. And so here's some good news. Michael Shellenberger is taking on fentanyl addiction and homelessness in California primarily. And let me tell you why that's good news.

First of all, if you don't know Michael Shellenberger, you should follow him on Twitter. That's the first thing you should do, if for no other reason than to boost his voice. Because what makes him different from almost everybody really is that you can't even detect politics in his work. I swear to God I can't tell if he's left or right. I mean, I really don't. He claims his roots are in the left but got a little bit red-pilled by finding out some of the green stuff wasn't really what it was promoted to be. So Michael Shellenberger is pretty much a facts-first, data-first, data-always, facts-always, rational player. But he's also like a pit bull. So now that he's got his jaws on this thing, we'll probably get a lot closer to understanding what works and what doesn't work with the whole homeless situation.

I'll give you just one simple example. One of the restrictions on temporary housing is that you can't do drugs. But so many of the people are drug addicted that that makes the solution completely unmatched to the problem. These are pretty basic things, and it's something that if you're political you just can't say, because your politics says I gotta treat it the way other people are treating it that are on my side. And if you're on the other side you say I have to treat it the way my side treats it. Shellenberger just goes in and says, well, what works? What works? What makes sense? And then he just hammers it until you can't ignore it anymore.

So the best news you've ever heard on homelessness and drug addiction in California anyway, and we would imagine that anything good that happens here could spread. The best news you've ever heard is that Michael Shellenberger decided to take a big bite out of it, and he's not letting go. So keep your eye on that and give him a boost if you can.

Rasmussen poll asked people if Biden is a stronger or weaker commander-in-chief. What do you imagine the results were? Well, surprise, surprise. Liberals by a strong majority think Biden is a better commander-in-chief, stronger. Meaning, and conservatives by a strong majority, almost the same in the other direction, say he's a weaker one. But what do the moderates say? Let's talk to the moderates. The moderates are the only ones who matter. And I'm starting to think that you could just ignore anybody who identifies as liberal or identifies as conservative, because you already know what they're going to say. What would be the point of doing a poll on either liberals or conservatives on a question that's been in the news for a long time? Because the longer something is in the news, the more people just retreat to the groupthink of their side.

Now if something is brand new, let's say anything involving the pandemic, you know that was a sort of a new thing. We hadn't thought about it for years already. That's actually pretty useful. I do actually want to know what the liberals and conservatives think, because it's just a whole new fog of war situation. But certainly with these older, more let's say questions which we've thought about for a long time, or they're just so automatically you're going to go to your side, like who's the better commander-in-chief? I mean really, we kind of know how that's going to turn out, right?

But interestingly the moderates were a little bit closer to split. And the moderates are the only ones who can make an election go one way or the other, aren't they? It seems like the moderate opinions are the only ones that matter. And I'll even go further and say that the extremes on both sides probably are closer to mental illness than political opinion. The extremes on both sides, left and right, are certainly, and I feel really confident in this opinion. I don't have to be a mental health professional to have this opinion and feel pretty confident about it. Most of the people on the far left and the far right, it's just mental problems. That's all it is. And we're acting like they're just like everybody else. You know, hey, these guys are liberals and these other people are liberals, so let's average them together. What sense does it make to average mentally ill people with people who are not mentally ill? What does the average tell you? Nothing. Doesn't tell you anything.

My guess is that people who identify as political moderates are largely free of mental illness, and that probably identifies them more than their political leaning. So it's absurd to look at mental illness and average it in with political opinions.

Speaking of mental illness, there's a new study that came out from somebody credible that says women are 40 percent more likely to develop depression than men. I think that's, this is just a little context. We'll get to the story. First of all, did you know that women are 40 percent more likely to develop depression than men? I would say sure looks like it. You know, if I had to base it on my own life experience, I'd say that might be low. It might be low. I mean, I certainly have known men who are depressed, but I don't think it's even close. So directionally this seems about right.

But I would also note that when it comes to depression, it's something that women get and men get it from women. In other words, it does have a viral element to it. You can catch it from somebody. And I would say that the old saying that you know, happy wife, happy life, is literally true for a man. For men, if your wife is not happy, you're depressed. That's it. If your wife is unhappy, you are depressed. You catch it from women. If you just took women's depression out of a man's life, I don't know if they would have any. I mean, if they got their basic needs met, I don't know if they would be depressed.

Now obviously some people are organically, genetically predisposed. I'm not talking about that group. That's just a pure medical problem. But certainly there are people who are being depressed with the, you know, not a capital D, that has to do with lifestyle and what you're doing.

But there's more on this topic. It gets worse. Apparently there is one demographic group that is extra, extra suffering from mental problems. Now it would be easy to laugh about this, wouldn't it? Because you know comedy is just tragedy happening to somebody else, right? It would be easy to laugh about this except that look at these rates. White women ages 18 to 29 who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals, and they had a rate of, what, 56.3 percent of them had mental problems, as compared to 28 in moderates and 27 percent in conservatives. So for the same age group, white women 18 to 29, twice as many who identify as liberals have medically certified, a medical diagnosis. It's not self-reporting, medical diagnosis. Twice as many of them, twice as many have mental problems.

Now are you surprised? Nope. Nope. Is there anybody who is even a little bit surprised by that? Now I think maybe the extent of it might be a surprise a little bit, or just shocking. I don't know if it's a surprise or it's just shocking. But I feel like we thought that, right? I think most of you thought, yeah, yeah. I'm looking at the comments now. You're not too surprised, are you?

And let us speculate how this happened. What was it that caused it? Has it always been this way? First of all, do you think this is a change that we didn't notice and it snuck up on us, or is it something that's always been true and we just figured it out? Well, I don't know the answer to that. I feel as though they're presenting it as if it's a change or a trend. And I would offer the following possible reasons for it.

Number one, fake news, right? I'll give you a few other possibilities. But would you agree that fake news probably causes depression in liberals in a way it maybe doesn't for conservatives? Would you accept the first statement as reasonable? Right? You know, this is not a science. We're just putting our best opinion on it. But I feel like the fake news does make them depressed. Imagine waking up and thinking that you lived on a planet that was going to be destroyed by climate change and nobody was doing anything about it. That would make a difference, because that's what the news is telling you. The news is telling you you're going to die. Don't have children. They're just going to burn up in a fireball.

But if you're a conservative, you look at the news and you say, yeah, I see that. Maybe or maybe not. I believe that it's getting warmer, but even if it is getting warmer and even if humans are causing it, we'll figure it out. We always do. We'll figure it out. And by the way, even the UN says the economic impact over 80 years won't be that big. Now CNN reports it as it's really big. But if you look at the actual latest economic projections from the most certified, credible source, they say maybe a 10 percent difference in the GDP over 80 years, which you wouldn't notice because the GDP will be so high by then because of just normal increase. That if it's 10 percent less than it might have been in 80 years, nobody will even know. That's how small it is. The problem is so small economically. And that's really the primary variable, is economics. Because if your economics are good, you can relocate people and you can move away from the coast. You can remediate. You can buy more air conditioning. You can do what you need to do. So if you get the economics right, you're in good shape, or at least as good as you can be.

So part of it is fake news, I believe. Then another part of it is, I've heard other people say this, that we've created a nation of narcissists. Now in this case I'm not using narcissism in the way I've used it recently, which is a constellation of behaviors that are way beyond just thinking you look good. But in this narrow context I think they're talking about narcissism as in looking at Instagram and everybody's got a better life than you do. Everybody is criticizing everybody for everything all the time. So you worry that your self-esteem might be part of that. Hey, people must be criticizing me too. I don't look as good as this Instagram model. So certainly your phone is doing some of it. Certainly your mobile devices are part of it. There's no doubt that that's something.

And then what about this? I have a theory that you can't be happy unless your lifestyle is compatible with biological truth. You see what danger I'm heading into here, right? So pray for me. Pray for me before I finish my sentences. In my observation, so I'm not going to say there's any science behind this. I'm just going to present this as an observation over my own lifetime and observation over the life of other people, plus a little bit of sprinkling in of polls I've seen and surveys of what makes people happy. So there's a little bit of sense of science to it, but I'm not presenting it as science. It goes like this.

Biology says you should be involved in the mating process somehow. Now being involved in the mating process if you're young might be going to school, because those people who are improving themselves are also improving themselves for mating. Now you might think you're improving yourself because, I know it's expected. You might think it's you're doing it for economic reasons. You're not. Everything you do has a mating motive to it. And once you realize that, the whole world is more clear.

I can speak personally that every move I've ever made economically was really mating. It was all about attracting a mate. When I decided on my college major, I said to myself, which one of these will make me a more attractive mate? Yes, explicitly. I said that. I didn't say to myself, hmm, if I could be a lawyer that would be a good job. It matches my capabilities. Nothing like that. I literally said which one will give me better mating possibilities. I said it explicitly. It was my only motivation for anything, because I'm very tuned into my biological truth, which is unfortunately I was born that way. I could try to deny it. I could try to act like there's some other motive in me, but there isn't. There is no other motive. It's just mating.

Now I can treat the mating motive as the sub-motive just for social reasons. So I can say stuff like, well I'm just naturally ambitious. That's like CNN speak. If I tell you I'm ambitious, which is true, it's just it's an observably true statement, I'm really telling you I'm improving my mating brand, if you will. Even if you're married, even if you're not looking for mates, even if mating is nowhere in your mind, even if you're not having children, even if you're never going to have children, we're still mating creatures. You can't turn it off. And I'm always completely aware that everything I do is connected to that.

Now on top of that, I believe that we're designed to take care of ourselves first and then expand our power, if you will, to taking care of your family, your tribe, your town, your state, your country, the world. Roughly that order. And if you're improving yourself, say in school, or you're learning things at work, you're moving towards something better, which is moving toward being more of a mating opportunity, even if you're not taking the opportunity. You just you're just moving in a biologically compatible way. And I feel this society has moved us out of that track, and then it guarantees mental problems. Because if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing and it doesn't seem to have a purpose or reason, it's not connected to anything, how could you be mentally healthy? How could you be?

I've been mainlining a bunch of Jordan Peterson videos lately. Let me tell you something. I'll tell you he can spin your brain around so hard in five minutes. It's just the most amazing thing. I tried to resist watching a lot of Jordan Peterson videos for years actually, but I got addicted recently, got sucked in, and they are amazing. They're just amazing. But when you listen to him you can see that he's also keyed in in his own way. I don't want to represent his opinion, but you can see that he's quite keyed into the biological truth of reality. And if you're not, if your life and your personality and your thinking are not aligned with your biological truth, you're just not going to be happy. You just don't have a chance. So I think that could be part of the problem too.

But when you look at the differences in politics, you even look at Trump losing the election in 2020, I feel like mental health is the biggest part of that. Let me say that again because that's a big statement. I believe that poor mental health determined the election outcome because it's the biggest factor. Now you have to have all the things that happen happen just the way they happen for an election to go the way it goes, right? So it's always a little bit absurd to say here's the one reason. It's the one reason because it's all the reasons. Otherwise it doesn't happen. All the reasons have to happen or you don't get that outcome. But one that's let's say underappreciated is Trump derangement syndrome. And Trump derangement syndrome was from moment one always serious. It was always serious, meaning that when I use the phrase, and whether when others, well I can't speak for others, I'll just talk about myself. When I used the phrase Trump derangement syndrome, there was no joking about that. It was a real important phenomenon, which I think more largely could be called the mental health. It was a mental health problem.

And I think that Trump represented every bully and every problem that many young women have suffered. What percentage of young women have suffered a sexual abuse or whatever's in that category, some kind of Me Too stuff, any kind of sexual crime? What percentage of young women 18 to 29 have experienced that? A hundred percent. It's like a hundred percent. Yeah, I've never heard of anybody who hasn't. I've literally never heard of an adult woman who has not had this experience, and usually multiple times. Yeah. So if you're in a category who is getting literally sexually abused daily almost, and then the guy running for president reminds you of all that because he does, right? Like I'm a supporter of the president, but you can't deny the fact that his personality, the allegations against him, true or false, create an image of him that is the scariest thing a white woman between 18 and 29 could ever see in her life. It's the scariest thing in the world.

And imagine that guy becoming president. Imagine somebody who had, I'll use another situation just so you can imagine it better. Imagine you'd been imprisoned wrongly by some leader, and then later that leader ran for president, who won, and it was somebody who had imprisoned you illegally for years and tortured you or whatever. How would you feel? It'd be the worst feeling in the world to watch your abuser become the leader of the world. Now in the case of Trump, he would be like a proxy or a stand-in for all the problems that people have had that are real. He just comes to represent them because he plays into that so strongly.

So I would say mental health was the primary reason the election went the way it went. And we're seeing some of the outcome of that by Biden having to resist everything that Trump did on the border, which is a disaster. Biden has to resist everything that Trump did in the Middle East, disaster. Biden's doing a little better and not changing things in China, but at least he's talking about it differently, and that might not be good.

All right, so somehow the country got conned into believing that poor mental health is the same as a political opinion, and it's not. It's not. Poor mental health is not a political opinion. It just looks like it, and sometimes you can't tell the difference. And let me put it in this specific way. If you're worried about imaginary risks, like you wake up in the morning and you start worrying about imaginary risks while ignoring actual real ones, that's a mental health problem. But if you wake up in the morning and you have a reasonably good sense of what's important, what is a real danger and what is not, and then you proceed that way, you probably don't have a mental problem, at least not in that narrow context.

So we've somehow bought into people worrying about imaginary risks can just be in the conversation too. At the very least you should separate the people who have imaginary problems from the people who have real ones. But then who is the judge, right? Who gets to be the one who says, oh these ones are imaginary and these are real? Who gets to be the judge? Well, we don't have too many people we can trust in this world because politics overwhelms everything. I would say that I try to be that person but probably fail because I just don't know if it's doable. I try to be the person who's not just giving you a political opinion. I mean I try pretty hard, and you've seen me take positions on all sides, so you know that at least I can do that.

But this is why you have to look for your Matt Taibbis, your Glenn Greenwalds, your Michael Shellenbergers, because these are the ones you know can take an opposing opinion to whatever side they're on. You know they can because they do it. They do it all the time. So if you're not following the opinions of people who you know can take opposing opinions to their own team on a regular basis, you're just involved in something absurd. Absurd. Following the partisans only, that's just a hobby. You shouldn't really be part of the conversation.

Let's talk about the fentanyl war. As you know, China is killing something like 50 to 70,000 Americans per year in drug overdoses. It's primarily fentanyl, which China sends into Mexico. The cartels send into the United States. And as you know, China knows exactly who their dealers are because we've told them. Here's the name of your dealer. Could you go pick this guy up? Nope. Nothing happens.

So in the fentanyl war that China is winning convincingly because America is not playing, I looked at a list of American war dead. And so far the fentanyl war alone is, it's sort of hard to calculate it exactly because overdose deaths a little hard to know exactly why you died. But if you take say 10 years times 50 to 70,000 deaths, that's what it has been or will be soon. There are already more fentanyl war deaths than Vietnam and more than World War One American deaths. So we're just, I'm just looking at American deaths here. But if you took the fentanyl war casualties and you added the COVID-19 casualties, so you took all of China's effect, the fentanyl being the chemical and the COVID being the biological warfare, b