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
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
00:00:00.000
Lynn was comparing American IQ estimates based on a representative sample with Japanese estimates
00:00:05.180
based on upper income, heavily urban samples. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in
00:00:10.980
not at 106.6, but 99.2. When the Chinese American scores were reassessed using up-to-date
00:00:18.180
intelligence metrics, Flynn found they came in at a 97 verbal and a 100 nonverbal. The numbers now
00:00:24.400
suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher IQs, but despite their
00:00:30.900
lower IQs. People are cherry-picking studies to get these big differences. It's not that you don't
00:00:36.800
get any difference between ethnic groups, but the difference is typically like two to three IQ points,
00:00:42.720
just not a really significant number. East Asian students spent approximately 13 more hours per
00:00:49.200
week on academic activities compared to their- 13! 13 more hours. It is not some Asians are
00:00:57.840
smarter than white people thing. It's Asians work harder than white people. Is that an offensive
00:01:03.200
thing to say? Like, I don't know. No, it's so, I think it's so commonly understood. When you remove
00:01:08.080
all of the DEI nonsense, 72% of the top academic performers become Asian. Like, that's wild.
00:01:14.880
But it gets more surprising because Asian Americans are actually way less successful than you would
00:01:20.480
expect them to be. Less than one percent of corporate officers and corporate board members
00:01:24.800
in America are Asians. And only two percent of college presidents. Only nine of the Fortune 500 CEOs
00:01:32.320
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?
00:01:43.120
Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be talking to you. We did an episode that was actually a long quote
00:01:48.800
from our book that went over the myth of a high Jewish Ashkenazi IQ. This episode has gone viral, so
00:01:56.160
that's fun. And I was like, let's double down. Because people said, this episode is going to get
00:02:02.880
you guys canceled. It's going to get Simone's campaign ruined. And I was like, how could it, like,
00:02:07.360
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
00:02:28.800
cancellations in regards to just engaging with like honest scientific information.
00:02:33.760
Well, yeah, just the fact that even there being commonly held group level traits is an extremely
00:02:41.120
controversial thing to say. And then also admitting that intelligence has a genetic component
00:02:47.440
is extremely controversial. And then of course, talking about Jews at all is extremely controversial.
00:02:53.120
So we were just, we weren't just stepping on third rails. We were like playing Twister just to try to touch
00:02:58.960
as many third rails as possible with that. Okay. Well, I decided, I decided I'm going back.
00:03:03.360
I'm going back. Round two of third rail Twister begins in three, two.
00:03:09.920
At the end of the episode, I set up this point where I was like, actually the, the, well, there are
00:03:18.160
specific cognitive traits that seem to have some ethnic correlation, broad IQ doesn't seem to be
00:03:27.680
broadly correlated when you actually dig into the, the, the nitty gritty of what's going on in these
00:03:34.320
studies. But the problem is, is we know that if it was highly correlated with ethnicity, we wouldn't
00:03:41.200
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
00:03:52.000
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
00:04:02.080
into the stats, what you then find, what we found was the Jewish situation is it's, it's not clear.
00:04:08.560
It's not, it appears that Jews have some areas where they're a little different cognitively,
00:04:14.000
but there isn't this huge IQ gap that is purported by the people who are the biodiversity bros,
00:04:20.320
even HPD bros. And it's actually very similar when you go into the Asian IQ differential. So that's
00:04:28.240
what we'll be going into in this. I am going to start because I don't want to get in trouble for
00:04:31.840
anything I'm about to say here. So I am going to be quoting from Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote an
00:04:37.920
article in New Yorker on this subject, which I paid for to get access to this article, just so I could
00:04:43.200
be quoting Malcolm Gladwell. So no one could say that I had said this stuff. Okay. All right. So
00:04:49.920
Malcolm says, now, hold on when you're quoting this, you don't get to say evil. Malcolm says,
00:04:53.760
that's what I'll say. Evil Malcolm. So nobody thinks that this is coming from my mouth. Okay. Okay. So Malcolm says,
00:05:00.320
Flynn, and he's talking about Flynn from the Flynn effect, a really well observed phenomenon that we
00:05:06.560
now have the reverse Flynn effect and blah, blah, blah. But historically it was the effect that showed
00:05:11.120
that IQ was rising over time as people were getting access to more nutrition. And then this effect
00:05:17.600
saturated, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians
00:05:22.160
have a genetic advantage in IQ, a possibility that has led to great excitement among IQ fundamentalists in
00:05:26.960
recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher IQs than people from European descent,
00:05:31.520
for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate
00:05:38.000
evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, pre-modern hunting practices,
00:05:43.600
brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the IQs of Chinese Americans also seem to be
00:05:50.480
elevated has led IQ fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international IQ pyramid with Asians at
00:05:56.640
the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom. Here was a question Taylor made for
00:06:03.520
James Flynn's accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn's data and realized that the comparison was
00:06:08.080
skewed. Lynn was comparing American IQ estimates based on a representative sample of school children
00:06:13.760
with Japanese estimates based on upper income, heavily urban samples. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in
00:06:20.800
not at 106.6, but 99.2. Then, Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese American estimates. They turned
00:06:28.880
out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco's Chinatown using something called the Lord Thorndike
00:06:36.080
intelligence test. But the Lord Thorndike test was normed in the 1950s. For children in the 1970s, it would
00:06:42.960
have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence
00:06:47.600
metrics, Flynn found they came in at a 97 verbal and a 100 nonverbal. Chinese Americans had slightly
00:06:54.240
lower IQs than white Americans. The Asian American success story has suddenly been turned on its head.
00:07:00.080
The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher IQs,
00:07:06.080
but despite their lower IQs. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis,
00:07:13.600
Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the
00:07:19.520
ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupation had an IQ of 97 or above. Among Chinese Americans,
00:07:26.240
that threshold was 90. A Chinese American with an IQ of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as white Americans
00:07:33.600
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.
00:07:38.640
There should be no great mystery about Asian American achievement. It has to do with hard work and
00:07:44.400
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
00:07:54.160
did have IQs that were higher than everyone else's, coming in somewhere at 103. Having worked their way into
00:08:00.560
the upper reaches of the occupational scale and taken note of how much the professionals value abstract
00:08:07.200
thinking, Asian American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific
00:08:12.160
spectacles. Quote, Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high IQ
00:08:18.800
rather than the reverse, end quote. Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussion of the relationship
00:08:24.720
between IQ and success, we often confuse causes and effects. So, thoughts?
00:08:31.040
I had never read anything like that before. This is surprising.
00:08:37.040
Yeah, it is surprising, but it gets more surprising because there's a few things that we're going to
00:08:43.680
note here. One is that Asian Americans are actually way less successful than you would expect them to be.
00:08:49.680
How can that be? When you look at general income and performance stats in the United States, they just
00:08:55.680
excel. When we talk about discrimination at elite universities, they're the ones that they're like,
00:09:00.640
stop throwing them at this. They're too qualified.
00:09:02.640
Everything you're saying is right. And we're going to get into how this leads to a very surprising
00:09:07.600
results when you actually look at key leadership positions. And then secondarily, we're going to be
00:09:12.720
talking about something really interesting, which is how East Asian, like why, if East Asians are not
00:09:19.120
particularly smarter than white Americans, why do they keep out-competing them, right?
00:09:23.680
Right, yeah. Well, and I guess not everywhere because how many East Asian politicians are there
00:09:28.560
in the US and how many East Asian- Well, that's what we're going to get to. So, they seem to out-compete
00:09:32.080
them within the average ranges and they seem to be massively slammed by them in the extremist angles.
00:09:39.120
Oh. So, how are they- So, they're like the women of smart people. Their distribution is less flat
00:09:49.120
and more clumped, but in a generally high area. Actually, yes, that is something we actually find
00:09:55.200
with their intelligence scores. That's so interesting.
00:09:57.840
They have a less wide distribution. But we also see from the data why they are so handedly out-competing
00:10:06.880
So, here I am going to be reading from the abstract of an article called Explaining Asian Americans'
00:10:12.640
Academic Advantage Over Whites. We find that the Asian American educational advantage over whites
00:10:18.880
is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in
00:10:24.400
tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian-white gap in
00:10:30.560
academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to one, cultural differences in
00:10:35.920
beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and two, immigration status.
00:10:41.280
Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian American
00:10:48.800
Insert Asian dad meme here. It's the standards. It's the culture.
00:10:52.400
But hold on. Hold on. I want to give the actual numbers here because they're interesting.
00:10:56.800
East Asian students spent approximately 13 more hours per week on academic activities compared to their
00:11:06.560
Is that not- that's in the United States, not a world of cram schools and insane-
00:11:11.520
Yeah, no, that's in the United States. They are choosing to spend an additional
00:11:16.880
13 hours is an astronomical amount of time in a week. Consider that like you sleep, you know,
00:11:23.920
like eight hours a night, right? So that means that they are spending probably around 25% of the
00:11:34.160
Um, basically, they're earning it. It's how they're-
00:11:39.280
It is not some Asians are smarter than white people thing. It's Asians work harder than white
00:11:45.520
people. Is that an offensive thing to say? Like, I don't know-
00:11:48.560
No, it's so- I think it's so commonly understood though. I mean, as much as I'm surprised by what
00:11:54.000
you're saying, I also shouldn't be surprised because yes, it is common knowledge that East Asians in the
00:11:59.200
United States perform really well, but it's also a common meme, and certainly among even people who
00:12:05.040
aren't around Asian populations, that Asian families tend to have higher academic and professional
00:12:11.680
standards. And then don't forget Asian dad meme, which is just my favorite, you know,
00:12:18.960
Pregnancy test, I have very mixed feelings about this one. You're watching The Bachelor,
00:12:23.680
why not watch The Doctorate? You know, like just, I just, I love, I love it. And I should have thought,
00:12:29.760
like, yes, especially because you and I are the, it's the culture people. I should have thought,
00:12:35.520
this is this, why would it be genetic when the culture is so obviously oriented around high
00:12:40.480
performance? And like, we all know this, right? Like, if you had Asian friends growing up, like,
00:12:46.080
you knew their parents were harder on them than yours.
00:12:48.320
Yeah. And, and I will note before we get further here, we are not saying IQ doesn't have a genetic
00:12:55.520
Just seeing the, the purported stereotypes of how it clusters around ethnic groups is just super wrong.
00:13:03.760
That is, that is what we're saying. And it is so super wrong that you basically as an individual
00:13:10.000
don't have the data to make statements or views or prescriptions around this information.
00:13:18.400
Just because it's so muddled by bad actors, basically.
00:13:22.720
Yeah. I guess it's kind of like a lot of unregulated medicine where I think it's totally
00:13:27.920
legitimate to say, yeah, mainstream medicine doesn't necessarily have all the right answers,
00:13:31.760
but then you go into alternative medicine and people are giving you homeopathic cures and,
00:13:36.560
you know, caffeine enemas. And it's like, no, no.
00:13:40.960
Okay. So, so that's, so that's, that's all we're trying to point out here. Okay. So, so next,
00:13:45.520
I'm going to go into an article that I found really interesting, which ends up that the writer of
00:13:51.200
this article was so cucked. They ended up being like, oh, this means nothing. It'll all even out
00:13:55.440
over time. We can just, you know, but, but I'm going to say, no, no, no, no, no. This is actually
00:14:01.040
significant. And it's something we need to talk about. The article was titled, if Asian Americans
00:14:05.920
are so smart, how come they have no power or influence? And so it starts out. Ouch.
00:14:12.960
In California, where a voter initiative outlawed racial preferences in admission,
00:14:16.560
nearly half of the undergraduates at the top public universities, UC Berkeley and UCLA are now
00:14:22.320
Asians in the Ivy league, which maintains all the traditional preferences for disadvantaged minorities
00:14:27.920
and athletes and alumni legacies. Undergraduate enrollment is still disproportionately between 15%
00:14:33.680
and 20% Asian because of academic performance. Stunyset High School, an elite public school in New
00:14:39.440
York, which is a feeder school for top colleges and universities and admits exclusively on test
00:14:44.960
performance. So in a city that's less than 13% Asian, 72% of the students at Stunyset are Asian. So
00:14:53.280
when you remove all of the DEI nonsense, 72% of the top academic performers become Asian. Like that's wild.
00:15:00.880
Now you might conclude that although Asians made up only 4.8 of the US population in 2010 census,
00:15:07.920
they probably have a disproportionate amount of power and influence in the US because of their
00:15:12.320
educational accomplishments. But that seems not to be the case. According to a much discussed
00:15:17.360
article in New York Magazine by Weasley Yang, statistics tell a different story. The article cites
00:15:22.240
various studies showing that less than 1% of corporate officers and corporate board members
00:15:27.040
in America are Asians and only 2% of college presidents. Only nine of the Fortune 500 CEOs are
00:15:34.720
Asians. Even in specific areas with a lot of Asian Americans, they are concentrated in lower ranks.
00:15:41.200
Although a third of software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, they make up only 6% of board
00:15:46.240
members and 10% of corporate officers in the Bay Area's 25 largest companies. At the National Institute of
00:15:53.200
Health, where 21.5% of the scientists are Asians, only 4.7% of the lab or branch directors are.
00:16:02.640
Asians get creamed at the upper ranks. So one, I would say I think a huge portion of this is DEI.
00:16:08.960
Asians, I think by far are the most discriminated class in the DEI world because on average,
00:16:19.440
they are the biggest large group to out-compete other groups. And so...
00:16:22.560
Yeah, but wouldn't you, I mean, I feel like you could still get points when there are,
00:16:27.040
when your imperative is to just not hire or promote another white man. The Asian competent
00:16:34.560
person would seem like the obvious choice. So you would... So this actually, and I think it's
00:16:40.160
why a lot of Indians have been able to move up so much. But not Asians? Not East Asians?
00:16:44.400
Well, no, but some Indians look like quote-unquote people of color to people in the United States.
00:16:49.440
They look darker. This is about how dark you look.
00:16:51.680
They look darker. I genuinely think that's why Indians have risen so much in the tech industry
00:16:56.000
is because they look... Because they look... Some look...
00:16:59.040
They have similar... I think it's that they have similar... I... Kamala Harris.
00:17:05.440
Well, Kamala Harris is half black, but I think that realistically, when these people in these
00:17:11.840
tech companies are choosing to promote someone, and keep in mind how much of their staff is Asian,
00:17:16.160
right? So if you're talking in Silicon Valley, they were saying 21.5% of the scientists in this
00:17:21.440
one group were Asian. And then in Silicon Valley, it was around a third of software engineers.
00:17:27.360
Yeah. But the point being is that when you are the promoting officer, when you're the HR person,
00:17:31.920
and you're looking at your pool of software engineers, you see your Asian employees as white,
00:17:37.360
because there are just so many of them. I'm telling you that's what it is, in huge part.
00:17:44.800
And you see this when they talk about it. When Asians get out there, and they're like,
00:17:47.840
we're being discriminated against a college admission.
00:17:55.040
Asians are white to the left, as Jews are, for example.
00:17:59.600
At least they're not hated the same way as Jews. Though they had their, man, like World War II was
00:18:05.040
just, oh, let's forget about the fact that we had Japanese internment camps. I mean,
00:18:09.760
talk about like, just like Jews, they were put in camps. But guess who put them in the camps?
00:18:17.040
And I would say that they had their property stolen.
00:18:19.040
A lot of the Asian American communities, this is what's really interesting, is Black Americans will
00:18:23.440
say the reason that we're behind is because we had everything taken from us. But I'm like, yeah,
00:18:27.520
well, Japanese Americans had that happen much more recently in their history.
00:18:31.120
They had all their, a lot of their businesses taken, a lot of their homes taken.
00:18:34.480
Everything that they, they, World War II set the Japanese-
00:18:36.800
I can't believe that happened. It still blows my mind that that happened. It is insane.
00:18:42.080
Did one of your family members like stay in, in some Japanese person's property to save it for
00:18:46.720
them after they got out of the internment camp?
00:18:48.240
A lot of our, our extended like friends and family either were themselves related to,
00:18:54.240
like had, had, you say like first generation Japanese immigrant ancestors who were themselves
00:18:59.520
interned or who tried to help people who were interned. But it doesn't matter if your neighbors
00:19:07.280
try to help keep squatters out of your house while you're sent off to a camp as an American.
00:19:12.720
It's not squatters out of your house. People would just take the houses or the farms or the property
00:19:17.200
or the businesses. So anyway, the East Asian community, but all of this creates a problem
00:19:22.240
for modern narratives, right? If East Asians are doing better than white people because they're
00:19:27.600
working harder, this creates some troubling- It's such a bad look. Yeah. It's the, because
00:19:34.080
the whole thing of like work harder, get a job. Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude.
00:19:41.600
That's what's stopping you. You got to get your act together.
00:19:44.720
Everyone hates, there's this meme on the internet. I'm sure you've seen it where Kim Kardashian is
00:19:48.640
just like, just work, get up and work, get out of bed. Like she, people hate that. They use it all
00:19:53.360
the time in a mocking way, but she's right. Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody
00:20:05.600
Kim is right. And also Kim is very successful and all the people who I see dumping on her are
00:20:11.280
not as successful as she is. So get out of bed and work, kids. But yeah, no, no one wants to say that.
00:20:17.440
So, so hold on because, because that is actually, I think DEI is a big part of why they're not
00:20:21.920
reaching the tops of these organizations. And I think another big part comes from the work. It
00:20:27.920
could be due to a distributional concentration that we talked about earlier, that they have a
00:20:32.640
fewer long tails. It could be due to their specific specialism. Remember how we said that-
00:20:40.400
Well, no, in the same way that Jewish people don't really have a significantly different IQ
00:20:48.720
Oh, right. But the things that they specialize in put them into positions of especially memetic
00:20:52.960
influential, influential power, like politics, like media, like, yeah.
00:20:57.760
Yeah, yeah. Specifically with Asia, East Asian populations, the area where they consistently
00:21:02.640
underperform is inverval. I mean, and they're probably not as good at the bureaucratic game.
00:21:07.920
And they're getting kind of screwed. Like our, our economy runs on them, apparently like
00:21:13.520
Silicon Valley and stuff like that. But yeah, but they're not, they're, they're, they're,
00:21:17.280
they're failing at the water cooler. They're killing it on the, you know,
00:21:21.360
We'll get into some hypotheses about this, but before we do that, I want to get into another
00:21:25.360
thing here because a lot of people might still be under this illusion that if you actually like
00:21:30.640
split the data or you go into the data, they're like, oh, there's, there's probably a reason
00:21:35.600
why you guys never mentioned, um, black American IQ. Like you, you must be just trying to avoid
00:21:41.360
that. It's like way lower or something like that. Well, but it's, it's, hold on, hold on,
00:21:46.400
hold on. Okay. So I'm gonna go into a study here. Okay. Um, because I think that if you are just
00:21:54.080
reading human biodiversity, bro stuff, you can be convinced that there are bigger differences than
00:22:00.800
there are if you're actually looking at the preponderance of data. Oh, with all groups,
00:22:05.680
right? I mean, with Jews and with Asians and with blacks. Yeah. Yeah. So here I'm going to be reading
00:22:09.840
a study that that's titled racial IQ differences amongst transracial adoptees. Fact or artifact?
00:22:16.960
What is a transracial adoptee? So this is specifically because culture, right?
00:22:21.600
Oh, okay. Okay. So, so like a white Midwestern couple adopting a baby from Korea. That's what they mean. Okay.
00:22:28.800
Okay. Okay. So some academic publications infer from studies of transracial adoptee IQs
00:22:36.720
that East Asian adoptees raised in the West by whites have higher IQs than Western whites,
00:22:41.200
and white adoptees raised by whites have higher IQs than black adoptees raised by whites.
00:22:45.920
Those publications suggest that this is because of genetic differences. This is because genetic
00:22:51.120
differences give East Asians a higher mean IQ than whites and whites a higher mean IQ than blacks.
00:22:56.800
This paper proposes a parsimonious alternative explanation. The apparent IQ advantage of East
00:23:02.080
Asian adoptees is an artifact caused by ignoring the Flynn effect and adoption's beneficial effect
00:23:08.720
on IQ. And most of the IQ disadvantage of black adoptees disappears when one allows for attrition
00:23:15.280
in the Minnesota transracial adoption study and acknowledges the results of other studies.
00:23:20.720
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
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.
00:25:46.160
And in another instance, we're told this student is really dumb and is going to do really.
00:25:49.120
Right. And they're the same students. And then they start treating the dumb students as though
00:25:52.560
they're dumb and the genius. Well, no, no, they actually do this between students.
00:25:56.720
So this study I think would be pretty unethical to do by today's standards,
00:25:59.440
but the students that the teachers told were dumb end up doing much worse than the students
00:26:03.280
that teachers are told. Yeah. I remember seeing that study. Yeah. Yeah.
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,
00:26:15.120
any, anything that's like, um, black people are like this genetically can largely just be trashed
00:26:23.920
in my mind because black people have the highest genetic variation of any population.
00:26:29.280
That's insane. By this, what I mean is if you're looking at African pools of, of, of people,
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
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
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,
00:28:00.560
they don't really like the American, they are way more racist against American blacks than
00:28:05.120
American whites are against American blacks. If you have African friends, we have quite a number of
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
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
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,
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,
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
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
00:32:58.000
demonstrate stronger spatial slash nonverbal intelligence compared with white populations.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
00:41:38.800
United States. But then secondly, the Shanghai Sheck group, they were like, oh, we want to take everyone
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
00:42:20.800
out how to make advanced semiconductors. They are trying hard. And yet the Taiwanese have this figured
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.
00:42:36.000
But I mean, that, that, I mean, it should, they're like, they're, they don't follow orders well
00:42:40.160
enough. And this is all true. Like we can look at Confucianism and say, well, Confucianism leads to
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,
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
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
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.
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
00:58:10.640
Marvel comparison. I read the freaking book. Okay. Listen, Simone, the Marvel comparison. I'm like,
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
00:58:22.880
teenage girls go into Lord of the Rings filled with masculine buff warriors. Yeah. Who do all of
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
00:58:49.920
transforms as they get older and they want different things as they age. And this is actually really
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.
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
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
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.
01:01:00.320
Well, I think, you know, something else that might be discounted here, which we totally
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.
01:03:22.640
Do you want to go to the Creek Torsten? That's what all this is about?