Is Idiocracy Coming? Genetics, IQ, & Realistic Outcomes

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they explore the controversial and alarming trend of declining IQ scores worldwide. This thought-provoking discussion delves into:

* The reality of the "reverse Flynn effect" and its implications

* Genetic factors influencing IQ and their correlation with fertility rates

* The potential consequences of declining average intelligence on society and governance

* The role of AI in mitigating or exacerbating these trends

* Ethical considerations surrounding genetic selection and societal stratification

* The future of human intelligence and potential solutions to the crisis

Whether you're a genetics enthusiast, concerned citizen, or simply curious about the future of human cognition, this video offers a balanced and data-driven perspective on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

[00:00:00] with no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to reward those who reproduce the most

having kids is such an important decision. We're just waiting for the right time. It's not something you want to rush into, obviously. I'm pregnant again! S**t! I got too many damn kids!

There's no way we can have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no. God, no. Come on over here, b***h! He don't care about you! Well, we finally decided to have children, and it's not going well. Yeah! Yeah! I'm gonna f**k all of you! That's my boy!

IQ is dropping by about 0. 2 points annually in some regions.

This may seem like a trivial decline,

but when you consider the standard deviation of IQ is 15 points, such a decline is sustained will lead to a drop by one standard deviation every 75 years. Should this trend hold in those regions [00:01:00] in just 125 years, your average human will have an IQ that would today qualify someone as intellectually disabled.

Would you like to know more?

Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be speaking with you today. Today, we are going to be asking the question. Is an idiocracy style future true?

Is the IQ of humanity declining over time? I have read in one of our comments, they're like, well, you know, this person thinks that you IQ is , declining over time. And we stay away from a lot of the controversial genetic stuff. However, this is the one controversial genetics topic where I'm like, People really need to be realistic about the data.

Well, yeah, it's, it's just the data in this is so loud and from so many different angles and it will create real problems from society if we try to ignore this or pretend it's not happening. So, I mean, I'm just going to start with a recent study that I saw that was like, okay, yeah, we got to be taking this [00:02:00] seriously.

So, this study shows that the mean IQ of U. S. college students has been dropping by 0. 2 points per year since the mid 20th century. And this phenomenon has been well documented in many sources and it's called the reverse Flynn effect. Historically, you had something called the Flynn effect, where all around the world, IQ was increasing they're pretty much every year.

And the reason why you had the Flynn effect was because nutrition was increasing. But once nutritional needs as they relate to brain development saturated in the human population then dysgenics appears to be the primary cause that IQ was going down. But we'll get into this in more detail with lots of citations for this one, because I'm actually going to be going to a quote.

From our book. So we're going to read a little passage from the book, The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion and go over it. All right. Are we destined to become a society reminiscent of the nightmarish dystopia depicted in the film [00:03:00] Idiocracy,

.

 Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothing, but, uh, it says on your chart that you're fucked up.

Uh, you talk like a fag, and your s**t's all retarded. What I do is just, like, you know, like, you know what I mean? Don't worry, Skrull. There are plenty of tards out there living really kick ass lives. My first wife was tarded. She's a pilot now. We mostly steer clear of fearful discourse about genetic selection against high IQ and dropping IQs in general because it is such a charged topic and our concerns around demographic collapse stand regardless of this scenario's potential. We only approach this philosophical third rail in order to dispel some common misconceptions.

IQ has a high level of genetic correlation and can be predicted by looking at a person's genome. So I have a citation here. If you want to go through all of these citations, I'll just mention when I run across the citation just, Get the [00:04:00] book. It's like a dollar on Amazon and it'll have all the citations listed.

This is in the appendix. The association between genetics and IQ is not small. In fact, this meta study argues the IQ correlation between adopted brothers and sisters, genetically unrelated people raised together, falls almost to zero in adulthood. Again, another citation. No, we think this meta study might be overstating the correlation a little.

Suffice it to say that There is very little argument in the scientific community over whether there is some genetic correlation in IQ. They debate things like how big that correlation is, whether that link is concentrated in specific ethnicities.

Which we spend an entire chapter of this book arguing against, whether IQ is a measure of what we mean when we talk about intelligence in the vernacular, a topic we won't go into here, do your own research, and whether the genes associated with IQ are stable in the population or declining, which we will focus on in this chapter.

For those who are not up to date with what is [00:05:00] an quote unquote offensive position in the scientific consensus, we encourage you to read the Wikipedia page on this subject. So the point that I'm making here is that It is so commonly accepted that IQ is a genetic thing that there is a Wikipedia page on this topic.

Or at least there was when I wrote the book. Who knows? It could have been scrubbed by lefties by now. But We're pretty sure the people who turn a blind eye to the role genetics plays in privilege will be held in the same regard as those who claim they quote unquote didn't see race in the 1990s.

Acting as though none of your partially inherited traits gave you systemic advantages over others, Be they height, metabolism, attractiveness, or IQ, only serves to reinforce your unearned privilege and ultimately breeds more systemic inequality. To be extremely clear, we refer to these two instances in relation to each other because each represents an assumed moral high ground through feigned blindness to systemic advantages one has over others.

We are not suggesting that any of these things are linked to race. Multiple studies have demonstrated that IQ is dropping by about 0. [00:06:00] 2 points annually in some regions. Oh, you see, it's been held up by more recent research. Though, the U. S. seems more resistant to this than other nations.

This may seem like a trivial decline,

but when you consider the standard deviation of IQ is 15 points, such a decline is sustained will lead to a drop by one standard deviation every 75 years. Should this trend hold in those regions in just 125 years, your average human will have an IQ that would today qualify someone as intellectually disabled.

Note, while our timelines are probably off, it is highly unlikely that we are wrong about the general trend. Quote, So here I'm pretending to be one of our the detractors. But IQ is not a good measure of intelligence. We too find it tedious and often misleading to focus so heavily on IQ.

That said, while there is plenty of research separating out IQ from intelligence, we are the last people to pedestalize it, carrying far more [00:07:00] about initiative and willpower. IQ does correlate with very common standards of achievement, if all the outcomes with which IQ correlates began to plummet, we seriously would be worried, and we think you would too.

Do you anyone who wants to try to argue that this is not a thing that's happening? , E especially, we're not arguing about the speed that it's happening. You have to argue one of two. Frankly, completely unwinnable positions. Only either that there isn't evidence that IQ is correlated with genetics, which is just super, super, super obviously is.

And it's probably one of the most robust findings in all of genetic science. Actually, I saw one paper claiming that it was the single most robust finding in all genetic science. Or two. Argue that.

People with lower IQs, aren't having more kids than people with higher IQs. , again, I cannot imagine how anyone could conceivably argue this, looking at any source of data in the world. But, The people will try to say [00:08:00] this. And they'll try to say it because it allows them to one, , not take responsibility for their unearned privilege. And to, , because it allows them to maintain a world framework, which is not correlated with reality.

 Some papers have argued that this decline in IQ is purely environmental. These arguments fall flat when combined with orthogonal source of evidence. In his paper, Natural Selection May Be Making Society More Unequal, David Hugh Jones wrote, quote, We found that 23 out of 33 polygenic cells Significantly linked to a person having more or fewer children over their lifetime, dot, dot, dot scores, which correlated with lower earnings in education, predicted having more children, meaning those scores are being selected for from an evolutionary perspective.

Scores, which correlated with higher earnings in education predicted. having fewer children, meaning that they are being selected [00:09:00] against end quote. This study even shows the polygenic score is correlated with higher earnings in education, decreasing within a population over time. This means it is measurable that genes, which correlate with high IQ are appearing at lower frequencies in the population over time.

And genes correlating with a high IQ are correlated with lower fertility rates. So this, And I'm not quoting the book anymore. This directly connects with demographic collapse. And when we talk about shifting populations, resulting from shifting fertility rates, what we're saying is that this, we have a lower educational attainment, lower earning future ahead of us based on these trends.

Right. So more from the book, imagine you are trying to determine the maximum speed of a car. One person makes this determination by looking at the engine and running calculations. This is analogous to the study looking at how genes that correlate with IQ also correlate with birth rate.

Another person makes this calculation by getting [00:10:00] in the car and flooring the accelerator pedal. This is analogous to the various studies measuring declines in IQ at the population level. If the max speed each group independently determines is close, you can be fairly confident in its accuracy. This is what we see above, meaning we're probably experiencing a meaningful decline in genes associated with high IQ that is likely to be sustained in the future.

So this is a really important point for people. Because a lot of people look at this decline in IQ and they're like, well, you know, okay. Okay. It's going down the IQ of people in college or the IQ of the general population. This could be due to something else, right? Like there's all these ways that maybe the way we're testing IQ is a bit different over time or something like that.

But the problem is, is that this decline. Aligns with the predicted decline. We would see from the fact that the people with the polygenic scores that we associate with [00:11:00] high IQ are also having fewer kids. And I should note something else that was pointed out about above paragraph for people are like, why are you guys focused so much on IQ?

It's like, you don't need to focus just on IQ. If you, for example, focus on the polygenic score associated with making a lot of money. That also. Predicts low fertility. That also. And when we say predicts the low fertility, what we're really saying is, that is, disadvantageous from a natural selection standpoint within a modern environment, meaning it's being selected out of the general human gene pool.

But not only do you have these studies, it's actually more accurate because there's a separate study that I might not have put in the book that looked at the polygenic scores that are associated with high IQ over time within genome databases. Because, you know, we've been collecting full genomes for a while now, like 10 20 years at this point and we can look at the frequency of specific genetic sequences over time and the Frequency in the developed world, at least [00:12:00] that we are seeing these high IQ predicting polygenic scores occurring in the population is decreasing at the rate you would predict it to be decreasing.

If we really were seeing the 0. 2 point decrease over time, but about this sustained into the future thing, part of me. I mean, so when we look at demographic collapse, we're also looking at populations getting lumpy and siloed and kind of walling themselves off part of me because of the growth of AI is a little bit less concerned about this than I used to be, because I feel like the number of people we need who are quite smart is now reduced due to the existence of AI.

And if you have. A sufficient number, like minimum critical mass of people super humanly boosted by the resources of AI, which we've recently discovered can even really augment creativity, scientific artistic, et [00:13:00] cetera that maybe will be okay. What are your thoughts on that? Was dropping IQs? No.

No? No. No, no, no, no, no, no. These people cannot use AI. Like, so one of the things that I have become increasingly aware of, given the direction that AI development has gone we'll have another episode where we focus on this, because we actually bought exclusive rights to a theme song for the show. And the theme song was made in part due to AI.

I don't know why I'm doing this.

The really great thing about this, AI art and stories are coming from people who in the past would have been [00:14:00] artists or writers or something like that. They need the AI , is very useful at augmenting an individual's personal genius. And that's where you get the really, really high quality stuff. Like when I get the AI songs that are of the quality of a professional musician these aren't necessarily the songs that the AI is just.

Bidding out, right? They are the songs that have been mediated by somebody who has a unique talent for this sort of stuff. They just allow that individual to create a lot more really high quality music a lot faster. But so let's just say if we have very, very few geniuses in the future, is that so, so much of a problem when the output of those geniuses can be 10 X by AI?

Oh, that's a good point. I mean, yeah. Well, the problem is, is that we live in democracies. And the, these people are going like, the dumb ones are going to be more and more of the general population as [00:15:00] time goes on. Yeah. And, and, and, and so they will be electing and building bureaucracies that. Make it harder and harder for the geniuses to do their jobs.

And I guess that also break in a road society in general.

We also need to consider the geopolitics of how a declining number of competent productive individuals impacts the solutions that countries are going to have access to. And demographic collapse really hits. We had some reporters from the wall street journal over at our house yesterday. And we were talking with them about how one, if you look at like the United States, if you look at the low income earners in the United States, it was something like. 80% of them are living paycheck to paycheck.

And yet most of their life is covered by social services. Most of the food that they eat or their housing, et cetera. And when that social service disappears, these people are genuinely EFT. [00:16:00] Now. The problem here becomes, as demographic collapse gets worst, it is hurting the more productive populations.

, economically speaking, I E the people who are paying more taxes more than it's hurting the populations that are. Taking taxes. Now, this becomes a uniquely big problem in the face of AI empowering these productive individuals, because it means that these productive individuals no longer have the same.

Geographic ties that they would have had in a historic context by that, what I mean is, you know, about someone who and I do work in venture capital. , when you look at the venture capital deals that are being done in Silicon valley these days, what everyone will tell you is it's like, Two guys in the United States, maybe 20 people in the Philippines, and then just tons of AIS. It is not like it used to be with Google or something like that, where you could get these giant companies that can't easily pick up and leave. If you think that you can make up. For the [00:17:00] rapid decrease in the number of productive people by taxing the few that are left more. These people will just pick up and leave the lay there, go to another country, or if no other stable democracies exists, we'll go to a charter city, which are increasingly being opened up, which allow them to not have to pay into these large socialized systems. Which means that. Millions of people are going to starve or old people are going to die.

I mean, we w the scale of the human tragedy that is going to happen because people are not being realistic about the fact that not all humans, even when you control for their childhood are born with the same opportunities due to genetic differences in terms of how we perceive the world or relate to AI or relate to. You know, w whatever, right. It's going to be catastrophic. It's going to be catastrophic at the scale. , or likely bigger than the scale of [00:18:00] something like the great leap forward in China, which depending on the stats you're looking at more people died in that five-year period, trying to move their economy forwards than died during the entire American slave trade. Just because something had good intentions doesn't mean people won't die. It doesn't mean you don't bear moral copability for ignoring it.

When people told you, Hey, you really need to pay attention to the fact that not all humans are born equally competent.

Yeah. I also, I should note for people who are like, IQ doesn't matter and you shouldn't look at it. We have another video that goes really strong on like the core arguments against that, that were done by like Naseem Talid or something like that.

I can't remember who it was. Oh yeah. But basically the people who argue this are lying to you, like in a way where I don't know if it's true. If they're like intelligent and have engaged with the data, like, I don't think they believe what they're saying. Really? Because, you know, you can look at their own arguments and their structure like [00:19:00] arguments.

And this is the point that we were making in the last episode that we did on this particular thing ages ago. That. The way that the arguments are structured, it structured like the person who's getting it knows that they're lying to the audience, but it's trying to figure out how to take the P. C.

perspective. Not by somebody who's genuinely been confused by the data. Because it's like, they'll be like, well, you know, it only really matters, you know, when you get to like, really low Iqs and stuff like that. And it's like, yeah, but that's where the whole world's going to be in 100 years. Right.

Like, and that's what really gets me that the average person in the developed world within 125 years that's born is going to be what today would be categorized as mentally disabled. That is not like a small problem. That isn't Right. Well, here, hold on though. I do think that things are a little bit Clouded.

I was listening this morning to YouTube video on the evil history of eugenics, and it was talking about all these different IQ surveys and bits of research that had taken place. And [00:20:00] based on contemporary definitions of basic intelligence, something like 45 percent of people coming through Ellis Island were, were seen as, you know, having the intelligence of a five year old or below, et cetera, et cetera.

And yet, you know, these are people who had figured out. From positions of, of quite a meager means, we'll say how to get across an ocean to America, you know, like these are, these are people with hustle, people that we might define as I challenge you, I would say these were people who came from an environments that were incredibly low nutrition environments.

They grew up starving. I would not be surprised given the amount of lead that was used in products back then, given the amount of starvation that would have happened back in. Yeah. Actually half the people going through Ellis Island did have the intelligence of a fire. And that may be. And so another one of the arguments that I want to present is, Yeah.

Throughout the vast majority of human history due to nutritional constraints due to immense poverty, pervasive poverty, and or just a [00:21:00] very small class, it was given the resources to even just be literate that we for a very, very long time have gotten by on a extremely small percentage. I think the most interesting element of this to me.

Is what's different now? And why is this risky now? And perhaps the biggest issue here is that in the past, those who counted as intelligent by contemporary measures were the ones who ruled society and built the things and decided how things were going to work. Whereas now society is going to be run by to a certain extent, the lowest or most mediocre common denominator, which means that either what's very urgent.

If the reverse of, I mean, basically given that the reverse effect. Reverse Flynn effect is real is we have to automate and eliminate as much as of government as possible so that there is as little deep state as possible because every person working in government is going to increasingly become a [00:22:00] liability as the average person becomes dumber, essentially.

And then does that make sense to you? But what you're missing here, and this is the point I was going to make is you're not taking into account the effect that a decreasing average has on long tails. So, what, what, what, what's really not being taken into account here is that whole saying of like, have you met the average person will half are dumber than that.

So the point I'm making, are you familiar with what I mean by long tails? I think so, but you're probably going to expand on it. I'm not really sure where you're going with this. I, I'm sure I, I'm assuming you're saying that just, this means that the dumbest people are going to be very dangerous. No, it doesn't mean that.

That, so suppose you had two populations, right? And one population had an average IQ that was five points above the other population. Okay. If you then in that society, Find the top 1 percent of people, right? 90 percent of that top 1 percent are going to be from the population that's [00:23:00] just 5, 5 IQ points higher than the other population.

If those two groups are equal numbered in society. It's a massive Of, of long tail distributions. When you have a move in the middle, it disproportionately affects the long tail. So if you have a move 5 points or 10 points down in the middle, that's going to affect vastly, vastly, vastly decrease the number of geniuses that are being born much more than you would expect from just like, say a 30 or 40 percent decrease in general intelligence.

It would cause the level of like genius level today, people being born to drop by like 98%, 99%. Um, It is so, so that's, that's really going to happen when a portion of the population That values intelligence and begins using polygenic risk score selection, not just because they're obsessed with intelligence, but because more and more people are [00:24:00] going to be forced to use IVF and PGTP polygenic risk score selection is going to become just more common practice.

The people will sort of by accident select for intelligence, even if they don't value it, that this population of people delaying fertility using IVF and then inadvertently selecting for intelligence is going to create. more super geniuses. I mean, we have, we have the Kwisatz Haderach of our family, right?

And like, they're what in like the top 99. 8 percent of intelligence. I think we're going to see more of those children being born as people select for them. So I think that what is going to happen in the future? So if I'm like actually trying to predict the most likely scenario in the future, this plays into that scenario.

But doing polygenic selection to increase the IQ of your kids, given how quickly polygenic scores are decreasing, isn't actually going to protect your family line that much, unless your family line is genetically isolating [00:25:00] itself from the general population. Right, because you've got reversion to the mean and in the end, you shouldn't be dating someone because they themselves are smart, but because their entire family is smart.

Yeah Like on first date, you should be asking like, so what did your grandfather do? Yeah, what did your parents do? I like this point because people often go to you and they'll be like, well, your wife is smart, but aren't you afraid of reversion to the mean?

And I'm like, yeah, that's why I checked that she was from a smart family because the mean is high. Because you're not reverting to, like, we often talk about reversion to the mean as being like to the population mean, but functionally what's happening in reversion to the mean is you're reverting to the mean of your individual families and ancestors.

And so if that mean is high and you are genius or intelligent due to some random mutation that random mutation isn't going to occur in your kids at, at a high level. So they're not going to get, you know, your unique intelligence. However, I'm not smart because I'm like a mutant. I'm smart because like my brother is smart.

It's a genius. And my [00:26:00] parents are geniuses. Well, and what's quite interesting is this actually shows up in the polygenic scores related to intelligence of our embryos. So there is only one embryo of all of our embryos for which we have polygenic scores that is either at the exact average for the population or two or 3 percent below average.

So the, the vast majority. of our embryos are clustered. Like, a third to halfway in between like the 95 percent range and the mean, so all kind of above average. So you can really see like there's this clustering and you see this with almost all polygenic risk scores. If you get any, like you look at polygenic risk scores of your embryos for something like gum disease or for schizophrenia or for depression, you're not actually, you might see one outlier here or [00:27:00] there.

But for the most part, you are just going to see them all kind of clustered. So for some of our kids, they just have equally shitty outcomes around certain things like acne, for example. We're all going to have a bunch of pizza face kids because that's just our genetic heritage. You were pizza faced and I was pizza faced.

So we're going to have pizza face kids. And our grandparents probably were pizza faced too. Yeah, so we have, what was I going to say? So yeah, what's actually going to happen? Do I think that some populations are going to begin to genetically isolate themselves as the general population really isn't doing anything about this?

Yes, I do think they're going to. Another thing to remember from a historic standpoint, and we mentioned this in another video, but it's good to come back to, is the effect that current child support laws have on out group breeding. Which is to say that historically you would have some individuals develop or some families develop genes that were more associated with success in that society, i.

e. earning lots of money, building up lots of [00:28:00] power. But then these individuals would, when they were male, impregnate lots of women who they weren't married to, which we can also see from the data. Fidelity, historically, was really common. And so, And through that, like a guy might rise up to a local Lord, but he'd impregnate a bunch of peasants.

And so you never really got that much of a differentiation between the competent people and the incompetent people that has changed recently. specifically due to child support laws, because now when a person is super wealthy, when a male is super wealthy or successful in some other means, they are going to be very wary about getting a woman pregnant who they don't see as their equal or someone they want to spend their entire life with.

Because they're going to be on the hook to pay for any children they have with them. Yeah. Which is hugely dysgenic because that means that individuals who like a man who is not. Successful who doesn't have much money, there actually isn't really that much of a cost to him in getting a bunch of women pregnant.

So if i'm the type of guy who's in and out of [00:29:00] pregnant In and out of prison, you know tons of debt. No wealth can't really hold a job There's no reason for me not to knock up a bunch of girls. Yeah, they're not even wages to be garnished Yeah, there's not even wages to be garnished and that's why you see the people who are knocking off lots of people And having a lot of children out of wedlock are the people You who, who don't have a lot to lose really, you know, and that's, that's hugely dysgenic and has effects.

But the larger point being to all of this, when people are like, we can just keep doing what we're doing genetically speaking without polygenic selection, without gene editing, you really can't. And if you're in a community that is not ruthlessly selecting for the intelligence of your children's mates and, and building a culture that does that In the future, you're just not going to be one of the few groups on earth that end up mattering and we can't engender that within our kids in terms of their mates.

You know, don't pay attention to how attractive they are. Look only at work [00:30:00] ethic, ambition, IQ, you know, stuff like this. And, and then eventually, given the direction of the general population, you know, when you're talking about a two standard deviation decrease in the next hundred years the only way some part of our current civilization ends up surviving is if some population does genetically isolate themselves.

Gosh, this is where my, I was, I've been reading this for book called Red Rising, which if you have Audible right now, it's presently available for free. If you have an Audible subscription, which is why I'm listening to it, but it was also recommended to us. It's the one I described to you where it has these striations in population.

There are the golds, there are the pinks and purples and coppers and silvers and reds, but the golds are at the very top of society and they rule. Humanity is an intergalactic empire. And they are brutally eugenic to the extent that in their top leadership academies, there are literal, not [00:31:00] battle Royales.

It's not like only one will be left, but they definitely have quotas of, of people that. Are totally permitted to be died. Like, you know, 10 percent of the student population is going to die. And that's a good thing because you want the weak ones to die. And they, they are therefore taller and bigger and they, they look different.

They're incredibly smart. They're incredibly agile. Their bones are stronger and it, yeah. Is that what you're saying? We need, do we need the golds of red rising? I'm seeing that. You know, people can be like, well, we can, there isn't a way basically to keep the IQ stable with the selective pressures that are created by modernity.

So you have two options, right? Either you're in one of the groups that's striving to increase your IQ or ambition, other genetically correlated traits, or you're not paying attention to this in terms of your groups of breeding practices, and you are in a, Downwards and rapidly downward spiral to cultural [00:32:00] irrelevance.

And it's an important thing to note as well. When we talk about the correlatories to IQ, a lot of people assume IQ is just. How smart you are, but like, what, what are things that are really correlated with IQ how likely you are to grape someone, people with low IQs are much more likely to grape someone than people with high IQs, even health outcomes.

Health outcomes are pretty much like you. Yeah. So, so all, is somebody going to rob you? Is somebody going to murder you? It's general pro sociality is correlated with IQ. So just broadly being a nice person, helping other people out, contributing to society. Being healthy, all of these things correlate positively with IQ, which is why I implied earlier that if people do polygenic risk score selection with their embryos, and they're only looking at things like being kind, having a sense of humor or being healthy, they're going to inadvertently select for IQ.

But something that you point out, yeah, sure you can, you can focus on this or you cannot in terms [00:33:00] of your family's breeding practices or whatever. But I think the bigger issue is. Either, like I said, you have to figure out how to streamline government as much as possible to avoid the human liability problem as people get, on average, less intelligent, or we need to really double down among those communities that are maintaining high IQs with this city state concept whereby people are just going to their walled off gardens and Well, you could have city state for In terms of what's that term that everybody likes to use now?

The network state. You can have networked state marriage markets and stuff like that, right? Which is what we're trying to do. If you're still being governed by a nation that is Increasingly inept and dangerous, then you are at risk. Well, and this is why I predict that city states are the future. As it becomes clearer that there are some subpopulations that through AI, as you pointed out, are going to be even more efficacious than they would be in today's world.

And that we'll have [00:34:00] a dramatically higher IQ than the general population. But also that government, which is increasingly deep state driven and still very much human run becomes increasingly dumber. Which, can you imagine government getting dumber than it is now? That's, that's scary. There's, you have to be, it's not just about having the 10x power or more of AI.

It's about being pushed away from quite a liability of governance. I think you're absolutely right. Well, any final thoughts on this, Simone? Yikes. But also you say that people with low IQ are moving in the direction of cultural irrelevance, whereas I think that that is not true. And I would expect something a little bit closer to idiocracy where that, that is the pervasive culture.

And it's huge and it's big and it's everywhere and it's loud. And. Well, I mean, I think closer than idiocracy is removing to Wally you know, the AIs and [00:35:00] everything like that, that are basically making all the decisions for these, but, but unlike Wally, the people won't just be, because the other thing that's really correlated with high fertility rates, people might be surprised by this, are the polygenic scores.

The single most correlated with fertility rate of all the polygenic scores a person has is the one that also correlates, That is actually meant for correlating with IQ. But the second one in a study that was looking at this is the one that's correlated with obesity. Such a fat negative podcast. Well, I guess Ozympic exists today.

So maybe that won't be an issue. It'll be some sort of weird, sad form of, I don't, I don't know. Hedonism or whatever, but yeah, I don't think it'll be exactly like idiocracy because I think that AI does sort of prevent a true idiocracy future. But the question is. What the general pop is, it's not a question.

The general pops IQ is decreasing rapidly, way more rapidly than people think. The one standard deviation in 75 years is shockingly fast. And that you see this across all measures and pretty much everywhere [00:36:00] you look. And it is so interesting to me that the powers that be. Are just pretending like it's not happening.

I suppose the question is what do you do about that? I think people just have to support human dignity and respect that maybe intelligence listen in the end. The thing that deserves whatever is the thing that takes it. And if obesity and lower educational attainment are what managed to inherit the future genetically, then power to the people, you know, that's what, that's what earns it intelligence clearly isn't everything.

And a big theme that we've seen in low fertility rates is people being so far up their asses in terms of thought. And we're probably going to do a separate episode on this, but. People overanalyzing things and overthinking things without having enough of an emphasis on action in their lives. Really just not having kids [00:37:00] also not doing anything with their careers, not doing anything with life.

In fact, I argue that there is an immense portion of the quote unquote intelligent population that contributes. Probably less to society than significantly less intelligent. And we're talking quite below average people in this world because they spend all of their time strategizing and writing and managing and analyzing and doing absolutely f**k all.

And it makes me so f*****g mad. So. Maybe in the end, IQ isn't all you make it out to be. Maybe in the end, only the small number of people who are both intelligent and action oriented, like Elon Musk, who can both think and do things, which is quite unusual are the ones who matter. And a lot of the people, even God bless you all, but people who listen to this podcast, who are very smart, but aren't doing anything with their lives don't matter.

In fact, matter less than the obese high school educated person. Who's having a ton of kids. So if you want to be among the elect to your based [00:38:00] camp listener, I hope that you are actually doing something with your life and actually having kids because you may be among the entire reason why IQ is disappearing because you guys can't keep your f*****g acts together.

The end. Thank you. And I love you very much. Malcolm. I love you too, Simone. Unrelated to today's discussion.

Cause I didn't even know we were talking about this. I was looking up quotes from mediocrity

Can't believe you like money too. We should hang out totally.

because I was looking for fun things that we could use in a base camp intro and I'm reading these and I'm thinking these are just things that we say around the house, not what the protagonist says, just what people from.

Future idiot world say like what like water like out of a toilet

But I mean who drinks water When you have diet coke.

[00:39:00] I was just looking for some regular water. Water? Yeah. You mean like in the toilet? What for? Just to drink.

No, there's so many great lines in it though, but also I don't, I think it's interesting that a lot of what's considered to be the epitome of dumb comments in idiocracy are actually super based comments that I would consider to be dumb. I mean, yeah, obviously there's a lot of like watering fields with the equivalent of Gatorade isn't exactly smart,

I was just going through Idiocracy clips. And this scene reminds me so much of When I am trying to talk to my brainwashed. Ultra urban monoculture friends who work in large companies like Disney or whatever.

In this [00:40:00] conversation, just replace.

Rondo with DEI. Electrolytes with.

Equality. And water with meritocracy.

 For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brondo stuff. But Brondo's got what plants crave.

It's got electrolytes. So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops? Yes. Like out the toilet? Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, but yeah, that's the idea. But Brando's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow. Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet. Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world? Okay, look you want to solve this problem so why don't we just try it Okay, and not worry about what plants crave Brando's got what plants crave Yeah, it's got electrolytes.

What [00:41:00] are electrolytes? Do you even know it's what? They use to make brando. Yeah, but why do they use them to make brando? Because Bruno's got X rays.

but do you know why there is Diet Coke and Coke Zero as two separate products?

I feel like I knew this once. Yeah. So Coke Zero came about when they invented a formula that could create a Coke that tasted more like the original Coke. And they decided to use this opportunity to see if they could create a diet product that was cat That targeted the male audience instead of the female audience because diet soda Was predominantly consumed by women who were worried about their figure, you know So they had they were the ones who were more willing to compromise on flavor to attempt to you know, stay thin, right?

So yes, because nothing tastes as good [00:42:00] as skinny feels that is why It's called Coke Zero instead of like Coke Light or Diet Coke or Diet Coke New. Because diet as a word in branding is associated with women, female products. You don't want to be a girl. And so they're like, how can you make it? Zero. And so what they did is they were like, zero, and then it's like red and black and bold masculine.

Yeah. That's very interesting. It it is, yeah. The light has also been considered a sufficiently male term. Now, I've, I've had campaigns when we've had TVs on while traveling, like in, in the rooms we've been in for the new light beer, I think is dos or. Like gold. They're not even trying to put in any indicator of low calorie ness anymore.

They're just telling people and advertising that it's a light beer. I just think it's that [00:43:00] toxic for men to be seen.

And here we have Duff, Duff Light, and our newest flavor, Duff Dry. Oh, here's, here's another fun advertising story. We'll be ending the video here is, is it's the story of, and these are things I learned in business school or like around that time. Or this one I learned in business school.

The Diet Coke thing was before business school. This one is the story of Lighthouse and Coors Light. So Coors Light, Lighthouse, a beer. Yes. Lighthouse. It was a light beer made by the Samuel Adams Brewing Company. And it kept winning. Every light beer competition, you know, in terms of like taste, right?

So we keep winning all the big taste testing competitions, but it just wasn't selling that well, especially when compared to the top light beer on the market, which was Coors light, which you know, everyone is like this. Does not taste like a beer. Like why is it winning all of these like in the actual mind of the consumer when [00:44:00] you go, okay.

So, so, they then did user testing and they went out to try to find, you know, why was everybody buying Coors Light and not the Lighthouse? And it turned out it was because they were optimizing around completely the wrong problems. What they had been trying to do with Lighthouse was to create a beer that was lower calorie than a normal beer, but tasted as close as possible to a normal beer.

Provided the beer experience. But with Beer's Light, they didn't want a beer experience? No, what they wanted was something refreshing to drink after a hard day's work. More like a, a lemonade. They literally wanted beer flavored water. Yeah, they wanted masculine water. They wanted, yes, they wanted man water.

That is honestly what Coors Light is. It is man water. It is. It is. Oh my God. Okay. [00:45:00] Oh, mysteries have been solved today. That is what Coors Light is. All right,

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