Good morning, Peepsen. Welcome to WOKP Daily with me your girl Daniel Moody recording from the home Bunker the folks. Today, as always, we get into a conversation with our friend,
our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel. And importantly in the show notes for today, you will see a link to a very long but incredibly informative expose done by the Washington Post on how life expectancy in the United States is decreasing and decreasing rapidly, and how it is falling along racial lines, economic lines, and political lines, and the fact that in the Midwest and in the South, Jonathan wrote a book called Dying of Whiteness, and that
is exactly what is happening. Whereas those people that are living in the interior of the country are more likely and I mean like forty nine percent more likely to die early than those that are living on the coasts and in urban areas. That is a reverse trend. And you know, Jonathan and I get into a conversation. He has his new edition of Dying of Whiteness will come out in February of next year, twenty twenty four, and he argues that we need both a health strategy and
a political strategy. I however, am at a point where I just feel exasperated by these stories and wanting to try and save people that are not willing to save themselves. Look, I understand the breakdown where they are imposing right. The right is imposing their will and their desire on the rest of the country, whether you're talking about abortion or
you're talking about access to guns. That blue states right with our governors clearly don't have as much power and authority as red state governors do, according to the Supreme Court. And so when we look and we see this unraveling of America as it is measured against its pure countries, the question is what can be done and what should
be done? Or are we at the stage where we're just like, fuck them, let them eat kke literally with all the fucking starch and the you know chemicals and you know high fat content and all the things that are going to kill them. Because when Michelle Obama said let's move, they said, let's sit down and give kids more dessert. Right So, right now, as we are at this place of great divide in this country, that just gets worse each and every week, each every month, each
and every year. And you know, when I see these articles, a part of me sure wants to feel bad, But then the other part is, just like for those people who do have means, this country is going to see, and I say this at the end of the conversation with Jonathan, a great exodus, A great exodus is going to happen from the United States of America where people
that can afford to leave will leave. You know, maybe they'll keep their businesses here, but they'll live in other countries part of the time, and this place will end up looking like the movie Lsem where there is just havoc and disease and people are destitute and jobless and dying in the streets. Right, because once Republicans are able to do away with every single social safety net, what stops this country from looking like underdeveloped purposefully underdeveloped nations
is our social safety nets, is our government. So once that is hollowed out, right, people who have been able to keep themselves quote unquote safe behind gated communities and all of these things won't because the moment that they step outside, guess what they're going to see. And much in the same way that during COVID at the height of COVID, which is still around because I know at least several people that have contracted COVID over the last couple of months. What we saw is that there is
no connectedness right around public health. It was every person for themselves because of the greed and the lies and just the hate that was spread from the right. So when I look at this story and I asked Jonathan today about his thoughts on it, because he literally wrote the book on it, and rewrote the book on it, where America is headed, I don't think at this stage can be averted. And that's the conversation that we have
coming up next. Folks. You know that whenever I have the opportunity to speak with our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel, I am always thrilled, particularly when the Washington Post comes out with a really disturbing expose where Jonathan, as I said the other day with my co host jajahat Ali, you are a soothsayer. You like you knew what was up when you wrote Dying of Whiteness, And it's just as if all of the reporting and research
is following what you had already said. So right now there is a expose in the Washington post entitled Dying Early, America's Life expectancy crisis. An epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon? And Jonathan, I'll just start out with saying that the opening graphs of this piece are extraordinarily disturbing because it goes to say that essentially we hit our peak where life expectancy in the United States
was growing. We hit our peak at around twenty fourteen, at around seventy eight point nine years of age was the life expectancy, and at that time we thought that
it was going to continue growing. Aside from the pandemic, which obviously was a major hit to life expectancy and played out along racial and economic lines, what this article says is that those people that are living in the Midwest, that are living in the interior of America are almost right now forty nine percent more likely to die early.
And it is extraordinary. And I just want to get your initial reactions to what is the quiet pandemic that has been happening in this country since you know the twenty teens.
Well, you know, I was glad to see this article published. It obviously builds on a lot of stuff that I've been working on for a long time. And the shocking revelation is that life expectancy is not just some kind of biological inevitability. Like it's not like people live longer because we just are smarter or live longer on the earth.
The reason people live longer is because of access to healthcare and knowledge of prevention and warding off infectious disease and workplace safety protections and all the things that have gone into basically, I mean, if you look at it, I looked at this for dying of whiteness, but it's pretty incredible if you just compare like the early twentieth century to now, or the eighteen fifties till now, when we started doing vaccines and realizing that stuff like asbestos
kills you and workplace safety protections, it wasn't just a little blip in terms of life expectancy, like people lived like two decades longer when we started implementing effective public health. Basically that was structural, government linked mandated because otherwise your workplace is going to be really unsafe and you're going to die of an infectious illness that you don't have
a immunization against, and all those other factors. So it's not a mystery that if you just revolt, you know, roll back those advances, you're going to revert back to earlier life expectancies, which is that people live about forty nine years, you know, on average, or something like that. And then of course, if you add in other things like having to carry bad you know, a dangerous pregnancy, to term women's reproductive health, all these things, and so
all these things contributed to rises in life expressing. And what's remarkable about this is that there aren't really many other examples of industrialized, advanced countries having not only a fall in life expectancy, but also a fall in life expectancy of the demographic majority group, right, White Americans, who were suffering from this the most. And so that was kind of where I started with Dying Whiteness, and I've got the new edition of Dying of Whiteness coming out
February fourth. And part of what I argue is that life expectancy is one metric, but you have to see that people, just like I argued the pandemic, kind of replayed it again. Life expectancy is just one metric. But the metric that White America and the Red States are playing with is power they're trading decades of life for power.
So part me, let me read you this piece, which kind of which speaks to what you just said. In the Washington Post article, they write, sickness and death are scarring entire communities in much of the country. The geographical footprint of early death is vast. In a quarter of the nation's counties, mostly in the South and mid West, working age people are dying at a higher rate than
forty years ago. The trail of death is so prevalent that a person could go from Virginia to Louisiana and then up to Kansas by traveling entirely within counties where death rates are higher than they were when Jimmy Carter was president. And they go on to say this this phenomenon is exasperated by the country's economic, political, and racial divides. America is increasingly a country of haves and have nots, measured not by bank accounts and property values, but also
by vital signs and grave markers. Dying prematurely, the Post found, has become the most telling measure of the nation's inequality.
I mean, I mean, the crazy thing is like, we're choosing it right, We're voting for it. So, I mean, I don't know. I have a very particular relationship to this, which is just it's terrifying. But I don't know. I got a couple of paragraphs into the article, and I, to be totally asked, I didn't even finish the article yet.
I will do it right after we talk. But it's just that you just think, like I guess it's crazy because like what I learned in medical school was that self preservation and longevity for yourself and your family and your community was the core human like evolutionary drive. But people are voting for this, they're choosing it, and they're choosing it like really actively and knowingly. Like it's not like I interviewed people and dying of whiteness who were who are not aware.
As I'm reading this right, and I you know, I often go back to this movie that I say is a terrible movie, but like it really is one of those sci fi films that is just like that could never happen, and then you're like, oh no, this is happening, and it's Elysium with Matt Damon and in the movie, Earth has completely been extracted of all of its value. There's sickness there's death, there's famine. It's everywhere. And in this place in outer space, Lyssum is where there is
only happiness and health and all of these things. And you can get a lottery ticket to go there, or you can be born into it. Right. But it's this idea that it isn't just about the advent of new technologies that allow us to screen for cancer earlier, or to take medication that allows us to live with you know, or to decrease hypertension or manage our diabetes or all
of these things. It's exactly what you said, that this is an active choice that these white people in the Midwest and in the South that are now dying at a higher And this is not to say, of course, it falls along racial lines as well, But what is wild to me is that the people that have been actively voting for their own demise are the ones that are dying at a higher rate. And I just like, it's at one time shocking, but also I go back, Jonathan, and I think about Michelle Obama in the White House.
Let's move was her initiative to combat childhood obesity. What did the Republican Party do, right? They said, let them eat dessert? They said that fruits and vegetables, now, we don't need them, right, that they were voting for pink slime and lunch meat as opposed to cafeterias filled with fresh food and vegetables. That's what the Republican Party was doing. And so when I read that paragraph and I think to myself, oh, it's the political climate, I said, it's a climate you created, you know.
As I mentioned, I've got the new edition, Edition two point zero of Dying of Whiteness comes out or a fourth And and what I argue in the new addition is that this is actually like one of the most
terrifying findings the pandemic. And these findings, like what the Post is finding, are among the most terrifying findings for the future of our country, right because the fact that people are knowingly are people, The fact that people are knowingly doing this means that we have to think outside our common assumption about like public health or communal health or something like that. That people are doing this, they're murders, right, we have to think of these people as murders, as
as foot soldiers or something like that. But that in a way, I don't know. We thought we were kind of all in this together, but the pandemic and all these factors, like the idea, all the core assumptions of public health are things like herd immunity, the idea that everybody works together to lower infection risk. So many communal Americans are based on people working together to improve wages or longevity or something like that. But half the country
is not working all that model right now. And so I guess the question for me, and I'd love to discuss this going forward, is what do you do with that knowledge? Right? What do you do with that knowledge? Because half the country, and it's not a surprise, but they are really not working on that communal model in a way, which undergirds like the entire public health apparatus of this of everything we know in a way, And so what do you do with that information? Because the
most terrifying part, which I don't think the posts. I mean, I'll read the full thing later because it makes me too upset to read this stuff now, but I'll say the most important part is like what do we do with these kind of stories? Right? Our natural tendency is to say, well, look, everything's so backward in red states, and everything's much healthier in blue states. But you have to recognize that the ideology that you're up against actually the goal is to subvert blue states. It's not just
to keep bad health in red states. And so an example is, for example, the Bruin case for the Supreme Court about guns. We knew that bad gun policies were killing more people in red states, and that data was really clearly presented to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court turned around and overturned New York's gun laws. It said, basically,
you have to adopt these pathologically bad things. So I feel like a lot of times our response to these articles is like, oh, well, thank god I live in a blue state, But you have to know that people willing to die for their whiteness. That's the target is blue state America. And so and so. I just think you need a better political need. We need a political strategy, not just a health strategy. That's what I argue in the new book.
Yeah, and I you know, and I agree with you in so many ways, But at the same time, I am at you know, really, as I was reading this piece, thinking to myself that we are now at a time where we're beyond tribalism, right that we are at a every person for themselves right that if you know, yes, of course, the Supreme Court can continue to rain down terror on states that have tried to make their inhabitants safer, whether it's from guns, whether it's from food products, whether
it's from greedy banks, whether it's all of the protections that governors apparently in blue states don't have the same power to command in the same way that governors in red states do. At the same time, it's like, when I think about my health and I think about the health of my family and friends, it is really your responsibility, right,
Like your health is your responsibility. And so if you and at that same time, we understand what happens in terms of poverty and not having access to health care, which is why Obamacare right was pushed through so that people could have access regardless of the type of jobs that they had, to healthcare. Republicans fought against that and have chipped away at it ever since it was put
in place. And so, you know, at one time, I look at this and I want to throw the whole, you know, my whole laptop away as I'm reading it, and then at the same time I'm just like, let them die, right like, and I say that like tongue in cheek. But at the same time, I'm just like, what political strategy in this climate, Jonathan is going to assuage people that decided not to put a mask on their own face to protect themselves and their families from
a virus that killed over a million people. What political strategy is going to move those people into a place where they didn't even value their own goddamn lives over the lies that were being told to them by a political party that they pled their li and their life too.
See, here's the issue for me. I mean, of course I wrote a whole book on that very point. But the idea of let them die, it's I just I can't say this enough. They're coming for you. So they're dying in order to own you in a way. And so the idea of the idea that this is just like, oh, there's just poor red states. That's not the goal of this ideology. People aren't just dying because they hate public
health and they want a shorter lifespan. They're dying because the strategy of their dying is part of a bigger project, which is to take over the Supreme Court and overturn the Affordable Care Act and overturn all gun laws and many other factors that will actually impact not just their life but your life. And so it's not just like hey, those backward guys down there, it's seeing that they're dying as part of a bigger political project. And that bigger
political project is taking over the country. Right. I think there's something terrifying about this that's not just backward red states, which is I mean, this is what I argue in the New Dying of Whiteness, that we have to see that this is part of a bigger political project whose aim is blue state America. And so in a way, the idea that oh, well, just we can divide the country, we can have a national divorce, that's not what this is about. This is about taking over the entire country.
And so these deaths really are like almost military foot soldier type deaths, about an agenda that has that's trying to impact your health and your life. And I just think we've been too late to wake up to that. I mean abortion to be illegal across the entire country, and no gun laws across the entire country. So the aim of this death, which again I haven't finished the Washington Post article, but I sure hope they get to this point is the aim of this death isn't just
like we want to all die in Red States. It's that this is the strategy they're using to take over the entire country.
My feeling, Jonathan, and you are the expert here, So outside of this Washington Post, you know, very in depth expose of the last year that they have been doing this research to come out here and they pull out and have different interviews with different people that are struggling, struggling from you know, from from chronic illness, a woman that died at the age of sixty one, and so forth and so on, a young man that died at
the age of thirty. And you know, the fact is I hear everything that you're saying, and I hear everything. They're coming for you, They're coming for your health like this is I mean it is. It's going to be elysium, where there is a place that is filled with death and despair and disease, all things that were preventable if you had invested in healthcare, if you hadn't done any of the investment means that other peer countries have been doing in prevention of disease. And that is what is
going to happen. But what what is a parent is that the wealthy will be able to shield themselves from this right, and is that the wealthy will be able to shield themselves from this Uh, those that are able and you know, and again that comes back to wealth. Those that are able to lead this country and live someplace else will right and you and you will see a great exodus of talent, of wealth, of intellect that that happens in nations that decide to battle for the bottom.
And I think that America is on that trajectory. And you know, look, I try these days to look for the hopefulness to find, you know, the rainbow in the rain. But in all honesty, when I read this article and I look at this and I talk to you every week for you know, going on three years now, I don't really see how things get better. And that is because I don't see how this political climate. I'll give you the last word, this political climate has not reached
its bottom yet. And the only way that things get better is for things to finally bottom out and then be able to That is my opinion.
I'm talking to you from Nashville today. I'm looking at my window. There are cranes as far as I can see. We actually once again reached crane maximum, which is what it's called here in Nashville. There's so many new building projects coming up here because all of these you know, I can see the Alliance Bernstein Tower out my window here. It's all these New York firms and companies and businesses are moving to Red state America because there's cheap labor,
no labor unions, no state income tax. It's a really kind of pro business. Amazon is rebuilding our downtown, all these kind of things. It's not like everybody's walking around with a corn cob pipe here. There's a lot of there's a lot of there's just a lot of commerce and business and wealth that's coming to the South. Property values are really high. And part of the reason that is is because there's a lot of cheap, disposable labor.
Unions can't organize a lot of these car companies that don't want to fight the battle in Michigan or thinking about you know, there are a lot of car car plants down here in Tennessee and stuff like that. And so the reason I'm saying This is because part of where I come to with this, I'm not ready to give up on America yet, but I am saying that how can you It's just funny that part there's a health story, which is people are dying earlier in Red
State America. And then there's also this business story, which is that all these businesses are moving down here because it's a lot cheaper them. Red State America is kind of like what Mexico used to be or something like that, Like you can hire all these people who are disposable humans to work in your stuff, and you don't have to pay taxes and that for you don't have to pay for social programs. And so the question I have in response to your question, I realized this is a
long way of answering. It is like, how can you fortify Blue State America so that Blue State America remains like a safe and healthy place. And part of that is about health, but it's also about commerce and finance.
Like the reason that New York is in trouble right now is because a lot of its tax base has moved to Florida and Texas and Tennessee and places like that, and companies to Mexico and things like that, and so I just feel like at the very least Blue State of America needs to needs we didn't need a better strategy for Blue State America in the face of this, which is about health, but it's also about finance and capital, like what would what would true progressive capitalism look like?
How could you how could you make make it profitable enough in Blue State America? Because the question for me is like, is Blue in America going to be able to continue to afford the health programs that keep people healthy? So those are really long and winding answer, except that I do argue in a lot of my writing now that Blue State America needs a better financial model to keep its health, not to just say, look at those backwards bumpkins down there.
Yeah, we will have to leave it there today, Jonathan, because you got two books coming out that are going to reshape conversations that are desperately in need of reshaping. And so we appreciate that we get to have those jump off conversations happen here on WOKF every week with you. Appreciate you, my friend.
Take care everybody, and don't forget like puppies and peonies are right around the corner. Just the minute Matt Gates becomes the Speaker of the House, Everything.
Everything will get a lot better. That is it for me today. Dear friends on woke a App. As always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.