The Myth of an Asian IQ Advantage： The Truth is Somehow More Offensive
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per minute
173.85411
Harmful content
Misogyny
8
sentences flagged
Toxicity
25
sentences flagged
Hate speech
83
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about IQ differences between Asian Americans and white people, and why it matters. We also discuss the controversial theory that Jews have a higher IQ than other groups, and how that could be linked to genetics.
Transcript
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Lynn was comparing American IQ estimates based on a representative sample with Japanese estimates
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based on upper income, heavily urban samples. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in
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not at 106.6, but 99.2. When the Chinese American scores were reassessed using up-to-date
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intelligence metrics, Flynn found they came in at a 97 verbal and a 100 nonverbal. The numbers now
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suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher IQs, but despite their
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lower IQs. People are cherry-picking studies to get these big differences. It's not that you don't
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get any difference between ethnic groups, but the difference is typically like two to three IQ points,
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just not a really significant number. East Asian students spent approximately 13 more hours per
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week on academic activities compared to their- 13! 13 more hours. It is not some Asians are
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smarter than white people thing. It's Asians work harder than white people. Is that an offensive
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thing to say? Like, I don't know. No, it's so, I think it's so commonly understood. When you remove
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all of the DEI nonsense, 72% of the top academic performers become Asian. Like, that's wild.
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But it gets more surprising because Asian Americans are actually way less successful than you would
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expect them to be. Less than one percent of corporate officers and corporate board members
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in America are Asians. And only two percent of college presidents. Only nine of the Fortune 500 CEOs
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are Asians. Gosh. Now, we're going to get to the final part where I'm going to get really offensive here.
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Yay! Really offensive. I love these parts. Would you like to know more?
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be talking to you. We did an episode that was actually a long quote
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from our book that went over the myth of a high Jewish Ashkenazi IQ. This episode has gone viral, so
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that's fun. And I was like, let's double down. Because people said, this episode is going to get
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you guys canceled. It's going to get Simone's campaign ruined. And I was like, how could it, like,
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what are they going to accuse us of saying that Jews aren't genetically superior? And somebody was like,
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like, unironically, yes, they may cancel you for even asking these questions.
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Like, but, but I don't, I don't think so. I, I genuinely just like, there's these areas that
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people are not used to engaging with, but I think that we as a society have moved past sort of reactive
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cancellations in regards to just engaging with like honest scientific information.
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Well, yeah, just the fact that even there being commonly held group level traits is an extremely
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controversial thing to say. And then also admitting that intelligence has a genetic component
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is extremely controversial. And then of course, talking about Jews at all is extremely controversial.
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So we were just, we weren't just stepping on third rails. We were like playing Twister just to try to touch
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as many third rails as possible with that. Okay. Well, I decided, I decided I'm going back.
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I'm going back. Round two of third rail Twister begins in three, two.
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At the end of the episode, I set up this point where I was like, actually the, the, well, there are
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specific cognitive traits that seem to have some ethnic correlation, broad IQ doesn't seem to be
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broadly correlated when you actually dig into the, the, the nitty gritty of what's going on in these
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studies. But the problem is, is we know that if it was highly correlated with ethnicity, we wouldn't
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be allowed to say that it was highly correlated with ethnicity. So whenever somebody comes along
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and says, here are some stats proving that it is, everybody just immediately jumps on it because
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they're like, well, at least somebody is giving me some information here. But unfortunately, a lot
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of the people who are doing this often have like alternative motivations. And so if you actually dig
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into the stats, what you then find, what we found was the Jewish situation is it's, it's not clear.
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It's not, it appears that Jews have some areas where they're a little different cognitively,
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but there isn't this huge IQ gap that is purported by the people who are the biodiversity bros,
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even HPD bros. And it's actually very similar when you go into the Asian IQ differential. So that's
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what we'll be going into in this. I am going to start because I don't want to get in trouble for
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anything I'm about to say here. So I am going to be quoting from Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote an
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article in New Yorker on this subject, which I paid for to get access to this article, just so I could
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be quoting Malcolm Gladwell. So no one could say that I had said this stuff. Okay. All right. So
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Malcolm says, now, hold on when you're quoting this, you don't get to say evil. Malcolm says,
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that's what I'll say. Evil Malcolm. So nobody thinks that this is coming from my mouth. Okay. Okay. So Malcolm says,
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Flynn, and he's talking about Flynn from the Flynn effect, a really well observed phenomenon that we
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now have the reverse Flynn effect and blah, blah, blah. But historically it was the effect that showed
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that IQ was rising over time as people were getting access to more nutrition. And then this effect
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saturated, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians
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have a genetic advantage in IQ, a possibility that has led to great excitement among IQ fundamentalists in
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recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher IQs than people from European descent,
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for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate
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evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, pre-modern hunting practices,
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brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the IQs of Chinese Americans also seem to be
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elevated has led IQ fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international IQ pyramid with Asians at
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the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom. Here was a question Taylor made for
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James Flynn's accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn's data and realized that the comparison was
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skewed. Lynn was comparing American IQ estimates based on a representative sample of school children
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with Japanese estimates based on upper income, heavily urban samples. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in
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not at 106.6, but 99.2. Then, Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese American estimates. They turned
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out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco's Chinatown using something called the Lord Thorndike
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intelligence test. But the Lord Thorndike test was normed in the 1950s. For children in the 1970s, it would
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have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence
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metrics, Flynn found they came in at a 97 verbal and a 100 nonverbal. Chinese Americans had slightly
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lower IQs than white Americans. The Asian American success story has suddenly been turned on its head.
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The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher IQs,
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but despite their lower IQs. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis,
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Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the
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ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupation had an IQ of 97 or above. Among Chinese Americans,
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that threshold was 90. A Chinese American with an IQ of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as white Americans
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with an IQ of 97. And this is a point we're going to go into a lot later in statistics I pulled up after this article.
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There should be no great mystery about Asian American achievement. It has to do with hard work and
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dedication to higher education and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But
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Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian Americans really
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did have IQs that were higher than everyone else's, coming in somewhere at 103. Having worked their way into
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the upper reaches of the occupational scale and taken note of how much the professionals value abstract
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thinking, Asian American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific
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spectacles. Quote, Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high IQ
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rather than the reverse, end quote. Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussion of the relationship
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between IQ and success, we often confuse causes and effects. So, thoughts?
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I had never read anything like that before. This is surprising.
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Yeah, it is surprising, but it gets more surprising because there's a few things that we're going to
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note here. One is that Asian Americans are actually way less successful than you would expect them to be.
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How can that be? When you look at general income and performance stats in the United States, they just
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excel. When we talk about discrimination at elite universities, they're the ones that they're like,
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stop throwing them at this. They're too qualified.
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Everything you're saying is right. And we're going to get into how this leads to a very surprising
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results when you actually look at key leadership positions. And then secondarily, we're going to be
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talking about something really interesting, which is how East Asian, like why, if East Asians are not
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particularly smarter than white Americans, why do they keep out-competing them, right?
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Right, yeah. Well, and I guess not everywhere because how many East Asian politicians are there
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in the US and how many East Asian- Well, that's what we're going to get to. So, they seem to out-compete
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them within the average ranges and they seem to be massively slammed by them in the extremist angles.
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Oh. So, how are they- So, they're like the women of smart people. Their distribution is less flat
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and more clumped, but in a generally high area. Actually, yes, that is something we actually find
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with their intelligence scores. That's so interesting.
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They have a less wide distribution. But we also see from the data why they are so handedly out-competing
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So, here I am going to be reading from the abstract of an article called Explaining Asian Americans'
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Academic Advantage Over Whites. We find that the Asian American educational advantage over whites
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is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in
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tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian-white gap in
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academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to one, cultural differences in
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beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and two, immigration status.
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Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian American
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Insert Asian dad meme here. It's the standards. It's the culture.
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But hold on. Hold on. I want to give the actual numbers here because they're interesting.
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East Asian students spent approximately 13 more hours per week on academic activities compared to their
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Is that not- that's in the United States, not a world of cram schools and insane-
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Yeah, no, that's in the United States. They are choosing to spend an additional
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13 hours is an astronomical amount of time in a week. Consider that like you sleep, you know,
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like eight hours a night, right? So that means that they are spending probably around 25% of the
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recreational time as their white counterparts.
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Um, basically, they're earning it. It's how they're-
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It is not some Asians are smarter than white people thing. It's Asians work harder than white
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people. Is that an offensive thing to say? Like, I don't know-
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No, it's so- I think it's so commonly understood though. I mean, as much as I'm surprised by what
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you're saying, I also shouldn't be surprised because yes, it is common knowledge that East Asians in the
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United States perform really well, but it's also a common meme, and certainly among even people who
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aren't around Asian populations, that Asian families tend to have higher academic and professional
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standards. And then don't forget Asian dad meme, which is just my favorite, you know,
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Pregnancy test, I have very mixed feelings about this one. You're watching The Bachelor,
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why not watch The Doctorate? You know, like just, I just, I love, I love it. And I should have thought,
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like, yes, especially because you and I are the, it's the culture people. I should have thought,
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this is this, why would it be genetic when the culture is so obviously oriented around high
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performance? And like, we all know this, right? Like, if you had Asian friends growing up, like,
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you knew their parents were harder on them than yours.
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Yeah. And, and I will note before we get further here, we are not saying IQ doesn't have a genetic
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Just seeing the, the purported stereotypes of how it clusters around ethnic groups is just super wrong.
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That is, that is what we're saying. And it is so super wrong that you basically as an individual
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don't have the data to make statements or views or prescriptions around this information.
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Just because it's so muddled by bad actors, basically.
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Yeah. I guess it's kind of like a lot of unregulated medicine where I think it's totally
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legitimate to say, yeah, mainstream medicine doesn't necessarily have all the right answers,
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but then you go into alternative medicine and people are giving you homeopathic cures and,
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you know, caffeine enemas. And it's like, no, no.
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Okay. So, so that's, so that's, that's all we're trying to point out here. Okay. So, so next,
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I'm going to go into an article that I found really interesting, which ends up that the writer of
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this article was so cucked. They ended up being like, oh, this means nothing. It'll all even out
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over time. We can just, you know, but, but I'm going to say, no, no, no, no, no. This is actually
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significant. And it's something we need to talk about. The article was titled, if Asian Americans
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are so smart, how come they have no power or influence? And so it starts out. Ouch.
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In California, where a voter initiative outlawed racial preferences in admission,
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nearly half of the undergraduates at the top public universities, UC Berkeley and UCLA are now
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Asians in the Ivy league, which maintains all the traditional preferences for disadvantaged minorities
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and athletes and alumni legacies. Undergraduate enrollment is still disproportionately between 15%
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and 20% Asian because of academic performance. Stunyset High School, an elite public school in New
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York, which is a feeder school for top colleges and universities and admits exclusively on test
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performance. So in a city that's less than 13% Asian, 72% of the students at Stunyset are Asian. So
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when you remove all of the DEI nonsense, 72% of the top academic performers become Asian. Like that's wild.
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Now you might conclude that although Asians made up only 4.8 of the US population in 2010 census,
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they probably have a disproportionate amount of power and influence in the US because of their
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educational accomplishments. But that seems not to be the case. According to a much discussed
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article in New York Magazine by Weasley Yang, statistics tell a different story. The article cites
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various studies showing that less than 1% of corporate officers and corporate board members
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in America are Asians and only 2% of college presidents. Only nine of the Fortune 500 CEOs are
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Asians. Even in specific areas with a lot of Asian Americans, they are concentrated in lower ranks.
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Although a third of software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, they make up only 6% of board
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members and 10% of corporate officers in the Bay Area's 25 largest companies. At the National Institute of
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Health, where 21.5% of the scientists are Asians, only 4.7% of the lab or branch directors are.
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Asians get creamed at the upper ranks. So one, I would say I think a huge portion of this is DEI.
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Asians, I think by far are the most discriminated class in the DEI world because on average,
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they are the biggest large group to out-compete other groups. And so...
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Yeah, but wouldn't you, I mean, I feel like you could still get points when there are,
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when your imperative is to just not hire or promote another white man. The Asian competent
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person would seem like the obvious choice. So you would... So this actually, and I think it's
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why a lot of Indians have been able to move up so much. But not Asians? Not East Asians?
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Well, no, but some Indians look like quote-unquote people of color to people in the United States.
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They look darker. This is about how dark you look.
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They look darker. I genuinely think that's why Indians have risen so much in the tech industry
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is because they look... Because they look... Some look...
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They have similar... I think it's that they have similar... I... Kamala Harris.
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Well, Kamala Harris is half black, but I think that realistically, when these people in these
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tech companies are choosing to promote someone, and keep in mind how much of their staff is Asian,
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right? So if you're talking in Silicon Valley, they were saying 21.5% of the scientists in this
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one group were Asian. And then in Silicon Valley, it was around a third of software engineers.
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Yeah. But the point being is that when you are the promoting officer, when you're the HR person,
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and you're looking at your pool of software engineers, you see your Asian employees as white,
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because there are just so many of them. I'm telling you that's what it is, in huge part.
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And you see this when they talk about it. When Asians get out there, and they're like,
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we're being discriminated against a college admission.
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Asians are white to the left, as Jews are, for example.
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At least they're not hated the same way as Jews. Though they had their, man, like World War II was
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just, oh, let's forget about the fact that we had Japanese internment camps. I mean,
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talk about like, just like Jews, they were put in camps. But guess who put them in the camps?
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And I would say that they had their property stolen.
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A lot of the Asian American communities, this is what's really interesting, is Black Americans will
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say the reason that we're behind is because we had everything taken from us. But I'm like, yeah,
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well, Japanese Americans had that happen much more recently in their history.
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They had all their, a lot of their businesses taken, a lot of their homes taken.
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Everything that they, they, World War II set the Japanese-
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I can't believe that happened. It still blows my mind that that happened. It is insane.
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Did one of your family members like stay in, in some Japanese person's property to save it for
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them after they got out of the internment camp?
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A lot of our, our extended like friends and family either were themselves related to,
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like had, had, you say like first generation Japanese immigrant ancestors who were themselves
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interned or who tried to help people who were interned. But it doesn't matter if your neighbors
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try to help keep squatters out of your house while you're sent off to a camp as an American.
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It's not squatters out of your house. People would just take the houses or the farms or the property
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or the businesses. So anyway, the East Asian community, but all of this creates a problem
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for modern narratives, right? If East Asians are doing better than white people because they're
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working harder, this creates some troubling- It's such a bad look. Yeah. It's the, because
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the whole thing of like work harder, get a job. Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude.
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That's what's stopping you. You got to get your act together.
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Everyone hates, there's this meme on the internet. I'm sure you've seen it where Kim Kardashian is
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just like, just work, get up and work, get out of bed. Like she, people hate that. They use it all
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the time in a mocking way, but she's right. Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody
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Kim is right. And also Kim is very successful and all the people who I see dumping on her are
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not as successful as she is. So get out of bed and work, kids. But yeah, no, no one wants to say that.
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So, so hold on because, because that is actually, I think DEI is a big part of why they're not
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reaching the tops of these organizations. And I think another big part comes from the work. It
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could be due to a distributional concentration that we talked about earlier, that they have a
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fewer long tails. It could be due to their specific specialism. Remember how we said that-
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Well, no, in the same way that Jewish people don't really have a significantly different IQ
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Oh, right. But the things that they specialize in put them into positions of especially memetic
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influential, influential power, like politics, like media, like, yeah.
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Yeah, yeah. Specifically with Asia, East Asian populations, the area where they consistently
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underperform is inverval. I mean, and they're probably not as good at the bureaucratic game.
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And they're getting kind of screwed. Like our, our economy runs on them, apparently like
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Silicon Valley and stuff like that. But yeah, but they're not, they're, they're, they're,
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they're failing at the water cooler. They're killing it on the, you know,
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We'll get into some hypotheses about this, but before we do that, I want to get into another
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thing here because a lot of people might still be under this illusion that if you actually like
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split the data or you go into the data, they're like, oh, there's, there's probably a reason
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why you guys never mentioned, um, black American IQ. Like you, you must be just trying to avoid
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that. It's like way lower or something like that. Well, but it's, it's, hold on, hold on,
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hold on. Okay. So I'm gonna go into a study here. Okay. Um, because I think that if you are just
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reading human biodiversity, bro stuff, you can be convinced that there are bigger differences than
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there are if you're actually looking at the preponderance of data. Oh, with all groups,
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right? I mean, with Jews and with Asians and with blacks. Yeah. Yeah. So here I'm going to be reading
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a study that that's titled racial IQ differences amongst transracial adoptees. Fact or artifact?
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What is a transracial adoptee? So this is specifically because culture, right?
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Oh, okay. Okay. So, so like a white Midwestern couple adopting a baby from Korea. That's what they mean. Okay.
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Okay. Okay. So some academic publications infer from studies of transracial adoptee IQs
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that East Asian adoptees raised in the West by whites have higher IQs than Western whites,
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and white adoptees raised by whites have higher IQs than black adoptees raised by whites.
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Those publications suggest that this is because of genetic differences. This is because genetic
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differences give East Asians a higher mean IQ than whites and whites a higher mean IQ than blacks.
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This paper proposes a parsimonious alternative explanation. The apparent IQ advantage of East
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Asian adoptees is an artifact caused by ignoring the Flynn effect and adoption's beneficial effect
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on IQ. And most of the IQ disadvantage of black adoptees disappears when one allows for attrition
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in the Minnesota transracial adoption study and acknowledges the results of other studies.
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Diagnosing these artifacts suggests a nil hypothesis. East Asian white and black adoptees raised in the
00:23:27.040
same environment would have similar IQs hinting at a minimum role of genes in racial IQ differences.
00:23:33.280
So Flynn effect adjustments. The author adjusts IQ scores from older studies to account for the
00:23:38.400
fin effect. The tendency of IQ scores to rise over time. For example, he subtracts six to eight points from
00:23:44.480
IQ scores in the Lane et al study to account for this effect. Comparison of adjusted scores. After
00:23:50.800
adjusting for the fin effect, the author shows that many East Asian adoptees IQ scores are closer to or
00:23:55.360
below 100 rather than significantly above as previously claimed. Meta analysis. The author combined results
00:24:01.120
from multiple studies, weighing them by sample size and variance, where it calculates the black,
00:24:06.320
white, biracial adoptees lagged white adoptees 0.4 to 3.1 IQ points on average. Attrition analysis. In the
00:24:14.800
Minnesota transracial adoption study, the author demonstrates how attrition loss of participants
00:24:19.040
over time inflated white adoptees mean IQ by about 3.8 points while having minimal effect on black
0.75
00:24:24.560
adoptee scores. Environmental factor analysis. The author quantifies environmental differences between
00:24:29.600
adoptee groups showing that black, black adoptees in the Minnesota study had worse environments on
00:24:35.040
several measures. 2.1 standard deviation when you're looking at this. Large scale data analysis.
00:24:40.720
The author analyzes from Swedish national studies, Dana et al and Lundborg et al, showing that the
00:24:46.480
Korean adoptees showed only 1.5 IQ points above the general Swedish population, which he argues is
00:24:53.040
negligible when accounting for the adoptive IQ boost. Statistical significance testing. The author used
00:24:59.120
T-tests and discuss p-values and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so the point being is that a
00:25:04.800
lot of these studies that you classically look at around this, when you start to account for
00:25:09.920
statistical artifacts, the big differences that they're showing disappear. People are cherry-picking
00:25:16.080
studies to get these big differences. It's not that you don't get any difference between ethic groups,
00:25:22.000
but the difference is typically like two to three IQ points, just not a really significant number.
00:25:28.320
And I think this really surprises people. And you've also got to keep in mind the effects of
00:25:33.120
bias here. When I say bias, I mean bias on the adoptive parents. There have been studies on teachers
00:25:40.320
where they were in one instance told that this student is a genius and is going to do really well.
0.97
00:25:46.160
And in another instance, we're told this student is really dumb and is going to do really.
0.97
00:25:49.120
Right. And they're the same students. And then they start treating the dumb students as though
0.99
00:25:52.560
they're dumb and the genius. Well, no, no, they actually do this between students.
1.00
00:25:56.720
So this study I think would be pretty unethical to do by today's standards,
0.81
00:25:59.440
but the students that the teachers told were dumb end up doing much worse than the students
0.88
00:26:03.280
that teachers are told. Yeah. I remember seeing that study. Yeah. Yeah.
0.98
00:26:06.320
So if you, if you have a belief that a group is smarter than another group and you're raising kids
00:26:10.480
within that group, it's going to have an effect. And here I should note with, with the black stuff,
0.99
00:26:15.120
any, anything that's like, um, black people are like this genetically can largely just be trashed
1.00
00:26:23.920
in my mind because black people have the highest genetic variation of any population.
0.98
00:26:29.280
That's insane. By this, what I mean is if you're looking at African pools of, of, of people,
1.00
00:26:36.160
if you look at a population on like one side of Africa versus the population on the other side of
00:26:41.440
Africa, and I'll put a graph on screen here that will show this, they will have significantly more
00:26:46.000
genetic variation between them than whites and East Asians have between them or whites and Native
00:26:52.800
Americans have between them. And I don't mean significant, like 20% more. I mean, significant, like
0.50
00:27:00.400
500% more. They, they, they just are, are far more genetically distant from each other.
00:27:06.800
Yeah. And you can't just be like, Oh, well then I'll look at a Nigerian immigrant differently.
00:27:11.440
Then I'll look at someone descended from colonial slaves, because even people who were
1.00
00:27:17.680
stolen is, and then sold as slaves, kidnapped and sold the slaves from Africa were kidnapped
00:27:21.680
in totally different regions over long periods of time. Like this is also, these are very different
00:27:26.400
populations. So it doesn't matter where someone came from. This is not a monolithic group at all.
00:27:33.120
Huge differences in American. So a lot of people would be like, yeah, but once they came to the
00:27:37.520
United States, they all intermixed. And it's like, this is functionally not true. For example,
00:27:42.640
the descendants of the escaped slaves that went moved to the North versus the slaves that were freed
00:27:48.400
and then moved to the North basically exist as two populations that for a long time didn't
00:27:54.080
intermarry and didn't like each other. And if you look at the recent African immigration waves,
0.95
00:28:00.560
they don't really like the American, they are way more racist against American blacks than
0.99
00:28:05.120
American whites are against American blacks. If you have African friends, we have quite a number of
0.98
00:28:09.600
African friends. And it's, it often comes up and I have these moments where I have to like,
00:28:14.400
you know, sort of do that mentally. I don't know if you've ever been in a conversation where
00:28:17.040
somebody gets really racist and you're like doing a little whistle and you get like,
00:28:24.480
I'm not hearing this. I'm not hearing this. I'm not hearing this. I'm not here. This isn't
00:28:28.160
happening right now. Please go and have a recorder on, but this happens all the time when I'm talking
00:28:32.000
to my African friends because they will, because they know that they're not going to have the same
0.99
00:28:35.200
blowback that, you know, I would have for saying something like that. And so, you know, they,
00:28:39.200
I think relish in being able to get away with this, but then let's, let's go over some other
00:28:42.800
studies. And watching the sweat. Oh God. Three other studies lend support to the environmental
00:28:48.560
explanations of group IQ differences. IELTS first, 1961, studied out of wedlock children
00:28:55.680
of black and white soldiers stationed in Germany after World War II, who were then raised by white
0.50
00:29:00.400
German mothers. In what has become known as the Eierhoff study, he found no significant differences
00:29:06.080
in average IQ between groups. Tizard et al, 1972, studied black,
00:29:11.920
West Indian, white, and mixed race children raised in British long-stay residential nurseries.
00:29:18.480
Two of three tests found no statistical differences. One test found higher scores for
00:29:23.360
non-white people. Moore, 1986, compared black and mixed race children adopted by either black
00:29:29.680
or white middle-class families in the United States. Moore observed that 23 black and interracial
00:29:35.440
children raised by white parents had significantly higher mean scores than 23 age-matched children raised
00:29:41.680
by black parents, 11 versus 104, and argued that differences in early socialization explained
00:29:47.200
these differences. And here's the thing about all of this. Like this isn't necessarily better.
00:29:54.320
It's kind of like worse, right? If, if, if you point out three things, okay, there are not actually large
00:30:05.040
IQ differences between groups in the United States. Okay. And, and actually we'll say there
00:30:09.520
are some differences within the United States. So here we've got to talk about the immigrant effect,
00:30:12.880
right? And this is where you actually get like big IQ differences with some groups is immigrants are
00:30:19.280
typically going to have traits that will make them better in business. When contrasted with non-immigrants,
0.99
00:30:25.360
you're going to be more ambitious, more open to change, more open to risk, more open to,
00:30:30.560
I mean, I think that this is why, you know, America's entrepreneur class is disproportionately
00:30:34.000
our immigrant class. I think it's like 37% of like wealth driven by new companies was,
00:30:38.720
were created by immigrants. Well, and there are many, many, many Asian entrepreneurs.
00:30:45.600
And that would also, this would also go to my DEI hypothesis. It's not about the distribution thing
00:30:50.720
because Asian entrepreneurs aren't being selected as against by DEI as much as like, do you become
00:30:56.640
the head of a fortune 500 company? Do you become the head of a department, right? Which is a DEI hurt,
00:31:01.760
which means that they actually could perform equally if not for DEI. But it's, it's not like this, this,
00:31:08.320
what I'm saying here isn't offensive. So I want you to consider the implications if everything I'm
00:31:14.480
saying here is true. Okay. There aren't big IQ differences between groups in the United States.
00:31:21.360
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Historic discrimination does not explain when a group is underperforming.
00:31:29.760
And then finally, most of the difference between things like Asian and white outcomes is due to how
00:31:36.240
hard they're working due to cultural expectations placed on them. People will say that I'm here like
00:31:41.200
trying to cover for stuff. Okay. Like I'm here trying to like be a woke apologist or something.
00:31:47.040
Excuse me. Those three things taken together don't lead to a woke explanation for anything.
00:31:56.400
If anything, they are significantly worse than just saying one group had a systemic disadvantage
00:32:03.040
around their IQ. But anyway, let's keep going here. So what can we say? So I tried to then look,
00:32:09.040
like with Jews where you saw a slightly difference in some areas, you know, like they did slightly better
00:32:13.440
in verbal. They did slightly better on verbal and math and they did slightly worse on visuospatial
00:32:21.280
and general reasoning. And this, I actually think it's mostly their culture, but you could argue
00:32:26.640
that this has helped them. Okay. So if both Jews and East Asians are doing poorly on general reasoning,
0.85
00:32:30.720
who's doing well on general reasoning? I can't say that, Simone. You know, I can't say that,
00:32:36.000
but hold on. I've got to keep going here. Okay. So what can I say? Yes. Overall IQ. East Asians tend
1.00
00:32:45.120
to score slightly higher on average than whites on IQ tests, but we're typically looking at like maybe
00:32:51.920
three to two points here. Okay. Okay. Not a meaningful number. Spatial reasoning. East Asians typically
1.00
00:32:58.000
demonstrate stronger spatial slash nonverbal intelligence compared with white populations.
0.80
00:33:04.000
And it's, it's very consistent across studies, verbal abilities. They tend to store, they tend
00:33:09.200
to underscore on verbal abilities. This is across scores, mathematical abilities. They tend to
00:33:14.480
outperform in mathematical abilities. And some research suggests a smaller distribution. Well,
00:33:19.920
here, if you're saying, okay, they're about equal with like the Jewish and white populations,
00:33:24.080
right? And black populations, but here I'm just using whites because that's what all the studies
00:33:27.600
would compare them to. And you don't need to correct for all the additional artifacts. So if you're
00:33:32.720
doing this right, what it could mean is specifically what allows a group to out-compete for the top
00:33:40.480
ranked position in our existing society, uh, like the Jewish population clearly does see our Jewish
00:33:45.600
video. It might just be that little extra verbal intelligence. It could be that verbal intelligence is
00:33:50.640
incredibly important in accessing bureaucratically gated positions. And that seems intuitively right.
00:33:56.400
Yeah. Now I'm going to get to something very offensive. So I am not saying it. This is coming
00:34:02.560
from South Korean psychologist, Eun-Hon Kim in 2004. And she argues that there is a strong
00:34:10.640
negative correlation to be found between creativity and Confucianism. In her exploration of creativity
00:34:16.560
among Southeast Asian countries with strong Confucius traditions, Kwon-hee Kim concluded that there is
00:34:23.440
an, quote, ideological opposition between Confucianism and creativity, where Confucianism
00:34:28.320
is about staying with tradition and living within existing confines, while creative strengths are
00:34:34.400
about investigating fresh, investing fresh energy into new ideas, end quote. And so here I'm just going
00:34:42.160
to go over a few points. She makes Confucian principles in Asian parenting and education emphasize
00:34:46.720
conformity, hierarchy, filial piety, and academic achievement, which can stifle creativity, which
00:34:52.640
like, yeah, I guess that kind of checks out, right? Like if you train people to toe a line,
00:35:00.320
then they're not going to thrive it. Yeah. I mean, what we've seen with pretty much all research on
00:35:07.280
mental performance and body performance is use it or lose it. So any modality that would,
00:35:13.840
you know, lead to some, some element of your brain function to atrophy like creativity
00:35:20.640
or running against authority or doing stuff that's weird. Yeah. That makes sense.
00:35:26.400
And then what makes you think it's offensive then?
00:35:28.880
Hold on. I mean, I'll explain why it's offensive when I get to the end of this.
00:35:32.720
Kim found in her research, a strong negative correlation between Confucianism and creativity
00:35:37.440
in her research. So basically the more Confucian somebody was in their value system,
00:35:41.520
the less creative they would be. And the specific elements that she said led to this were obedience
00:35:47.200
and respect for hierarchy, which yes, would create that outcome. She argues gender inequality. I don't
0.55
00:35:54.000
think so. I think that's just woke nonsense. Conformity, conformity would definitely. And
00:35:58.160
conformity is important to Confucian value sets, right? Suppression of expression. I don't believe
0.90
00:36:03.440
that that's important, but work pay dichotomy. Now this could actually be one of the key aspects
00:36:09.040
here. And I've really seen this was my Asian parent friend group, right? Is there's a much
00:36:15.040
stronger dichotomy in the Asian friends I have between work and play than in white cultural values,
00:36:22.240
especially because white cultural values aren't unanimous. So here I'd say I noticed this dichotomy.
00:36:26.960
I also see it more in like Catholic cultural groups. But if you're looking at like the greater
00:36:31.280
Appalachian cultural group, which we come from, you know, and here I'll play a clip from one of
00:36:34.960
simone's favorite songs that you cry whenever you listen to. Do what you love, but call it work,
00:36:50.320
they say in the song. And it's true. It is a strong cultural value of the greater Appalachian region
00:36:56.720
and was in a number of white cultures that have ended up becoming dominant in the greater American
00:37:02.560
cultural ecosystem. But keep in mind, there's many different white cultures in the American
00:37:06.080
cultural ecosystem that are as different from each other as they are from East Asian cultural groups.
1.00
00:37:10.320
Now we're going to get to the final part where I'm going to get really offensive here. Yay.
00:37:16.800
Really offensive. I love these parts. So I just came in here and had this conversation with you all
00:37:23.760
where I was like, look, ethnicity just really doesn't matter that much to IQ differences. It's culture,
00:37:30.800
it's culture, it's culture. And then people may hear, you know, somebody's here and they're all
00:37:36.800
sad. They're like, but I wanted a master race. Why isn't there a master race, Malcolm?
00:37:45.440
Who are they? And I'm like, well, unfortunately, the data just doesn't seem to show any groups. It's
00:37:51.440
really like out competing everyone, except for maybe Jayans. We'll get to that later.
0.99
00:37:55.680
Oh, what? Okay. Chains are going extinct. So it doesn't really matter.
00:38:00.640
Yeah. Yeah. I guess you have to kind of define, I see that as failure to thrive, but okay.
00:38:06.960
Failure to, yeah, whatever you want to call it, they're not having kids. Okay. But,
00:38:11.760
but IQ does have a genetic correlate and that genetic correlate differentiates,
00:38:19.280
not between ethnic groups, but due to two core things. Okay. One.
00:38:29.840
Culture and culture. Recent genetic bottlenecks. Oh, duh. Yeah. Two.
00:38:38.480
Class. Oh boy. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Here's the, here's the part where it got really offensive. We
00:38:46.320
finally got there. Thank you. I'll give you an explanation of what I mean here when I talk about
00:38:52.800
Asian population groups right here. Right? So in the United States, I'll give an example from
00:38:58.000
starting with the United States, because it's what I always give, which is of Cubans. I talked to
0.97
00:39:01.680
Americans about Cubans and they go, Oh, Cubans. Yes. Cubans. They're, they're very Republican.
00:39:07.920
They're very entrepreneurial. They're very hardworking. They're very wealthy. Their businesses
00:39:13.600
seem to work at like really disproportionate rates when contrasted with other groups. Cubans. Yes.
00:39:18.960
Those are the traits of Cubans. And it's like, no, those are the traits of Cuban Americans. There's a
0.99
00:39:26.640
whole other communist country out there, you knob head. And those are not the traits of the people who
00:39:33.120
stayed in that country. There was a recent hard selection event, which led to a bunch of people
00:39:38.960
with similar beliefs and keep in mind that it's not just like IQ, right? Like in terms of success,
00:39:45.600
IQ isn't the predominant factor. It's things like ambition and entrepreneurialism and comfortableness
00:39:49.760
with change and all of these things, which also have genetic correlates, right? So you had a recent
00:39:54.880
bottleneck that was both cultural because it wasn't just a genetic bottleneck. It was also a cultural
00:39:59.280
bottleneck that led to this group of Cubans coming to the United States. And they created a culture
00:40:06.480
that represented not necessarily Cuban more broadly, but the selection of it. Okay.
00:40:16.080
We also see this in East Asian immigrants to the United States. And I've seen larger analysis that
00:40:22.160
argue this, this small advantage, because remember you do still, when you really wash things out,
00:40:26.640
see like a small, like three point advantage in East Asian populations, the United States,
00:40:30.240
if you contrast it with non-immigrant populations that stayed in East Asian, it disappears. Because
0.96
00:40:36.800
immigrating to the United States from East Asia is very difficult. It's a lot of sacrifices. It requires
00:40:42.400
a base level of wealth. And there are certain pressures that are going to draw you here, cultural
00:40:46.800
pressures, like a value for entrepreneurialism, a value for freedom, a value for, but then you also
00:40:51.840
have a bottleneck. There is one country in the world today that 70% of the world's computing powder
00:40:57.040
relies on. If they disappeared, our entire world of AI would collapse. Our entire world of modernity
00:41:06.240
would collapse. And you might say, oh, this country must be uniquely competent in some way. What could have
00:41:14.160
created this country of hyper-competence? It was a recent selection event. The country, of course, I am
00:41:21.520
talking about here is Taiwan. And Taiwan was largely created when the Shanghai Sheck's government was
0.97
00:41:30.320
retreating. And they were fascists to start, but the communists were coming in. First, people who
00:41:35.840
didn't like communism were like, I'm going to get out of here, similar to the Cubans who went to the
1.00
00:41:38.800
United States. But then secondly, the Shanghai Sheck group, they were like, oh, we want to take everyone
0.99
00:41:44.720
who looks like they could be useful in any like entrepreneurial business people or any people who
00:41:49.680
had achieved a level of success. And they pulled them out. And that created the birthplace of the
00:41:54.480
modern, whatever, you know, what's it coming, Taiwanese cultural group, which now produces the world
00:42:01.680
chips. Like, Taiwan and China are basically the same ethnicity, okay? It is genuinely remarkable with like
00:42:12.880
10x their wealth. And the government is pumping money into this in China. The Chinese cannot figure
1.00
00:42:20.800
out how to make advanced semiconductors. They are trying hard. And yet the Taiwanese have this figured
1.00
00:42:28.720
out. And they can't even like work with Americans. Like there's studies of like them trying to like
00:42:32.400
set up factories in America. And they're like, these white people just can't figure out these factories.
0.64
00:42:36.000
But I mean, that, that, I mean, it should, they're like, they're, they don't follow orders well
0.95
00:42:40.160
enough. And this is all true. Like we can look at Confucianism and say, well, Confucianism leads to
0.94
00:42:47.440
lower types of creative outcomes. Right. But sometimes that's not that sometimes that's ideal.
00:42:53.680
Yeah. Maybe it's this very conformity, which has allowed them in a hierarchy preference,
00:42:58.400
which has allowed them to do these super clean fabs that no one else can create on scale.
00:43:03.760
Okay. And everyone else has tried. This is a national security interest of every other country
00:43:09.040
on earth. We just can't do it or not at scale in the way that they're doing it. And so the, the, the,
00:43:15.360
the, the, the thing here is that yes, different groups are different and we globally benefit from
00:43:24.400
that difference. Progressives say we love diversity, but everyone's secretly the same.
00:43:30.000
And it's like, then why would diversity matter to you if everyone's secretly the same? We're like,
00:43:33.680
we love diversity because no group is better than another group, but each group brings its own
00:43:39.600
proficiencies and perspectives. And through working with people who have different proficiencies
00:43:43.600
and perspectives, we can do more. But here, I'm going to talk about the last super offensive thing.
00:43:54.400
Oh no. We're not going to get fully into this, but I'm going to talk about it here
00:43:57.920
in the context of China. So for people who aren't familiar with the Chinese revolution,
00:44:03.600
when they did the revolution, they inverted the social classes. They took any family who had wealth
00:44:09.840
or had businesses or who had education. And as they were redistributing land, as they were
00:44:15.040
redistributing opportunities, they gave them and their children less. They would be regularly mocked
00:44:21.040
in ceremonies, like walking through the town. They would be sometimes just killed for having
00:44:26.480
been rich in the past. And the kids had to grow up as orphans. This was very-
00:44:30.240
They were separated from their kids. Yeah, totally. It was very intense.
00:44:33.760
You had a complete class inversion. Okay. So the communists in China attempted a class inversion.
00:44:46.240
So led by Alberto Alessini of Harvard University, the academics mined data from household surveys and
00:44:53.200
census reports and land records. And they found that by 2010, the income of the descendants of the
00:44:58.640
pre-communist elite were 16 to 17% higher than those born into families that were underprivileged
00:45:04.560
before 1949. They were also more likely to have completed secondary and tertiary education.
00:45:11.280
They performed significantly better in mass tests. They were more likely to be in the top decile
00:45:16.320
of earners, not just in China, but also when they immigrated to the US and Canada. So the top decile
00:45:21.600
of earners by 14% more or 11% more of being in the top decile. And by bonus, fun fact, the Tongs,
0.75
00:45:30.160
the Chinese organized crime syndicate, have a stated goal to reinstate Ming emperorship.
00:45:36.160
And they hold parliament seats, the only non-communist party to do so.
00:45:41.520
So yeah, this brings two things, right? Some people do actually seem to have a genetic
00:45:50.240
advantage over other people, but it's not ethnic-based. It's usually class-based. It is immoral to ignore
00:45:56.960
these systemic advantages we are born with. It is immoral for when I talk to my friends at Stanford
00:46:02.240
Business School and they're like, I pulled myself up from my bootstraps and I started with nothing.
00:46:06.400
And I'm like, well, I mean, you did probably have a genetic advantage over your peer group.
00:46:10.480
And they're like, nope. If they had worked as hard as me, they'd have everything I'd have.
00:46:13.360
And I'm like, well, I mean, that's probably not true. Have you thought about getting this tested?
00:46:17.440
You can do a, you know, a genetic test. And then they're like, no, I won't do that. Of course.
00:46:22.320
I won't test to see if I would cheese the game. Pretending you don't see your privilege over
00:46:29.760
So if you're wondering where I fall genetically, I decided to pull up my results just based on the
00:46:34.320
question I had posed here. Brain volume to two different studies, either the 87th percentile
00:46:40.080
or the 98th percentile. And then for intelligence, the 72nd percentile. And this is to say, I mean,
00:46:48.720
clearly I've achieved more than 72nd percentile in society, but I also very obviously, obviously,
00:46:55.600
obviously had massive advantages over your average person. To compare my relative career success
00:47:04.240
or my relative academic or life success with somebody who didn't have this unearned privilege
00:47:12.720
is frankly unfair and immoral. And it really genuinely disgusts me when people who obviously
00:47:22.880
had some form of a genetic advantage over other people pretend that there is no such thing as
00:47:29.920
heritability of intelligence, which just gives them a right to pretend that they are 100 percent
00:47:38.560
responsible for their own success and that there was no outside hand on the scale tipping the
00:47:44.160
metrics. But this is also why classless societies don't really work because class like reorients itself
00:47:51.040
into society along genetic lines. And this actually happened. You see this in the UK. There's some studies
00:47:56.800
that look at the persistence of class across generations, even when you see significant
00:48:00.960
disruptions or somebody loses everything. And I even saw this with a lot of my Jewish friends.
00:48:06.160
You could just see this. If anyone has tons of Jewish friends, you will know a lot of families
00:48:10.400
that were super wealthy in Germany and they had literally everything taken to them. Came to the US,
00:48:15.680
started from literally nothing, and then became super wealthy again.
00:48:18.480
I think you see this also a lot with the various Soviet countries where people came from. A lot of
00:48:26.240
family wealth completely wiped out. Now they're back at the top. And this is pretty universal, it seems.
00:48:33.760
And so I also want to talk about where does prejudice make sense? If you're going to assume things about
00:48:39.840
somebody, if you're going to be talking to somebody and say, oh, you have some cultural
00:48:44.960
predilection is when you have intentionally sorted cultural groups. Okay. So let's talk about
00:48:51.920
intentionally sorted cultural groups, because that's largely what makes up the United States.
00:48:56.640
What I mean by this is you can largely tell more about somebody's genetic sort of correlates to their
00:49:03.280
perspective by looking at either what part of the United States they decided to settle in,
00:49:08.640
or by looking at what their religion is, their religious cultural identification is,
00:49:14.000
than by looking at their ethnic group. So somebody who chooses to settle in, and I broadly agree with
00:49:19.520
the cultural groups. I might draw some few others and create my own cultural group map of the United
00:49:23.680
States. But I broadly think the American nations map that we've been using that I'll put on screen here
00:49:28.240
is pretty right about American cultural groups. Which is to say, I have, for example, a lot of Indian
00:49:36.560
friends. I grew up with a lot of Indian friends in Dallas, Texas. My Indian friends from Dallas,
00:49:41.760
Texas were culturally very different from the Indians I met who chose to settle in San Francisco.
00:49:47.280
A lot of Indians who choose to settle in San Francisco. They honestly were closer to me,
00:49:53.440
a Texan, culturally speaking, than they were to the Indians who settled in San Francisco.
00:50:00.240
And that was because that requires a cultural choice. Like when you are choosing where to settle,
00:50:05.280
you're like, I'm going to go to Dallas versus San Francisco. There's likely a reason for that.
00:50:10.400
And that reason is in part cultural, it's in part genetic, and it is making that sort. And that is
00:50:16.480
why you actually end up with more concentration of dispositions and perspectives. When you have
00:50:24.800
freedom to move and settle, and you don't look at these historic genetic groups, but instead you say,
00:50:30.800
people are signaling something about themselves to you that is true based on where they choose to move.
00:50:40.000
And we actually have an Indian population near us in Pennsylvania, which I know a few of,
00:50:44.000
and they're actually quite different from the Texas group and the San Francisco group. I think they're
00:50:49.360
actually fairly similar to the Texas group. Like they're much more in common with the Texas group
00:50:53.680
dispositionally than they are to the San Francisco group. But I also think that rural Pennsylvania is very
00:50:58.880
similar to Texas, dispositionally speaking. So that would make sense. Do you have any final thoughts
00:51:04.160
on this, Simone? Or have we just gone too off the rails with offensiveness on this? Just pissed off
00:51:09.040
everyone. We pissed off the biodiversity bros. We pissed off the people who want to say that like,
00:51:14.000
everyone is born exactly equal. We pissed off the people who want to say, my race good, your race bad.
00:51:20.560
I regret nothing. This is, this is perfect. Let them all be angry. Just go out with the torches
00:51:27.120
and just, just lighten everything a fire. No, just go out and work people. You're not working hard
00:51:32.640
enough. It's your own damn fault. Oh my God. Yep. I love it. And I love you. I love you too. And you are
1.00
00:51:40.560
spectacular, Simone. And I am honored to have you as a wife and somebody who can. Back in your days,
00:51:46.800
like when you were a San Francisco urban monoculture person and somebody had brought all this to you,
00:51:50.720
what would you have thought? Would you have thought that they were just a racist or would
00:51:53.360
you have found it interesting? No, I would have had the same reaction I do now.
00:51:58.320
I think most people who aren't like actually brainwashed. That's the thing is, is most people
00:52:02.080
recognize group level differences. And, and like I pointed out at the beginning of this conversation,
00:52:06.560
the fact that Asian dad meme exists, you know, and we have these stereotypes and like mainstream jokes
00:52:13.360
shows that people broadly recognize these group based average differences. So it's not.
00:52:20.880
Yeah. Right. And it's also a very different understanding of success or pushing kids and
00:52:25.040
like my cultural group. So what is really offensive, I will say though, is, is the findings. And again,
00:52:31.520
this is just replicated across so many channels that it's hard for me to imagine a world in which that
00:52:36.400
doesn't make sense, but that people who came from historically high social class or historically
00:52:44.400
wealthy families tend to rise again, even if everything is nuked and everyone starts at the
00:52:50.320
same point again. They didn't start at the same point. I'm just trying to know. They started,
00:52:53.920
they start off worse. They start off worse. Yeah. It's just that even we were interviewed by
00:52:59.280
some people on Monday and one of them sort of kept implying. Wall Street Journal.
00:53:03.120
Yeah. That, that there are, you know, systematic inequalities in society and, and how should
00:53:08.080
those be corrected for? And it's not fair. And there's, I think definitely still this perception
00:53:12.320
that if we just let there be a genuinely level playing field, starting point in society, that
00:53:18.240
people would just then have equal shots at, at succeeding. And that's just not true from the data,
00:53:25.360
because as you point out, even when you take those who are privileged and make them worse off,
00:53:29.600
you put them in at a negative 10 and everyone else is starting at a zero, those people end up at a
00:53:34.640
positive 10 in the end, whereas everyone else is, you know, around like a five or six. So it's,
00:53:38.880
Yeah. So a few final points here as to why we care that some people will still then be like,
00:53:43.120
well, why don't you care about those two to three points IQ difference? Well, when IQ in the developed
00:53:47.440
world is dropping by 0.2 points a year, see our idiocracy episode. And that means a standard
00:53:51.760
deviation decline in just 75 years, this stuff doesn't matter. It comes out in the wash. Like
00:53:57.120
general IQ scores are changing too quickly due to dysgenic selection for you to care about like
0.96
00:54:06.320
population level IQs. They just don't really matter. The second thing I would note here is when you
00:54:12.560
talk about areas, like I'm like, do some groups seem to systemically out-compete other groups due to
00:54:19.200
anything historically. Yes. I will notice some out-competing, but it doesn't happen as much along
00:54:25.120
ethnic lines as it seems to happen along groups on the border of civilized areas, uh, reliably
00:54:32.240
out-competing civilized areas. So basically, and there's a mechanism for this and we'll probably do
00:54:37.280
a different episode on it, but the longer an area has been civilized, there's some genetic exhaustion
00:54:42.640
there, bureaucracies and stuff like that. And you, you, or maybe the, the comfort and amenities of
00:54:48.720
that civilization starts to make people weak. Hey, that also could be what it is. Yeah. All right.
00:54:54.000
Love you, Simone. Love you too. That's what everyone knew. You brought the looks to this relationship.
00:55:00.480
You're so sweet to me. I really appreciate it. A lot of people on the, the comments, they're like,
00:55:05.120
no, look at like the one about, um, what women actually like, and like, why they cheat on guys.
0.54
00:55:10.640
Oh, okay. In the comments, people are freaking out because they're like, no, like if you look at
00:55:15.840
romance novel covers, you know, they have like big, strong, muscular men on them. And I'm like,
00:55:21.280
if you look at romance novel covers in cartoons, yes. No, no, no, no, no. If you, if you actually do,
00:55:28.400
I think this is, this is a worthwhile observation, but the, I think the important thing is that yes,
00:55:35.040
many romance novel covers have muscular men on their covers. Steve Su sent a screenshot just of
00:55:42.800
bestselling romance novels. But when you actually read the books, there's very little correlation.
00:55:48.320
So did you look at the screenshots that he sent? He interpreted them as having lots of muscular men
00:55:53.280
on them. It was maybe one in six of the books. They were more on the, on a, on a scale from Homer
00:55:59.120
Simpson to Chris Williamson. They were closer to Chris Williamson. Yeah, but they weren't,
00:56:04.800
they were not what people are thinking. They're thinking like Fabio. Oh yeah, no, no, no. They
00:56:10.240
weren't. Yeah. They weren't he-man. I wouldn't say they're, they're like Chris Williamson. They're
00:56:13.840
much closer to when they did have muscular men, much closer to Chris Pratt, which is a very-
00:56:19.120
Jurassic Park, Chris Pratt, not Parks and Rec. Right. But people don't look at Jurassic Park,
00:56:24.400
Chris Pratt and say, that is a man whose physique is dominated by his musculature.
00:56:29.680
Like you just don't, you, you don't look at him and think of first saying that's a, that's a
00:56:33.680
bodybuilder. You look at Chris Williamson, the first thing you think is that's a bodybuilder.
00:56:37.360
Yeah. Which is, which, and, and, and it's actually- I don't know. Like I, I just, yeah, I assume,
00:56:43.360
yeah, you don't think he goes to the gym. I don't think Chris Williamson comes across as a
00:56:46.960
bodybuilder, but he comes across- No, but hold on. Simone, what I was going to say is, is other than this,
00:56:51.120
just, if you go to Google and you type in like best-selling female romance novels of 2024.
00:56:57.920
Okay. I'm doing this right now. I'm going in. I'm going in girls. 2024, best-selling
00:57:05.520
romance novels. Female romance novels. Oh, well. Oh yeah. Because of all the male romance novels.
00:57:11.440
Okay. Romance novels. All right. I don't care. How many, how many buff guys do you see on the entire
00:57:15.840
page? You know, actually the funny thing is a lot of them are leading with women.
00:57:19.520
Yeah. No, no, no. Simone, I'm asking you a question. You're looking at about- Oh, and the
00:57:24.320
first one I'm seeing of a guy is actually a very effeminate looking guy. Yes. You're looking at
00:57:29.520
about 36 images now. Is there a single buff guy among them? Actually no. Okay. I asked you a
00:57:37.760
straightforward question. You are being manipulated by people who are misleading you. It is actually very
00:57:43.680
uncommon in the top female romance novels to have buff men. Something you might not know about the
00:57:49.280
current trend. Do you know when our generation, it was vampire boys. They were like the sexy boys.
00:57:53.680
Yeah. Do you know what it is for girls in this generation? Because I try to keep up with this.
00:57:56.400
Wait. Fairies. Fairy boys. But again, not buff men. No, no, no, no. Malcolm, you don't understand.
00:58:03.200
They're fairy boys who turn into giant wolves. Simone, I know when girls, remember I did the
1.00
00:58:10.640
Marvel comparison. I read the freaking book. Okay. Listen, Simone, the Marvel comparison. I'm like,
0.98
00:58:16.640
all of the guys in this and they choose Loki. So women go in to Lord of the Rings. Like your young
0.99
00:58:22.880
teenage girls go into Lord of the Rings filled with masculine buff warriors. Yeah. Who do all of
0.94
00:58:28.720
them come out with a crush on? Effing Legolas. No, well, no. Our sister-in-law was team Aragorn.
00:58:35.920
But yeah, my, all my friends in my, we're team, we're team Legolas. Of course, now everyone wants,
00:58:41.360
once they, they're hit, they hit all like mid thirties. They want Sam. Everyone wants Sam,
00:58:44.960
you know, start out wanting Legolas. But this is an important thing is that female sexuality
1.00
00:58:49.920
transforms as they get older and they want different things as they age. And this is actually really
0.93
00:58:55.840
important to note. The reason I explicitly said, look at the art of like the, the fan fiction art that
00:59:03.040
they draw of like the guys that they're dreaming about of teenage girls, you will never see buff
00:59:07.520
guys. It's always like lanky vampires. Now I'm on Amazon scrolling bestselling and the two,
00:59:15.440
most of them are illustrations. Most of them are evenly showing guys there. It seems to be just
00:59:20.640
as many images of women as the, at the forefront as there are as guys. But the two photos of guys shown
00:59:27.280
show men on the Chris Williams inside, not bodybuilders, but clearly hit the gym.
00:59:31.280
Yeah. But hold on. This is two pictures out of how many?
00:59:34.400
So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
00:59:40.080
So two out of 10. Two out of 10 is not common, Simone. Yeah.
00:59:45.520
Tried the same experiment on Amazon and I only found one single image of a buff guy.
00:59:51.360
And I noticed something that I should have asked Simone, but I didn't think to about her two out of
00:59:55.680
10. The one image of a buff guy was a sponsored image. None of the non-sponsored images had buff
01:00:04.960
You're trying to create an argument for something that's just not there. But the point I'm making,
01:00:08.240
and this is important for guys to note, is the ideal body type for women changes as they age.
0.98
01:00:12.960
When women first go through puberty to, I'd say really up until like the end of college and a bit
1.00
01:00:18.640
after they're in this stage where they really, for whatever reason, prefer extra feminine,
01:00:25.680
like Legolas type men. You see this in fan art. If you hang out on Tumblr communities,
01:00:30.800
you see this in really anywhere you're looking. They then go through a transition where for a period,
01:00:36.800
typically until they're like 30, they do begin to perform the more, I'd say, Chris Pratt body type.
01:00:44.560
And then after that, they prefer the Samwise Ganji personality because they completely move
0.99
01:00:49.600
away from caring about body type at all. And this is just not being recognized. And so all of these
01:00:55.200
guys are like, why, why aren't I finding good women? All of the women are terrible, blah, blah, blah.
1.00
01:01:00.320
Well, I think, you know, something else that might be discounted here, which we totally
0.98
01:01:04.080
don't discount with women is specifically that with men, we're also valuing youth. And when you
01:01:13.360
are an adolescent boy, you cannot kind of help, but be muscular and thin as you're going through
01:01:18.240
puberty, you know, you're just nothing but elbows and arms and, and, and boys as teenagers typically
01:01:23.600
are thin. Maybe it's that we're also selecting for youth and people are confusing youth with
01:01:28.720
attractiveness or conflating or equating select for youth in the same way that men do.
01:01:34.320
I know. It's just that I'm trying to think of like, you know, it seems that a common
01:01:38.320
characteristic among those who do seem to be pictured here is that they just look more like
01:01:43.120
teenagers and not like men. So I don't know, but we're not here to talk about this.
01:01:49.920
I'll get to the episode topic. Okay. You want a video showing you of a turtle and you want our
01:01:55.040
subscribers to see it? Yes. And you think they'll find this very clever? Yes. And I'll send them
01:02:02.880
subscribe to our YouTube channel too. Okay, Octavian. Do you want to have kids when you grow up?
01:02:12.240
Yes. How many kids? Um, two and, um, uh, two more and three and, um, uh, two more.
01:02:25.840
Okay. So like seven? Yes. That's a good number. What matters most to you in life, Octavian? What
01:02:32.960
do you care about the most? I take this and also. Torsten and Titan. So you care about Torsten and Titan the
01:02:42.000
most more than mommy and daddy? Yes. I can sell them as a turtle now and then I'll piece for you on.
01:02:47.280
Right? Yeah. You did a good job. Hey, I need a turtle. What do you need help with, buddy?
01:02:56.720
Okay, I'll come help you. Do you want to say like and subscribe, Torsten? If I'm, if I'm a turtle
01:03:01.920
tell them right to you, then we say, oh my gosh, this is bad. Do you want to say like and subscribe?
01:03:07.520
Yeah. Help me. Then tell them, tell them, tell them in a turtle voice. Follow me. Don't bite me.
01:03:14.960
You're, are you a snapping turtle? No. Oh yeah. Like and subscribe to our video. Bye.
0.79
01:03:22.640
Do you want to go to the Creek Torsten? That's what all this is about?