November 28, 2024 • 15 mins
George Noory and author George Ure discuss planned obsolescence, where manufacturers create products designed to break or become outdated so consumers are forced to buy replacements, the social behavior of buying new things to compete with neighbors and friends, and the importance of staying healthy to have a fulfilling life.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back George Nor along with George, you're and
George before we move on to your next book, The
One hundred Year Toaster. I was just kidding. I'm not
thirty nine.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
I sort of get that. By the way, I put
a couple of additional links up for people who visit
the urbansurvival dot com site. I put up some There's
a study out not a brand news state but current
and it says if you play golf you can live
(00:36):
five years longer. So there you go. There's your excuse
to get out on the course. It's very good socially,
it gets you a lot of walking activity. It was
a mortality study among Swedish golfers. So I thought that
one was kind of interesting and want to keep your
eyes on. In terms of it sounds strange and gross,
(00:59):
but ecal microbiotic transplants are coming. There's more and more
going on in modern medicine that links what goes on
in your gut, your health of your intestines, and the
processes by which we break down food. It's being linked
(01:19):
the gut microbiome. That's called is being linked to everything
from Alzheimer's to cardiac issues, to various forms of cancer
and so forth. And so one of the avenues medicine
is taking is to actually transplants stuff from a healthy
person's guts into a non healthy person's guts so that
(01:42):
the microbiome can heal itself. So that's a weird one
to keep an eye on. I also put a link
up to the thymus Regeneration Immino Restoration, Insulin Mitigation Extension Trial,
which is that the met Foreman and DHGA interduct, So
(02:03):
that link is up on the site, and there's one
or two others in there, biometals, iodine, melbten and things
like that that can also have an impact on both
Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. And we're really interested in those
two because both my wife and I have the A
(02:26):
p O E four. You lose the genetic lottery this,
which unfortunately increases statistically our chances of at some point
being more crazy than we are already.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And I wasn't kidding about your dentist. He really believes
that you look younger, doesn't he.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Oh yeah, yeah. In fact, he said you have to
tell me how you do it. And so this was
six months ago we were in for our teeth cleanings,
and so I wrote the book and gave him a
review copy and he looks at so, yeah, this stuff
does work. It's not a you know, you're not going
to wake up tomorrow morning in your twenties and so forth,
(03:08):
not when you're mid seventies. But you really can slow
the clock down dramatically. And the quality of life. Just
being able to get out of bed without hating the
idea of getting out of bed, you know, the aches
and pains and so forth, that's really worth something. And
the other thing I think Church and you're really a
great example of it. If you just go sit on
(03:32):
the couch and watch TV, the grim Reaper is going
to come sit on the couch with you. And the
way the way you got to take on aging is
don't stop living. You've got to have new goals, new activities.
You know, this whole lifelong learning process that I've been
involved in when I was busy in the higher education realms,
(03:57):
you know, in colleges and higher education and software platforms,
those things that keeping the mind busy and doing new stuff,
travel and so forth, those really just wonderful age extension strategies.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
It's critical. I told my dad when he retired at
sixty from the Ford Mortar Company, I said, Dad, keep
busy right after you retire sixties young. And he lasted
until he was eighty eight, and had he not fallen George,
I think he could have gone much longer. My mother's
ninety five and it's still going strong. But there's something
(04:34):
to be said about keeping your mind active.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
And also physically active too. I mean, your dad's a
perfect example. Eighty eight is well about the expectations for
his age cohort at the time he retired. My mom
moved to ninety three. So if you have some lucky
jeans in your family, you may lose on some of
the disease markers like high blood pressure or you know,
(05:03):
higher risk of Alzheimer's, but you can also have big
wins in terms of overall age expectation.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Now, the one hundred year toaster, what is that all about?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Well, you know, I've I've been writing about economics for
thirty years. The Peoplonomics website that I publish, that's that's
all about investing and so forth. And I wanted to
sit back and consider how do we hit the goals.
You know, the World Economic Forum and several groups are
(05:39):
trying to talk about, well, the future is going to
involve eating bugs and you know, dialing back you'll have
less and be happy with it, and that kind of talk.
But what's interesting is I wanted to sit down, methodically
go through what we as a society have done placing
(06:02):
money at the forefront of our value system. In other words,
my wife and I have been eating off plane correl
dishware for thirty years, almost twenty five years. I had
Corell on the boat because it's a vitreous of semi
(06:24):
glass ceramic and nothing reaches off of it. It's microwave proof.
And we still have dishes we had on the sailboat
and we're using them today. And there are so many
things where we have as a nation gone to the
(06:45):
planned obsolescence business model. And what happens is we have
we have products that are like pick cell phones. You know,
there's always a new cell phone on the market. But
I have friends and they're very smart people, I mean
really smart people, and they're still running around with Ald
(07:08):
Motorolla flip phones, the early ones. I remember those, and
you know what. They can still make a phone call.
And do you really need to have banking and four
K video feeding a virtual reality display in your pocket
everywhere you go? An the answer is probably not. Do
(07:31):
we need new car designs every year? Well? Probably not.
Should we be pushing electric vehicles as hard as we
are when you can't go anywhere because there's no charging stations.
We have a HouseGuest visiting us for the Thanksgiving period,
these tax attorney fellow, we call them Art Consigliery, and
(07:55):
we were comparing the driving of an internal combustion car
from Columbus, Ohio, which is where his practice is, to
our place in East Texas, and he could not do
it anywhere near as easily in an electric vehicle. He
would have had to spend two maybe two days on
(08:17):
the road if he could find a charging platform for
an electric vehicle. And that's what really has separated the
success of Tesla, which began with that system's view, this
is you've got to have someplace to plug this stuff in.
So what it must do. Tesla did all of these
(08:37):
charging stations, and as a result, they were the predominant
initial electric car in America. And there are so few
charging stations outside of urban areas that you know, the
annual model of internal combustion cars as ubs trucks still
(08:57):
very much with us. And get it doesn't have to
be that we're out disposable society. Can you remember the
Checker caabs George.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Oh, yeah, in yellow cabs.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, Well, Checker Cabs had a group called the Checker
Motor Company and I think they lasted until nineteen sixty
nineteen eighty seven or so. And this is just one
example of planned obsolescence. It doesn't really benefit anyone, Timworth, Peterbilt.
(09:33):
These are over the road trucks that easily go millions
of miles with routine maintenance. And yet my son just
bought a new car because he bought the disposable, and
everybody's in the same boat. He bought a car he
knew it would last one hundred thousand miles. It got
(09:54):
over one hundred thousand miles, and so it was time
to get rid of it and get into something his
next hundred thousand miles of driving. And see, that's that's
the kind of disposable stuff that doesn't make sense. And
that's what the one hundred year toaster was about, or
is about. It's about all these little decisions to make
(10:15):
in life, planned obsolescence and unfortunately the economy. And this
is to the balancing act. If you have an annual
model of a car, forget the checker that you can
drive for forty years and throw a new you know,
another Hemi engine in it at the five hundred thousand
(10:38):
mile mark. Right, those cars just don't exist anymore, accept collectors.
But what we have done is we have made the
business model in finance is all about growth and the
story of future growth. And if the number of people
(10:59):
and this is straight out of population forecasts the UN
World Bank folks like that when world population levels and
begins to even decrease, how do you show growth other
than having dispoke more disposable products. But that runs exactly
counter to the how do you slow down the consumption
(11:22):
that you know, we joke around here about has the
last order of fish and chips been placed yet? Right?
Because we're strip minding the oceans of all of their nutrients.
And so how do how do we get the earth
back in balance if we keep making throwaway products? And
the answer is we need to throw away the dollar
(11:45):
heavy economic model and stop valuing dollars. So another here
comes another book, right, and I started writing it last week,
and it's on downsizing because the only way you can
get there is by having people inspect their life purpose
(12:06):
and begin consuming to purpose. And that's a very hard
concept for people because status, sex, Hollywood celeb all that stuff.
The Joneses, right, we got to keep up with the Joneses.
And although if your neighbor has a new writing more,
or you've got to get a new writing more. If
your writing more still works, you're going to get a bigger, better,
(12:28):
faster one, so you can outpose your the neighbor. And
so that's what we've gotten ourselves into. We've become so
absorbed with media and trying to you look marbelous, right,
So in order to keep up our look and our
and our status, we make continuous bad choices about demanding
(12:54):
durable consumer goods. And this whole deal with the one
hundred year toes. I had a nineteen twenties toaster when
I founded a good will store in Seattle when I
was back in my sailing period and kept it on
the boat. You cannot find the one hundred year coaster today.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Now did it work?
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Ohly? It worked. You know, I sold the boat in gosh,
what two thousand and two or three, and it had
given me eleven years being kicked around on board a
sail boat, and it was still just a great toaster.
Since then, we've been through like three or four toasters,
(13:40):
you know, you buy them on Amazon and you know,
other nineteen bucks in the last four or five years.
And you know, and one of the things I did
in the book is, you know, you look at the toaster.
We could have one good toaster company, or we can
have twenty mediocre toaster companies. But the mediocre toasts fill
(14:01):
of social function. And the social function is they give
people something to do for work, so they have more
money so they can buy more coasters. So toaster companies
can contribute to growth of financial statements. And so you've
got this great collision between articulated environmental values on the
(14:23):
one hand, and the and the need for turnover in
industry so that they can have what we call synthetic growth.
And that's that also has had a lot to do
with the rise and fall of Europe. They opened up
Europe to huge in migration from other places, and they
(14:45):
got a great bump when the Wall came down, and
then and then the uh the migration from North Africa
and so forth. Great economic stimulus, but but as you
get past that, in need its synthetic growth payoff. We
have the same problem with US Mexico relations. We've had
(15:07):
a wonderful stimulus to the American economy from additional persons
coming in. It has kept the price of housing high.
We've gotten so much more work done. It's kept wages
relatively a little bit lower because there are more people
to spread the work app and it has prevented the
(15:27):
unemployment rate from going high. But the downside of it
is when the synthetic growth ends, it turns around in bites,
and that's when you get economic depressions.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back George Nor along with George, you're and
George before we move on to your next book, The
One hundred Year Toaster. I was just kidding. I'm not
thirty nine.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
I sort of get that. By the way, I put
a couple of additional links up for people who visit
the urbansurvival dot com site. I put up some There's
a study out not a brand news state but current
and it says if you play golf you can live
(00:36):
five years longer. So there you go. There's your excuse
to get out on the course. It's very good socially,
it gets you a lot of walking activity. It was
a mortality study among Swedish golfers. So I thought that
one was kind of interesting and want to keep your
eyes on. In terms of it sounds strange and gross,
(00:59):
but ecal microbiotic transplants are coming. There's more and more
going on in modern medicine that links what goes on
in your gut, your health of your intestines, and the
processes by which we break down food. It's being linked
(01:19):
the gut microbiome. That's called is being linked to everything
from Alzheimer's to cardiac issues, to various forms of cancer
and so forth. And so one of the avenues medicine
is taking is to actually transplants stuff from a healthy
person's guts into a non healthy person's guts so that
(01:42):
the microbiome can heal itself. So that's a weird one
to keep an eye on. I also put a link
up to the thymus Regeneration Immino Restoration, Insulin Mitigation Extension Trial,
which is that the met Foreman and DHGA interduct, So
(02:03):
that link is up on the site, and there's one
or two others in there, biometals, iodine, melbten and things
like that that can also have an impact on both
Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. And we're really interested in those
two because both my wife and I have the A
(02:26):
p O E four. You lose the genetic lottery this,
which unfortunately increases statistically our chances of at some point
being more crazy than we are already.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
And I wasn't kidding about your dentist. He really believes
that you look younger, doesn't he.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
Oh yeah, yeah. In fact, he said you have to
tell me how you do it. And so this was
six months ago we were in for our teeth cleanings,
and so I wrote the book and gave him a
review copy and he looks at so, yeah, this stuff
does work. It's not a you know, you're not going
to wake up tomorrow morning in your twenties and so forth,
(03:08):
not when you're mid seventies. But you really can slow
the clock down dramatically. And the quality of life. Just
being able to get out of bed without hating the
idea of getting out of bed, you know, the aches
and pains and so forth, that's really worth something. And
the other thing I think Church and you're really a
great example of it. If you just go sit on
(03:32):
the couch and watch TV, the grim Reaper is going
to come sit on the couch with you. And the
way the way you got to take on aging is
don't stop living. You've got to have new goals, new activities.
You know, this whole lifelong learning process that I've been
involved in when I was busy in the higher education realms,
(03:57):
you know, in colleges and higher education and software platforms,
those things that keeping the mind busy and doing new stuff,
travel and so forth, those really just wonderful age extension strategies.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
It's critical. I told my dad when he retired at
sixty from the Ford Mortar Company, I said, Dad, keep
busy right after you retire sixties young. And he lasted
until he was eighty eight, and had he not fallen George,
I think he could have gone much longer. My mother's
ninety five and it's still going strong. But there's something
(04:34):
to be said about keeping your mind active.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
And also physically active too. I mean, your dad's a
perfect example. Eighty eight is well about the expectations for
his age cohort at the time he retired. My mom
moved to ninety three. So if you have some lucky
jeans in your family, you may lose on some of
the disease markers like high blood pressure or you know,
(05:03):
higher risk of Alzheimer's, but you can also have big
wins in terms of overall age expectation.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Now, the one hundred year toaster, what is that all about?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Well, you know, I've I've been writing about economics for
thirty years. The Peoplonomics website that I publish, that's that's
all about investing and so forth. And I wanted to
sit back and consider how do we hit the goals.
You know, the World Economic Forum and several groups are
(05:39):
trying to talk about, well, the future is going to
involve eating bugs and you know, dialing back you'll have
less and be happy with it, and that kind of talk.
But what's interesting is I wanted to sit down, methodically
go through what we as a society have done placing
(06:02):
money at the forefront of our value system. In other words,
my wife and I have been eating off plane correl
dishware for thirty years, almost twenty five years. I had
Corell on the boat because it's a vitreous of semi
(06:24):
glass ceramic and nothing reaches off of it. It's microwave proof.
And we still have dishes we had on the sailboat
and we're using them today. And there are so many
things where we have as a nation gone to the
(06:45):
planned obsolescence business model. And what happens is we have
we have products that are like pick cell phones. You know,
there's always a new cell phone on the market. But
I have friends and they're very smart people, I mean
really smart people, and they're still running around with Ald
(07:08):
Motorolla flip phones, the early ones. I remember those, and
you know what. They can still make a phone call.
And do you really need to have banking and four
K video feeding a virtual reality display in your pocket
everywhere you go? An the answer is probably not. Do
(07:31):
we need new car designs every year? Well? Probably not.
Should we be pushing electric vehicles as hard as we
are when you can't go anywhere because there's no charging stations.
We have a HouseGuest visiting us for the Thanksgiving period,
these tax attorney fellow, we call them Art Consigliery, and
(07:55):
we were comparing the driving of an internal combustion car
from Columbus, Ohio, which is where his practice is, to
our place in East Texas, and he could not do
it anywhere near as easily in an electric vehicle. He
would have had to spend two maybe two days on
(08:17):
the road if he could find a charging platform for
an electric vehicle. And that's what really has separated the
success of Tesla, which began with that system's view, this
is you've got to have someplace to plug this stuff in.
So what it must do. Tesla did all of these
(08:37):
charging stations, and as a result, they were the predominant
initial electric car in America. And there are so few
charging stations outside of urban areas that you know, the
annual model of internal combustion cars as ubs trucks still
(08:57):
very much with us. And get it doesn't have to
be that we're out disposable society. Can you remember the
Checker caabs George.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Oh, yeah, in yellow cabs.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, Well, Checker Cabs had a group called the Checker
Motor Company and I think they lasted until nineteen sixty
nineteen eighty seven or so. And this is just one
example of planned obsolescence. It doesn't really benefit anyone, Timworth, Peterbilt.
(09:33):
These are over the road trucks that easily go millions
of miles with routine maintenance. And yet my son just
bought a new car because he bought the disposable, and
everybody's in the same boat. He bought a car he
knew it would last one hundred thousand miles. It got
(09:54):
over one hundred thousand miles, and so it was time
to get rid of it and get into something his
next hundred thousand miles of driving. And see, that's that's
the kind of disposable stuff that doesn't make sense. And
that's what the one hundred year toaster was about, or
is about. It's about all these little decisions to make
(10:15):
in life, planned obsolescence and unfortunately the economy. And this
is to the balancing act. If you have an annual
model of a car, forget the checker that you can
drive for forty years and throw a new you know,
another Hemi engine in it at the five hundred thousand
(10:38):
mile mark. Right, those cars just don't exist anymore, accept collectors.
But what we have done is we have made the
business model in finance is all about growth and the
story of future growth. And if the number of people
(10:59):
and this is straight out of population forecasts the UN
World Bank folks like that when world population levels and
begins to even decrease, how do you show growth other
than having dispoke more disposable products. But that runs exactly
counter to the how do you slow down the consumption
(11:22):
that you know, we joke around here about has the
last order of fish and chips been placed yet? Right?
Because we're strip minding the oceans of all of their nutrients.
And so how do how do we get the earth
back in balance if we keep making throwaway products? And
the answer is we need to throw away the dollar
(11:45):
heavy economic model and stop valuing dollars. So another here
comes another book, right, and I started writing it last week,
and it's on downsizing because the only way you can
get there is by having people inspect their life purpose
(12:06):
and begin consuming to purpose. And that's a very hard
concept for people because status, sex, Hollywood celeb all that stuff.
The Joneses, right, we got to keep up with the Joneses.
And although if your neighbor has a new writing more,
or you've got to get a new writing more. If
your writing more still works, you're going to get a bigger, better,
(12:28):
faster one, so you can outpose your the neighbor. And
so that's what we've gotten ourselves into. We've become so
absorbed with media and trying to you look marbelous, right,
So in order to keep up our look and our
and our status, we make continuous bad choices about demanding
(12:54):
durable consumer goods. And this whole deal with the one
hundred year toes. I had a nineteen twenties toaster when
I founded a good will store in Seattle when I
was back in my sailing period and kept it on
the boat. You cannot find the one hundred year coaster today.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Now did it work?
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Ohly? It worked. You know, I sold the boat in gosh,
what two thousand and two or three, and it had
given me eleven years being kicked around on board a
sail boat, and it was still just a great toaster.
Since then, we've been through like three or four toasters,
(13:40):
you know, you buy them on Amazon and you know,
other nineteen bucks in the last four or five years.
And you know, and one of the things I did
in the book is, you know, you look at the toaster.
We could have one good toaster company, or we can
have twenty mediocre toaster companies. But the mediocre toasts fill
(14:01):
of social function. And the social function is they give
people something to do for work, so they have more
money so they can buy more coasters. So toaster companies
can contribute to growth of financial statements. And so you've
got this great collision between articulated environmental values on the
(14:23):
one hand, and the and the need for turnover in
industry so that they can have what we call synthetic growth.
And that's that also has had a lot to do
with the rise and fall of Europe. They opened up
Europe to huge in migration from other places, and they
(14:45):
got a great bump when the Wall came down, and
then and then the uh the migration from North Africa
and so forth. Great economic stimulus, but but as you
get past that, in need its synthetic growth payoff. We
have the same problem with US Mexico relations. We've had
(15:07):
a wonderful stimulus to the American economy from additional persons
coming in. It has kept the price of housing high.
We've gotten so much more work done. It's kept wages
relatively a little bit lower because there are more people
to spread the work app and it has prevented the
(15:27):
unemployment rate from going high. But the downside of it
is when the synthetic growth ends, it turns around in bites,
and that's when you get economic depressions.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
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George Noory
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