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Ep. 169 – Before The Devil Knows You’re Defunct: "Christian Healthshare" w/ Spencer Bland
470 Plays2 years ago
This week we’re joined once again by our good friend and fantastic comedian, Spencer Bland! We kick things off talking about the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl commercial that’s caused an absolute uproar. Tempers are flaring on all sides of this one… Then we trudge into the slippery, slimy, putrid swamp that is Christian Healthshare - a controvertial and uniquely-American industry bodysurfing a wave of partisan indignance, legislative corruption, and spiritual bankruptcy toward the rocky shores of financial insolvency. The past 15 years has seen healthshare participation swell from less than 50k to well over a million members in spite of the fact that 1) it’s not healthcare, 2) it’s largely unregulated, and 3) it’s full of conartists and charlatans. While there are plenty of people who are plenty happy with their healthshare plans, the whole industry stinks… stinks like a butt. We love hanging out with Spencer, and we’re big fans of his comedy! Follow him on Instagram and YouTube (@spencerspicy), TikTok (@spencerspicyy), and visit www.godsfavoritecomedian.com for show dates and his comedy special “Dinner at 4pm!”
Articles Referenced:
P.S. Shoutout to the listener that turned us onto such an interesting topic. Thanks for the suggestion!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, I think that's one of the other ones that John Oliver played was just like yeah a hundred percent of The bills that fall within the parameters of the kinds of things we'd pay for get covered What is the message what is the message of like current Christianity whereas bring your broken self credit score included to the altar and Jesus will save you so That's really just what they're trying to do. They're trying to break you down So the health the health share can bring you up, you know, you know, I call managing your credit score building up treasures on earth and
00:00:29
Speaker
And I'm building up treasures in heaven, okay? Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I'm doing.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hey, everybody. We are back with another episode of Growing Up Christian. I'm Sam. I'm Casey. And we are joined here today by none other than Spencer the Spice Man Bland. What's up, everybody? Oh, happy to be back, dude. This is my third time. And on the third time, I rose. This is the most Christian thing we've done since we started the podcast. Hell yeah, baby. Are you, in fact, our Lord and Savior?
00:01:19
Speaker
No, I actually just turned 34, so I'm out of my Gs this year. Should've done this last year. Dude, I think, is this the new record? A three time reoccurring guest? Ooh. I think we've had Luke Wilson on three times. Is it two? It might be two. Wow. I can't.
00:01:39
Speaker
Are you guys referring to the Luke Wilson? No, I mean, I consider our Luke Wilson the other is an absolute poser imposter. Our Luke Wilson has a donk for days. And ever since he graduated with his PhD, he has been
00:01:59
Speaker
Flaunting that bad boy all over his Instagram. Just dragging a fatty around the medical halls. Okay. Absolutely. He's vacationing constantly. Actually was just messaging him this week because we do want to get him back on. So if he isn't, if he hasn't had three, he's going, if he has had three, he'll be going on four. Uh, and he was in like Brazil doing some, doing some, dude, maybe you never know. I got to go on, I got to go on a quick time. Have you ever seen a man with like a really nice ass? It is jarring. Like.
00:02:27
Speaker
Dude, I was walking around target yesterday. This guy walked in front of me and I was like, Jesus Christ, my man, you are dragging like two wedding cakes back there. It was wild.
00:02:35
Speaker
I don't like the thing now. That's like the tick tock dude thing. Yeah, I do. I would try to do squats and I've never had anything more than a Hank Hill ass. And I never do that. I squat. I squat at the gym two to three times a week. And my ass just looks like I like a teacher who sat their entire life. Nothing. Nothing's happening back there. It looks like when you let the air out of your tires and the car just sits there. That's yeah. I know that feeling. It's not fun to get an egg on a nail.
00:03:02
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. My mom, when I was a kid, used to give me a hard time. Until I got into studded belts, I didn't wear belts. I didn't think they were necessary. No matter what, buying pants that fit, they would slowly work their way down because I just had no cape to hold that handle.
00:03:25
Speaker
I got the exact opposite problem. Yeah, Casey's one of the nice butt guys. I could never be one of those sagging pants, scene kid dudes, because I'd have to buy a 40-inch waist or something. Oh, yeah. He's got a bolt on ass. Incredible. I got a VBL. I've got a very standard ass with a giant ass crack. My butt crack is pretty much out constantly.
00:03:47
Speaker
Goes up to your shoulder blades. It literally like it's like it's my ass crack starts like halfway up my back. It's unfortunate What's your hair situation doesn't have wanja too, but it's got altitude the hair situation on my ass Yeah, I gotta be honest. I haven't I'm assuming it's pretty hairy. I know inside. It's it's like the Rencore. It's fuckin. Yeah No one no one should ever see it, but I think the cheeks are like
00:04:10
Speaker
I've seen Harrier, I think I can say that. Yeah. Yeah. Body hair is weird, dude. And the older you get, the weirder your body hair gets. Like, I'm at this point now where my legs, I'm like, should I just shave my legs because of all the fucking patchy spots on them at this point? It's not great. I'm doing okay. All right.
Super Bowl Ads and Controversies
00:04:30
Speaker
It's like my shins covered in hair. You just shift to the left a bit and it's just like bald. And I'm like, now I need shin tattoos to like cover up my weird hair patterns is what I'm thinking. Hey, get some nice, get some nice crosses down there. Yeah. Or maybe some, some, maybe a tattoo of someone washing your feet.
00:04:46
Speaker
And that would. Hey, hey, you're segueing us because I did want to get into some foot washing. Oh, yeah, for sure. I got a hot tick tock planned about that company. Yeah. Obviously, we're this will be coming out on the day before Valentine's Day. So if you would like to share this with your loved one for Valentine's Day, I'm sure they would love it. So maybe go ahead and share it with your Valentine. I think. Yeah, it's a hard time. My butt's up top.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, maybe Casey's willing. He could do a little spin for us and make the ladies swoon if they want to watch the video, provided Casey gets the video up. I mean, that's juries out on whether or not that'll happen. But I've been it's hard.
00:05:33
Speaker
So, it's 12-12. On 12-11, some of us were watching the Super Bowl. The most interesting thing about the Super Bowl is usually the ads, unless you care about football. Or the halftime show. We can talk about the halftime show if we want. It was fine. It was fine.
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'll go with fine. Yeah. Ads, though. Let's go. I mean, we we ever we all have an ad that's at the top of our mind when we're here doing our thing. Before we get to that one, there is two that stood out to me. Were there two or were there any that stood out to anyone else? That's a really great question, because I don't.
00:06:14
Speaker
The one that actually stood out to me was the Beyonce Verizon one. And it wasn't because it was good. I was like, what is Tony Hale doing with Beyonce? Dude, same. I actually asked. I didn't understand that connection at all. Because it wasn't a universe where Beyonce clearly existed, so we're in our universe. So Tony Hale is still Tony Hale, AKA Buster Bluth, AKA I'm pretty sure he graduated from Liberty. What?
00:06:38
Speaker
I'm like 99% certain he graduated from Liberty. I knew he was a Christian. I gotta check that. Yeah, someone fact check me. I know he's at least- And if you are a real Christian, you did graduate from Liberty. Yeah, exactly. But it just makes sense that like Tony Hale was playing Beyonce's bitch. Like I didn't get like-
00:06:56
Speaker
He's like, oh, I'll be checking your emails and schedule. It's like, why is why is Tony Hale Beyonce's assistant? Not that I'm saying that they're equal in talent and value. Obviously, Beyonce is far, far more important in the zeitgeist of America, but it just didn't make sense. It was like someone some casting agent was like, oh, we need some shrimpy guy. And they're like, oh, let's get Buster Bluth. Yeah, that was a that was a weird one. I was that one shocked me. I had to ask the people I was with. I'm like, is that in fact Buster Bluth and
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah. And then honestly, I don't remember any of the other ones. I wasn't I wasn't super duper paying attention. I'm kind of I'm kind of mad that I missed the one for Israel, you know, because you know me, I'm a huge supporter. So yeah. Yeah. Big big idea. Aren't we all? Yeah. Yeah. I I missed that one, too. Yeah. Maybe Casey has heard of it.
00:07:47
Speaker
He's a little up on the things, but one that stuck out to me was that RFK ran an ad. Oh, that's right. Yeah, that was so fucking funny. That was just it was kind of bewildering. It wasn't. I don't think it was a great ad. I mean, whatever. He had to apologize for it.
00:08:04
Speaker
He like pseudo apologized because he was like, I guess the rest of the Kennedys were mad at him, which I mean, he's kind of a black sheep of the Kennedys, right? Very much so, yeah. I feel like RFK is just a weird outlier man who they clearly tried to silence him by cutting out his vocal cords at one point and he made a recovery just enough where he's able to come back and run for president. They hit him with the the permanent laryngitis. Yeah. He just feels like dark timeline Michael Bloomberg to me, man.
00:08:35
Speaker
He like popped up on the scene. He's like, I got a shit ton of money. I'm going to advertise a bunch. The worst people you know, like me. And that's about it. And then I'll disappear in six months after making a ton of money. It's like he hit. Dude, he's kind of an anomaly because he like hits the scene with like good ideas for like economy and infrastructure, but hates vaccines and loves to support.
00:08:56
Speaker
Israel unrelentlessly. Yeah, it's very what are we doing here? Cuz and he just looks like he looks like like he looks like Jordan Peterson Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan just like like Dragon Ball Z fused into one guy like it doesn't make any sense
00:09:08
Speaker
Like a megazord of bullshit men. They touch fingers. They're just like, hey, bigotry, racism. Someone popped into the very end and was like, libertarian beliefs. It's like an afterthought. It's just like an unfinished tale. Yeah, it's like we didn't really put a lot of thought into the theory behind it.
00:09:28
Speaker
yeah that ad was weird I guess in hindsight I guess it was mimicking like an old Kennedy JFK ad whatever that's lost on everyone voting right now so I don't know why he went in that direction but his apology was funny because it was like
00:09:46
Speaker
sorry to my family but then he like pinned the tweet and like put it up everywhere for like if you look if you look him up it's just like the top thing you'll see yeah and then um and it was like i guess it was put out by a super pack uh and he's just like
00:10:02
Speaker
Because those are always good. Oh, you know, we can't elude like I don't. So I didn't know. But then he's out there just like championing it like he loves it. So, you know, whatever. I'm sure I'm sure him in his super pack communicate. I don't. It's hard to believe that super packs are not actively in communication with the people that they're not supposed to be communicating with. I worked in advertising the amount of coordination and effort that I go into getting a Super Bowl ad made and approved is there's there's no fucking way he wasn't a part of the process.
00:10:31
Speaker
Did you did you work? Did you work on one? Yeah. Shit, did I? No, I was. You were like a Budweiser frog. No, that would fucking be awesome. No, I can't remember which one it was. God, this would have been 2013. Yeah, no, 2014. So I guess the 2013, 2014 season, I was working for an ad agency in New York and I think
00:10:59
Speaker
I got, I got to remember this, but I think they did. Cause I remember it was Metamucil and Michael Strahan was their spokesperson at the time. And I think they did a Superbowl ad. I was not on the Metamucil team. I was on the Vicks team. Like Vicks vapor rub. Oh yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. My job consisted of telling people on Facebook that no, you should not rub it on your feet.
00:11:20
Speaker
but you should rub it on your chest right yes no there's like a that's a totally different thing but there's in the latin community there uh they view vix vapor rub totally differently and like honestly it kind of works but uh we had like since like legally we can't be like it's it it's made for this we had to be like
00:11:37
Speaker
Please don't ingest it. Like so many people are like, I take a teaspoon and put it in my tea. Like it was wild like home remedies with it. Yeah. Whoa. People are always insane, dude. No matter what, no matter what you put out, someone's ingesting it on TikTok. Oh yeah. People are going to find a way to get fucked up on it. It's like, I remember this thing, this thing came around, it was called Beezin and people would take vapor rub and rub it on their eyelids when they were tripping balls and it would like apparently make you trip even harder. And we had to like,
00:12:01
Speaker
We had to make a post and we're like, don't put it in your eyes. Stop beezing. Let in the pain terrible. Bizarre. Who thinks up? I don't understand who finds these weird elevate your high remedies that people come up with. They're even more bizarre sometimes than the curing disease ones. Yeah. I think it's just mom Facebook groups, man. It's a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands.
00:12:27
Speaker
Just using the guess and check method, you know, just be like, Oh, let's see if this works. Oh, maybe it did. And then they have to write like a long diatribe on Facebook with a lot of emojis about it. And some, some other impressionable person is like, I don't know. This is three paragraphs. I got to believe it. Someone took the time to write those. It got really salmonella from like licking different toads to try to find the right.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, dude. The right skin texture or whatever to get you messed up. Super wild. How many people died from eating mushrooms just hoping to go on the best trip of their life? Oh, dude. That always confuses me. I go back to the pineapple, and I'm like, who was the first guy to look at that? And that was like, that's definitely, there's something good in there. The first person who was like, I should sit on that. Yeah. For sure.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, but no, it was that ad agency and I think they were doing an ad with Michael Strahan because I remember he was in the office one day, super nice dude. And I wasn't expecting that. I thought he was, I just assumed all celebrities are like mean people, but he was really nice. Sorry, I burped. But yeah, and then when I was back up there in 2015,
00:13:35
Speaker
Yeah, same thing. Like another team did a Super Bowl ad, but like, I was like adjacent, like we would pop in and like help them every now and then, but it is like high stress, dude. Like, yeah, it's gotta be perfect. And you're spending, I don't know, it's like a 30, it's either 30 seconds or a minute. And it's like, yeah, there was one year million dollars of all time. Highlife did a one second Super Bowl ad. It was just that it was just this big black dude in a warehouse and he just went high life.
00:14:03
Speaker
That's fucking sick. I don't know how much that costs. I think I think it still was like a couple million dollars or something like that. It was wild. If you if you weren't like if you like just stepped out for a second or whatever, like or we're just talking with your friends, you would you'd miss that. That's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Miller High Life 2009. I'll drop it in the chat. Perfect. Which one, you know, if you're like in moments of quiet when you
00:14:32
Speaker
are just kind of reflecting and you're more in touch like with, uh, you know, like your deeper subconscious, I guess, like which Budweiser frog do you think you are? Oh, I don't know the Budweiser frogs. And I think that might indicate how, how long it's been since I definitely think I'm her. That was what I was kind of thinking. I'd like to think I was white, but I think I'm more of an err. Cause the err is like, he's tired. He's at the end. He's like, let's just get this over with. There's a, you know,
00:15:01
Speaker
There's an unspoken cynicism to er. Yeah. He's kind of, he's like the Eeyore of the group. You know, he's just like, guys, let's get this. He's like, we, we didn't all have to pick a syllable. One of you guys could have said this, you know? Yeah. But is officially dead. Er is the, is the frog of our, of our time, our generation. He is very millennial, millennial-y coded. Is this the 1995 Superbowl commercial?
00:15:27
Speaker
Yeah, with the frogs. Were they? They were around for a while. It was like they were like they were the they were like the guys of the year for a while. Yeah, they were like the Taco Bell dog for for Budweiser. That's crazy about that thing. Oh, my God. Did they still use the horse? The oh, yeah, they definitely still use the horses. Clydesdale. Those horses are pretty sweet, actually.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, those are big boys too. Can you imagine charging one of those into war? Oh my God. Oh dude, you would feel ready to kill. I mean, they could put the biggest wimp on a horse and be like, I'm going to kill a thousand men tonight. 100% dude. Yeah. If I was on an armored horse, I'd be like, nothing's stopping me. Do you remember what I feel like? Oh, of course you remember, but the scene in the Patriot where they like the horses are charging in, they all lift up the spear. Oh, is that brave? Yeah.
00:16:15
Speaker
Braveheart. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I watched those two. I mean, there was there was a charge in the patriot, too. Yeah. And I remember just being like horses definitely seemed more powerful, like watching that scene. I was like, I I played Age of Empires on my computer. Yeah, dude. And horses did well. And then you watch Braveheart and they just pick up some sticks and it's like no more horses. It's like, yeah, that was fast. They didn't do what they were supposed to do.
00:16:42
Speaker
I really wonder like how often people like cavalry charges were like charging into like a spear row like that. They always do in movies, but yeah, it doesn't seem like a very effective way to, uh, most of the time it was used as like a flanking maneuver. Yeah. Like you got you around the edges so you can act from different points, right?
00:17:09
Speaker
Mobilize quickly, that's what you're saying. Now I want to read up on the history of cavalry charges. Yeah, and how their horses were used in war. I mean, you deck them out with some armor, maybe not originally. I get it as a ranged form of where the Native Americans would just rip them with their thunder thighs and just grip tight and just launch them. Unreal. That's crazy. That's some crazy shit.
00:17:31
Speaker
But like thinking of them on a person on a horse with a sword, it's like I've watched horse races and those bitches go down quick. Like I don't. It's hard to imagine that like a horse in battle doesn't just get like Achilles and just drop. Well, it was a different time. You know, horses were more horsey back then. You know, now you got these sissy horses, you know, Joe Biden's president. You know, horses aren't the same. You know, five horsepower used to be a lot. And it's not even you can't even get three horsepower now. And then
00:18:00
Speaker
You know, they're cutting the mains off of them. And, you know, some horses don't even look like horses anymore. All right. Which is arguably the only animal that should have long hair. I agree. I also I think we can confidently say that horses are the hottest animal, like 100 percent. They're up there. Yeah, I think I think they're I would.
00:18:19
Speaker
I think I'd fight someone and I'd say that horse is the hottest animal. There's a Vietnamese pho restaurant in Raleigh where I live and they have this majestic painting of horses that definitely look like someone that it's like painted by someone who has definitely never seen a horse before in real life.
00:18:36
Speaker
Because like they're all like one of them's pink, one of them's purple, like they don't make any sense. But the horses, the horses have abs. It's insane. Like they like they're like charging at you head on and they all these amazing flows. And then like their chest is just rippled abs. It's wild. But if I can. Yeah. Yeah. If I can find a photo, I'll send it to you guys because it's it's honestly it's it's a work of art. I am kind of drawn to like horse art.
00:19:02
Speaker
It's cool, dude. Yeah. I see him in a gas station next to the like, uh, you know, the, the coffee mug that's like a skull and the, you know, the, the. And the lighter that's definitely used for dabs. And like, I, I am kind of drawn to them. Like I, I, I.
00:19:21
Speaker
a shirt, a black shirt with charging horses and lightning on it. Like I am tempted to buy it ever. Yeah. Yeah. I'm partial to my favorite celebrities drawn as. Oh, I just sent horse sent. Oh, that's fun. You know, I like that. Centaurs are cool. Yeah.
00:19:43
Speaker
Anyway, uh, horses are great.
Light-hearted Humor and Nostalgia
00:19:47
Speaker
Their hair should be long. Their tails. Centaurs. Where is the penis on the centaur? Is it like, I think it's coming out the bottom of the man body or do they have horse dong out the back? I think it's horse dong out the back. Yeah.
00:20:00
Speaker
It's exactly where you would think a horse dong is. There's no messing with the anatomy. Wow, you're awfully sure about centaur anatomy. Yeah, which is frustrating for them. So dismissive, dude. They can't jerk off at all. I mean, they can't. Oh my god, dude. Yeah, they can't. That sucks. There's no reach. They just have to find two trees growing out from one another where they just get it wedged in there. Oh my god, dude. Horses do.
00:20:29
Speaker
That really, that really changes, uh, that really changes Harry Potter scenes with the centaurs for me. Oh yeah. I'd like to see someone remake that scene and the horses just have just normal. Give them dicks, give them dicks made anatomically correct to ruin it. Okay. I am drawing from some sort of like remote file in my brain right now, but I'm pretty sure that I read something about how horses will like.
00:20:59
Speaker
when they've got a heart on, they will slap it against their family. Oh, you know what? Dude, I've got a friend who literally, she owns a horse farm, and I'm going to text her this tomorrow and be like, hey, haven't talked to you in a few months. How you doing? How are your kids? How do horses jack off? You ever just open the stable door suddenly, and the horse is like, what are you doing? Wait, wait, wait. I was cleaning it. I was cleaning it. I wasn't doing anything, mom. They pull a bunch of hay over them. I wasn't doing anything. I thought there was a bug on it.
00:21:30
Speaker
God, knock! Dude, absolutely brutal. So he gets us, right? You guys think he gets us? Oh, man. Casey, did you see that he gets us? I know you aren't a big football fan. I didn't watch any of it. I watched The Never Ending Story. Did you? I said it's great, dude. Oh, my God.
00:21:56
Speaker
I was awesome. Yeah, I recently watched that a few months ago as well. It is phenomenal, dude. It is such a good like rainy Sunday movie. I think I saw it when I was maybe when I was really young, but I hadn't seen it since. It holds up watching it again. It's it's great. It's such like a hopeful story to the death of our taxes is truly one of the saddest moments in cinema. And it comes out of nowhere, dude, like there's no like stage set up. It's just like, oh, yeah, the horse is dead. Then you're just you just got to keep going.
00:22:25
Speaker
That the horse actually died in that scene. They were like they're filled out. They're like, oh, fuck. This one's a goner. Rollie emblematic of life. Rob, you know what? Things die. Keep going. You got to go talk to the big turtle. I haven't seen that movie in a really long time.
00:22:43
Speaker
It's great that you could talk to Joe Biden. I would love to do something like that. Is Joe Biden the guy on the bike? I am totally going to dub Joe Biden's voice over that scene now where Atreyu is like, what am I supposed to do? Oh, you got the kids were touching my legs. They called me Corn Pop. You know, we're seeing an increasing number of people like quarantined into Rafa and now the Israeli army is about to invade. Like what are you?
00:23:13
Speaker
You know, what is your messaging to to President Netanyahu about that? I don't care. Nothing matters. Yeah, yeah. That's gross me as a kid, for sure. Sam, you should 100 percent go rewatch. Watch it with your children. Your children are like old enough, right? Yeah. Yeah. And six. Yeah. Oh, that's a perfect never ending story age. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's all practical effects. It's great. It's amazing. I like I want to.
00:23:43
Speaker
I hadn't watched any movies in so long. And then recently, like we've kind of been on a spree where like we went back. I'd never seen like the extended version of Lord of the Rings. What? Oh, my God. It's so good. Yeah, dude. Like going back and watching them now. Those those movies are incredible. They're phenomenal, dude. I watch them multiple times a year. It's bad.
00:24:08
Speaker
The extended version adds so much to it too. It gives you so much context, dude. It's the only movies that I've, I mean, I'm not a big, I don't watch a lot of movies these days, but I feel like it was the only extended version of a movie I saw, at least until, you know, Schneider started doing cuts and trying to rip the whole concept, I guess. That's time well spent. Yeah.
00:24:32
Speaker
But that was the first, the extended cut comes out and you go, actually, this still works. I remember the first time I saw one that didn't was when I watched the deleted scenes for the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man. And those weren't good. Oh, I haven't seen those. I gotta go check those out. Okay. I highly recommend watching them. They make no sense. And it was like, that was the first time as a child where I go,
00:24:54
Speaker
Cause you know, you don't have a critical eye as a kid. You get the more, the better. Unless you're like a loser, but yeah. Uh, and I was, but not the right time. So I was like, that was the first time as like an early teen where I go. Oh, I get, I get why you edit stuff out like that. It was so glaringly obvious to 13 year old me that it shouldn't have been there. Hard to believe they filmed that scene and then even thought to just include it as a deleted scene.
00:25:24
Speaker
That's very funny Yeah, the extended editions Lord of the Rings are I can't even watch the regular ones now like it's not
00:25:32
Speaker
Cause I'm like, Oh wait, what the fuck? And then I remember like, Oh, I'm watching the normal version. Yeah. The original should just be shelves, like take them off. Yeah. So, uh, apparently there is a, uh, in a, in a mountain in Arizona, there is like 200 hours of unused footage, uh, from all three movies that, um, I think either Miramax or someone is just sitting on and people, the, the underground Lord of the rings community is like, release the big cut because there's like,
00:26:00
Speaker
There's stuff like there's more of like the oh my God, I'm fucking forgetting the name, but like the in the intro of the fellowship, there's more of like the initial battle like in Mordor. I don't know why I'm blanking on the actual proper name of that, but there's more of that. There's like way more like character exposition for Faramir. There's like way more with the Rohirrim like it's it's supposed to be like a ton of things have leaked here and there.
00:26:24
Speaker
And, uh, people are demanding the release of the cut, which will probably mean it'll never happen. But I want to see like a Harold and Kumar style, like on a mission to get that footage movie. I think that would be fun. That'd be fun, dude. Yeah. I actually, I would support that. Are either of you guys watching a season four true detective? I have not. Yeah. I got through the first episode. I want to watch more, but I, I'm, I.
00:26:50
Speaker
I like to wait for episodes to come out a little bit so I can watch like four or five, just back to back on like a, on a real like depressed day where I'm like, I don't want to remove. Well, don't expect that to lighten your mood. Okay. I know it's heavy. Yeah. I want to know without any spoilers if it's like improve it. Cause you, you, you were a little critical of episode one. Uh, and as we've talked about season one is one of the greatest television shows seasons of all time. Season two is arguably one of the worst.
00:27:19
Speaker
And look, I mean, juxtaposed to season one, it feels probably way worse. I've probably seen worse television, but just had lower expectations. So it doesn't register the same. But season three was good. Season three was good. Not great. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Was season season three was Vince Vaughn or was that season two? That was season two. That was okay. That was fun. Yeah. Like fun. No, no, no, no. I was not fun for the right reasons, but it was fun. Like it was.
00:27:48
Speaker
Someone told Vince Vaughn he could win an award and he was like... He tried to act real hard that time. Yeah, he put his whole Vince Ussy into it and it came out weird. It was season two straight off of, what was the movie he did where
00:28:08
Speaker
What? Oh, God. Well, this will be where he's down. Was it a movie where he had Down syndrome or was there pretending to? No way. Really? Are you thinking of The Ringer with Johnny Knox? Well, that's the one that was Johnny. Yeah, fuck. I thought he was in it. I thought he was a great movie. It is a good movie. I went back and rewatched it a few months ago because people were talking about it. And I was like, this is it's pretty bad. Like it's it's funny for like when you turn on your like 14 year old jackass brain.
00:28:36
Speaker
But as like a middle age or dude in their 30s watching it, you're like, oh man, this is real fucked up. It's a little rough. You know a movie definitely not made to today's standards, that's for sure. But it's still very funny. A movie that gets that same criticism that I will stand by is actually a good movie. And maybe that's because I'm the wrong kind of person.
00:28:59
Speaker
Uh, is, uh, Tropic Thunder. I don't, I get the criticism of why it doesn't age well. And I fully disagree. I actually don't, I think it ages perfectly fine. Cause it's, it's purely pointing out the satire of all that stuff. It's ahead of his time pointing out. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. I mean, Rachel Zolozal was basically in that movie.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah, I was just talking like before, like right before I jumped on this with some of my friends about because we were talking about our favorite Manchester Orchestra albums. And one of one of my friends was like, I really love simple math. And I was like, I can't think of that that song or that album without thinking of simple Jack from from from traffic thunder. But at all, I literally just replaced lyrics with simple Jack. Whoa. I think it's not like.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, the movie's great. I think it holds up. I think that what it's going for and what it's trying to point out in a comedic fashion truly holds up and is still relevant. Yeah. Yeah. I get that some of the language is troubling to some, but don't watch it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, why don't you grow up, you sissy? You got soft hands, brother.
Critique of True Detective Season 4
00:30:11
Speaker
Well, season four of true detect. I'm interested to see what some other people think of it like actual people that I can talk to and not, you know, the Internet. I am. I hate it. Oh, wow. I hate it. I think it's like so just contrived and terrible and I don't know.
00:30:32
Speaker
But yeah, we'll wait and maybe have that discussion on Discord or something like that. Some people might like it. You know, well, April and I have talked about it a whole bunch.
00:30:44
Speaker
If it was just a random like crime slash horror show, then it would kind of be whatever like it. I don't think it would be good, but it wouldn't be so irritating. It's that it's like co-opting something really good and creative and different and awesome. Yeah. Like, I don't know. I mean.
00:31:07
Speaker
Nick Nick. I can't what his name is because it has a lot or whatever that wrote it. I mean, oh, yeah, he's he seems like he could probably be pretty annoying and he's wrote some garbage, but I don't know. It's it really sucks. It sucks, too, because I feel like the like, you know, Jodie Foster's great. She's such a great actress. Yeah. And she's doing her best with what she's got here. And it's just like it's just not good.
00:31:37
Speaker
Bummer. I'll end up watching it. I. Yeah. My age or max subscription lapsed. So I was just waiting for the whole season to finish so I can do it. I got a I got a high. I got a high seas. I got a high seas website I can send to you. High seas. Yeah. Well, it's I don't want to use. I don't want to use the word. I don't know if I don't know if the man's listening. The man's always listening. I'll give you I'll give you a hint. Jack Sparrow. That's what I've been doing.
00:32:05
Speaker
That's right. It's a website where it's everything is prior to the Caribbean. Jacking Sparrow. Is that James? No, I, uh, I, I use a website, uh, that has everything and it honestly doesn't make sense how quickly it gets up there.
00:32:17
Speaker
Um, but I don't ask questions cause I've had it for like five years. I used to use one when I was in college and I'm blanking on the name of it, but it was, it was a very reliable way. It was reliable and then it shifts, right? And then they all eventually get shitty at some point and like all the links are broken and someone figures out what they're up to. Sorry. This one has maintained its legitimacy for, I mean, dude, at least since like my senior year of college, it's insane. I think it's a, it's like, you guys know what Plex servers are?
00:32:45
Speaker
No, I've heard of it. I don't know. Yeah, it's basically like someone. Some computer nerd like has a ton of storage at their house and has opened it up to the cloud and they use a bunch of like VPNs and stuff to like hide it. And they just, you know, build a website around it and let people choose from there. But I mean, this dude, that's I mean, I love how cool it's why people are. It's like 80 bucks a year. And I mean, like if an episode
00:33:11
Speaker
aired like tonight at nine, it would be up at midnight. It's crazy. I have no idea how they do it. I don't ask questions. It's, you know, obviously it's very much not legal, but, uh, you know, it's also annoying that we pay for shit. And then they're like, Hey, we know that, you know, we all started this because you guys didn't like cable, but what if we reinvented ourselves back into cable? I know we're, dude, horseshoe theory is in full effect right now. We really, really disrupted the industry back to exactly what it was 20 years ago.
00:33:39
Speaker
Did it cost money to make the rings of power? Yeah, that's true. He has a billion dollars an episode to shit on Tolkien's grave.
'He Gets Us' Ad Reactions
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah Before we get to the meat of what we want to do I do want to touch on he gets us because it is right. It did just happen. Yeah, and What I think is so funny about it is they like
00:34:00
Speaker
So for anyone who doesn't know, which you all do, everyone knows, we talked about it not maybe last year, two years ago, after the first Super Bowl where it aired and where their money comes from and stuff like that. So there's not a lot. They had done a previous Super Bowl commercial. Yeah. Two years ago. Oh, I had no idea. It was their first Super Bowl. He gets us. It's like, uh,
00:34:21
Speaker
it's a it's a faux liberal uh think tank very faux yeah but their whole yeah you do yeah it's your podcast Sam sorry no no but what's so funny about it is it's like so it's like uh it presents itself as like uh it tries to like build up Jesus as an immigrant and uh that Jesus is there for the quote unquote least of these so like
00:34:43
Speaker
I don't remember what the original commercials were, but like the two that aired during the Super Bowl, it was just like it would be like a homeless person or like a drug addict who was like it have like clearly looking like they were on something in the streets. Yeah. It's like demons. Does this whole like Jesus cares for all these people? Jesus never taught hate. And then the second commercial was all
00:35:08
Speaker
AI generated images of people washing other people's feet. And that's the one that's getting the most criticism because it's weird. So it's like a cop washing a black person's feet, a priest washing a gay man's feet. And then it's just like at the end, it's like Jesus never taught. Hey, he gets us dot com.
00:35:30
Speaker
Uh, slash love thy neighbor. Uh, I think is what it is. So what's so funny though, is it, I mean, it is getting criticism from all angles. It like conservatives are losing their gourd over it. They think it's just like
00:35:46
Speaker
They think it's like liberal horse shit, even though it's funded by like anti-gay, like anti-abortion par for the course. Like the Hobby Lobby motherfucker is like put in millions to the company that kind of like owns the He Gets Us campaign. So it's a very, very conservative evangelical. It's hilarious organization. They're trying to rebrand Jesus to make people like him and they just like
00:36:16
Speaker
I don't know they went right down the middle when they had to hit the 710 split and they It just isn't working and I think so conservatives are out here. Just like Focusing on those like last it's like everything in it is just like yeah, Jesus washed feet Yeah, Jesus cared for people who were suffering. Yeah, Jesus like all of it is like they'd be like, well, yeah Yeah, of course Jesus cared about those things but
00:36:39
Speaker
But at the bottom line, they can't just handle the Jesus didn't teach hate thing. I guess that's really hard for them. I do. There is a post. Well, the biggest thing I don't know if you saw I don't know if you saw the bright the Breitbart article today, but Breitbart Breitbart's mad because all the images depict white people washing minorities feet.
00:37:03
Speaker
Oh, gross. They're like, oh, we can't get some black people washing white people feet. Like, it's like that's literally. Which the irony of it, like, that's like a double fuck up because, like, yeah, they're wrong for more like they just accident. I don't know. It's they just confirmed like, yeah, they're like, oh, so you guys are like pretty fucking hateful. And they're like, yeah, and we're mad about it. And then it also shows like the angle that this conservative group is coming from. They're like, well, obviously, if you're a minority, we should be washing your feet here.
00:37:33
Speaker
Uh, there's this page. I've invited the guy on the podcast. He has agreed to do it. It hasn't happened yet. He probably won't end up doing it. His page is called honest youth pastor and he has 220,000 followers at this point. Jesus Christ. Literally. When I first reached out to him and he was very particular about like.
00:37:56
Speaker
Well, I could only do these times because he's also a youth pastor, which is a pretend job and you don't have that much to do. Sorry for any youth pastors listening, but I've been friends with several and it's cushy as fuck. That's a lot of going to Chick-fil-A with children.
00:38:11
Speaker
But he posted a whole thing about it, and I think he sums up pretty good where your evangelical people are coming from, so I'm just gonna read his lame-ass post. He goes, let's just get the obvious out of the way. I know you think I'm a Pharisee, but hear me out. These, he gets us commercials, are what one could expect from what let's do everything short of sin to tell people about Jesus mentality.
00:38:38
Speaker
It's surface level at best, yet misses the entire call of Jesus. Repent, the kingdom of heaven is near. It's a message that nearly everyone can get behind. Just be nice to each other. And the message that if you don't get behind, your scene is out of touch. This misses the whole point of the gospel, that God has made a way to be reconciled to him through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.
00:39:01
Speaker
It portrays Jesus' acts of humility as an act of acceptance. A live and let live type of mentality. However, this was neither the message or the foot washing nor the message of loving one's enemies. Both acts are ways to follow in the ways of Jesus.
00:39:18
Speaker
the way of humble obedience to God walking in holiness. The message of Christ is one of humility, yes, but a humility that, as Paul says in Romans 2.4, reminds us of God's kindness and patience. A reminder that leads us to repentance. The Gospel of He Gets Us campaign is one of a Jesus that simply wants you to be kind. The Gospel of Christ is one that calls us to repentance, self-sacrifice, and holiness.
00:39:45
Speaker
Fuck you, honestly, Patrick. I would love to hear what his idea of self-sacrifice is. Oh, yeah, dude, probably not much. He's like literally built a brand for himself just being like a holier-than-now prick.
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah, that guy sounds like he sucks. And so but that's pretty much it. They go. Oh, it says Jesus didn't teach hate and shows him doing the thing that Jesus actually did in the Bible. Yeah, it's a hokey ass commercial. I didn't like it. I wish they didn't air it. I think they're doing long to do a lot of big disservice to everyone everywhere. But
00:40:21
Speaker
for conservatives to find reasons to hate it, for them literally just showing a dozen images of an example of something Jesus did and finding a way to hate it because their biggest fear is that it's just like a license for everyone to be as they are and not like them is like hilariously ironic because Jesus literally did that and was fine with people being the way they were and not being like him.
00:40:50
Speaker
He was totally fine with it. In fact, nothing excited about some people just like not being like even religious at times. He's like, yeah, you don't have to do this shit. That's obviously bullshit. He's pretty stoked to just love people for for being people. If you actually read the Bible, nothing will piss off the evangelical right.
00:41:07
Speaker
more than just like pointing out the shit that Jesus literally did. But liberals hate it, too. And this is where it gets so funny. They're like, well, if you're going to spend 10,000 million trillion dollars on a Super Bowl commercial, what you could have spent that money actually helping the people that you're talking about. And it's like, oh, my God, people can't stop publicly jerking themselves off. No, there's such a good video by I can't. This this girl just randomly on TikTok. It's got to have like millions of views now, but
00:41:36
Speaker
She just gets on there and she's like, yo, this is for people on the left. We got to talk about something. She's like, I was like, I posted an article or she was watching something. It was like, or it was a tweet where someone was like, yo, people on the left are like, just in general, like y'all got to exercise. Like if you think that there's a civil war coming, like.
00:41:53
Speaker
you gotta take care of your body and get in shape. It was like one of those like coded things. And then she was like, that's a normal thing to be like, exercise is good for humanity. That's not a controversial statement. And then she just went in more and she was like, but people on the left are like,
00:42:09
Speaker
Yeah, but what about? Don't body shame. Yeah, don't body shame. People aren't able bodied. What about this? And she's like, no one brought that up. She's like, but you guys are, are detracting from the statement that exercise is good for you and will lead to like a longer life. And it's like a much longer video that she breaks it down, but it's so good because that's exactly what the left is. Like someone will say something that is an okay statement that makes total sense. And then they're like, okay, but you're not thinking about every single person in existence ever and their things. And it's like,
00:42:39
Speaker
Okay. Obviously someone who is in a wheelchair is not going to have the same exercise as someone who was able bodied, but both of those people should still exercise.
00:42:49
Speaker
And it is so rarely the person that actually has those limitations. Yeah, that's like calling it out. It's it's just some self aggrandizing. Yes, dude. It's like, I will go forth. I will speak on behalf of those that cannot participate. It's honest. You thought, yeah, I am here for the least of these. Just, yeah, everyone thinks they're Jesus fucking Christ all the time. Yeah, it's ridiculous. And also, it's so funny because look,
00:43:20
Speaker
Ideologically, I couldn't be more opposed to the right, but what they did is they found a few points to rally around, even though it's so dumb. Everyone on the right, they all just toe the line and they roll with it. You do see that on your neoliberal horse shit, CNN, whatever the fuck.
00:43:39
Speaker
liberals love to eat their own. They love it 100% dude. They can't stop. They have no unified message. They have no way to get anyone on board because if you're on board, oh, you're not on board like I am, or you're not on board enough, or you're on board in the wrong way. And let me explain to you why you're a piece of shit ableist.
00:43:57
Speaker
fucking loser. It's like it never ends. The left can't get out of their own way. And that's why Joe Biden is our president. And that's why he will lose likely. Whatever. Maybe, maybe not. To RFK. It's like, what are we doing? It's so fucking silly, dude.
Humor and Political Correctness in Comedy
00:44:15
Speaker
And it's so annoying to be someone with like what I would espouse is progressive
00:44:20
Speaker
Values or maybe liberal values or leftist ideology and to just have feel like there is no team There is no camp. There's nowhere to like there's no one to rally around there's no one There's no group of people that I feel like I get in with because you're just like afraid of saying the wrong thing to the wrong people and being It's like that's that's the community that like anything left of Center has created and there it's
00:44:48
Speaker
It's killing any like chance of. Dude, it's so wild because it's like, it's like, dude, I'm I'm I'm left. I mean, my political opinions are if you go left enough, you get your guns back, you know, like. Yeah. And it's wild because like I'll be hanging around people and I'm like, I'm like, I mean, I hope I can say certain words around these people like like even crazy. You. Oh, that's crazy. Well, that's an ableist. And I mean, like, I remember
00:45:15
Speaker
This was a couple of years ago, it was during COVID, because I remember there was an open mic in Durham, which is like 20 minutes away from here. It's definitely more like liberal leading the city. I mean, Raleigh is pretty liberal, but Durham is way more liberal. And this dude was telling a joke, and I think he said,
00:45:30
Speaker
I think he said prostitute, which isn't that bad of a word. And this girl stood up and screamed to him and goes, it's sex worker. And it's like, dog, that's not the battle we need to be taking. But that altercation probably made that, I mean, it definitely made me sit into that word being like, all right, well, I don't give a shit.
00:45:52
Speaker
The semantics that people argue over is so ridiculous where it's like, what if we just focused on, I don't know, making sure there wasn't a homeless crisis right now versus should we call them unhoused? Right. Especially in comedy too, man. You probably see that a lot more. Oh, big time.
00:46:09
Speaker
This is an area we go for a few minutes to just suspend the rules and see if we can laugh. One person being bothered thinks that they have the right in comedy to decide what's appropriate for everyone else to listen to, and that's what gets old. What tells you whether or not what you did was funny was if it doesn't work.
00:46:35
Speaker
on a broad audience. Exactly. Now I have to shift gears. I tried it seven times because I liked it. And I mean, you listen to like big time comics go, I have a joke I love and I can't make it work. Yeah. And they have to just eat that joke. And they go, it is what it is. I mean, I'm obviously not I'm either not doing it right. It's not working. It's not the right time. It's not the right place. Whatever happened, it's not it's not it right now. So
00:47:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's so weird. There's that there is I feel like there's so much of that in especially is comedy just like Netflix took over comedy, right? Because everyone thinks everything on Netflix is for them So when it shows up there if they don't like it, it's like Netflix personally offended them with their content Well with that being said I will be having a Netflix special soon I hope I wish man that ain't never gonna happen. I'm gonna have it's gonna be on to be if anything I
00:47:31
Speaker
The move now is putting it out on YouTube. Yeah, self-produced. Actually, it's funny. Jordan and I headlined the side room at Goodnight's The Comedy Club in Raleigh, and I work in video production, so I just brought my two nice cameras. I was like, fuck it. I'm going to film it, and we're going to run the audio from the board and try to get a nice little tape out of this.
00:47:50
Speaker
And I've got it and I'm like, I guess I'll just put it out on YouTube. It's not like special level quality, but it's like, it's, you know, it's 45 minutes of me having some fun. And I'm like, ah, whatever. I'm kind of trying, I'm tired of doing those jokes anyway. So yeah, you put them out and then you kind of have to do something new, right? You don't want to keep doing the stuff you put out on YouTube. Exactly. Yeah.
00:48:09
Speaker
All right. He gets us. Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't. We're moving on. We have another topic that we want to touch on that's come to our attention recently. A listener messaged us on Instagram about Christian health share ministries and Christian, quote unquote, health insurance. And it struck a chord with me.
00:48:36
Speaker
for a couple reasons. One, because I'm just moderately familiar with it. So I guess the last thing I ever saw on it, Casey, you sent me the video, but John Oliver on his show last week tonight during the pandemic when he didn't have a live audience. He did an episode on Christian Health Share Ministries,
00:49:01
Speaker
Like him and like Rachel Dratch, right? They like came up with like a, yeah, dude, that was very funny. Which was great, very informative. It's like 23 minutes of just like straight, great information on how they operate. Yeah. So check that out if you're curious. He'll, he brings, you know, he clips in interviews from people, news stories that broke on people who have had bad experiences with it.
00:49:27
Speaker
He kind of just gives a brief history of like why they became more prominent But it struck a chord with me because the reason they became more prominent was actually something somewhat personal When my wife and I got married
00:49:42
Speaker
Well, we got it was probably like I want to say 20. Well, I was married in 2009, but 2011 is like we were living in Boston and we didn't have health insurance or I had a single pay. Like my work, I was able to get coverage, but we didn't have a family plan. And my wife.
00:50:01
Speaker
was teaching at a like a private or sort of charter school for basically was a school for kids who didn't have homes. It would be real behave big behavioral disorders, emotional behavioral disorders. So she was working there and they didn't have insurance. So we had to find something we were living in a house in Boston with like five other people trying to make ends meet barely making any money because Boston's crazy expensive.
00:50:28
Speaker
And we remembered that Shane Claiborne, former guest, and someone I personally respect on a lot of levels, he had done the Christian health share stuff. Christian health, quote unquote, insurance. It's not actually insurance. They can't call it that. They definitely cannot call it that. That would be a huge problem if they did.
00:50:54
Speaker
But they did it. And so we go, well, maybe that's an option to look into. And I remember when we were signing up for it, my wife had to fill out a statement of faith saying like, I believe in the triune God and Jesus Christ died and rose again. I had to do that when I got life insurance. Yeah. So she had to do the whole thing. And that was the application process as well as like sign all this bullshit that says that you'll be like a good Christian.
00:51:24
Speaker
Um, but I forgot about all of that until, uh, the, the, this guy messaged us on Instagram. So it kind of made all that flashback. Uh, and that one that's why we use was Christian. It was like Christian metashare is what we use Christian Mingle. Yeah. Christian Mingle metashare. Um, and it was fine. And one of the things that we.
00:51:47
Speaker
made sure would work is because that was around the time that we did wanna have, we wanted to start like having kids. We were talking about having kids and it's like, well, would this cover that? And there was a lot of like, I don't know. There was a lot of like emails and questions. It was like, I don't know. And I don't remember if she had that insurance or sorry,
00:52:17
Speaker
When we got pregnant, I don't remember. It's possible we did.
00:52:25
Speaker
Either way, it was a very, it was very strange. It felt like it was really hard to know what you could be covered for or not. But the reason we did it was because, oh, with Obama. So Massachusetts was one of the first states to like do the like, you have to have health insurance things. Obamacare got modeled after that.
00:52:47
Speaker
I'm not, I think this may have been right before, perhaps, that it became like a national requirement to have health insurance. But we were looking at it because if you didn't have health insurance, you got fined. Yeah, so I remember. We were looking for like, what's, you know, we're in our early 20s.
00:53:09
Speaker
healthy people. We didn't need much. We just basically, we needed to know that if we like fell down the stairs, our life wasn't over. Just needed some good fire insurance. And even then, not guaranteed that that was good. So it met the Massachusetts requirements, but what expanded this whole thing was that it
00:53:27
Speaker
With obama care becoming a thing in requiring health coverage they open the floodgates for these. These like health care share these like sharing programs they like really loose in the red tape and we're just like.
00:53:46
Speaker
Yeah, you count because we know we're making things a lot harder. We're trying to make things easier for people and move it towards more insurance, which could potentially drop premium, whatever. The whole theory is behind everyone being insured would work if health insurance companies weren't fucking crooks, but they are, so it's never going to work as intended.
00:54:08
Speaker
But yeah, so it was like, it allowed for more options like that. It allowed for more options with less oversight. It really loosened the oversight. It was a little bit tighter before. That's why Metashare was the first one approved. Because despite being shitty in a lot of ways, they were more particular, more like they're
00:54:35
Speaker
Their system was like more directly laid out, less up in the air, will we, won't we cover your medical net? But anyway, Obamacare kind of opened up for a lot more possibilities. Yeah. So I kind of dove into this over the past couple of days. And it's, it's one of those things where you're like,
00:54:58
Speaker
looking through articles and stuff like it. One thing that's interesting about it is if you go searching around on YouTube and stuff for like, like, you just want to find horror stories, you know, because ultimately, like, that's what you're looking for, right? If you want to like, I don't want to see the ad, I want to see who had this and got screwed, you know, and there's not tons of horror stories readily available, almost to the point where you're like, All right,
00:55:28
Speaker
It's to the point where you're like, this is kind of weird that YouTube is just like refusing to show me any, you know, any negative things about this. Yeah, even like fringe conspiracy theories. Yeah. So I think having dug into it a little bit, it's a little more, I don't know, I have mixed feelings about it. So basically, like the idea of
00:55:52
Speaker
like meta share type pro programs, I guess you could call it started like way back in the early 1900s. Yeah, they're really big among like Mennonite and Amish communities. And I think at the core, there's like so many things when you talk about healthcare, when you talk about, you know, like,
00:56:14
Speaker
you know, helping out people who are, you know, underprivileged or going through a hard time. Like there's so much of that kind of stuff that if it was managed on a smaller level, if it was like a community, handing funds to people who needed them, all of all of this stuff would work so much better. Oh, 100%. Right. You're doing it on this scale that's like unmanageable. And, you know,
00:56:39
Speaker
Picking through the details of this thing, I think if all of this functioned the way it was supposed to, the way that it looks like in the brochures, I wouldn't have a problem with it. I remember when I first graduated college and I went to work.
00:56:57
Speaker
We had my dad's company that I worked for, they had a couple of different options for healthcare. There's the health savings account where you just accrue money on your own and there's all sorts of rules around it, but you're basically setting aside funds that you can draw from throughout the year and stuff.
00:57:18
Speaker
There was always like a catastrophic coverage plan where it's like high deductible, basically like you just kind of sign in on the dotted line saying like, if something wild happens, I'll have coverage, but I'm anything else that goes wrong here. I'm just going to be paying for out of pocket. Yeah. Like that was a willing choice that you made and that was fine. And that's really where these fit in.
00:57:40
Speaker
Like most of these things are meant to be like catastrophic coverage. That's kind of what's in the details. And I think that's what's kind of annoying when you look at like, like I watched that video that John Oliver did a couple of times. The first time through it was like one of the first things that I looked at and I was like, Oh man, this is crazy. This makes, this makes no sense. All of this is ridiculous. And this and that and the other, you know, after like reading through some of the stuff about them, like
00:58:09
Speaker
watching it again, I was like, okay, well, you're just taking issue with the whole idea of like a catastrophic coverage plan. Like complaining about the fact that it doesn't cover like routine doctor visits and stuff like, okay, but it's never like it's not supposed to that's, that's the agreement, you know, and kind of like when we talked about
00:58:31
Speaker
you know, like Hillsong, mega churches, all of this kind of stuff. You know, there's like a tendency in media to paint like the congregants as these like, hapless victims that are just being stolen from, you know, and that makes for a great story or documentary when you're trying to be salacious. But at the end of the day, it's like, well, those are adults, and they're clearly they like what they're buying there. And it seems dumb from the outside, but
00:58:57
Speaker
They're grown adults if they want to give their money to this billionaire pastor with a private jet. I don't think they're a victim. I think that's their choice. They're just unfortunately stupid. That's how I feel about these two.
00:59:14
Speaker
You know, as we've talked about so many times, part of the problem with Christianity and Christian culture right now is that it will tell you at face value that it's always first in these people's lives, but it's always second. It's always like takes a backseat to their political ideology and their ideas about, you know, all these different things. It's just like the ad you just talked about. Why do we have a problem with Jesus washing people's feet?
00:59:42
Speaker
It's because that's secondary in those people's value system. The political ideology that it's paying homage to is a bigger problem for them than the fact that it's representing Jesus serving others. Also, why are we doing feet stuff still?
01:00:03
Speaker
That was relevant at a time 2000 years ago. Find a better way to represent that idea. Other than it's also funny. It's like that's fucking weird. It's like we didn't we didn't have shoes back then. Everybody was rocking sandals like or just or just straight up raw dog in the ground with their feet. Like it made sense to wash feet. Like it doesn't make sense to like do that now. They had bloody in grown toes. Yeah. Now it's just sexy, dude. Like, yeah.
01:00:27
Speaker
No, I think I think it goes back to where like horny and that's what made me angry. I'm like, yeah, I'm trying because you're not supposed to be horny. That's a sin. It made me feel sinful because I was horny watching. I was lusting for this commercial. It was making me slip in my faith. No, I think that what it boils down to and you kind of touched on it, but it's like people trust specifically religious leaders too much, dude. Yeah, yeah.
01:00:51
Speaker
Like, oh my God, my mom will, I think Anne Graham Lott, who's like a prosperity gospel older lady. I don't know if you know who she is, but like my mom will buy anything that woman sells. She's like, she's such a good person. She's so founded in the word. And it's like she has, she is wearing so many pearls that I think she is contributing to like the oyster population decreasing. Like it's insane. It's just a walking, talking oyster Holocaust. Yeah, dude. Like, and it's just like, you look at these people and it's, it's like,
01:01:24
Speaker
I don't even think this is that controversial of a statement. Like most people have not critically read the Bible because there's just no way that you can look at like what's going on in Christianity today. And people are like, that's totally what I read. That's amazing. Like it's like, it's basically like, I don't know. We just, the Christianity today is just a really, it's, it's very emblematic of when like Hollywood studios get a hold of like a popular book, you know? They're like, yeah, we got the general vibe, but we're going to change a lot of stuff. Yeah.
01:01:44
Speaker
I genuinely believe that most people and actually I
01:01:50
Speaker
And it's just, it's, it's crazy. And I think that boils down to this, you know, this health share program is that people probably see that like, Oh, our church or our, or like our, you know, whatever parent company, like let's use ax 22 is they're putting this, uh, this, this health share program together. Like we, that's our pastor said it's good. So it's gotta be like, and like, Oh, my, my college age son is graduating. He needs health insurance. Let's, let's sign them up. And they probably don't read anything about it. Cause they just trust that their pastor would, would give them something good.
01:02:19
Speaker
And then they go to the doctor and the doctor fucking laughs in their face and he's like, yeah, yeah, this is going to be $300. I think some of the problems are too, is there are a lot that have acted and are acting nefariously with very little oversight that qualify as legitimate alternatives to insurance. So if you're required to have insurance and you're not going to require any oversight for what you can and cannot offer as part of that
01:02:49
Speaker
plan like yeah just just let people not have insurance that if they're going to be stuck with a three hundred thousand dollar bill when someone gets sick you know so like i take liberty health share is one of the ones that you know john elver brings up but i'm on the website now we'll get into those yeah and it goes what so they were one of the big they were a big donor for c-pack
01:03:11
Speaker
They're trying to get everyone on it. Now, we know, not entirely, but we do know that a lot of like, you're more like conservative for public and people are generally older. Younger people are more on the left, maybe in the middle, but like, so it makes sense, right? And also being conservative Christian value type stuff, it makes sense to align themselves with CPAC.
01:03:37
Speaker
And there's this line or this quote from one of the speakers there because they get time to speak and he denigrates like, oh, if you want the government to be in control of your health insurance, blah, blah, blah, like a government can't do anything. The irony of the conservatives is they go, we want small government. And then they try to create a government that tells everybody how to live their lives at every fucking waking moment. Yeah, it's ridiculous. But Liberty
01:04:03
Speaker
health share, which also the name we know who they're pandering to. Yeah. Ironically, Liberty Assist is for people 65 and older already enrolled in Medicare parts A and B. So like. So let's let's just put a pin in that for. OK. Because liberty is a big part of the.
01:04:22
Speaker
Like, they're the Thanos of this universe. They're like, they're the linchpin. They're what's going to blow the top off this whole thing. So if we want to shift, if we want to get to that later, let's go back to one that is the least problematic, which I think is Metashare. I think Metashare is truly the least problematic one. They all sound the same. I have no idea which one's which.
01:04:43
Speaker
You can have, you know, a problem with their ideas. But one of the things that like they sell you on is so let me go, for example, pull up my notes here, Dave, like Dave Ramsey's website that is like he partners with one. Right. So nice. So you know, it's legit Christian health care ministries.
01:05:09
Speaker
Um, yo, that's crazy. My notes are gone. I actually, I started, I started one this afternoon. It's I, it's called Hosanna on the healthiest and uh, it's, it's really great. It's $50 a month. Y'all chip in hot.
01:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's not gone. I was looking in the wrong spot. I forgot that I did it in Google Docs. So Dave Ramsey, he partners with CHM Christian Healthcare Ministries, also another one that seems pretty par for the course, but I think he
01:05:42
Speaker
despite my issues with Dave Ramsey, authentically spells out what he believes is the right and good thing about these and also the thing that I have a problem with. Casey, what you said, I think I generally would agree with. This idea as a concept, especially knowing how insurance companies function and how crooked they are and how profitable they are, is aggravating. And the idea of having a nonprofit
01:06:08
Speaker
way to share finances in a way where you just can pretty much expect to get coverage for these big things I love which is funny because it's like it's kind of it's kind of like communism just a little bit a little bit but you can opt into it communism
01:06:27
Speaker
So Dave Ramsey in his website breaking it down, he says, you know, a lot of people don't like the idea of paying for medical services that conflict with their religious beliefs. So now you can tell where this is going. Basically abortions, morning after pill, things like that are not covered by these, which you would expect if they're if they're of that mindset, right? You would expect that they're not going to cover things like that.
01:06:51
Speaker
Again, that's why they're not health insurance. But it is funny that their biggest thing is what your quote unquote money goes into to cover. I guess people could say the same thing about taxes. You could say the same thing about a lot of things. I think making it out to be about you're paying into something that covers things that you're not
01:07:17
Speaker
That you don't agree with isn't exactly the same as funding them directly, but yes falling on children for instance Yeah, yes. Yeah, I know I want to sign up for that one If those kids buy into the health insurance then the bombs that they could probably get some help from the Injuries from the bombs should if they survive there's a there's a clause There's a clause in the documents that you have to you have to survive the bombing to receive insurance, but if you do Give you a solid seven percent off
01:07:47
Speaker
Life's full of risks. Yeah. I agree, man. No, it's, uh, it is funny cause it's like, I mean, it's just what you guys said, like on a, on a, on a root level, like if it was like, if it was just like one church where they're like, Hey, the offering this Sunday, we're going to put into an HSA that we're going to use to like, I mean, it's essentially go fund me. You know, like it's like, what if a church did a go fund me? And that would like actually make sense. Like, like you consider like.
01:08:12
Speaker
I mean, do we have a church here in Rock? We have multiple, but there's one church here called The Summit and it's massive. I mean, I think they have like six or seven campuses, you know, same thing. The fucking pastors got jets, all that shit. And it's like if he got up there and he was like, hey guys, Stacy over here has got breast cancer. And what if we all chipped in five bucks? They would cover, she'd be covered in a second because they have so many members. But it's not as righteous as that. It's much more sinister.
01:08:40
Speaker
power corrupts. Right. Yeah. It started out that way. Eventually getting to Liberty Health Share, they have a long sorted history that started before this current company.
01:08:59
Speaker
at the forefront of a major scam that started in the 90s and blew up in the mid 2000s. The same people that then went on to start Liberty Health Share. But the guy that originally started the whole thing back in like the 1960s, he was a pastor in Ohio that had like a men's ministry for people who were, you know, basically like suffering from substance abuse, mostly alcohol.
01:09:29
Speaker
He got in a big accident with all of his family and stuff in the car and like his wife and three of his kids, I think were killed. Jesus. And then several of the other kids that were in the car and himself like had just massive debilitating injuries.
01:09:45
Speaker
Um, and people all pitched in to help them with their, their medical bills. Yeah. They had like a newsletter. They sent out the story and asked for
Challenges of Healthcare Ministries
01:09:54
Speaker
help. People all pitched in that kind of gave him the idea of like, wow, could I do this on a bigger scale and help people out? And he did. And he did for a bit, but then in the somewhere in the like eighties or nineties, it always goes south, right? Yeah. It always starts out virtuous. There's this.
01:10:13
Speaker
douchebag named beard his last names beers and he was in like the marketing department and they really started focusing on sales like you know selling membership packages and stuff to people and they brought in like 10,000 members or something like that I mean they were really man making it yeah I mean this thing was so rudimentary at first like it was
01:10:35
Speaker
people sending, directly sending money to people in need via this newsletter that they sent out. Which is like rad. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And then like over time, you know, then it started like they opened a bank account and all the money then got routed through them, which is like the start of the problems. And then all of a sudden like, there's not a lot of paper trails on like all this money that's coming in and stuff like that. But, um,
01:11:05
Speaker
Let me just before we get to like the scandal story here. Let me just give you like some example of Christian health care ministries, which is the one that Dave Ramsey endorses because I think this is what's annoying about like watching John Oliver's video on this and the way he represents it so
01:11:22
Speaker
This is like not fine print. This is right on the I mean the hero image links into the website Yeah, this is spelling out like what this is actually about right? So it's saying this is the limits page. It says number one is
01:11:37
Speaker
Only incidents over a thousand dollars before discounts will have any sharing or reimbursement. Doctor visits, medical care and treatments where the total for all treatments add up to less than a thousand dollars before discount will have to be paid from the money you save by participating in Christian health care ministries, which is a great turn of phrase. Yeah, that's good. We're not paying for it, but you can pay for it with all the money you're saying. But basically like
01:12:04
Speaker
Most of these that I looked at, and it looks like this one might even be like a cumulative plan, but most of these are not even cumulative. Like you have a $2,000 deductible, and once your healthcare costs go over 2,000 for the year, then boom, that your insurance coverage kicks in. Most of these are like, hey, if you have an incident that's below $1,000 out of pocket, each individual incident, like those don't qualify for this. It's a catastrophic plan.
01:12:29
Speaker
I don't really think that's a problematic thing. It's not problematic until you do have a catastrophe because the way that these also work is they don't cover your bills as a whole. You have to pay your bills and then submit for reimbursement. So if you have a catastrophic event, you have to set up essentially a payment plan with the hospital and you're kind of held hostage at this point.
01:12:56
Speaker
The organization and so this is that's that's another thing that i think has like varied over time with all these different organizations most of these seem like. They have like a real ponzi scheme sort of arc where it's like they start out like.
01:13:11
Speaker
kind of small, kind of lean, they're pulling in money and they're paying out claims like they're kind of building a brand for themselves for several years. And then all of a sudden, we start tightening the belt and not really covering a lot of things. And that seems to be the case with a lot of these where like they go to that system where instead of paying hospitals and stuff directly, they want the the member to to take responsibility for the cost of the medical procedure.
01:13:41
Speaker
They want you to negotiate your bill down, which usually I think means not making your payment for a long period of time. It means telling the hospital you're going to kill yourself if they don't lower your bill. Right. You're basically forcing them to send it to collections so that you can negotiate a lower price. And then once you've gotten it down to what they're happy with,
01:14:02
Speaker
then they will reimburse you for what you pay in, which is an insane way of doing this. I mean, you're basically saying like, hey, look, you have coverage if you have a catastrophic event, but you have to ruin your credit in the process of getting your MRI covered. And then run the risk of them denying your claim because that's also entirely up to them under all circumstances indefinitely. And I think that's the other language that gets goofy is they go like,
01:14:30
Speaker
If it, you know, I think that's one of the other ones that John Oliver played was just like, yeah, 100% of the bills that fall within the parameters of the kinds of things we'd pay for get covered. What is the message? What is the message of like current Christianity? Whereas bring your broken self credit score included to the altar and Jesus will save you. So that's really just what they're trying to do. They're trying to break you down so the health, the health share can bring you up, you know?
01:14:56
Speaker
You know, I call managing your credit score, building up treasures on earth. And I'm building up treasures in heaven. Okay. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I'm doing.
01:15:05
Speaker
Because all these are Christian they go like you know here's I'm on the meta share page But it's just like some requirements that you have to do is like live by biblical principles Who's trackers believers yet? Is it like it's like an elf on the shelf type deal where they got a little guy like a pastor on the Pastor on the
01:15:28
Speaker
I'm trying to think. Dang. Ah, the rhymes. Elf on the shelf is too good, man. But pastors after write yearly and some of them pastors have to write a letter yearly vouching that you follow biblical principles, which means no use of tobacco. Dude, the funniest one, though. Oh, my God. One was so
01:15:51
Speaker
I got to find this exact quote. It's, um, it's about, uh, I'd finally, we'll say it again because we love, uh, Nope. Nope. One of them was just like, basically you can't use tobacco products. Um, and it goes in parentheses, the occasional celebratory cigar is okay. After a birth or something of those, but not to lie, not Cuban, you're just like, you could,
01:16:19
Speaker
you can have an occasional cigar or pipe, but you can't engage in regular tobacco use. It's so silly that they have to, like, say it. And then, of course, and this makes something that makes sense that I think, you know, to your point, Casey, that sometimes John Oliver goes a little too hard on is like they don't cover any preexisting conditions. It's like it's because it's not insurance like
01:16:48
Speaker
You can't operate an idea like this on that scale and cover pre-existing conditions. It's for people who are generally healthier that don't need it. I think the problem I have is their language is they just cloak it in this idea of biblical principles and living a godly lifestyle and your body's a temple.
01:17:10
Speaker
And you do run the risk of them deeming your ailments as a potential pre-existing condition if it turns out that there's something serious going on that would be ongoing. That actually now qualifies as a pre-existing condition. And that's another thing that gets tough about it. Because if you walk into it thinking you're healthy and then you find out that you have something serious,
01:17:37
Speaker
It's no longer going to work for you. Is sin a pre-existing condition? Sin is everybody's pre-existing condition. It's getting real, real methodical here. They're like, I don't know, is it predestination? What is it? Born into a fallen world is actually considered a pre-existing condition.
01:18:00
Speaker
Yeah, like this one. So CHM says right on it says ongoing medical costs are not covered and it lists insulin dialysis blood pressure medications, etc All the good stuff. This is like a it's a It's like a high deductible Catastrophic plan for people who are not planning on anything going wrong. Yeah, and it's you were gambling by doing this and
01:18:26
Speaker
And some of the stories that I read, people had problems afterwards. Yeah, don't cast lots, right? Don't cast lots. Some of the stories that I read of this, though, there was a guy that, he's financially ruined, but he was a mid-50s guy.
01:18:46
Speaker
that was like, I don't like the idea of Obamacare. That's, that's dude, that is the cheaper. And I don't like the healthcare mandate is such that is the primary motivation for almost everybody that I've read about getting this plan. Pretty much. Yeah, absolutely. I can sympathize with the cheaper thing. The other part, though, if you gamble on this, because, you know, screw Obama, like, I just don't
01:19:13
Speaker
I'm sorry that you're ruined, but you were a 50 some year old guy. Yeah. You're an adult with a history of health, like heart complications in your family. Then you have a heart attack. Like, what do you, what do you want everybody else to do? You know, like this is a risk you took.
01:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's what's frustrating is I think because people are so financially strapped and things are so difficult and tight. It is predatory in a sense where they go. Yeah, you can spell out all of like what you won't cover when you find out that there's an actual problem. But it even then it's like even even as a catastral like I just
01:19:52
Speaker
the lack of like, even as a catastrophic insurance, quote unquote, you go like, well, we're still going to have to debate what's, what's covered, you know, like, and there's so many clauses in here too. It's like, so even with like Medicare, it's like applicants needs to have abstained from the use of tobacco or illegal drugs for at least 12 months prior to application or to be eligible applicants attest that they have not abused legal drugs such as prescription.
01:20:18
Speaker
Medications over the counter members must only engage in sexual relations within biblical Christian marriage like you have all these weird parameters that they're like stating where they can It really what the the number of in the amount of parameters they place on on Potentially awful coverage anyway, it gives them so many fucking outs to go tell you to pound sand and that's what I think It's pretty accurate to regular insurance
01:20:47
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's the other side of this thing is that we're acting like there's great insurance on the other side of the... Yeah. It's like this is just the exact same coverage, but now you've got Jesus involved. So, shift him back to liberty.
01:21:09
Speaker
So these guys, they run this take it basically take this like Christian newsletter, like, you know, send money by mail program, and they start turning it into this giant, like monstrosity of a company, millions and millions of dollars in in money that they brought in. And
01:21:35
Speaker
It's like what seems to be the trend that you see with these. I mean, first of all, there's just like we were saying, there's just no oversight on these because they're not technically an insurance company. There's just very little that the government can do to regulate these. They're just not held to the standards that an insurance company would be, you know.
01:22:00
Speaker
I mean, which are already low as we've established, right? So what happens is, is these guys start bringing in money, you know, they, they, they accumulate like this big pot of dollars for one.
01:22:15
Speaker
Part of how they dodge the responsibility of being an insurance company is because they say that these are like member funds that have some sort of group direction over how they're allocated and spent. These are technically nonprofit organizations, so it's not super easy to just
01:22:35
Speaker
I shouldn't say that. Like you can't just necessarily like take a draw and pull money from the company account. So what these people do is they create other businesses and they start outsourcing services to their for-profit businesses that they own. So like the guys that did, you know, that what is now Liberty Health Chair, their company that they had before that, you know, the first things that they started outsourcing was one,
01:23:05
Speaker
Bill negotiations so they created out you know a for-profit company that they own and they start out they start paying that company to negotiate
01:23:17
Speaker
individual hospital bills for consumers on behalf of the main company. And the amount of money that they pay them is absurd. I mean, it's clearly just like it's a it's a big hole in the bottom of the the barrel that money just pours out of and into the ether. It's gone from there like it's it's essentially washed at that point. You know, they also outsourced things like, you know, like the fund management.
01:23:46
Speaker
They start doing things like the family that started Liberty Health Share and the company beforehand. They have this big circle jerk of businesses called Lazy L Ranch.
01:24:01
Speaker
They had like a ranch where they produce cattle, where they had a butcher shop where they butchered the cattle. They had restaurants where they sold the meat that they had taken from the butcher shop. They had a game ranch. They had all this different stuff, all of which is just charging these other businesses exorbitant amounts of money and washing these funds that they've siphoned out of the health share company.
01:24:28
Speaker
And it all is fine. And while they've got, you know, their family is basically all the top brass in the health share is their family members and lackeys and cronies. Every time they bring in somebody from outside that starts asking questions, they just kick them out the door. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't question God.
01:24:46
Speaker
A lot like church. Modeled a lot like church. I mean, it makes sense, dude, it's like, it's the way the church is structured in America just welcomes grifters, dude, because you're like, hold on, I don't have to pay tax. And if anyone questions me, I can just call you a liberal cuck and most people will agree with me.
01:25:03
Speaker
Any sort of scrutiny is like big government trying to like stifle the church or yeah or witches in the Congregation, it's the devil. Yeah You can blame anything anything that's not in your like in your sight or in your purview Yeah, yeah, whatever whatever boogeyman you want. Yeah
01:25:29
Speaker
They start hiring lobbyists to lobby on their behalf in different states. So there's actually, there's like a fair number of states. There's like 30 states now that have exceptions for these guys that have just created these big gray areas that they exist in.
01:25:51
Speaker
Well, and, and like Liberty is obviously like that. Like I said, that's the big, that's the big dog in this space. There was another one I've, there was a Forbes article about this, uh, company called medical cost sharing. Cause these two guys, Craig Reynolds and James McGinnis based out of Missouri, um, similar sort of thing on a much smaller scale. But these guys, uh, over the course of a few years that they were in operation, they pulled in $7.5 million in like members donations.
01:26:21
Speaker
I chose the wrong job. Yeah, dude. I know, dude. All of this makes you think like, God, if only I was smart enough to think up a scam. That's why Casey, Casey, this is why you keep going in like that. Well, listen, they're adults making their own decisions. You're just like priming yourself to get involved in this shit. I can hear you in 30 years. Like just look, they were all adults. They made their own decisions. I want to tell you, I don't believe I should be going to prison right now. I'm not a Christian. I am unmoored from any sort of like
01:26:51
Speaker
Set in stone moral code and I will do whatever you want. I will take advantage of you So Over this time period they took in seven and a half million dollars, which is pennies compared to Liberty We'll talk about that in a second of that seven point five million how much is
01:27:13
Speaker
Do you think that they paid in medical bills? I'm going to go 340,000. This is Price is Right rules. Price is Right rules, Spencer. What are you going to say? Oh, we're doing Price is Right. I'm going to say $1, Bob. Ah. Yeah. You set me up for it. Yeah, I did. I fucked myself. I Christianed a shit myself.
01:27:33
Speaker
$250,000. Oh, I think you wins. You win. Wait. You win a free colonoscopy. Oh, hell yeah. Well, that's unfortunately, unfortunately not covered, though. No, that's only because the doctor donated it. It's not because your cost is shared. And he has some you're not allowed to look and he's got some weird ways of going about it, but it's still 100 percent. Yeah, it's actually. Yeah, you just stick your butt through the confession window. That's what happening.
01:28:02
Speaker
Dude, these guys, as the news started to tighten around them, so they siphoned out $4 million of the seven and a half million that they brought in. Unreal. As the news started to tighten, like, it said 2021, they paid zero dollars. Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. That shit's so fucked. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. Yeah, that's wild. This is so similar. Like, did you guys ever watch that documentary on, I think it was Hulu, about the call centers?
01:28:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah, because a lot because I worked for one of them. Oh shit, really? Yeah, I was a CDG employee, man. That's amazing, dude. This is just that, dude, like without the call. So it's like it's remarkably similar, actually. Yeah. Yeah. The little fat guy in the hat.
01:28:47
Speaker
Oh, dude, what was that guy's name? He was amazing. Like Mark Pacakis or something. Uh, uh, Jay Pespas. Uh, Jay Pespas. Was it Mark? Mark? No. Pat Jay Pespas. Pat Jay. Hey, it's Patrick Jay Pespas here. How you doing? Dude, the legend. Amazing character, man. That is a, uh, that is a Northeastern man. That's what I figured. I was so bummed. I had reached out to, um, the guy who made it.
01:29:16
Speaker
his publicist, they reach out to him on Instagram and he messaged me back with like, sounds great, love to do it.
01:29:23
Speaker
The podcast he sent me his publicist email. I reached out I heard back a couple days later that They they just closed off all interviews up until like award seasons or whatever That's whack and they're just like yeah, we're not doing the press tour every all press is over for now So maybe if they if it gets nominated you can reach back out. I Fucking just missed my window. I was so pissed because
01:29:48
Speaker
Dang, that would've been great to have him on. As a former employee, I wanted to talk to him so fucking bad. Yeah, dude. That's wild that you worked there. That is so cool. Oh, man. Okay. So,
Regulatory Gaps and Scams in Healthcare Sharing
01:30:03
Speaker
shifting to Liberty. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. I've been thinking that the entire time. You can't not. Yeah.
01:30:11
Speaker
So here's here's an example. So these guys, they're their company was called Benevolent Health Systems. So that was like absolutely amazing. That was the company that was doing like the bill negotiation on behalf of. Oh, man, it was called like the Brotherhood was what their their original organization was called. It was kind of like a block name like we have a rigid bill negotiation system is just
01:30:38
Speaker
A dude with envelopes named Bill Negotiation doing absolutely nothing.
01:30:43
Speaker
So, okay, so here's, this is, I'll read this real quick so it gives, but it says, in the early days of the Brotherhood, the ministry handled little of the money because members sent payments to one another through the mail. But this changed in 1995 when the Brotherhood began directing many members to send their monthly fees to a bank account that Beers and Hawthorne had set up under the name of Beers' wife, Theodora, which is a great name.
01:31:09
Speaker
That was a good name, yeah. The non-profit wasn't just pooling money. Was it the name of one of the assistants in Hamilton? Was it Theodora?
01:31:16
Speaker
I never saw it. Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy. That's what it was. No Theodore. Okay, moving on. Yeah. Beers and Hawthorne now had control of members' fees. The day after opening the account, Beers and the cousins started a business called Benevolent Health Systems, which the Brotherhood soon hired to negotiate with hospitals and doctors to lower bill amounts. In return, Beers claimed his business would pocket 15 cents of every dollar saved.
01:31:42
Speaker
Now here's where it's fun. That's a fun way to phrase it too, if every dollar saved. Oh yeah. So basically if they negotiate your bill down from a hundred grand to 25 grand, they get 15 cents on the dollar for that $75,000 that they negotiated, right?
01:32:01
Speaker
But it says, but Ohio Financial Crimes investigators later found no correlation between Benevolent Health Systems revenues and the services it provided to the Brotherhood. In late 1997, which is just, what, two years later? Beers began automatically transferring $55,000 a week from the Brotherhood to Benevolent Health Systems.
01:32:22
Speaker
In three years, beers is from collected at least $23 million from the charity. And this is, this is in the 90s. So this is before Obamacare and everything blows sky high. And these guys already doing crazy.
01:32:38
Speaker
Right. They start like moving all this property and stuff around like they're just buying crap. They bought an airline tour bus like amazing land. And it's just like they they just have like this. It's like a shell game of just moving property and dollars around each other and different family members and different people's names. And so like this basically like they they
01:33:06
Speaker
He did a big investigation on these guys. Dossier reveals that state forensic accountants recommended 65 felony counts of fraud and theft against Beers, offenses that carried the threat of years-long prison sentences. The Brotherhood organization is a, quote, criminal enterprise, state investigators wrote, and top executives were, quote, engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity. But, um,
01:33:31
Speaker
They had to hand it over to the attorney general's office, some sort of financial crimes, whatever rules did this and that. It was like an election year, several different people like lost their positions and then new people came in and basically like this just gets dropped. There was like fines and stuff levy. Unreal. The crazy part was that like, um,
01:33:57
Speaker
The guy ended up like he's just like this amazing con artist that's just like rags to riches to rags again. So after all of this, after pulling all this money out, like he ends up just like a homeless grifter. That's like swindling contractors out of like construction jobs that he got them to pay him for up front. And there's like, this guy is just conning people nonstop.
01:34:26
Speaker
So all of that happens, right? And then one of the other guys, Hawthorne, he died in 2012 without ever paying anything. These guys, they keep getting pinned with fees and stuff and like they've paid so few of them. Like they've paid almost nothing. Just like the health insurance. Excuse me, not insurance.
01:34:51
Speaker
Basically, after all of that, this Christian Brotherhood newsletter thing falls apart. A group of these healthcare sharing ministries, other organizations, they formed like a trade organization. It says, by 2008, the Alliance of Healthcare Sharing Ministries had convinced five additional states to pass laws shielding ministries from regulation.
01:35:11
Speaker
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act passes, right? You get the individual mandate where everybody has to carry some sort of health insurance. They hire lobbyists and, you know, people like, what's it, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Oh, yeah. Great guy.
01:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, he's real cool. So he helped them get like, they got put onto the the, you know, mandate exception list. So if you if you do a health share ministry plan, then you're out of the woods on that. It says the exemption 200 words in a 900 page bill didn't just save the industry, it propelled it.
01:35:51
Speaker
Healthcare sharing ministries now offered a legal and financially attractive alternative for consumers. They drew thousands of members who were opposed to President Obama's hallmark legislation, but they also appealed to many more who wanted a better deal than what they could find on the new insurance marketplace.
01:36:06
Speaker
Before Obamacare, maybe 40,000 people belonged to healthcare sharing ministries. Four years later, the Alliance boasted that the number of people enrolled in ministries had jumped to a million. Wow. Geez. That's in 40,000.
01:36:22
Speaker
It's so funny when you think of like, uh, the intent of requiring an insurance plan because to, we all know that uninsured people would, or could, um, uh, could, uh,
01:36:38
Speaker
pick up even hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt and just never pay it because they can't afford it, which some people have a problem with, I would say is a great argument for finding a way to actually ensure everybody. Yeah, agreed. Either way, you go, that's the problem, right?
01:37:01
Speaker
that's a burden on the on the system and instead of addressing the burden with a real way of handling it they just go like oh well then the new rule everybody's required to have insurance and you're like yeah but the problem is we don't because we can't afford it so then
01:37:22
Speaker
It's just like, it's so funny when you try to find a solution to the problem that makes the problem worse. Oh yeah, and you let the biggest offenders in the industry write the legislation. Yeah, through lobbyists who just go, we have a great idea. And you just, you go, well, now we need to make it more options available to people. So I think that's the other problem with this, like, this
01:37:44
Speaker
this avenue as you go. Yeah. So I'll point out Christian Manasher again. They've been around since and were approved as a provider before Obamacare, right? Like Massachusetts, it worked before when you were required to have insurance. Like they, they were just one of the originals and whatever your problems and hangups with them are, that's fine. Have them. Don't use them.
01:38:09
Speaker
but they were operating with more transparency and integrity as a company that genuinely wanted to do what they set out to do.
01:38:25
Speaker
provide health coverage for people who shared their values, who were moderately healthy, uh, who didn't have preexisting conditions to, to create something that was sustainable. I, whatever flaws along the way there are.
01:38:41
Speaker
along the way are there, they're there. But I think what's annoying is it's mostly a nefarious, it feels mostly like a nefarious concept when you go, when you, when in 2011, all of a sudden you go from 40,000 to a million. You go, people are looking to profit off of
01:39:03
Speaker
anything so to act like their quote unquote ministries is just bullshit like and we know that we've been around we've been around the block how missions trips work we know how churches work it's all ministry but like it's hard to even call it a ministry like i think that's what's so frustrating too about calling these ministries where you're like
01:39:24
Speaker
My experience in Christianity is that ministry is you take your good news and give it to others. Or you take your money and give it to people who need it. Or you do with your time to help those in need. And this entire system is built around making sure you don't get yours if you had sex outside of marriage. Or tobacco.
01:39:47
Speaker
Yeah, or you filled out the application nine months after your last cigarette instead of 12, and you go, that's not a ministry. That's not what a ministry is for all intents and purposes within the parameters of what we understand them to be as human condition. Yeah, there's a lot of conditions to the, quote unquote, unconditional love of Christ.
01:40:12
Speaker
Like it would be for those people if it was a ministry. Exactly. Just stop calling it a ministry. That's what's so fucking annoying is like you just call it that shit. Dude, I don't think anybody in this thing...
01:40:25
Speaker
I mean, that's just window dressing like there's, it plays no role. And like, you know, it's like, I don't even mean that in the sense of like, well, these guys aren't real Christian. Like I don't think they care anything about any of this. Like I don't think that's a factor in this. It's just a way to like check a box on a forum to keep you out from under scrutiny. You know,
01:40:49
Speaker
And it's a marketing point. But yeah, it's, I don't know. So these guys do the same thing with this Liberty company. So it started in 14, right? It was like 2015 before they started doing the same thing, where they were outsourcing services to companies that they owned. So it says, Liberty outsourced bill negotiations to a company called Medical Cost Solutions, which was owned by Liberty CEO, Bellis, before he sold it to Favers' father.
01:41:19
Speaker
So at this point, like beers, he's like behind the scenes on all of this stuff, but his name's not on anything. So he learned that from the last go round shadow master between 2015 and 2021. The ministry paid at least $35 million to medical cost solutions, but the true amount is likely higher Liberty masked payments that were going to the company by reporting that those millions of dollars were spent on members medical costs.
01:41:47
Speaker
ProPublica found by comparing internal accounting records with IRS filings from 2017 to 2019. That's what's crazy about Liberty 2 is that they're doing this on such a massive scale and they're just doing stuff like that. They're handing money to this company that he owns and claiming it's going towards customers' medical expenses. Isn't it something as high as 80% too? Something insane?
01:42:17
Speaker
There was a number in here somewhere where they had to like, they, they had to publish the amount that was spent on claims and it was like 56 cents per dollar, which for insurance company, like the minimum standard that's legally allowed is 80 cents per dollar. Oh wow. So it's pretty dramatically low. And those are for profit. That's, that's what's crazy. Yeah. Like they're not, there's, they're not like hiding behind a nonprofit.
01:42:46
Speaker
They're like, we're an insurance company, a for-profit business, and it can't be below $0.86. One of the most exploitative industries in the world too, and it's $0.80 a buck. Yeah, it's wild. Liberty also contracted with a firm called Cost Sharing Solutions to bring in new members. These guys were doing marketing and stuff like that for them.
01:43:08
Speaker
Company was owned by Brandon Fabris and Danny and Ronnie Beers. So that was two of the sons. Between 2015 and 21, Liberty paid $105 million for its marketing services.
01:43:21
Speaker
a billion dollars for marketing. That is wild. Dude, having been in the ad industry, the prices that agencies charge to companies is insane, dude. Marketing's so goofy too, because you don't know if it's doing anything until like five years later, you know? Yeah. And if it doesn't work, you're like, oh, sorry, market trends changed. Yeah. That's exactly it.
01:43:50
Speaker
It's like it's so much money and these two companies that they started like they don't have any other clients Liberty is their only client. Yeah Second go-around was like names off everything. He's like a faceless dude. He's like the fucking dr. Claw of Christian healthcare and
01:44:13
Speaker
It is so funny because the ProPublica guy, like that's where this article is at. It's worth a read. If this interests anybody at all, like this ProPublica article is definitely worth a read and I'll link to it in the notes. But he talks about like he reached out. They keep reaching out to these people for comment and obviously like not many of them want to write. But he got a meeting with like the CEO or somebody like that to do an interview.
01:44:40
Speaker
Uh, Mr. Beers had declined to meet with them. And they said that like midway through the meeting, like he pulls up in his truck, blocks the entrance to the, to the building, like stomps in and just like pushes the door in and sits down with like a big grin on his face. Like, Oh, what are you going to do now? I'm here.
01:45:03
Speaker
And then just basically was like, yeah, I'm not going to answer that. Ah, nothing. Nobody. It's fine. A bunch of no's. Sounds about right. Yeah. So I don't know. There's so much here that you could go into. They paid $200,000 a year to be a top sponsor at CPAC between 2017 and 21. So they paid $1.2 million.
01:45:29
Speaker
just a CPAC to be a sponsor. And because they're trying to do a rebranding now, right? Because of all this shit. Yeah, they're trying to dig them. It's new new leadership now. And they're trying to dig themselves out of this hole. But they have like a huge backlog of unpaid claims. And like most of these people are screwed. Oh, 100 percent. Yeah, it's so funny. It's funny. You remember when Trump came out and he hugged the American flag like a jerk off? Yeah.
01:45:58
Speaker
I totally forgot about that. He's just like, I don't know if you can see it, but there's like a Liberty health share logo. Oh, that's right. That's so good. I totally forgot about that. Yeah. So like there's just dude, there's so much here. It is such a wild scam. It says, Oh, just the one more stat here. It says between 2015 and 21 Liberty collected at least $1.9 billion in revenue.
01:46:27
Speaker
That's unbelievable. That's so much money, dude. But again, at CPAC, what's just so funny is they they really try to do this whole like, get your government out of your health care. What you want to trust government or you want to trust Christians, blah, blah, blah. And then it's just like, oh, wait, but you can only get it if you're already enrolled in Medicare. It's like it's so silly. They're just it's all cartoon characters.
01:46:54
Speaker
do the another funny thing that they mentioned in here was that they had a like just one of those other stupid like you're managing this much money and your scams are this bad like yeah they they had so they they had a program like an internal creative program
01:47:13
Speaker
that gave customers the, like a dashboard that they could log into and see their account and, you know, supposedly what they had accrued and expenses and stuff. But like there was no actual account.
01:47:26
Speaker
It was just like it was just nothing. It was a video game, basically. Right. That sounds about right. Yeah, it's incredible. So all of this crashes and burns and like these guys are all in trouble. There's a huge backlog of claims. People get are getting screwed left and right out of their expenses that they're supposed to have, you know, paid for the beers family and all of their lackeys kind of get pushed out of the organization, you know, just due to public scrutiny and stuff.
01:47:56
Speaker
Like I said, there's a huge backlog of claims and everything. So their next venture, which they've already started on, I forget where it's at. It's either in Missouri or Arkansas, I think, but they've started, they bought a bank. Dude, they're like the Mark Driscoll of Christian Health Share. Grift after grift, man. Just gets ousted and just lays low for five seconds and then starts a new church saying the same old bullshit. Yeah.
01:48:25
Speaker
So they paid $7.3 million to buy farmer's state bank, a small chain that served rural communities at the foot of the Missouri Ozarks. The bank is the linchpin of the family's next business venture. And they're basically just going to run this same scam again, only this time they're a bank that has like individual accounts built for each member that signs up. And it's going to be like a health savings account sort of thing.
01:48:51
Speaker
that they collect money on. It's just a regular savings account. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to collect money. That's for sure. Yeah. The whole thing is so nuts, dude. It is funny though, like trying to think of a scenario, like I would love to just call them and like ask some absurd questions about pre-existing conditions or morality problems or whatever. Yeah.
01:49:17
Speaker
Like now, I'm a man. Can I get a colonoscopy or is that considered homosexual and not of the church? Is that gay shit? Is that gay shit? Yeah. And they're like, I don't know. We got to consult the Lord about this one. We'll get back to you in six months. Yeah. If I suffer from same sex attraction and I smile or giggle during the colonoscopy, like is it still covered? Like, no, you have to not enjoy it.
01:49:43
Speaker
you are allowed a cigar afterwards though. We're gonna put like a penis cage around you with a button in the end of it and if you get hard it pushes the button and boom your claim's denied. They have different sized cameras and they just keep going up in size until you don't like it anymore. It's no longer gay.
01:50:04
Speaker
Yeah, dude, like there's a button. There's like a big light bulb and a buzzer on the end of it. If your penis gets hard enough to push the button, an alarm goes off in a crowd. It's like the operation game. Yeah.
01:50:19
Speaker
But the alarm goes off, a curtain drops and there's a studio audience there that points at you and goes, yay, yay, yay. Oh, my God, dude, it's such a funny. You got to pay. What an incredible system. It's truly obviously truly of the Lord. I love that just masking things and cloaking it in Christian language is just enough to keep making money. I also love how these people like
01:50:49
Speaker
It's wild how many people can like grift like this, get caught up in lawsuits, wriggle out of it, and then start the same fucking thing two, three times later. And people are like totally fine. You're not allowed to start this anymore. Like you can't, you're not allowed to do business anymore. Yeah. That's what happened with the campus ministry I was a part of in college. Like the dudes that ran it, like the core leadership like got pegged in like the 80s or 90s for like stealing money from kids. Like,
01:51:18
Speaker
Cause they were like, they're like emotionally manipulating college students and like the governing body of campus ministry is just like, you guys, you can't do this. And they were like, they're like totally fine. And they disappeared for like 10 years and they came back and they're like, Hey, we're going to do the same thing, but just call it something different. And they're like, we believe in forgiveness. Welcome back. Yes. Yeah. That's funny to think that like the. Something is some organization like the Southern Baptist convention.
01:51:43
Speaker
Like if you get caught embezzling, it's less likely that they will move you to a different town and let you start over again if you get caught stealing money from them than if you got caught molesting somebody. Yeah, 100%. There's forgiveness and retribution for people who do that. But if you steal money from the ministry, you get the scarlet letter. Yeah, of course. You cut your hand off like they did back in Assyria or whatever.
01:52:10
Speaker
They send you out. It's like, was it Abraham when him and his brother just like, Oh, which land do you want? You go this way. I'll go that way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a classic, classic chapter in Genesis. You know, the one we barely remember. Many scams had father Abraham. Well, this was good. This was fun. Yeah.
01:52:34
Speaker
This is great. Now I'm actually going to sign up for Metaverse or Meta whatever the Meta one is. I'm going to sign up for that one. Liberty is clearly messed up, but I think Meta is a good one. Amazon Prime Health Insurance is a thing now. That's starting. Yeah, my buddy, I can't remember if you guys have had him on here, but McBride.
01:52:53
Speaker
Yeah, yes, we just talked to talk to him this week. We're going to have him. Yes, again, it's going to be the year of recurring guests, I guess, because you meet a few cool people and you're like, how do we get it? We got to get them back on. That takes up like a couple of months out of the year. There you go. Hey, I'm glad that I'm I'm glad that I'm part of it. But yeah, I'm pretty sure McBride's on the on the Amazon insurance.
01:53:15
Speaker
Oh, hell yeah. We got to grill him for that support on the man. From what I've heard, from what I've heard, it's not good. Oh, I'm pretty sure it over covers telehealth. Yeah. But now I would. That's like the main area of concern now. I want to know.
01:53:35
Speaker
was looking at it during just Yesterday, I was just scrolling through like trying to get an idea but it was Look it was Less straightforward on the prime app than it is then the Christian health share shit is on their own website So it's I don't know maybe Amazon's gonna Fall into the same same trappings but
01:54:01
Speaker
Jeff Bezos won't pay any money for that at all. No, he won't. He'll wiggle his slimy tits out of that one. Okay, so here's a quick question, right? Because we all hate corporations, but we also all support them constantly. We all hate corporations, like in word, but never in action like we all support them. Very much so, yeah. So during COVID, because I work in the automotive industry, right?
01:54:29
Speaker
And there was a big shortage of cars and those like all these dealer lots were empty. There was so few vehicles because they couldn't get them over to here from, you know, Japan and other places. And so there was a lot of dealers that like, especially on the like car values went up a lot, but then like on hard to get vehicles.
01:54:55
Speaker
like the Ford Bronco, it had just come out, everybody wanted one. And there was a lot of dealers that were marking them up pretty high, right? Or if there was an agreement in place where they could only market up a certain amount as, you know, part of the manufacturer, another dealer would buy it from them, market up and then sell it, right? And there was like a bunch of people that were really angry about it, which I get, right? But there was a bunch of people that are like,
01:55:22
Speaker
Dude, these dealerships are just like scammers and they're stealing money from people. Like these markups are insane and like they need to just, Ford needs to just shut these dealers down and like sell direct to consumers and this and that and the others. And I, I don't, I'm, to me like that to me sounds like a bad idea. It would put a ton of people out of work for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I, I feel like,
01:55:51
Speaker
negotiating with the local guy who owns a car dealership in your town makes that, to me, I'd rather do that than have to negotiate with some giant multinational corporation. The AI chat on ford.com.
01:56:11
Speaker
Like I get the the anger over like the markups and stuff, but it was also like vehicles that weren't like like not people aren't buying a Bronco out of necessity. Like it's true to a more luxury category, you know. Yeah. Like, oh, they marked this Corvette up so much. And it's like, dude, only jerk offs like Jeremiah drive a car. Mark it up, you know.
01:56:39
Speaker
Take take Jeremiah for all his worth. Dude, I would hate to sell a car to Jeremiah. He would probably like pick you apart in your own driveway. He would literally make the salesperson walk into his office and just put his toe on the trigger. He's like. And Jeremiah's like, look, you got I mean, what am I supposed to do? I asked you good questions and you couldn't take it. That would be his. Take no responsibility. Well, this is how I feel. I don't I don't know, like.
01:57:07
Speaker
That's a tough one to me because I get some of the anger around it, but at the same time, I don't want that. Cutting dealers out and local businesses and stuff just to maybe save a couple of bucks because you buy directly from Toyota or whatever. To me, that just doesn't sound like a great plan, but I don't know. What do you guys think of that?
01:57:33
Speaker
I only know what I've heard from you, which is that the amount of the incentive plan, like dealerships are pretty fucked in a lot of ways anyway. Like the incentive plans, the way they make money, the way they keep their salespeople paid, it's just like a make it or break it every month. Do we exist or do we not? It's like real shitty.
01:57:55
Speaker
which I imagine couldn't be much better if you just if Ford's willing to put local dealers through that to not put up with the hassle of selling direct to consumer. I can't imagine buying from them direct would be better. I don't. Yeah, I think I think people look at it with rose rose tinted glasses because it's the same thing. It's like, oh, we get rid of like CD card dealerships and then we put
01:58:15
Speaker
a mega corporation in place. And it's like, it's going to be shit regardless. There's a, uh, there's a really, there's a really good this American life. Uh, I don't know if it's a series or if it's just one episode, but where Ira glass follows a couple dudes around in Jersey who are car salesman. And it is super eye-opening because they're like, it's like three or four dudes and they're all like one guy's brand new. One guy's been doing it for 50 years. One guy like just transferred over from like the mechanic shop. It's crazy, but just like hearing these guys just
01:58:44
Speaker
scratch and claw to make a deal. It's kind of like what you were saying, Sam, where it's like their lives are up in the air every month to make their nut. It's brutal. It's a brutal industry. Yeah. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion if I'm being totally honest. I've only bought a car once and I'm sure I got fleeced, but I didn't care. I was like...
01:59:03
Speaker
I went in there, I traded my car and I was like, I don't give a shit. Just give me the car that I want. I'll sign the papers. I pushed back a little bit on like the trade in value and that's what I got. And I was like, good. I never want to talk to you guys ever again. Goodbye.
01:59:15
Speaker
It is a horrible need to be like when people like so many people like tell me about their car buying experience and I'm on the service side. So I don't like I'm not an authority on like the sales end of things for cars, but it is. It's hilarious to me how many people like will tell you that they basically like pulled one over on the on the dealership or the car lot. Yeah, it's like, no, you didn't.
01:59:44
Speaker
They can always be like, yeah, I got them to take, you know, 400 bucks. I got them to drop this like service fee or something. You're like, well, what did you get for your trade-in? They're like, oh, $200.
01:59:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, oh, wow. Yeah, you you you didn't win. Yeah, I'm happy. I fully own that. They did. I did not win anything. Yeah, sometimes sometimes just going to take an L for a sienna. I got the price I wanted for the sienna. I got wrecked on rate because they go, oh, how much do you want to pay a month? I'm like, what? I wasn't prepared for this question. I just want to buy this.
02:00:22
Speaker
on a five year loan at a reasonable interest rate. And they're like, I was like, so what's the rate? And they're like, well, how much do you want to pay? It's like, well, what's the rate? How much do you want to play? I'm like, all right. And then I walk out and then I like, I do the math. I'm like, I think I got a 13% interest rate.
02:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, which was fine because we had a I mean it wasn't that high and that's not fine but I am I Refinanced the next week with Mike with a credit union that we had worked with previously and got a fine rate and it's like But they didn't care they like they they're like because most people will probably walk out and don't think I'll refinance tomorrow I was just like I'm tired of this conversation. I know I'm gonna refinance and
02:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, you're in like your fourth room. You have no idea where you are in the car buying process. The best was when they're just like, do you want all this extra stuff? And it's like an extra package of insurance kind of shit. And you're like, I don't think so. And they're like, well, if you're driving home and the entire thing explodes, you're fucked. And you're like, is that going to happen? There's no way to say it won't. What a closing tactic. Thank you, sir.
02:01:31
Speaker
I don't know. I shouldn't say like, I shouldn't make blanket statements because I don't know every single one, but dude, the extended warranties. Like they are garbage. Oh dude. 100%. I turned that down so hard. If you're going to buy one, you have to buy one through like the manufacturer or something. Don't buy one through some like self-funded program. Like a lot of the dealers have like their own little self-funded program that they do. So basically like.
02:02:01
Speaker
Your money every month just goes into a big pot and they choose what they pay out on. And like you, you only are going to get things covered if you just go in and like cause a complete riot in the service department or whatever. It sucks. And then like they sell those things up front and like, oh, yay, we did so great all that, you know.
02:02:25
Speaker
And then the people that work in the service department are the ones that have to tell you like, yeah, that's not covered. I know they, I know you, you were under the assumption that this was, but it's not. And then like my, uh, my, my family plan or whatever, like for my, cause I bought a Tacoma a couple of years ago and I get like, I get like, I get like free oil, you know, like, you know, free maintenance basically for the rest of the, for the lifetime of the car. But I have to go in when the light turns on.
02:02:52
Speaker
Like I remember one time I was like a thousand miles, like it was like 5,000 miles and I went in at like 6,500 and they're like, Hey, we could kick you off the plan if we wanted to. And I fucking, I was like, yeah, you're not going to fucking do that. Cause I paid however many dollars for it. And the guy was like, whoa, whoa, calm down, sir. And I was like, calm down. Yeah. I was like, yeah, I am called.
02:03:13
Speaker
They love that shit. Even if you go to Jiffy Lube, they're like, do you want to pay for the extra good oil? What happens if I don't? They're like, well, this oil could blow your car up. And you're like, why do you sell it? I think I'll be fine. Well, we can't guarantee that your car won't explode. And you're like, what does that mean? They're like, it means that if it explodes, we can't help you. And they just keep doing the winks and the nods about how they're selling you a product that could ruin your vehicle.
02:03:42
Speaker
Yeah, dude, it's ridiculous. Am I in a twilight zone right now? Because you can't be telling me you're going to sell me something that will ruin my vehicle. They did that to me the last time I took my old Jeep in to get the oil changed. And it's a 96. And so the guy's like, well, you need to get the high mileage oil because that's what Jeep put in there to begin with. That's what the manufacturer wants you to have. It's a semi-synthetic. That's what you need to get that, or we can't guarantee it.
02:04:11
Speaker
I just like, I'm not even going to argue with her. I'm just like, I don't need your guarantee. So I think, okay, the bottom line of this moral of the story. Uh, and I know that we all violate this, uh, like maxim all the time, but you have to be responsible for your choice, whatever you do.
02:04:34
Speaker
because no one is coming to save you. That's what everybody needs to remember. You should have it tattooed on the back of your eyelids, whether we're talking about the election or we're talking about like your future retirement plan or
02:04:50
Speaker
The extended warranty on your car, no one is coming to save you. So you better know what you're buying and paying for and signing up for because there is no, all these people, they bought this plan and it sounded great. And by all accounts, the thing that they were supposed to get.
02:05:09
Speaker
should be coming to them. It's not. And they are screwed and nobody's going to do anything to help them. That's because there's just nothing to be done. So that is the American dream, friends. Hell yeah, baby.
Guest Promotions and Conclusion
02:05:22
Speaker
I'll salute that. Spencer, what are you up to?
02:05:26
Speaker
do too many I don't a lot of things but no it's gonna be it's gonna be an interesting year I'm gonna hit the road a bunch not try to yeah taking about taking a month off for sure you know a few more weeks off for February black history month I get you exactly yeah you know I don't need to be on stage for that but no I
02:05:45
Speaker
If you have anyone listening in Wilmington, North Carolina, I'm headlining Why Not Skybar March 27th. So that'll be pretty fun. And then hopefully come into a helium comedy club near you across the states. I don't know why. I'm fucking crashing. It's 11 o'clock over here. Yeah, I'm late. Yeah, but no, you guys can follow me, SpencerSpicy on TikTok and Instagram. I'll post shows and dumb videos and things, because that's what I have to do to stay relevant. So that's what I'm doing.
02:06:13
Speaker
Hell yeah. Well, it was so fun having you on again. Yeah, man. I love doing great. Thank you so much. Hang out. I hope we do it in person someday. I would love that, man. It'll happen. It'll happen. For sure. Because I'll find my way out to your area. You guys have you guys have such a good audience and like such a good crowd like on the discord. Like, I don't know. You guys should figure out a way to do a live show. Oh, my God. I would love to. We talk about it a lot. It's just.
02:06:41
Speaker
I know logistics living in two different states, yeah. It's so hard, so hard. Casey's in Kansas, I'm in Massachusetts. It's tough. Where is there a good portion of the audience enough to do the live? I'm in Kansas and I've looked at the stats and we have like no listeners in Kansas.
02:07:00
Speaker
We have like two, and one's my buddy Curtis. Yeah, hell yeah. Shout out Curtis. Yeah. But it would be a blast if it's ever in your area, you're getting the invite to do it with us. And hell yeah, baby. I appreciate it, guys. You got the experience with the live shows, so that'd be nice too. That I do. All right, everybody. Well, subscribe to Spencer Spicy for some funny reels and upcoming comedy dates. Hell yeah, baby. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you next time.
02:07:38
Speaker
you