Is Idiocracy Coming？ Genetics, IQ, & Realistic Outcomes
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Summary
Is there a link between genetics and human IQ decline? Is it genetic, or is it environmental? Is there a demographic collapse coming? Are we destined to become an Idiocracy-style society like the one depicted in the film "Idiocracy"? In this episode, we discuss the growing evidence that genetics is to blame for the decline in human IQ.
Transcript
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With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to reward those who reproduced the most.
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It's not something you want to rush into, obviously.
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Come on over here, bitch! He don't care about you!
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Well, we finally decided to have children, and it's not going well.
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IQ is dropping by about 0.2 points annually in some regions.
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This may seem like a trivial decline, but when you consider the standard deviation of IQ is 15 points,
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such a decline, if sustained, will lead to a drop by one standard deviation every 75 years.
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Should this trend hold in those regions, in just 125 years, your average human will have an IQ
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that would, today, qualify someone as intellectually disabled.
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Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to be speaking with you today.
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I have read, in one of our comments, they're like,
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well, you know, this person thinks that you guys believe that human IQ is declining over time,
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and we stay away from a lot of the controversial genetic stuff.
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However, this is the one controversial genetics topic where I'm like,
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people really need to be realistic about the data.
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It's just the data in this is so loud and from so many different angles,
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and it will create real problems from society if we try to ignore this or pretend it's not happening.
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So, I mean, I'm just going to start with a recent study that I saw that was like,
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okay, yeah, we've got to be taking this seriously.
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So, this study shows that the mean IQ of U.S. college students has been dropping by 0.2 points per year
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And this phenomenon has been well-documented in many sources,
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Historically, you had something called the Flynn effect where all around the world,
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And the reason why you had the Flynn effect was because nutrition was increasing.
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But once nutritional needs, as they relate to brain development saturated in the human population,
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then dysgenics appears to be the primary cause that IQ was going down.
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But we'll get into this in more detail with lots of citations for this one,
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because I'm actually going to be going to a quote from our book.
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So, we're going to read a little passage from the book,
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The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, and go over it.
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Are we destined to become a society reminiscent of the nightmarish dystopia
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Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothing,
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but it says on your chart that you're fucked up.
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You talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
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What I do is just say, you know, you know what I mean?
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Now there are plenty of tards out there living really kick-ass lives.
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We mostly steer clear of fearful discourse about genetic selection against high IQ and dropping IQs
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in general, because it is such a charged topic,
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and our concerns around demographic collapse stand regardless of this scenario's potential.
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We only approach this philosophical third rail in order to dispel some common misconception.
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IQ has a high level of genetic correlation and can be predicted by looking at a person's genome.
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So I have a citation here. If you want to go through all of these citations,
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I'll just mention when I run across the citation, just get the book.
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It's like a dollar on Amazon, and it'll have all the citations listed.
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The association between genetics and IQ is not small.
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In fact, this meta-study argues the IQ correlation between adopted brothers and sisters,
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genetically unrelated people raised together, falls almost to zero in adulthood.
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Note, we think this meta-study might be overstating the correlation a little.
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Suffice it to say that there is very little argument in the scientific community over whether
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They debate things like how big that correlation is, whether that link is concentrated in specific
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ethnicities, which we spend an entire chapter of this book arguing against, whether IQ is a
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measure of what we mean when we talk about intelligence in the vernacular, a topic we
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won't go into here, do your own research, and whether the genes associated with IQ are stable
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in the population or declining, which we will focus on in this chapter.
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For those who are not up to date with what is an quote-unquote offensive position in the
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scientific consensus, we encourage you to read the Wikipedia page on this subject.
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So the point that I'm making here is it is so commonly accepted that IQ is a genetic
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thing that there is a Wikipedia page on this topic, or at least there was when I wrote the
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But we're pretty sure the people who turn a blind eye to the role genetics plays in
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privilege will be held in the same regard as those who claim they, quote-unquote, didn't
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Acting as though none of your partially inherited traits gave you systemic advantages over others,
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be they height, metabolism, attractiveness, or IQ, only serves to reinforce your unearned
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privilege, and ultimately breeds more systemic inequality.
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To be extremely clear, we refer to these two instances in relation to each other because
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each represents an assumed moral high ground through feigned blindness to systemic advantages
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We are not suggesting that any of these things are linked to race.
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Multiple studies have demonstrated that IQ is dropping by about 0.2 points annually in
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Oh, you see, it's been held up by more recent research.
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Though, the U.S. seems more resistant to this than other nations.
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This may seem like a trivial decline, but when you consider the standard deviation of IQ
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is 15 points, such a decline, if sustained, will lead to a drop by one standard deviation
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Should this trend hold in those regions, in just 125 years, your average human will have
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an IQ that would, today, qualify someone as intellectually disabled.
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Note, while our timelines are probably off, it is highly unlikely that we are wrong about
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Quote, so here I'm pretending to be one of our detractors, but IQ is not a good measure
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We, too, find it tedious and often misleading to focus so heavily on IQ.
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That said, while there is plenty of research separating out IQ from intelligence, we are the last people
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to pedestalize it, carrying far more about initiative and willpower.
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IQ does correlate with very common standards of achievement.
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If all the outcomes with which IQ correlates began to plummet, we seriously would be worried,
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To anyone who wants to try to argue that this is not a thing that's happening, especially
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we're not arguing about the speed that it's happening, you have to argue one of two, frankly,
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Either that there isn't evidence that IQ is correlated with genetics, which it just
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super, super, super obviously is, and it's probably one of the most robust findings in
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Actually, I saw one paper claiming that it was the single most robust finding in all of genetic
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Or, two, argue that people with lower IQs aren't having more kids than people with higher IQs.
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Again, I cannot imagine how anyone could conceivably argue this looking at any source of data in
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But people will try to say this, and they'll try to say it because it allows them to, one,
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not take responsibility for their unearned privilege, and two, because it allows them to maintain
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a world framework which is not correlated with reality.
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Some papers have argued that this decline in IQ is purely environmental.
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These arguments fall flat when combined with orthogonal source of evidence.
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In his paper, Natural Selection May Be Making Society More Unequal, David Hugh Jones wrote,
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We found that 23 out of 33 polygenic scores were significantly linked to a person having more
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or fewer children over their lifetime, dot, dot, dot.
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Scores which correlated with lower earnings in education predicted having more children.
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Meaning those scores are being selected for, from an evolutionary perspective.
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Scores which correlated with higher earnings in education predicted having fewer children.
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Meaning that they are being selected against, end quote.
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This study even shows the polygenic scores correlated with higher earnings in education decreasing
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This means it is measurable that genes which correlate with high IQ are appearing at lower frequencies
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in the population over time, and genes correlating with a high IQ are correlated with lower fertility
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So this, and I'm not quoting the book anymore, this directly connects with demographic collapse.
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And when we talk about shifting populations resulting from shifting fertility rates, what we're saying
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is that this, we have a lower educational attainment, lower earning future ahead of us based on these
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Imagine you are trying to determine the maximum speed of a car.
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One person makes this determination by looking at the engine and running calculations.
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This is analogous to the study of looking at how genes that correlate with IQ also correlate
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Another person makes this calculation by getting in the car and flooring the accelerator pedal.
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This is analogous to the various studies measuring declines in IQ at the population level.
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If the max speed each group independently determines is close, you can be fairly confident in its
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This is what we see above, meaning we're probably experiencing a meaningful decline in genes associated
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with high IQ that is likely to be sustained in the future.
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So this is a really important point for people because a lot of people look at this decline in IQ
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and they're like, well, you know, okay, it's, it's going down the IQ of people in college
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Like there's all these ways that maybe the way we're testing IQ is a bit different over
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But the problem is, is that this decline aligns with the predicted decline we would see from
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the fact that the people with the polygenic scores that we associate with high IQ are also
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And I should note something else that was pointed out about above paragraph where people are like,
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If you, for example, focus on the polygenic score associated with making a lot of money,
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That also, and when we say predicts low fertility, what we're really saying is that is
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disadvantageous from a natural selection standpoint within a modern environment, meaning it's being
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But not only do you have these studies, it's actually more accurate because there's a separate
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study that I might not have put in the book that looked at the polygenic scores that are
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associated with high IQ over time within genome databases.
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Because, you know, we've been collecting full genomes for a while now, like 10, 20 years at
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And we can look at the frequency of specific genetic sequences over time.
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And the frequency in the developed world, at least, that we are seeing these high IQ predicting
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polygenic scores occurring in the population is decreasing at the rate you would predict
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it to be decreasing if we really were seeing the 0.2 point decrease over time.
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But about this sustained into the future thing, part of me, I mean, so when we look at demographic
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collapse, we're also looking at populations getting lumpy and siloed and kind of walling
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Part of me, because of the growth of AI, is a little bit less concerned about this than
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I used to be, because I feel like the number of people we need who are quite smart is now
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And if you have a sufficient number, like minimum critical mass of people super humanly boosted
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by the resources of AI, which we've recently discovered can even really augment creativity,
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scientific or artistic, et cetera, that maybe we'll be okay.
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These people cannot use a, like, so one of the things that I've become increasingly aware
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of given the direction that AI development has gone, and we'll have another episode where
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we focus on this because we actually bought exclusive rights to a theme song for the show.
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The really great AI art and stories are coming from people who in the past would have been
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They, the AI is very useful at augmenting an individual's personal genius.
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And that's where you get the really, really high quality stuff.
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Like when I get the AI songs that are of the quality of a professional musician, these
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aren't necessarily the songs that the AI is just spitting out, right?
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They are the songs that have been mediated by somebody who has a unique talent for this sort
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They just allow that individual to create a lot more really high quality music a lot
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But so let's just say if we have very, very few geniuses in the future, is that so much
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of a problem when the output of those geniuses can be 10X'd by AI?
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Well, the problem is, is that we live in democracies and the, these people are going like the dumb
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ones are going to be more and more of the general population as time goes on.
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And, and, and, and so they will be electing and building bureaucracies that make it harder
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And I guess that also break in a road society in general.
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We also need to consider the geopolitics of how a declining number of competent, productive
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individuals impacts the solutions that countries are going to have access to when demographic
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We had some reporters from the Wall Street Journal over at our house yesterday, and we
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were talking with them about how, one, if you look at like the United States, if you look
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at the low income earners in the United States, it was something like 80% of them are living
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paycheck to paycheck, and yet most of their life is covered by social services, most of
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the, the food that they eat or their housing, et cetera.
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And when that social service disappears, these people are genuinely effed.
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Now, the problem here becomes as demographic collapse gets worse, it is hurting the more productive
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populations, economically speaking, i.e. the people who are paying more taxes, more than
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it's hurting the populations that are taking taxes.
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Now, this becomes a uniquely big problem in the face of AI empowering these productive individuals
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because it means that these productive individuals no longer have the same geographic ties that they
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By that, what I mean is, you know, both Simone and I do work in venture capital.
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For example, when you look at the venture capital deals that are being done in Silicon
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Valley these days, what everyone will tell you, it's like two guys in the United States,
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maybe 20 people in the Philippines, and then just tons of AIs.
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It is not like it used to be with Google or something like that, where you could get these
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giant companies that can't easily pick up and leave.
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If you think that you can make up for the rapid decrease in the number of productive people
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by taxing the few that are left more, these people will just pick up and leave.
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They'll either go to another country, or if no other stable democracies exist, they'll go
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to a charter city, which are increasingly being opened up, which allow them to not have to pay
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into these large socialized systems, which means that millions of people are going to starve,
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I mean, the scale of the human tragedy that is going to happen, because people are not being
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realistic about the fact that not all humans, even when you control for their childhood,
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are born with the same opportunities due to genetic differences in terms of how we perceive the world,
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It's going to be catastrophic at the scale, or likely bigger than the scale, of something
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like the Great Leap Forward in China, which, depending on the stats you're looking at, more
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people died in that five-year period trying to move their economy forwards than died during
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Just because something had good intentions doesn't mean people won't die.
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It doesn't mean you don't bear moral culpability for ignoring it when people told you, hey,
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you really need to pay attention to the fact that not all humans are born equally competent.
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Also, I should note for people who are like, IQ doesn't matter, and you shouldn't look at
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We have another video that goes really strong on the core arguments against that, that
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were done by Nazeep Talid or something like that.
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But basically, the people who argue this are lying to you.
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In a way where I don't know if they're intelligent and have engaged with the data, I don't think
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Because you can look at their own arguments, and they're structured like arguments.
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And this is the point that we were making in the last episode that we did on this particular
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thing ages ago, that the way that the arguments are structured, it's structured like the person
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who's getting it knows that they're lying to the audience, but is trying to figure out
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how to take the PC perspective, not by somebody who's genuinely been confused by the data.
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Because it's like, they'll be like, well, it only really matters when you get to really
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And it's like, yeah, but that's where the whole world's going to be in 100 years.
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And that's what really gets me, that the average person in the developed world within
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125 years that's born is going to be what today would be categorized as mentally disabled.
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I do think that things are a little bit clouded.
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I was listening this morning to a YouTube video on the evil history of eugenics, and it
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was talking about all these different IQ surveys and bits of research that had taken place.
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And based on contemporary definitions of basic intelligence, something like 45% of people
00:20:05.960
coming through Ellis Island were seen as having the intelligence of a five-year-old or below,
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And yet, these are people who had figured out from positions of quite meager means, we'll
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I would say these were people who came from an environment that were incredibly low-nutrition
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I would not be surprised, given the amount of lead that was used in products back then,
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given the amount of starvation that would have happened back in.
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Actually, half the people going through Ellis Island did have the intelligence of a five-year-old.
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And so another one of the arguments that I want to present is throughout the vast majority
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of human history, due to nutritional constraints, due to immense poverty, pervasive poverty, and
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or just a very small class that was given the resources to even just be literate, that we,
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for a very, very long time, have gotten by on an extremely small percentage.
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I think the most interesting element of this, to me, is what's different now and why is
00:21:16.860
And perhaps the biggest issue here is that in the past, those who counted as intelligent
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by contemporary measures were the ones who ruled society and built the things and decided
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Whereas now, society is going to be run by, to a certain extent, the lowest or most mediocre
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common denominator, which means that either what's very urgent, if the reverse of, I mean,
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basically given that the reverse effect, reverse Flynn effect is real, is we have to automate
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and eliminate as much of government as possible so that there is as little deep state as possible
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because every person working in government is going to increasingly become a liability as
00:22:00.260
the average person becomes dumber, essentially.
00:22:05.400
But what you're missing here, and this is the point I was going to make, is you're not
00:22:09.980
taking into account the effect that a decreasing average has on long tails.
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So, what's really not being taken into account here is-
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Right, that whole saying of like, have you met the average person?
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Are you familiar with what I mean by long tails?
00:22:29.600
I think so, but you're probably going to expand on it.
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I'm not really sure where you're going with this.
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I'm assuming you're saying that just this means that the dumbest people are going to
00:22:43.520
And one population had an average IQ that was five points above the other population.
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If you then, in that society, find the top 1% of people, right?
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90% of that top 1% are going to be from the population that's just five IQ points higher
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than the other population if those two groups are equal numbered in society.
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When you have a move in the middle, it disproportionately affects the long tail.
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So, if you have a move five points or 10 points down in the middle, that's going to vastly, vastly,
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vastly decrease the number of geniuses that are being born.
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Much more than you would expect from just like, say, a 30 or 40% decrease in general intelligence.
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It would cause the level of like genius level today, people being born to drop by like 98%,
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Do you think that's really going to happen when a portion of the population that values
00:23:51.480
intelligence and begins using polygenic risk score selection, not just because they're
00:23:56.600
obsessed with intelligence, but because more and more people are going to be forced to use
00:24:00.960
IVF and PGDP polygenic risk score selection is going to become just more common practice.
00:24:05.980
That people will sort of by accident select for intelligence, even if they don't value it,
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that this population of people delaying fertility, using IVF, and then inadvertently selecting
00:24:16.500
for intelligence is going to create more super geniuses.
00:24:21.120
I mean, we have the Kwisat Khadarak of our family, right?
00:24:24.580
And like, they're what, in like the top 99.8% of intelligence.
00:24:29.600
I think we're going to see more of those children being born as people select for them.
00:24:36.040
So I think that what is going to happen in the future, so if I'm like actually trying
00:24:40.740
to predict the most likely scenario in the future, this plays into that scenario, but
00:24:45.180
doing polygenic selection to increase the IQ of your kids, given how quickly polygenic
00:24:50.520
scores are decreasing, isn't actually going to protect your family line that much, unless
00:24:57.380
your family line is genetically isolating itself from the general population.
00:25:01.400
Right, because you've got reversion to the mean, and in the end, you shouldn't be dating
00:25:04.540
someone because they themselves are smart, but because their entire family is smart.
00:25:09.180
Like on first date, you should be asking like, so what did your grandfather do?
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I like this point because people often go to you and they'll be like, well, your wife is
00:25:19.420
smart, but aren't you afraid of reversion to the mean?
00:25:21.900
And I'm like, yeah, that's why I checked that she was from a smart family, because the mean
00:25:25.620
is high, because you're not reverting to, like we often talk about reversion to the mean
00:25:30.220
as being like to the population mean, but functionally what's happening in reversion to
00:25:34.700
the mean is you're reverting to the mean of your individual families and ancestors.
00:25:40.020
And so if that mean is high and you are genius or intelligent due to some random mutation,
00:25:46.960
that random mutation isn't going to occur in your kids at a high level, so they're not
00:25:50.800
going to get, you know, your unique intelligence.
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However, I'm not smart because I'm like a mutant.
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I'm smart because like my brother is a genius and my parents are geniuses.
00:26:01.460
And what's quite interesting is this actually shows up in the polygenic scores related to
00:26:07.660
So there is only one embryo of all of our embryos for which we have polygenic scores that is either
00:26:17.340
at the exact average for the population or like two or 3% below average.
00:26:26.220
So the, the vast majority of our embryos are clustered like a third to halfway in between like
00:26:43.800
So you can really see like there's this clustering and you see this with almost all polygenic
00:26:48.420
If you get any, like you look at polygenic risk scores of your embryos for something like
00:26:52.580
gum disease or for schizophrenia or for depression, you're not actually, you might see one outlier
00:26:59.260
here or there, but for the most part, you are just going to see them all kind of clustered.
00:27:03.780
So for some of our kids, they just have equally shitty outcomes around certain things like acne.
00:27:09.120
For example, we're all going to have a bunch of pizza faced kids because that's just our genetic
00:27:16.780
So we're going to have pizza faced kids and our grandparents probably were pizza faced too.
00:27:26.360
Do I think that some populations are going to begin to genetically isolate themselves as
00:27:30.380
the general population really isn't doing anything about this?
00:27:35.320
Another thing to remember from a historic standpoint, and we mentioned this in another video,
00:27:39.220
but it's good to come back to is the effect that current child support laws have on out
00:27:46.160
group breeding, which is to say that historically you would have some individuals develop or some
00:27:52.000
families develop genes that were more associated with success in that society, i.e. earning lots
00:28:00.360
But then these individuals would, when they were male, impregnate lots of women who they
00:28:05.520
weren't married to, which we can also see from the data.
00:28:11.260
And through that, like a guy might rise up to a local lord, but he'd impregnate a bunch of
00:28:16.640
And so you never really got that much of a differentiation between the competent people
00:28:23.160
That has changed recently, specifically due to child support laws, because now when a person
00:28:30.060
is super wealthy, when a male is super wealthy or successful in some other means, they are
00:28:34.520
going to be very wary about getting a woman pregnant who they don't see as their equal
00:28:39.700
or someone they want to spend their entire life with.
00:28:41.700
Because they're going to be on the hook to pay for any children they have with them.
00:28:45.460
Yeah, which is hugely dysgenic because that means that individuals who, like a man who is
00:28:51.020
not successful, who doesn't have much money, there actually isn't really that much of a
00:28:55.580
cost to him in getting a bunch of women pregnant.
00:28:57.800
So if I'm the type of guy who's in and out of pregnant, in and out of prison, tons of debt,
00:29:03.080
no wealth, can't really hold a job, there's no reason for me not to knock up a bunch of
00:29:11.580
And that's why you see the people who are knocking up lots of people and having a lot of
00:29:15.440
children out of wedlock are the people who don't have a lot to lose, really.
00:29:23.220
But the larger point being to all of this, when people are like, we can just keep doing
00:29:29.200
what we're doing, genetically speaking, without polygenic selection, without gene editing,
00:29:36.320
And if you're in a community that is not ruthlessly selecting for the intelligence of your children's
00:29:42.400
mates and building a culture that does that, in the future, you're just not going to be
00:29:48.420
one of the few groups on earth that end up mattering.
00:29:51.180
And even we can't engender that within our kids in terms of their mates.
00:29:54.960
You know, don't pay attention to how attractive they are.
00:29:57.860
Look only at work ethic, ambition, IQ, you know, stuff like this.
00:30:03.200
And then eventually, given the direction of the general population, you know, when you're
00:30:09.260
talking about a two standard deviation decrease in the next hundred years, the only way some
00:30:14.920
part of our current civilization ends up surviving is if some population does genetically isolate
00:30:24.220
I've been reading this book called Red Rising, which if you have Audible right now, it's presently
00:30:29.320
available for free if you have an Audible subscription, which is why I'm listening to it.
00:30:34.440
It's the one I described to you where it has these striations in population.
00:30:38.800
There are the golds, there are the pinks and purples and coppers and silvers and reds.
00:30:44.320
But the golds are at the very top of society and they rule.
00:30:49.500
And they are brutally eugenic to the extent that in their top leadership academies, there
00:31:00.820
It's not like only one will be left, but they definitely have quotas of people that are totally
00:31:07.940
Like, you know, 10% of the student population is going to die.
00:31:10.880
And that's a good thing because you want the weak ones to die.
00:31:13.100
And they are therefore taller and bigger and they look different.
00:31:29.760
I'm saying that people can be like, well, we can, there isn't a way basically to keep
00:31:35.480
the IQ stable with the selective pressures that are created by modernity.
00:31:41.860
Either you're in one of the groups that's striving to increase your IQ, ambition, other
00:31:47.500
genetically correlated traits, or you're not paying attention to this in terms of your
00:31:51.900
groups of breeding practices, and you are in a downwards and rapidly downward spiral to
00:32:02.540
When we talk about the correlatories to IQ, a lot of people assume IQ is just how smart
00:32:09.440
But like, what, what are things that are really correlated with IQ?
00:32:15.360
People with low IQs are much more likely to grape someone than people with high IQs.
00:32:31.900
So just broadly, being a nice person, helping other people out, contributing to society,
00:32:37.940
being healthy, all of these things correlate positively with IQ.
00:32:41.980
Which is why I implied earlier that if people do polygenic risk or selection with their embryos,
00:32:46.700
and they're only looking at things like being kind, having a sense of humor, or being healthy,
00:32:55.360
But something that you point out, yeah, sure, you can, you can focus on this or you cannot
00:32:59.120
in terms of your family's breeding practices or whatever.
00:33:02.340
But I think the bigger issue is either, like I said, you have to figure out how to streamline
00:33:08.300
government as much as possible to avoid the human liability problem as people get on average
00:33:13.240
less intelligent, or we need to really double down among those communities that are maintaining
00:33:19.120
high IQs with this city-state concept whereby people are just going to their walled off gardens.
00:33:25.260
And well, you can have city-states in terms of, what's that term that everybody likes to
00:33:30.300
use now, the network state, you can have network state marriage markets and stuff like that,
00:33:36.440
Yeah, but if you're still being governed by a nation that is increasingly inept and dangerous,
00:33:46.740
Well, and this is why I predict that city-states are the future.
00:33:50.180
As it becomes clearer that there are some subpopulations that through AI, as you pointed out,
00:33:54.640
are going to be even more efficacious than they would be in today's world, and that we'll
00:33:59.580
have a dramatically higher IQ than the general population.
00:34:03.620
But also that government, which is increasingly deep state-driven and still very much human-run,
00:34:09.780
becomes increasingly dumber, which can you imagine government getting dumber than it is
00:34:19.600
It's not just about having the 10x power or more of AI.
00:34:23.060
It's about being pushed away from quite a liability of governance.
00:34:34.960
But also, you say that people with low IQ are moving in the direction of cultural irrelevance,
00:34:43.960
And I would expect something a little bit closer to idiocracy, where that is the pervasive culture.
00:34:48.840
And it's huge, and it's big, and it's everywhere, and it's loud, and it's amusing.
00:34:53.980
I think closer than idiocracy is removing to WALL-E, you know, with the AIs and everything
00:35:00.200
like that, that are basically making all the decisions for these.
00:35:05.980
Because the other thing that's really correlated with high fertility rates, people might be
00:35:11.880
The single most correlated with fertility rate of all the polygenic scores a person has
00:35:15.520
is the one that is actually meant for correlating with IQ.
00:35:19.420
But the second one in a study that was looking at this is the one that's correlated with obesity.
00:35:25.800
Well, I guess Zimpik exists today, so maybe that won't be an issue.
00:35:28.820
It'll be some sort of weird, sad form of, I don't know, hedonism, whatever.
00:35:37.160
But yeah, I don't think it'll be exactly like idiocracy, because I think that AI does sort
00:35:47.040
The general pop's IQ is decreasing rapidly, way more rapidly than people think.
00:35:52.020
The one standard deviation in 75 years is shockingly fast.
00:35:56.500
And that you see this across all measures and pretty much everywhere you look.
00:36:00.720
And it is so interesting to me that the powers that be are just pretending like it's not happening.
00:36:06.040
Oh, I suppose the question is, what do you do about that?
00:36:11.380
I think people just have to support human dignity and respect that maybe intelligence...
00:36:20.760
Listen, in the end, the thing that deserves whatever is the thing that takes it.
00:36:26.740
And if obesity and lower educational attainment are what manage to inherit the future genetically,
00:36:42.260
And a big theme that we've seen in low fertility rates is people being so far up their asses in
00:36:49.100
And we're probably going to do a separate episode on this, but people overanalyzing things and
00:36:54.680
overthinking things without having enough of an emphasis on action in their lives,
00:36:58.600
really just not having kids, also not doing anything with their careers, not doing anything
00:37:03.180
In fact, I argue that there is an immense portion of the quote-unquote intelligent population
00:37:08.460
that contributes probably less to society than significantly less intelligent.
00:37:14.240
And we're talking quite below average people in this world.
00:37:16.880
Because they spend all of their time strategizing and writing and managing and analyzing and
00:37:27.260
So maybe in the end, IQ isn't all you make it out to be.
00:37:31.680
Maybe in the end, only the small number of people who are both intelligent and action-oriented,
00:37:37.040
like Elon Musk, who can both think and do things, which is quite unusual, are the ones
00:37:42.720
And a lot of the people, even God bless you all, but people who listen to this podcast,
00:37:46.880
who are very smart, but aren't doing anything with their lives, don't matter.
00:37:51.080
In fact, matter less than the obese, high school-educated person who's having a ton of kids.
00:37:56.760
So if you want to be among the elect, dear Based Camp listener, I hope that you are actually
00:38:02.680
doing something with your life and actually having kids.
00:38:05.540
Because you may be among the entire reason why IQ is disappearing.
00:38:09.360
Because you guys can't keep your fucking acts together.
00:38:18.120
Unrelated to today's discussion, because I didn't even know we were talking about this,
00:38:29.880
Because I was looking for fun things that we could use in a Base Camp intro.
00:38:33.660
And I'm reading these and I'm thinking, these are just things that we say around the house.
00:38:39.000
Not what the protagonist says, just what people from the future idiot world say.
00:38:48.820
But I mean, who drinks water when you have Diet Coke?
00:39:18.820
No, there are so many great lines in it though, but also, I don't, I think it's interesting
00:39:27.880
that a lot of what's considered to be the epitome of dumb comments in Idiocracy are actually
00:39:34.680
super-based comments that I would consider to be dumb.
00:39:38.940
I mean, yeah, obviously there's a lot, like watering fields with the equivalent of Gatorade
00:39:44.440
I was just going through Idiocracy clips and this scene reminds me so much of what I am
00:39:52.000
trying to talk to brainwashed ultra-progressives.
00:39:55.720
So when you're watching this scene, replace Brondo with DEI and Electrolytes with Equality
00:40:03.020
and this is me like talking to my friends who are higher-ups at Disney or whatever.
00:40:11.080
For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brondo stuff.
00:40:21.040
What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops?
00:40:29.240
Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but yeah, that's the idea.
00:40:36.440
Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.
00:40:41.360
Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.
00:40:45.980
You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?
00:40:49.100
Okay, look, you want to solve this problem, so why don't we just try it, okay?
00:41:06.440
Yeah, but why did they use them to make Brondo?
00:41:14.840
But do you know why there is Diet Coke and Coke Zero as two separate products?
00:41:26.660
So Coke Zero came about when they invented a formula that could create a Coke that tasted more like the original Coke.
00:41:35.440
And they decided to use this opportunity to see if they could create a diet product that targeted the male audience instead of the female audience.
00:41:45.800
Because diet soda before that was predominantly consumed by women who were worried about their figure.
00:41:51.540
So they were the ones who were more willing to compromise on flavor to attempt to stay thin, right?
00:41:59.040
Yes, because nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.
00:42:02.460
That is why Coke Zero, it's called Coke Zero instead of like Coke Light or Diet Coke or Diet Coke Blue.
00:42:10.400
Because diet as a word in branding is associated with women, female products.
00:42:23.800
And then it's like red and black and masculine.
00:42:30.100
It is, yeah, that light has also been considered a sufficiently male term.
00:42:36.360
Now, I've never had campaigns when we've had TVs on while traveling, like in the rooms we've been in, for the new light beer, I think it's Dos Equis Oro, like gold.
00:42:50.120
They're not even trying to put in any indicator of low-caloriness anymore.
00:42:55.500
They're just telling people and advertising that it's a light beer.
00:42:59.200
I just think it's that toxic for men to be seen.
00:43:02.660
And here we have Duff, Duff Light, and our newest flavor, Duff Drime.
00:43:14.480
It's the story of, and these are things I learned in business school or like around that time.
00:43:20.500
The Diet Coke thing was before business school.
00:43:21.940
This one is the story of Lighthouse and Coors Light.
00:43:30.600
Yes, Lighthouse was a light beer made by the Samuel Adams Brewing Company.
00:43:35.440
And it kept winning every light beer competition, you know, in terms of like taste, right?
00:43:41.040
So it would keep winning all the big taste testing competitions.
00:43:44.720
But it just wasn't selling that well, especially when compared to the top light beer on the market, which was Coors Light.
00:43:49.860
Which, you know, everyone is like, this does not taste like a beer.
00:43:55.340
Like, why is it winning all of these, like in the actual mind of the consumer when we know?
00:44:02.420
Okay, so they then did user testing and they went out to try to find, you know,
00:44:09.780
why was everybody buying Coors Light and not the Lighthouse?
00:44:13.060
And it turned out it was because they were optimizing around completely the wrong problem.
00:44:19.040
What they had been trying to do with Lighthouse was to create a beer that was lower calorie than a normal beer,
00:44:26.660
but tasted as close as possible to a normal beer.
00:44:31.200
But with Coors Light, they didn't want a beer experience?
00:44:34.240
No, what they wanted was something refreshing to drink after a hard day's work.
00:44:48.600
That is what, like, that is honestly what Coors Light is.