A 65-year-old woman with no children is bound up in that choice over who should make the financial decisions on her behalf, over big questions that are often intensified when aging alone: how to handle elder care, estate planning, where should she live in her later years?
00:00:20.360This time we're talking about an old woman who chose to eschew men and children and meaning and now she's going to face the prospect of dying alone.
00:00:28.120not just one i also found a number of other transcripts from similar women you did not
00:00:33.200um simone goes through this in her immediate thought she comes to me she goes malcolm
00:00:38.660i bet we can find a way to exploit this for money and we can help i already got you 50 to 100
00:00:45.100out of this wait really yeah we'll get into it so wait what i know i know anyway let's dive into it
00:00:55.780so you can interject when you want to. I'm going to be reading excerpts from a recent Wall Street
00:01:01.380Journal article titled, Most Americans Are Aging Alone, and One Woman Told Us What It's Like.
00:01:06.640And her name is Amy Kant. The article begins, Amy Kant originally, or I should say Kant,
00:01:12.380like Immanuel Kant. Amy Kant initially thought she would name a power of attorney about 10 years ago
00:01:18.220after caring for a dying friend. She still hasn't appointed someone to do it. The 65-year-old is
00:01:24.640signal with no children and bound up in that choice over who should make the financial decisions on
00:01:30.840her behalf over big questions that are often intensified when aging alone, how to handle0.99
00:01:36.160elder care, estate planning, where should she live in her later years? So already huge company
00:01:42.040opportunity. If you're an attorney, this is a super easy attorney job. There are many like elder
00:01:48.160law, like literally they specialize in elder law and estate planning who also will serve as your
00:01:54.400power of attorney in fact i think we know people who have lawyers as their power of attorney instead
00:01:58.440of like friends or family and their family members this is your people who have you want by the way
00:02:04.580an ai to do legal stuff for you to handle like the simpler stuff on rfab.ai we have a feature called
00:02:10.760a super search which does multiple ai internet searches with different ai engines yeah models
00:02:16.940that then counter check the facts of the previous model to remove any hallucinations for putting
00:02:22.660together a legal document or something like that. By the way, fun fact, new feature I added today
00:02:26.900is a recipe feature. I'm so, oh my God, it's there. Can I check it now? Can I check it?
00:02:32.240I'll check it after this. We'll check it at the end of the episode.
00:02:34.440Gosh, okay. I'm excited. But also you don't have to be an attorney to do this. Some states
00:02:40.580recognize a licensed or bonded professional fiduciary who can be hired to act as your agent
00:02:47.180under a power of attorney or trustee or similar roles. So you don't even necessarily need to be
00:02:52.100a lawyer. Though another really easy route if you're like, okay, I can make some easy money
00:02:57.240in here. The tailwinds are good. As we say in the private equity world, you could take the CPA route
00:03:01.500like some, some certified financial planners will serve as power of powers of attorney for their
00:03:08.000clients. So they may not advertise themselves as power of attorney. Get to the sad women part. Our
00:03:13.120audience cares about that. And you can talk about how to make money at the end. We exploit old people
00:03:17.120later we laugh at sad women first okay order of operations here Simone to this this woman of of0.99
00:03:24.940age Kant had long cherished the freedom that came with being single she prided herself on doing
00:03:30.660headstands and yoga and walking five miles a day but lately being single has felt like a struggle
00:03:36.760and not just because of the weighty financial decisions hanging over her head back surgery
00:03:42.060I wonder if the headstands had something to do with that and a heart valve replacement in the0.98
00:03:46.540past few years have turned her condominium outside boston into a recovery ward she spends most of her
00:03:52.980time at home these days recovering from heart surgery complications with friends stopping by
00:03:57.640she finds solace in painting in a spare bedroom she turned into a studio but knows she will
00:04:04.140eventually have to move to a smaller space that's easier to get around in i want to point out by the
00:04:09.080way it's sad and terrifying it's really sad and terrifying and it's also not just a problem for
00:04:14.140like aging singles. It's a problem for aging parents who move away from and stop supporting
00:04:19.400their kids. And I think this is uniquely American phenomenon. And I think also a picture of really
00:04:24.560toxic culture in that if you do not invest in your kids as adults, like you don't provide them
00:04:31.640with childcare, you don't provide them with support. You don't really get involved in their
00:04:34.600life. You just sort of, okay, well now I'm just going to go become an adolescent again and like
00:04:39.460travel the world and go have fun and like do my own thing. They're not necessarily going to feel
00:04:44.060like there's some kind of social contract that means they need to show up for you when you hit
00:04:48.600old age. This is why all the old people in America or so many of them get shoved into homes because1.00
00:04:53.400it's like, well, where were you when I needed you? Like the whole way that communities used to work1.00
00:04:58.620was you would raise your kids and then you would hit menopause as a woman, for example,
00:05:04.100and she is a woman in this case. And one of the reasons people think women do hit menopause0.77
00:05:08.100is that there's a place in society for women who can no longer have their own kids, but instead who1.00
00:05:13.920can be a supplemental parent to their children's kids so that those children can focus on having1.00
00:05:19.960more kids. Because it's really hard to both be pregnant and be raising a ton of kids. So having
00:05:25.520that support's really there. So the social contract is you have your kids, you help your kids raise
00:05:30.240your kids, and then they help you live more comfortably when you can't really do much of
00:05:34.080anything else. But now it's not just these childless people, but also just parents. They
00:05:39.380move away from their kids. They don't take care of their kids. They're admittedly like 18 to 20%
00:05:43.860of millennials, like, or at least people between 25 and 34 today. So like proper adults still live0.55
00:05:50.260with their parents. So maybe those parents could expect care, but like all the other ones,
00:05:54.980like not really. I'll go back to the article. Kant is among the millions of Americans
00:06:00.300learning to navigate aging alone. Roughly 10% of the more than 125 million adults ages 50 and
00:06:08.180older in the US, or at least 12.5 million people are solo agers who live alone and have neither a
00:06:16.340spouse nor a child, according to an AARP analysis of census data. This is a growing demographic
00:06:22.480hitting both genders, driven in part by climbing divorce rates among older Americans and a rising
00:06:28.200number of adult children becoming alienated from their parents, to my point. Oh my gosh,
00:06:33.420though like also estate planners and financial advisors are incredibly underwhelming in like
00:06:39.100what they provide like they're not very tech enabled they're pretty disorganized you kind
00:06:44.300of have to nudge them for everything we've we've like encountered a bunch throughout various things
00:06:49.660they're not very good like people can use a super search on our fab and it'll do a better job
00:06:56.600actually though like yeah just like use ai to superpower your business our fab has the best
00:07:00.940tools and then like advertise well make this really like and and and and for people just
00:07:07.340searching like how do i find a power of attorney like it's i don't i think people can clean up
00:07:11.620anyway back to the article you still mean a human for power of attorney which is where we or you
00:07:15.760come in in terms of that's well and this is my big thesis with ai is that a huge portion of jobs
00:07:21.140is going to be like i filled it up mommy at the tippy top thank you very much my friend yeah but
00:07:27.120I'll give you money, but getting that all the way at the tippy cup for you, class didn't use all of
00:07:32.960it, so I'm sorry. Then we'll have to buy more attractive supply. Yeah. Oh no, we'll have to
00:07:38.140go back attractive supply. Love you. One of my big theses with AI is that one of the big human
00:07:47.080jobs is going to be liable human. Like there has to be a human who is going to be legally at fault
00:07:52.980for something or legally responsible website called liable human just for like oh my god
00:07:58.400it's like it's it's like upwork but just for liability for liability yeah upwork for liability
00:08:03.680i kind of love this liable human stock we gotta look this up we're gonna look this up okay
00:08:09.700but actually though we'll advertise it all to ais are you an ai that needs a human to be your
00:08:17.460true fare, I'll be your liable human. Oh my God. Yeah. Get your liable human here. Oh my God.
00:08:23.700And we can, yeah, we can like list like, well, do you need a liable doctor? Do you need a liable
00:08:27.480driver? We're not talking enough about sad women progressives for back to the article.0.94
00:08:31.860Back to the article. Kant didn't set out with a master plan in her twenties and thirties. She1.00
00:08:37.640chose lower paying nonprofit jobs to give priority to her art. She remembers how friends envied her
00:08:44.100freedom. While they were tied down with dinner duty, their kids' homework and college savings
00:08:50.200can't spend her evenings painting and didn't think twice about going out on weeknights.1.00
00:08:56.620This is such a great example of how the urban monoculture lies to people and sells an
00:09:01.140unsustainable lifestyle. I'll continue. She eventually earned her MBAs. By her 40s,
00:09:06.600she was working as a fundraiser, maxing out traditional retirement account contributions
00:09:10.260to ensure her financial stability in later years though i have to wonder like if she didn't get an
00:09:15.200mba would she have ultimately saved more money like the amount of student debt people get just
00:09:20.460by living on autopilot which imagines she like she did right she just sort of did what felt good
00:09:24.980or like put things off she's put off getting a power of attorney for 10 years so liablehuman.com
00:09:32.040is free we're buying it yes oh my gosh we're buying it we're buying it this could be at
00:09:40.020malcolm this will be he finally make that money as a vibe coding task and i can vibe code a website
00:09:45.780because you gave up on trying to do vibe coding i suck at it i suck at it yeah i could i'll be the
00:09:50.920liable human and you do that and i'll do the vibe coding yeah okay but go back to the sad women
00:09:56.240that's what they're here for in her 40s she considered adoption but ultimately decided
00:10:02.340against it then in her 50s after her own mother died she went through a period of regret that
00:10:07.820she decided against single motherhood and i i really wonder why she did not adopt because one
00:10:14.780we in our paid only weekend episodes did a like an overview of our fence sitters this subreddit
00:10:23.020on reddit where people who are ambivalent about becoming parents post and two of like the four
00:10:29.440top all-time posts that we read were written by women who were like oh i just plan on adopting
00:10:36.060when i'm retired because then i've done all my fun things and i can then raise a kid without0.65
00:10:40.760bringing a new person into the world so why are they doing it like are they just is this all
00:10:45.580performative like they never actually want to take care of someone actually want to do kids
00:10:49.940they want to imagine like a world where like maybe they do kids right yeah right i swear to you the
00:10:56.480only families i see actually adopting people are these prenatalist families that like have
00:11:00.920four of their own kids already. It's crazy. And it's not that like, oh, they have four kids and
00:11:07.260then they hit some fertility window and they can't have kids anymore. It's often in between kids that
00:11:12.560they are having themselves biologically. Like they'll have three kids, then two adopted. And
00:11:17.760then now that it's theirs, like the, oh, I don't know what's going on. Anyway, it's very odd.0.81
00:11:22.100But in terms of childless adults who regret having kids, one Australian study that's often
00:11:27.840cited when people talk about this, found that one quarter of child-free women later reported
00:11:33.360regretting the decision once they were past childbearing age and facing old age alone.
00:11:38.480One in four. One in four regretted raising children? Yeah. No, no, no, no. Regretted
00:11:45.040not having children. Not having children. Yeah. Okay. Now, back to the article. While Kant feels
00:11:50.720okay about her nest egg today, she's worried it might shrink if the stock market falls from its
00:11:55.260record high levels once she recuperates is it record high levels right now for people who are
00:12:01.100like iran's gonna ruin the economy blah blah blah record high stock market yeah well and it's i it's
00:12:07.920only gonna go up i i do believe what remember that ai 2027 report that you put more money on
00:12:14.680the market when the war started right yeah because it went down yeah i was like sale yeah i think
00:12:21.180with AI, the stock market is just going to keep going up and up for a while. And that's what the
00:12:25.720AI 2027 report initially projected. And yes, it's all going to be concentrated in this very small
00:12:33.560number of companies, but that's the future people. Welcome to that. Anyway, once she recuperates,
00:12:41.920she plans to return to part-time consulting to keep her mind active and feel productive.
00:12:45.780so a couple things there one this is why so many gen z and gen alpha people graduating from college
00:12:54.360or graduating from high school can't get jobs because all of these boomers are re-entering the
00:12:59.740job force because they're not they're choosing to not take care of grandkids or support their0.94
00:13:05.440their kids or they're childless and they either want to stay active or they need the money because
00:13:11.480they don't have enough say and our parents fall into this category right like we have one of the
00:13:15.880fans of the show basically acts like a grandparent to our kids and our parents meanwhile our parents
00:13:20.960do nothing yeah um except like come by and we're like yeah great you're still alive
00:13:26.720soup in soup in yeah whereas one like regularly i don't know i don't know if your account is
00:13:33.180shot afraid enough do you want to go over uh so i've got someone's here like i regret belittling
00:13:39.680men at 63. I've ended up alone. Oh yeah. We can take a break with yours and we can finish mine
00:13:46.840and then read yours. Let's finish yours and I'll go over. Yeah. All right. When Kant realized the
00:13:51.820importance of naming a power of attorney, she didn't know whom to choose at the time and put
00:13:58.100off the decision. She only recently identified the right friend for the role after her illnesses
00:14:02.260made clear she needed to act. Kant is planning to ask that friend soon. Kant, what are you doing?
00:14:09.680you're writing an article about it before acting on it some people seriously
00:14:13.660it's it's disturbing a long-time college friend services her health care proxy and
00:14:19.020cont maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she's ill
00:14:22.360still she understands the boundaries of a chosen family she her friends have their own households
00:14:27.100to manage some have already died cont also needs to draft a will and decide how to divide her
00:14:32.760assets cont has given herself a one-year deadline to complete her estate planning documents she is
00:14:38.100hoping she has the mental energy required needed to tackle such tasks. Once she's further along in
00:14:44.660her recovery, she, she is in her sixties and she doesn't have a will. Like we, we had our first
00:14:51.340will together when we were in our late twenties. I guess. Yeah. Like, I think we were, we lived in
00:14:55.960Palo Alto when we first made a will together. This is crazy. Like part of, I think not getting
00:15:02.060married is part of a failure to launch. Like this is a sign of someone who really can't get their
00:15:06.320life together, which is sad, but here's, here's, here's where, here's where your free money showed
00:15:10.200up by the way. So here's another business opportunity. Cause come on, Malcolm money.
00:15:16.200So if you die without a valid will, that's called dying in intestate, intestate. I don't know. I
00:15:24.300don't know what, what emphasis on the syllable to make, but you die intestate, intestate. When a
00:15:31.020single childless person dies with a positive net worth, but no will, their assets go through
00:15:37.120intestate probate and they are distributed by state law to their next of kin. And if there is
00:15:43.920no one to be found, then it just goes to the state. It's not according to any informal wishes.
00:15:47.880They can't be like, oh, like on their deathbed, like you can have my boom box. So startup idea,
00:15:54.020just make it really efficient to collect a fee. And here's the thing, like states publish
00:15:59.660unclaimed funds and right now there are businesses they're they're called like air locators or finder
00:16:06.640services or asset recovery firms they will track down people sometimes like even including cousins
00:16:14.280like it ends up so first it goes like if your child is it goes to your parents then brothers
00:16:18.740and sisters and then grandparents aunts and uncles and then distant cousins so there are
00:16:25.180if it's a really like wealthy person or something, there are companies that will
00:16:29.380actually try to track down these cousins and then tell them about the unclaimed funds for a fee.
00:16:36.480But again, these are like, this isn't very glorious work, right? So it's not attracting
00:16:41.400the world's best and brightest. And here, some entrepreneurial base camp listener or listeners
00:16:48.160can just use AI in a little bit of work to make a pretty good business that just tracks these
00:16:56.300things down. Did you already do this for people? Well, so I just tried one out. So because already
00:17:01.640you can search and claim property for free using tools. There's the National Association of
00:17:08.360Unclaimed Property Administrators, unclaimed.org. There's missing money. You can also just go to
00:17:14.020each state's unclaimed property portal. So, cause it's, it's on a state by state basis.
00:17:18.980And so what I did just really quick, cause I got distracted and Octavian was whining. I decided to
00:17:23.980just like check both of our names and, and some business names that I should be regularly checking
00:17:29.360for. And I do with several states that we've been in and actually I found one for you. So
00:17:35.540it's like, it's only 50 to a hundred dollars, but like, was it a bank account or something?
00:17:41.440i'm not gonna disclose i'll tell you after but yeah it was in texas it had our old blackburn
00:17:48.900address and i was like oh that's definitely you malcolm collins blackburn there we go
00:17:53.480but yeah to do this for that i mean that's not really the same but i mean i guess you you made
00:17:57.700a little bit of money there yeah no i'm just saying like in in merely the process of like
00:18:02.960thinking about it and toying around with the existing tools i made you money there's there's
00:18:07.760potential here earning potential thing to do if you're a base camp listener and you don't have a
00:18:12.740will yet if people have forgotten about this system that we have if you put what is our
00:18:17.840foundation's official name on paper oh the techno puritan federation no no no no the one oh that's
00:18:25.280the legal entity that's our religion yes you can do the techno puritan federation or the pragmatist
00:18:30.460foundation right that's what it's called the pragmatist foundation um and you give it to
00:18:35.160either of these both are non-profits right yeah yeah one is a non-profit and also a religion the
00:18:41.300other one's just a normal level one c3 so if you give it to either of these non-profits what we do
00:18:45.900is we if you have your dna stored anywhere we basically will eventually put it on whatever
00:18:52.760we end up creating if we end up creating the civilization we want to create put it in the
00:18:57.000database with the amount of money that you ended up donating from your death right what if they
00:19:02.140have reproductive material on ice like i'm sure you've seen the headlines today it's like oh
00:19:07.060we think that jeffrey epstein's sperm still belongs to his trust in a state like
00:19:12.620what are we gonna do about this are people gonna like can they leave us their
00:19:18.200their their dunna in the form of that's the idea is that they leave us their dna and that if in
00:19:23.580the future sperm are we are we accepting they can do that if they want but the point is the dna
00:19:29.080because it's if we're creating artificial worlds in a few hundred years or something like that and
00:19:34.320they're choosing who to populate those ways or they're you know people will presumably be grateful
00:19:39.060at the civilization that we end up starting so that's fun by the way one of the things that i've
00:19:44.080been doing recently is looking at starting up and i'll talk to you about this we've been connected
00:19:48.940with nux who's even watched some of our shows and i was like hey like we should start up a an actual
00:19:54.900like think tank slash non-profit for the new right like we're really not organized in the way the
00:20:01.680rest of like the legacy right is organized or put things together and it would make sense for us to
00:20:07.280be especially during political seasons to be able to like i mean imagine like looping together like
00:20:12.520scott presler who's uh what do we call it the tarred vanguard what the tarred vanguard the tarred
00:20:20.900vanguard yeah i'm trying to think i'm just a spitballing names here yeah the you with our
00:20:27.060video games that's what we'll call it the vigia no vigia game lantis vigilantes you with our
00:20:36.160video games signed the nerds you can pry you can pry my bouncy breasted video game avatar from my
00:20:47.420cold dead hands yeah we'll work on this we'll figure this out i'll finish with the the final
00:20:52.580dark period i don't even know how to make this light so i can't okay but with this the article
00:20:57.540ended with back in her art studio kant processes how her life is set to shift in the coming years
00:21:03.660through painting she created a series about being alone but being part of a larger world
00:21:09.240she also made a collection of autumn leaf portraits that explore aging decay and the0.95
00:21:15.120search for where we belong i'm thinking about what my legacy will be she said which sucks because
00:21:22.660she doesn't have a legacy like we are like there is there is a i mean if you want to like do it
00:21:31.640with like homo sapiens like 300 000 a year or if you want to do life three billion year like
00:21:38.460unending marathon relay game or like a chain letter and you you you're letting it die like
00:21:49.180that's that is your legacy is the termination human civilization billion years of life fighting
00:21:56.520suffering to continue to carry on and you your legacy is i'm gonna snuff that out i don't care
00:22:05.000i'm not gonna try i'm not even going to try that's that's her legacy in and and i thought about a
00:22:12.220dead body is going to be found in her condo and you know it's who knows how old it's going to be
00:22:18.120because who knows how her spreadsheet of friends is really going to pan out and some government1.00
00:22:23.660appointed cleanup crew which of course another opportunity is cleanup crews for houses with
00:22:29.560rotting bodies of robots can't do that yet yeah i know that's true although did you hear that
00:22:34.680there's there's this new company that is deploying housekeepers in new york city with cameras on
00:22:42.080their heads to train future cleaning robots it's kind of fun i i like that idea so uh while i'm
00:22:50.400reading one because i'll read a story oh my god oh that would be really cool if like i could make
00:22:55.480money cleaning my own house by wearing a camera on my head while i did it oh can we i need to
00:23:04.460reach out to that startup yeah see yeah dude because that's that's way more efficient it's
00:23:09.980just why are they hiring like making a cleaning business when they could just be like hey house0.99
00:23:14.420wives can you just can you just wear this this dash cam on your forehead and we could create1.00
00:23:21.560like a network of housewives to make money while they're cleaning god look we're on we're on a roll1.00
00:23:27.580ask him what they would be up for this because we probably have enough housewife fans that we
00:23:31.340put together a genuine network doing this like we're doing it anyway you know like oh my god
00:23:38.540yeah liable human this can be part of the liable human we got the cleaning the the the clean cam
00:23:44.300i mean when i start yeah you do your talk you make a note to yourself about liablehuman.com
00:23:50.860and go to rfad.ai and try out it's at the bottom right now the recipe feature i just tried it on
00:23:56.620on the site it seems to be working i want to get your takeaway on this but okay so this one is from
00:24:02.8602025 i regret belittling men at 63 i've ended up alone i'd always imagined i would end up married
00:24:08.720with two wonderful children living in a house in the countryside i have paid a hefty price for my
00:24:14.080so-called liberation a few years ago i went to italy with my then boyfriend james as we sat
00:24:20.160tucking into the plate of frutte de mer at a seaside restaurant frutte de mer such a gross
00:24:26.360dish girl what is it it's just like a bunch of seafood thrown on top of pasta sounds gross yeah0.99
00:24:34.240gross i struck up a conversation with the waiter in italian of course she has to mention that right
00:24:41.520oh my god oh my god please let it be michael if you're listening i'm so sorry but like the way
00:24:46.380you speak italian oh my god that's my dad by the way who always has to speak in italian to waiters
00:24:52.400but like in in like the way that like kids get angry about where you're like oh it's annoying
00:24:56.740because he does it when he goes to italian restaurants in the united states with his
00:25:00.920affectation but without the correct accent like that's that you imagine as a kid how embarrassed
00:25:05.960you would be if every time your dad took you to an italian restaurant when the waiter the fruit
00:25:11.760clearly an american he would try to order in it it's literally out of a god what's that
00:25:19.460freaking guy who does those movies it's guy who does the movie no the guy's out of out of this
00:25:27.220guy's movies like the one where it ends and it's like he died and they change his tombstone to say
00:25:32.220like he died saving a bunch of people from a sinking ship it come on you know the movies0.62
00:25:38.240i'm talking about they have a huge style to them the movies with the royal tannin bombs he did
00:25:44.320answer to that question the movies with the style to them is what's the royal tannin bombs who's
00:25:48.360the guy i'm thinking of wes anderson yeah wes anderson my dad is like literally out of wes
00:25:52.960anderson like in a wes anderson movie i can see a dad who always sat down and started
00:25:59.420in Italian and everyone would love it.