Episode 1392 Scott Adams: Study Says Young Liberal Women Have Mental Problems, Translating CNN, and Experts Get Stuff Wrong
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Content:
Translating CNN speak
Michael Shellenberger takes on fentanyl, addiction, homelessness
Political extremes and mental problems
Young white liberal women and mental problems
President Trump taught us NOT to trust experts and the media
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Go. Yeah.
Yeah, that's the stuff.
That's the good stuff.
Morning stuff. That's a reference from Land Before Time.
One of the funniest scenes by Will Ferrell.
Well, on CNN, I was reading an article about how the Republican-led states of Texas, Florida, Georgia, and some other ones, have quote, and this is the phrase from CNN, have seized on former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election.
They've seized upon his lies.
And I don't know exactly what it means to seize upon some lies, because it's hard to get a handful of a lie.
They're kind of slippery.
But apparently you can seize them, and then once you've seized them, bad things happen.
And apparently the bad thing is that these states are adopting new restrictions that will make it harder for some of the residents to vote.
Well, that sounds bad.
My God, why are these states making it harder for people to vote?
I feel like I've heard the whole story now.
There couldn't possibly be anything that would explain why they're making these changes.
Well, the reason they're making the changes to the voting system is because they seized on President Trump's lie.
You can see how these are connected, right?
So you've got the seizing on the lie, and that causes you to change your laws so that fewer people can vote.
It's true, because it's right here in CNN. Oh, do you think there's another way to interpret this?
Well, let's go to the CNN-speak interpreter.
All right, calling up my app for interpreting CNN... We'll look up seizing on a Trump lie.
Seizing on a Trump lie, that's translated to improving election integrity.
Alright, so seizing on a Trump election lie, same thing as improving election integrity.
Let's see, are there other things that are confusing?
Let's see, restrictions on voting.
Let's go to the translator. Restrictions on voting means Restrictions on vote rigging.
Yeah. Restrictions on voting translates into restrictions on illegal votes and vote rigging.
Anything else we should look up?
How about... I see them use the phrase capital insurrection a lot.
Let's go to the translator. Capital insurrection.
Click, click, click, click, click. Capital insurrection translates from CNN speak into a capital protest.
A protest. How about courts find no widespread election fraud?
Put it in the translator.
Courts find no widespread election fraud.
And that translates to blind man watches no movies this year.
Well, that's just an analogy.
That doesn't help me. Let me think.
Blind man watches no movies.
Well, Of course.
Because he's blind.
Because when you're blind, you can't watch things.
And if you're a court and nobody brings you a case that you're willing to hear, well, maybe you don't find any widespread election problems.
Could be because there aren't any.
Could be. Could be they didn't find any because there aren't any.
It could also be because they didn't look for any.
Either one of those two things would get you in the right place.
Alright, here's some good news.
Have you ever noticed that when people, let's say, invest in companies, or even managers at big companies, they tend to make their decisions based on the personnel more than the details of the proposition?
So if you're high up in management of anything, if you're a leader, you're usually depending on the person who brings you the idea to know if it's a good idea.
Like, you can't independently know What all of your underlings know.
So you just depend on them.
So if you've got the right people, well, you've got a good investment.
Warren Buffett would tell you that they invest not only in solid businesses, but they make sure that the management is solid.
That's one of their top things.
Of course. Of course.
So if you're looking at any problem in the world, and you're saying to yourself, if you're saying to yourself, What's going to happen with that problem?
I think you look at the personnel involved.
And that will predict pretty well.
And so here's some good news.
Michael Schellenberger 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 Schellenberger, 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.
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 Schellenberger 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've got to 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.
Schellenberger 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 Schellenberger 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 Pohl 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 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 a 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 leading.
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% more likely to develop depression than men.
I think this is just a little context.
We'll get to the story. First of all, did you know that?
That women are 40% more likely to develop depression than men?
I would say, sure looks like it.
If I had to base it on my own life experience, I'd say, that might be low.
Might be low. I mean, I certainly have known men who are depressed, but I don't think it's even close.
So that, you know, 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 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 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 at a rate of...
What?
56.3% of them had mental problems?
As compared to 28% in moderates and 27% in conservatives.
So for the same age group, white women, 18 to 29, twice as many who identify as liberals have medically certified in medical diagnosis, it's not self-reporting, Medical diagnosis that twice as many of them, twice as many, have mental problems.
Now, are you surprised?
Nope. Nope.
Is there anybody who's 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, 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?
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 are, 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, you know, credible source, They say maybe a 10% difference in the GDP over 80 years, which you wouldn't notice.
Because the GDP will be so high by them, because it's just its normal increase, that if it's 10% 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, an observation over the life of other people, plus a little bit of sprinkling in of polls I've seen in 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 It's expected.
You might think you're doing it for economic reasons.
You're not. Everything you do has a mating motive to it.
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 the 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 see-it-and-speak.
If I tell you I'm ambitious, which is true, 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 in 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're just moving in a biologically compatible way, And I feel that society has moved us out of that track, and that 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 a 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 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 in to the biological truth of reality.
And 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 used the phrase, 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 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 is 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?
100%? It's like 100%.
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 unusually multiple times.
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 and 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 that 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 in 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 You're Matt Taibbi's.
You're Glenn Greenwald's.
You're Michael Schellenberger's.
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 50,000 to 70,000 Americans per year in drug overdoses.
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...
It's sort of hard to calculate it exactly because overdose deaths are a little hard to know exactly why you died.
But if you take, say, 10 years times 50,000 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 I. American deaths.
So I'm just looking at American deaths here.
But if you took the fentanyl war casualties, and you added the COVID-19 casualties, so that you took all of China's effect...
The fentanyl being the chemical and the COVID being the biological warfare, be it accidental or intentional.
And if you add those together, and I think you could, I mean, there's a reasonable way to do that, you're approaching World War II numbers.
Now, World War II is the biggest war loss of life for Americans.
But if you added COVID and fentanyl together, it looks like it might pass it eventually.
Now, it will take several years, but the fentanyl war together with the COVID war will be the biggest war casualties that America has ever suffered, and all of it at the hands of China, who we still do business with.
And we still negotiate with them.
We treat them like, oh, hey, how you doing, China?
Let's have a meeting. Amazing.
It's amazing that we can walk around in that fog.
One of the best things that's come out of the last few years, and I credit Trump for this, and I also predicted it in 2016.
I told you Trump would change everything about how we view reality.
And the biggest part of that, I think, is discrediting the news, rightfully, and discrediting experts, again, rightfully.
Trump has been the leading voice in saying that the experts are not to be trusted and that the news is not to be trusted.
And here we are. We don't trust them.
Did Trump succeed?
Yeah, he did. He totally succeeded.
He taught us not to trust our experts just automatically.
You still have to trust experts if you don't have a better idea.
There's no other option.
Maybe all the experts agree, and they've agreed on it for years.
Maybe there are lots of studies.
So there are some things you can do that will give you some comfort with expert advice.
But believing the experts somewhat automatically is stupid.
It's just stupid. You should try to wean yourself off of that habit.
There's an article in the Washington Post that tells you the trend by Allison Young.
And she says, quote, It seems that expert consensus was somewhat illusory.
Now she's talking about the lab leak hypothesis with COVID. The expert consensus was somewhat illusory.
And it would have been well to remember that, like the rest of us, scientists are prone to groupthink and non-scientific concerns can creep into their public statements.
Now, here's the amazing part.
It's not that you didn't know that.
Raise your hand if you didn't know that.
We all knew it.
Here's the weird part.
Everybody knew it.
But for some reason, we had agreed to act like we didn't.
Right? Wouldn't you say that, let's say five years ago, that everybody would know that experts can be biased?
Everybody knew that. 100% of people know that experts can be biased.
But we had all agreed, sort of as a silent, unspoken agreement in society, that we would act as if it weren't true.
Why? Why?
Was there ever a reason to act as if the thing we all knew was true, to act as if it's not?
Why did we do that?
It never made sense.
And Trump, I would say, fixed that.
He fixed that.
It's probably his greatest accomplishment.
We'll never get credit for it.
The history books will not write that Donald Trump taught us to stop blindly trusting experts who are lying to us.
But he did that.
He did that, right?
I mean, you know, it was a ripple effect that started with him, so many of us were involved with it.
I would say I'm part of that process as well, as many people are.
But it was him. I mean, I wouldn't have been doing it if he hadn't started it.
It was him. And it's one of the most useful things that's ever happened in, wait for it, the history of civilization.
That's right. This mental shift that Trump did for us, stopping our trust in experts, blind trust, right?
You still need some trust in experts.
You don't want to get rid of all of it.
Because sometimes you can be a little more comfortable with them.
But I would say that Trump has made the biggest psychological improvement in humanity's thinking Maybe one of the greatest shifts in all of human history.
And you didn't really notice it because there was so much noise going on.
We were just arguing about stuff, and we were sort of arguing about experts, and sure enough, experts were wrong, and sure enough, the news was wrong, and it's more hoaxes than real.
And you didn't really realize the transition as it was happening.
But we're here. You know it now.
And you know it wouldn't have happened without Trump.
Right? I'd like to see if people agree with that part of my opinion, that Trump was the cause that really launched that all.
I'm just going to read some opinions here as they go by.
The Great Disillusionment, somebody's calling it.
I see some people agreeing.
Yes, yes, yes. 100%.
Blah, blah, blah.
I see one now from Dale.
Dale. Somebody named Dale says no.
It's the only no I see. All right.
Yeah, it looks like most of you agree with that statement.
All right. And then lastly, because it's Memorial Day, and...
Because there are some stories that are important but should not be reported with vigor.
And here's one of them.
There was another mass shooting.
I'm not even going to tell you the state.
I mean, if you want to look into it, you can Google it.
But I'm not going to tell you how many people died.
I'm not going to tell you where it was.
I'm not going to tell you what state it was in.
I'm not going to tell you what weapons were used.
I'm not going to tell you a hero stopped it if they did.
I don't know. I'm not going to talk about this anymore.
Because every time you do, it just gives attention to the shooters, and there's nothing good that can come from that.
Now, I'm not ignoring it.
If you're saying to me, Scott, it's a giant problem, and you're ignoring it.
No, no, that's not happening.
I'm not ignoring the problem.
I'm just not making it worse.
So by ignoring talking about it, I'm helping to fix the problem.
So by ignoring it, I'm trying to be part of the productive part of the world that's putting it back in its place and not persuading people that it's a good idea to get some fame.
We saw with, I think it was the Parkland shooter, there were some videos that came out that showed that he really wanted the fame.
He did it for the fame.
Now, what gave him that idea?
Well, the fact that it's widely reported and talked about.
If he didn't widely report it and talk about it, he would have had a different idea.
Maybe less dangerous.
I don't know. So let's not lose how important these shootings are, but let's not fetishize them.
Let's not make them something that somebody wants to participate in.
If you do, you should be lost in obscurity, and I'll help you.
All right. Yeah, you know, I worry about these...
You hear these cases where everybody was warned about the shooter.
You know, the police had already talked to him.
The FBI was warned.
I don't know if you can make that criticism, really, because it's always out of context.
The context is that the police and the FBI probably get so many warnings that they couldn't possibly treat them all as serious.
They've got to do a little...
They've got to do a little judgment on, okay, this one looks like it'll blow up.
Maybe this one isn't such a big problem.
But they don't know.
They have to guess, because otherwise you can't get to all the work.
So I tend to be more forgiving than most when I hear a story like, the FBI talked to this person and all the signs were there, but they didn't act.
Because I've got a feeling the signs are there with a lot of people who don't act.
And I would imagine the FBI knows that.
It's like, you know, There'd be a lot of people we could arrest based on the suspicion it might happen.
But you need a lot more than that.
You know, we still live in a free country.
You can't be arrested because somebody suspects you might want to commit a crime.
All right.
Brian says, you've lost trust with every element of our justice system.
Well, let me give you some perspective.
Do you believe that our justice system is worse than any time in history?
I'll bet not. I'll bet if you had any way to objectively rate the justice system in the United States, and then if you had magically the same ratings across time, I'll bet it's better than it's ever been.
But we just might have more information about the bad stuff.
So I'm not positive, but I think it's probably better.
And probably a lot better.
That would be my guess.
My guess would be a lot better.
Not even close. But those of you who say it's worse, keep in mind that you're seeing non-stop bad news.
Because bad news is the only news about the justice system.
If the justice system just does its job, that's not news.
So the only news you're hearing is the problems.
Just keep that in mind. I wouldn't automatically think the justice system is a disaster.
And I would say that if you're looking at what the purpose of the justice system is, it's to keep society together, right?
If you lose our justice system, the whole thing falls apart.
I think you'd agree with that, right?
So the justice system is mostly about keeping the wheels on.
And has it done that?
And has it made the United States a place that people want to leave their country and live here, in part because our justice system is better?
I'd say yes. If I were to give our entire justice system a grade, I'd have to grade it against other countries.
If you grade our justice system against some notion of perfect, it's pretty bad, right?
Because it's not perfect.
It's not too close to perfect.
So if that's your standard, yeah, it's a mess.
But if you compare it to other countries, not bad.
It's not bad. And if you look at it on a functional level, does it make people want to come here?
Does it allow our commerce system to work efficiently?
Because commerce requires a judicial system.
You can't do commerce Unless you can sue somebody who screws you, right?
Nothing works unless you've got a judiciary.
So I would say our commerce system is working great, which suggests that the foundation for it, the legal system, is at least doing a sufficient job, if not spectacular.
So Henry says, they threw the January 6th people into solitary confinement.
Yeah, individual mistakes, yes.
There are plenty of individual mistakes, and we should not lose sight of that.
The justice system is not the sort of thing that's going to work perfectly all day long.
It's the sort of thing that's going to be breaking continually, and you just got to keep fixing it continually, which we do.
The very fact that you know that, that you're aware of the fact that those people were put in solitary, which, by the way, I'm not entirely sure is true, but if there's enough transparency to put pressure on that, At least there's some counterforce, and maybe that makes a difference.
500 people is not an individual mistake.
Well, I don't believe that there are 500 people in solitary confinement.
And I'm not sure that anyone was for a long time.
But I'm open to it.
I'm not saying it didn't happen.
It just feels like a little bit Feels like a little too on the nose, like maybe it wasn't that bad, but I'm open to the fact that it might have been.
