itely have long COVID. But then suppose you said, Scott, you've been studying this stuff for a long time. You know what confirmation bias is. You know what cognitive dissonance is. Now do you think you have long COVID? And then I say, oh I do know what those things mean. I don't know. Not only do I not know, I don't even have a good guess. I'm not even sure which would be slightly more likely. No idea.

But if you think that you're sure in my exact situation, if you could be in my exact situation and you would say to yourself I'm sure, I'm sure this is long COVID, then you haven't learned your lesson yet. And you will learn this lesson by the end of this livestream. Oh there's more to come. Watch me tie it all together in one beautiful soufflé. Yeah you don't see it yet but it's coming together.

I saw a tweet from P.D. Mangan today, who's a good follow. P.D. Mangan, M-A-N-G-A-N. Shows that 25% of women in the United States are on an antidepressant. 25% of adult women are on an antidepressant in the United States. So I saw separately another tweet that said the United States rate of antidepressants is through the roof compared to other countries. Surprised? I'm not surprised.

Do you know what is different about the United States compared to all those other countries where they have fewer prescriptions for antidepressants? Well I don't know if this is true so I'll ask you for a fact check. Is it true that the United States is the only place that those companies can advertise directly to consumers? Because you see advertisements directly to consumers, don't you? Think that makes the consumers ask for it and that's why they do it. The whole point of it is to make consumers ask for it. So do you think that the United States has a much bigger problem with depression or do we have a big problem with media manipulation and brainwashing by advertisement? Which problem do we have? Maybe both. Yeah, maybe a little bit of both. It's hard to know how much of each.

But does that number sound right to you? Let me just test it commonsensically. So here's one of your filters. If the thing that science is telling you doesn't map with what you're observing, that doesn't mean it's not true because your observations might be biased. But if it doesn't match you should at least raise a flag and say okay there's a little discrepancy here. Why is my observation so wildly different than what I'm seeing?

What is your opinion of the 25% of adult women on antidepressants? Higher, lower, or just right? High or low? Yeah it's low. Almost everybody says it's low. There's a few high, a few say high. Most people think it's low. Yeah, why is that? Why is that?

Well here's my take. I think that society is organized in a way that prevents us from achieving happiness. Now I say society, I mean everything from the way we use technology to the way we get married to the way we have relationships to the way we raise kids to the way our school system works. Just everything. Just all of it is designed, not designed, it sort of evolved that way, but we have created a civilization that couldn't possibly satisfy its people. Am I right?

If you took those same people and you know just airlifted them and dropped them into another environment, let's say you just put them in another country where people are happier, I don't know where that is. Name a happy country. South Korea, Poland, Albania, Tahiti, I don't know, Finland. I don't know. Wherever they're happy. Do you think those people would be happier if you dropped them in a happier place with a different civilization? Maybe. I don't know. Maybe.

But to me the 25% seems super low. Because what's not included is the number of people self-medicating. How many people are taking illegal pills? That's not in here, right? Don't you think there are just a ton of people who are taking an illegal Xanax or an illegal Adderall or an illegal something and that they're doing it to feel better? In other words it's an antidepressant of sorts. Yeah, overeating. You could say overeating is an antidepressant. It's a very bad one.

This data is from 2014. So imagine what the rate of antidepressants is now after the pandemic. Yeah so you got to throw in alcohol, you got to throw in weed, legal weed. You got to throw all that in there. I think it's clo