Hey, everybody, Adam Savage here not in my cave. I'm actually on a small vacation
so I am in lovely Colorado. I am mere feet from the beautiful Rio Grande here in southern Colorado
and I am answering some of your questions today and the first question comes from Joe Niedbala,
who says and I quote: As someone who has been forthcoming about your own hearing
related issues why do you think that more attention has not been given to this topic
both from a preventative and a treatment perspective? So many people refuse to
acknowledge they have a problem. Hearing aids are marketed primarily to the elderly,
making hearing loss seem age related and a shameful sign of frailty
rather than something that can affect anyone in our loud industrial world. Joe, it's true there
is a bias and if I'm going to be honest it was a couple years before I -- at least a couple years
before I was willing to consider hearing aids because of the same bias because the idea of
not being able to hear clearly made me feel lesser. But when I was a kid I had eye problems
and then I got glasses and that was amazing. That was a totally amazing transformation
and the same thing happened with hearing aids. And I want everyone to experience that because they
didn't just improve my life they improved the life of everybody around me because I could hear them.
You end up when you have hearing difficulty and you're not addressing it
you end up with a lot of coping mechanisms and some of those are things like just nodding and
smiling when you can't actually hear what someone is saying, not saying "what?" repeatedly ...
You make the accommodations and then other people don't realize that you're not getting what they're
saying. And this isn't a way to go about things. I think one of the other things about the stigma
is that hearing aids are ludicrously expensive. They're way more expensive than they should be
or that they need to be and they are a medical device, there are certainly many ways in which
one could be harmed by this medical device, and so that regulation of that is very very important.
But to make the cost of the threshold to entry for a hearing aid company, require them to charge
thousands and thousands of dollars ... My hearing aid was like $3,500 for each one. And I feel
incredibly lucky that I can afford that because it's not covered on my super expensive health plan
but not everybody can. And I also recognize that many people have been entering this space over
the years trying to come up with disruptive products and that there are hopefully cheaper
alternatives coming which would be a net boon to humanity because being able to hear your partner,
being able to hear your kids, being able to feel a part of the things that are going on
around you and maybe that's the biggest thing. When we can't hear -- when I was unable to hear
especially in noisy environments I'd be out with friends and I wouldn't be contributing to the
conversation because I couldn't follow it. Because in an aurally toxic environment like a restaurant
it's easy to become overwhelmed and even with hearing aids it is
easy to become overwhelmed. And even with all the modern interventions hearing aids have,
like coupling to the phone and using remote microphones, it's still a very imperfect system
and there are still a lot of bugs to work out. And it's a little tough that the the people who
are using hearing aids, which is a lot of older people, they're not the most technically savvy.
I'm not even a digital native, right, like my kids are way more savvy than I am and still I'm a lover
of technology and the hearing aids and using the technology with them has been a pain in the ass.
So i mean that's just some of my personal experiences with them. I agree with you we should
have less stigma because as I've said many times before never in the history of the world did
someone get a hearing aid and then go back and not use it. Like that just doesn't happen. No one ever
put a hearing aid in and thought, Oh, I'd rather have the other reality. That's just not the case
and so I think one of the ways that we can help remove that cultural stigma is by doing what we're
doing. You submit your question and I'm talking about it. We've got to talk about it. We've got
to talk honestly and openly about those biases and that stigma so that we can all hear each other.
Because frankly -- yeah now I'm going to get super meta -- but you know the world is in a rough state
and if we're going to make it out of this rough state and I hope that we will the only way we
will is by listening to each other. So there. There's my little shift in perspective. Thank you,
Joe. That is a fantastic question. I really appreciate you asking it.