equal. There is the R&D in the form of basic research. There's the R&D in the form of applied research. And there's R&D, of course, in the form of development. The private sector is exceptionally good at that third one, development, getting out to market. And there is an incredibly important role, one that I think is underattended to in part because when you're engaging with technology on a daily basis and you're pulling out your mobile phone, you're not seeing it, that is the government role in investing in basic research. And the absence of that public investment can have incredibly detrimental effects in the overall value chain that is created through research and development. So look at the numbers. And it is clearly a view of this administration that we need to be doing more investment in research and development. It's not enough to just say that the private sector is investing a lot in research and development. We have to really understand what the various phases of that mean. Today's a good day to be talking about this because we're on the one-year anniversary of the Precision Medicine Initiative. This administration has rolled out a few key areas in which we want to focus and really accelerate basic and advanced research and development in a way that we think the government has a unique role in doing. The Precision Medicine Initiative was something that emerged from a report that we did on big data, which some of you may be familiar with. It's called the Podesta Report. And that report, which I'll mention a few times, essentially concluded this, that big data and its era can be tremendously beneficial for consumers and for innovation, but at the same time that there is an essential role the government needs to play in ensuring that the harms that are potential in the big data space don't come and ultimately derail it. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But Precision Medicine is a classic example of an area where advances in technology and advances in appropriate use of data and data science can dramatically accelerate, in this case, innovations that can save lives. It is, to me, an example of government at its best. It's dreaming big. It is marshaling resources, including over $1 billion to support this initiative in the President's fiscal year 17 budget. It's convening the best and the brightest in ways that only the White House and the administration can at times, and also it's driving coordinated action. And when it comes to driving coordinated action, I also want to draw attention to two other areas that we've had these sort of moonshot initiatives. One is the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which the Vice President is leading on behalf of the President. And secondly, the Brain Initiative, which we have another $1.3 billion in our budget to try to support in order to dramatically accelerate neuroscience as an enabler to so much more that innovation can drive in our economy. These are the sorts of basic investments we can make, but there's more to it. That sort of convening, that sort of agenda setting can help dramatically accelerate where we are. And it's an essential role that government can play across a few key verticals as well as that underlying basic research and development, which needs to continue. So second, let me talk about infrastructure and access. It is easy to forget and also even easier to misquote the idea that the internet really is a series of tubes on some level. The internet has infrastructure. It is not just out there in the ether. Everyone around here knows that. And it's important to recognize that that infrastructure that leads to broadband, that leads to your mobile device in your pocket is essential and not going to build itself. And there is a tremendously important government role in helping to both create the conditions for private sector investment that have driven so much progress here. And we have seen tremendous progress, but there's also an incredible role that is important for us in terms of ensuring that that infrastructure is accessible to all. Let me talk about the former first. Obviously, government has a role in making sure that the tax code provides the right investment incentives. We can help catalyze private investment across new areas. And if you take the wireless case as a snapshot, the idea that the federal government is committed to make 500 megahertz available to mobile broadband. The fact that federal government has committed to ensure that we are as quickly as possible vacating certain elements of spectrum. That sounds wonky, but the results speak for themselves. A world in which when this administration began and we were in technology, 0% of Americans had access to 4G LTE technology. Today, over 98% of Americans have access to 4G LTE technology because of technological innovation, because of private sector driven growth, and because of the investments that they were making. In the wire line side, I think it's very fashionable in the United States to talk about how U.S. infrastructure doesn't match a place like Korea, a place like Korea that incidentally is the size of Michigan. The reality is that for the average American, your broadband speeds, wire line broadband speeds, have gone up by a factor of three over the course of the president's tenure, and that's only increasing. It's a story that's not often told. Now, did government play an important role in supporting some of that? Yes, during the Recovery Act, the worst economic downturn in our generation, there has been 114,000 miles of broadband infrastructure that was laid as part of the Recovery Act, largely a middle mile, largely not known to the average consumer, but leading to some of the middle mile and ultimately infrastructure build out that took place in the wireless space. And obviously, auctions, spectrum auctions that have been blockbusters both for the federal bottom line, delivering in just the last auction over $40 billion, but freeing up more of this wireless spectrum so that more and more demands are placed on our digital technology and on our mobile devices that we actually have the infrastructure to support it. Okay, so that's the good news. The bad news is that as this infrastructure has built out, there is no question that there is a pervasive digital divide in this country. The Council of Economic Advisers released a report on this that I'd really encourage all of you to read if you hadn't. It really goes through and in a data-driven way, documents what the digital divide looks like in America right now. Let me give you the snapshot that I think is most significant. There are two of them. The first is one that we've spent a lot of time focusing on and that's schools. In 2008, 2009, 2010, under one in three American schools had what we would consider to be even basic broadband connectivity. That means wired connectivity to the school and wireless within the school.  Secondly, there's a challenge that is an income-based disparity that continues to pervade American broadband connectivity. And that's a statistic that I thought was particularly shocking in the CEA report. And that is that if you are in the bottom income quintile, you are 10 times more likely to not have broadband to your home than if you're in the top income quintile. Think about that, 10 times more likely. Those numbers are striking. It means that under half of Americans in the bottom income quintile do not have access to broadband, to wireline broadband at home. So what that means is that there are two huge areas that the market is, for lack of a better term, failing. Or if you wanna think about this in public policy terms that the market is failing to serve and that we, the government need to ensure if we see it as a value that every American has the ability to get online for all the values and all the purposes that we've been talking about over the course of today that we have a role to fill that gap. And so when it comes to school broadband, two and a half years ago, the president announced something called ConnectEd. This is the president's technology and schools initiative and it had a pretty ambitious but pretty basic goal. Connect 99% of American schools to high-speed broadband and wireless within five years. It was built on top of actually a Clinton Arrow program that was a prescient one called E-Rate that recognized that there is no way to make the market of school broadband work. Schools are not going to be in the place of making the capital expenditure necessary to wire themselves with a fast broadband that is increasingly essential to delivering high quality teaching and learning. The numbers don't work. And that's why with the help of the FCC, the ConnectEd initiative and the E-Rate reforms that they undertook have actually delivered now committed over $8 billion of public sector funding to support school connectivity. The way the president put it is this, like in a country where we expect free wifi with our coffee, we should expect it in our schools. We need to demand it for our kids and that's what ConnectEd is all about because it recognizes that this question of whether or not kids can benefit from technology in the classroom is as settled as this question of whether small businesses can benefit from the efficiencies of technology behind their desk. This is a matter where the richest schools in the country are delivering this kind of connectivity, this kind of technology to help students be more engaged, to help deliver better pedagogy, to help teachers do their job better in a more efficient way. Those are the kinds of benefits that every student in this country demands. And so ConnectEd in two and a half years has delivered over this initiative connectivity to bring that under one third number up to 77%. ConnectEd has closed the digital divide in American schools by half in just two and a half years and we're well on our way to hitting 99%. So let me talk about a second area, this income disparity. One announcement we made recently is something called Connect Home. This is an initiative that focuses on a segment of those in the lowest income quintile and it's a particularly challenging one. It's individuals who live in public housing, public and assisted housing, who by and large do not have the connectivity that they need. And in many cases where the government, because the government is the provider of housing, creates additional challenges. Building codes aren't up to spec. It's not simple for HUD to put in or even to require that there be broadband connectivity in a public housing development. And so the Connect Home Initiative is focused on helping that bottom quintile, particularly in public and assisted housing, get connectivity where they live and to get it at a discounted rate. This is something that began in 27 cities and one tribal nation, that has already shown huge results across a number of them and is really improving day to day. I think there's actually a lot more to be heard on this in even the next month. So stay tuned and I really would encourage you to take a look at that CEA report. Let me just say this, access to connectivity is access to opportunity for the poor, for entrepreneurs and just think about the power that we heard about earlier today that it can deliver large businesses and small businesses alike and storage, processing, presence, payments, payroll. These are the sorts of things that were once the provenance of dozens of staff, hundreds of staff now are available to an individual behind a computer in every small business. It's true in tech, it's truer in tech, but it is increasingly true beyond tech. And so that may be the case, but only as long as the market conditions allow it. As with everywhere in the economy, the power of incumbency in the digital space and beyond is strong and it lies at the heart of why this president has and will continue to take and call for when appropriate bold action when necessary to keep the lanes of innovation open. It's important in the digital space, but it's as important in the broader economy as the digital economy becomes a crucial piece of infrastructure and enabler to every single area of our economy. Let me talk third briefly about skills and participation. I think there is a conventional wisdom here that in the worker displacement and automation space that we've simply seen a hollowing out of lower skilled jobs. And there's actually a really interesting report that just came out in the economic report to the president's chapter five. Those of you who don't have the ERP memorized that talks about the developments in the academic research on what it means to move towards a more automated economy and who's going to suffer from that the most? I think the conventional wisdom is those at the lowest side of the skills equation. I think there's been some really interesting development in the research that suggests it's both, it's created a hollowing out of that middle skill area, but the pace of it has not actually been consistent. And so I think we need to continue our research into exactly what this means obviously as we talk about what the sharing economy, what the gig economy, things like that mean, and you heard a lot about that today. There is a need, a dire need, for more and more up to date academic research on it. And if you want the state of the art, like I said, take a look at the economic report to the president chapter five. Interesting report also, McKinsey did something on this in November of 2015, which obviously helped bring us here today. At the same time, the government again has an essential role to play to make sure that those who are displaced, those who run the risk of displacement have the skills to participate and compete in the modern economy. So the added benefit of a digitally savvy workforce right is that these workers are already consumers. And so they can make more informed decisions than they have before. And we hope that that can translate into a more efficient, more effective, and ultimately more productive economy for workers. But at the same time, there are over a million vacancies in this country right now for tech-skilled jobs and far too few people who are capable of meeting them. That's why we announced something like the Tech Hire Initiative. This is a multi-city initiative designed to build together partnerships of a pipeline of skills that can lead to workers, some of whom will have community college degrees, some of whom will have non-degree granting skills, some of whom will go through traditional educational pipeline, but all of whom will be available to compete in the digital economy. And with those skills that might not be considered tech economy skills, but are increasingly important all across, think of the hospitality industry and beyond. It's also why we signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in the summer of 2014 and why the president made a call that if you told me five years ago, he would make in the State of the Union what I said you were crazy. The president called for every American K-12 student to have access to computer science education. That's a sea change for the American discussion about what education means and it has the potential to really transform our workforce. So let me just conclude by talking about what I think are the two or three biggest challenges that we face, the sort of breaks in the tracks. The first is this notion that data is working against you and not for you. The second is privacy, both at home and abroad and the third is cybersecurity. I talked before about this big data report that we released and there are lots of conclusions to it. I don't want to shorthand it here except to say I think it's clear from the conversation that happened today and obviously a lot of us are having around the world right now that the opportunities of big data are immense. I talked about precision medicine. The list goes on and on. And yet at the same time, there is a clear sense that that proliferation of data can create significant challenges for the American consumer and for the American worker. There was a fascinating report that the Council of Economic Advisers released in February of 2015 about big data and differential pricing. I think this hits home for a lot of us. The idea that you might go to a website and based on a certain consumer profile that they have on you only offer you a subset of products. In some cases, that may be wonderful and tailored advertising right to you. In other cases, if it has to do with, for instance, a credit product, it actually could be tremendously harmful, particularly if that profile that's held on you correlates to race or to gender or more superficially to the type of browser you use. And so there are real interesting challenges that the idea of differential pricing can face for the American consumer that ultimately run the challenge of eroding the basic consumer confidence that we have spent the last 25 years developing in the digital economy.  And that leads to the second challenge and one that could not be more salient right now and that is privacy. From the standpoint of the American consumer, that's important. From the standpoint of the American citizen, it is equally important. This is an area that has been really challenged over the course of the last couple of years. I don't wanna go through and do chapter and verse on every single privacy development, but let me just focus on one. Yesterday, if you need any more evidence of why this is important, the president, 430 p.m. in the Oval Office signed a bill called the Judicial Redress Act, which is about as wonky and legalistic as you can get. But that bill granted certain rights of judicial redress under the Privacy Act to certain designated foreign citizens that would otherwise be eligible for it on the basis of the existence of an existing commercial data sharing arrangement. What? This bill let EU citizens amend and correct their data and sue in court if the US government mishandles it. This is something, a bill, that grants important rights to what are now millions of consumers, but even more important than that, this bill took on a certain totemic influence in Europe. It was the bill that was essential to concluding something called the DPPA, which was a data sharing arrangement on law enforcement. It was essential in its progress to helping us conclude something called the Privacy Shield. You know it is safe harbor previously. This is a commercial data sharing arrangement that over 4,400 US companies relied on and that was responsible for smoothing over $300 billion of global economic trade. The message here is this, in any privacy space, a fortress is no longer good enough. A fortress in this globalized digital space in which we live is not the way in which to deliver services back to an individual consumer, whether they're inside your nation or beyond. And so high walls need to be married with open doors here. And that's a theme that you've seen over the course of not just the last few weeks in US-European relations, but actually over the course of the last couple of years. We took some unprecedented intelligence reforms in the world. Obviously this was in the context of the intelligence disclosures that took place. The president has implemented and signed into laws comprehensive reforms that I think it's worth reminding exist nowhere else, including in Europe right now. And this is a conversation that we've had obviously with our counterparts in Europe because there remains this duality, an incredibly important one between maintaining free flow of information and open borders for data while making sure that we're keeping the American people safe. And not just the American people safe, but our allies and partners abroad including in Europe. And so what you saw perhaps three or four years ago or even at the height of the Snowden disclosures was a sort of dialectic between American privacy and European privacy. That one is weak and the other is strong. What you're seeing now is a period of mutual recognition. A recognition that the US has privacy laws, that Europe has privacy laws, that they're both strong, they work differently. And that if we're going to have a future of an economy that interoperates with itself and with one another, that those systems have to recognize one another's strength and to continue to move forward. So we've seen some really important developments on that front. So let me just close on what I think is a cautionary note as I'm sure has come up several times and seems to be the theme right now which is cybersecurity. Let me just take a little consumer angle on this. Right now, I'm sure most of you have seen this data, nine in 10 Americans based on pupiling, nine in 10 Americans feel like they have lost control over their data. And can you blame them right with breaches which are obviously not just private sector breaches but they've heard about Target, they've heard about Anthem Blue Cross, they've heard about JP Morgan Chase, they've heard about OPM and they've seen just on the private sector side alone, 675 million records breached and that number actually strikes me as a little low but that's the number that's in here, 675 million. If you were an American consumer right now, you would if not have a sense of panic and if nothing else you'd have a sense of what I call cybersecurity fatalism. The idea that your information is out there and you don't have the kind of control over it you want but there's nothing you can do about it. And if you're a business, I think this is equally true. And so what we're seeing is that good cybersecurity particularly in light of Target, Target a company that has a new CEO now after their breach, good cybersecurity is no longer just the cost of doing business, it is the cost of staying in business. That is going to be a theme across I think increasing number of sectors in our economy and if you look to the government side as well, there's no question that we have a unique role in ensuring that a crisis of cybersecurity does not become a crisis in consumer confidence. And it really has the potential to do that if we don't act. So obviously we've taken a number of steps. Recently the president just unveiled his cybersecurity national action plan. This is the culmination of over seven years worth of work on this issue. It calls for among other things a 19 billion dollar cybersecurity surge fund to rip out a lot of this old technology outdated computers that in many cases are the root cause of why on the federal side we have so many cybersecurity challenges. I know a lot of businesses face the same challenge at the same time, but there's more to it than that. There's among other things calls for reorganization. There's a smarter way of applying the notion of cybersecurity within agencies so that instead of having for instance the US park service, a national park service handling its own cybersecurity, maybe that's something you can outsource to the pros elsewhere in government to have certain shared services that you're sharing across government. Again, this is taking best practice in industry and porting it over to government and innovating at that pace. At the same time, we also recognize that in the last 11 months of this administration we're not going to solve all of the nation's cybersecurity challenges even for the government side. And so we put together a national cybersecurity commission that's gonna be co-chaired by Tom Donilon, the former national security advisor to deliver recommendations that are primarily geared at the next administration. To take stock of what we've done to recognize those areas that we have not done enough and what we can do in the government both to improve federal cybersecurity and even more importantly what we can do to enable better security in the private sector whether it's through investments, whether it's through better coordination, whether it's through better information sharing or what have you. So in all those ways there is no question that we have entered a world where technology is not just a public policy space that is relegated to a few. I think groups like this and events like this show that this is now core to the future of trade policy, the future of our economic development, more than just what we'd consider traditionally to be Silicon Valley issues. And that the digital world if it ever was distinct is no longer. It is the world of day-to-day economics. It is why so many of us are working on these issues all the time. But those benefits are not going to be fully realized on the private sector and they're not gonna be fully realized by a huge number of the American public let alone the global public. If we don't recognize that there is still a role, an enduring role for government in making those costly basic R&D investments in ensuring that infrastructure is in place and shared by everyone in ensuring that we have access for those who are squeezed out whether that's because of their parents zip code and the incomes that their parents had or because of a corporation that decides they don't want a shoulder competition. And at the same time we have to ensure that the hardest policy challenges that we face that those hiccups do not become paroxysms in the fragile growth of our digital economy. There are many, they're multiplying but I think we are in good shape through conversations like this to move it forward. So thank you very much. Have a good day. Thank you.


Okay, you know that when I sit in this chair, it's story time. Okay, first of all, we're gonna scoot into the middle a little bit here, maybe up a little bit. All right, that's good. So a lot of you know me as a biker because most of my content on the channel is about biking. Olé, olé, olé, olé. But I do squeak in some running videos every now and then. The sun is coming up and it is a big, beautiful red ball. And then in some other content, I always wanted this channel just to be my life, essentially, not just focusing on one sport. But don't get me wrong, I love all the bike stuff and that brings me a lot of joy. But that's why I like to do these types of videos that are a little bit different. So I was thinking that it'd be fun to make a video about how I got into athletics. Why am I the guy I am today oléing and no crashy and whammying all around the world on bikes and ultramarathons and stuff. So let's go back to when I was a little boy. I was at my well baby checkup. I was about five years old. My mom brought me in.  And I was just a little guy and I don't really remember a lot of this because I was so little. This has been recounted to me by my mother. And the nurse came in, took my blood pressure and my mom could see in her face that something was wrong. And the nurse told her that my blood pressure was 160 over 140. If you know anything about what normal blood pressure is, this is not normal. It was extremely high. The nurses didn't believe it. Little kids usually don't have high blood pressure like this. So then she went out and called in another nurse just to double check, make sure she didn't do it wrong. The other nurse comes, put the cuff on me and she takes it again, boom, 160 over 140. And to make a long story short, they thought I was gonna have a stroke right then and there.  And so from that moment on, I was in and out of the hospital all the time because they were trying to pinpoint what was causing this high blood pressure. And again, I have pretty faint memories of all this. This has all been told to be by my mom. And she would bring me to the hospital and they'd do all these scans. I remember going in cat scans. I remember having my blood drawn and overnights in the hospital. And I really did not like it, of course. Nobody likes going to the hospital. And they could never really figure out what was causing my high blood pressure. I was the only kid to go through the CU Med Center here in the University of Colorado and they couldn't pinpoint it. They couldn't figure it out. And I went through months and months of testing. But they did find that this one medication worked to keep my blood pressure down. And so from the age of five years old, I started taking pills every day to keep my blood pressure down. And the reason why that's important is because if your blood pressure is that high for that long, it can lead to strokes and other problems, heart attacks and things like that. And of course at five years old, none of this is normal. And this is where things changed for me in my life. And this was a vivid memory. I will never forget my doctor looking at me and saying, Ryan, this is very serious. And the best way to combat this problem is to be really healthy. And that means heart healthy. So you need to be as active as possible. You need to strengthen your heart. And as a little boy, I was like, okay, yeah, I trust you doc, I'm on it. I'm gonna figure this out. And it's a funny thing to think about now, a little boy really taking doctor advice seriously and changing habits.  But at five years old, I was like, okay, I'm on it doc. And that's when I started running. It's kind of my forest gump moment. I was running and I would run before school in elementary school. It was crazy. Most kids don't like running, right? Luckily I liked running and I was pretty good at it. And I knew that it was gonna be healthy for me.  And my school also had a race at the end of the year called the mile marathon. And this race was a big deal. It was the end of the year celebration. All the kids got excited for it. And in gym class, we would prepare for it. We'd do little running activities. And I was always the fastest and I was so into it. And I loved being competitive at a young age. I loved winning. We all love winning, right?  I run all the time. Running is my sport now. And then I would beg my mom to sign me up for races.  Luckily in the 80s, there were little 5Ks and 10Ks. And I would do all these races. And I was always competitive and I loved going fast. And I loved pushing my body. And I also competed, of course, in the Boulder Boulder. When I was six years old, I ran my very first Boulder Boulder. And it's a big race. And I'll never forget my mom just kind of trusting that everything was going to be OK. I went to the start line with my friend and his parents. I was just a teeny little guy. And I lost them immediately. And I just kind of took off running. And I did the whole race by myself. And I remember running into the stadium where the race finishes with the Marines. I ran right alongside them, I think, because I liked their pace. Left, left, left, right, left. And I finished that first Boulder Boulder. And it lit a fire in me. It really did. And so from that moment on, every year I ran the Boulder Boulder, I ran every race that I could. I did summer track. My events were the mile and the 800. I started getting faster and faster and more competitive. In eighth grade, I won the state championship in the 800. And when that happened, I was like, OK, this could be a way for me to go to college and get scholarships. Because I knew that my family wasn't going to have the money to pay for college. So I was going to have to figure it out myself. And then I went to high school, joined the cross-country team. I was on varsity as a freshman, which is pretty hard to do. But by this point, all the other kids in the state had kind of caught up to me. So I was the best when I was young, because the competition isn't all that great. But everybody starts developing and getting stronger by the age of 15, 16, 17. And I wasn't the fastest anymore. I was good, but I wasn't the fastest. And that was hard for me to swallow, because I loved winning races. But that's when running for me turned a little bit from being the best and having Olympic dreams to like, OK, I'm just going to run because I love running. And it's my way to connect with the outdoors. Every run for me is an adventure. I get to explore. Luckily, I live in Boulder. And there's all these beautiful trails all around me. But also, I loved the community. The cross-country teams at Boulder High School were so nice. And most runners are nerds. And what are nerds? Nerds are nice. And I loved the supportive atmosphere of the cross-country teams. And the boys and the girls got to train together. So we got to hang out with pretty runner girls. This was so cool. In eighth grade, I did football and all those other sports. And I was always strong. And I could hold my own. But I didn't like the culture of football. I loved the culture of the cross-country team. And then after high school, running for me was just a way to stay in shape. Again, remember, the whole reason why I started running when I was young was to strengthen my heart and to be healthy and to be able to live a long life. I'm going to go back a little bit. But when I turned 16, I decided not to get a driver's license for many reasons. One, our family didn't have the money to buy a car, so what's the point of getting a license? But two, I got really environmentally minded. And I wanted to do everything I could to save the planet, essentially. And so in my mind, I'm thinking, all right, I'm not going to have a car. I'm never going to have a car. I'm going to ride my bike everywhere I go. And I made that pledge at a very young age. And I am 43 right now. You can see all the gray hairs.  And I ride my bike everywhere. People always ask me, how can you function in today's society without a car? And it's very easy for me. It's because I've created a life where biking is how I get around. And again, luckily, I live in Boulder, which is a very bike-friendly city. And the weather is pretty mild. And even when it's snowy, you just wear warm clothes. And I love biking. And you all know this because it just makes me feel alive. You have that feeling of freedom every time you get on your bike and the wind and your hair and you're cruising around town and you're not insulated in a little car or listening to music, you're not even, when you're in a car, you're not engaging with the world. But when you're on a bike, you can like say hi to people, you can stop whatever you want and visit with your neighbors. And so I've always loved riding a bike. Happy Thursday, happy, happy Thursday, happy Thursday, happy, happy, hey! And my love for biking and being outside and connecting with nature and myself is essentially what created my career After college, I joined the Peace Corps and I lived in Honduras for two years and I worked with kids and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I lived in a small village in the mountains of Honduras and I'll never forget those times. It was a highlight of my life, even as hard as it was. Of course, it was hard to live far away from home in a foreign country. It was a very beautiful, romantic, simple way of living. And when I finished my service, many of you have heard this story many times, I decided to cash in my plane ticket, buy a bicycle, and ride my bike from Honduras back home to Boulder. And that's exactly what I did. And that adventure was pivotal in my life, in creating the career that I have today as a storyteller. I haven't always been a YouTuber. I worked in the TV world for many years. But that ride was the catalyst. Every day I'd get on my bike and pedal, pedal, pedal as far as I could. I'd meet wonderful people. I rode through storms and hurricanes and I'd never felt so alive. It was so exciting every single day. And I documented the entire adventure on my little Sony handicap and made a video about it. And so when I got home from that ride after three months, I decided, okay, I want to somehow make a living by being a storyteller. And at the time there was no YouTube. It was just TV. So I really tried to be like a travel channel, adventure host guy. And I had some success for about 10 years, but it was difficult. Why are there boxing gloves in a tasting room? And now I know, it's the bass drum. Time for a ho-down. But that led me to YouTube where I thought, okay, I'm gonna try my hardest to create a channel on YouTube. Build up my own audience big enough to the point where I can make a living, but also share stories that are meaningful to me and hopefully to the audience. And I don't have any editors at a TV station saying, cut this out, cut this out, cut this out. I can do whatever I want. And I'm sitting here right now doing exactly that. A video like this would never play on the travel channel, but on YouTube, it's great. And I have built up an audience and I'm so incredibly grateful. And now this brings me back to the point of this whole video. How did I get into being an athletic guy? And it was something that was initially horrible, severely high blood pressure. My mom was terrified.  Would this lead to other problems in life? We didn't know at the time, but that doctor said, you need to be athletic. And that led me to being a runner. And I am so grateful in a weird way for that diagnosis at five years old because it led to who I am now. And it's a beautiful life. And I love it. And I love connecting with all of you. And luckily, I'm healthy now. I took those pills that controlled my blood pressure from age five to about 25, all the way through the Peace Corps. And now my blood pressure has stabilized. I do check it from time to time just to make sure. Make sure I'm still healthy. And we're down to about 120 over 80, which is great. And that's why I wanted to make this video. I just wanted to tell you a story about how this all happened. And everybody has a unique origin story about how they became who they are. And it doesn't always involve athletics, but it's always some sort of unique story. And it's something in life that seemed horrible, but led to something very good. And here I am today in Boulder, grateful for this beautiful life. My heart is healthy, my body is healthy. I have the ability to go on grand adventures and run 100 mile ultramarathons and ride my bike for thousands of miles. And I will never stop being grateful for this body. And I want to share this story because we all have struggles in life. We all go through tough times, dark times. Sometimes it's physical ailments or sometimes it's mental depression or problems with family members or relationships. And it's hard. I get it. I've gone through a lot of different stuff as have every one of you. It's part of being a human. We're not always bouncing off the walls with joy. Not at all. That's not real life. You know, the great thing about being a human is that we can get through tough times. We are resilient. We've done it for thousands of years. It's part of us. It's part of our DNA. And I was told something that was pretty scary at five years old, but I turned it around.  You wouldn't be who you are today without going through the tough times. And I've always learned the most about myself when I go through tough times. And sometimes they're voluntary tough times. I go on these adventures that are very, very difficult and it pushes me to my absolute limits. And I have to stop and think, I chose to be here. I wanted to do this really hard thing. And here I am. And all of the tools that I've learned throughout my life of going through difficult moments are gonna help me now in this moment to get me forward, you know?  It's absolutely agonizing no matter what you're going through. Times can be tough and you don't see a way out, but there's always a way out. And I try to look at every situation in a positive light. And how can I learn more? And how can I turn this situation around? And how can I make this bad thing into something positive? And it doesn't always work out. It doesn't. But as long as you're trying your hardest and you really deeply believe in what you're doing and you use your tools and your heart and your friends and your community, you can get through just about anything, I think. So that's enough of me blabbing, right? I wanted to make this video because I wanted to share this story with you. I think it's unique. And it's who I am today because of that diagnosis at five years old. And I'm incredibly grateful for this body and this life and this family I have.  And I want you to share with me your triumphant stories when you do hard things and when you challenge yourselves, it makes me happy. We've built a community here. This is a team. We are a team, my friends. And I want you all to do your best. And I want you to get to the mountaintop, whatever that mountaintop is. So thank you so much for watching this long video of me just talking in front of the camera. Please like and subscribe. If you're new to my channel, I have adventure videos from all over the world that will probably put a smile on your face. My goal is to always show the best of humanity and mother nature and put it all together in a nice little package. And yeah, I'm sitting here with a smile. Life is good. And you're number one. You, right there. You're number one.