Feb. 12, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:10
3201 Why Liberals Are Wrong About Inequality | Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux
The pursuit of truth can never be biased or prejudiced. Are you aware of the differences in intelligence between various groups? Are you aware of the predictive capacity of general intelligence factor related to income, poverty, crime, health and many other life outcomes? Why aren't differences in Intelligence part of the outcome equality discussion?Bill Whittle joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the third rail of modern politics, the dangers of not understanding human differences, why output equality is overlooked, what the science says about differences in Intelligence and the preservation of western civilization.For more from Bill Whittle check out: https://www.billwhittle.comMore from Stefan and Bill Whittle!1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY-ueR0OLlQ2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jhU3RZDg703: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNLnehTFanM4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLYVG4OP_wgFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux, back with our good friend Bill Whittle of the aptly named BillWhittle.com.
You should go and check out his work.
He also works with PJ Media and other places around the internet.
But he is currently floating around in our tiny little box on your screen.
Thanks a lot, Bill.
Great to have you back.
It's good to be here, Stefan.
How are you?
I'm well, thank you.
So, this show has dipped a little bit into the acid pool of aggregate IQ differences between ethnicities.
And you mentioned just in our pre-show chat, you read The Bell Curve, which was Dick Ernstine and Murray's big magnum opus, although it had only one chapter out of I think a dozen or more that was devoted to this.
But it kind of goes in passing.
Oh, that's interesting, bookmark, and you kind of keep going forward.
But we've, of course, had a whole bunch of experts from both the left and the right on talking about IQ differences between ethnicities.
And I think that helped to bring the issue more to the forefront of your thinking.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, that's the controversial part of The Bell Curve is the IQ difference between ethnicity.
I think the deeper issue is since IQ seems to – general IQ, right, is the term they use.
Since it so closely correlates to both poverty and crime on one hand and generally success and wealth on the other, It would be useful to be thinking about what a society that was recognizing these differences looked like.
I just love your example.
I've used it every time.
It's hard for me because it's such a damn good analogy.
But it's like you said, you can't put somebody on a basketball team to make them taller.
And I think it would be an interesting discussion today to talk about what a society that recognized the importance of cognition is in a third wave economy.
And you can compare it to first and second wave economies as well.
So, you know, we have so many of our problems.
We talk about, well, we're going to fix welfare by throwing more money at it, or we're going to means test these people, or we're going to do all this.
I happen to think that all this stuff is dancing around the margins, that there are, in fact, some solutions.
But if you're not going to have the courage to talk about the real issues in terms of race, in terms of IQ, in terms of all of this stuff, then you're not going to get anywhere.
And just to preface this so that the fire brigades that are already on their way, you know, This is a hard thing for progressives to understand about people like you and me.
When we talk about these things, it's not because we hate these people and it's not because we want to see them go away.
On the contrary, we seem to have, I listened to your shows on this, we are willing to take the kind of abuse that we're going to take by talking about some of this stuff, specifically because we'd like to see everybody live better.
I'm certainly speaking for myself here and I know you are too.
It's like you've got...
We've got a big part of the country in an ongoing trap and I'd like to see them get out of it and be happy and free and successful.
So that's where I'm coming from on this one.
Yeah, well, without a doubt, there's certainly no animosity.
The pursuit of truth can never be something that is biased or prejudiced by its very nature.
If you're naming it the truth, you're exactly trying to get away from bias.
And just so that's a very, very brief introduction for those who don't know the background or the backstory to this.
And we'll talk about its explanatory power.
In a moment and the dangers of ignoring these basic facts, but the IQ test came in a little over a hundred years ago and the first group to use it was the US military.
And this very quickly spread to other military operations throughout the world.
The reason being that they didn't want to put the smartest people in the trenches.
They wanted them to be, you know, ballistics operators or decryptors or managing communications or writing propaganda.
So they gave IQ tests, and IQ tests have been used ever since, particularly in the US military.
So people who say, well, IQ tests are meaningless, really better phone the Pentagon, which has been using it for over a century, and inform them that they're completely misallocating their resources.
I think you'll have a tough time making that case.
These guys are dealing with life and death, and if there's a meaningless test, it would not have survived for over a century.
Can I throw one thing in here?
Just one thing super quick.
I just spent the weekend with a friend of mine who's my number one success story.
On some level, he's the dad I should have had.
He was a geology professor, and then he started his own business, and they do 90%, 95% of the world's carbon-14 dating.
And I only found out just yesterday, or rather just over the weekend, he joined the Marine Corps, and he joined the Marine Corps to get in combat, and he specifically flunked the IQ test because he knew if he gave it everything he got, he wasn't going anywhere near the front lines.
Right, right.
And it's a tragic way that it was sort of introduced.
Now, the IQ test has been given millions and millions and millions of times in the developed world, in the undeveloped world, everywhere in between.
And it is normalized for Caucasians, for whites at around 100.
And, you know, the preface for all of this, of course, is that there's no such thing as being able to use IQ test generalizations to judge any specific individual.
Because, you know, it's like saying there can't be any tall Chinese people, even though Chinese on average are shorter than, say, Danish people, who I think the tallest around.
And so what happens is generally the Ashkenazi Jews, who are the wandering Jews, the Jews who basically were not in the Middle East throughout most of European history, they clock in at about 115.
And they're actually somewhat lowered by not so great visual spatial skills, but they're exceedingly good at language skills.
They go 120, 120 plus, and that's a full standard deviation above.
That is, it's a remarkable difference.
Right.
And the argument for this is that Jews throughout most of human history were not considered particularly intelligent.
But about 700 years ago, the culture kind of changed their reaction to a variety of things so that they began to really focus on breeding for brains.
And the Jews did something, the Ashkenazi Jews did something that you kind of wish the Catholic Church had encouraged, which the Catholic Church took the smartest people, locked them in monasteries and deactivated their testicles, which was really not great.
That's right.
By making priests celibate, you were taking the smartest, most literate people in society and making sure that they didn't reproduce.
And the studies are very clear on this.
The smartest Jews tended to be rabbis.
Marrying a rabbi was the very best thing.
And they de-emphasized looks and re-emphasized or focused on brains.
And over the last 700 years, the argument is that that's given them about a third of an IQ point per generation.
Which has given them a standard deviation higher.
So when there's all this Jewish conspiracy stuff where the Jews are in charge of this, that, and the other, it's like, no.
Smart people are in charge of this, that, and the other.
Jews just biologically or culturally, I think it's more biological, about 50 to 80% of IQ tends to be heritable.
That's just smarter people and Jews are overrepresented.
After the Jews come the East Asians, right, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Japanese, and so on, they clock in at 105, 106, but very good.
Visual special skills and very, very fast reaction times, which is another way that they measure intelligence.
Caucasians come in at about 100, and then below that are Hispanics clocking in at around 90, and then American blacks clocking in at around 85, partly because they have 20% European admixture in their gene pool, and then sub-Saharan Africans clocking in at around 70, which is...
Obviously very tragic, but this is the reality of what's happened.
And slightly below that are the aboriginals in Australia, clocking it at around 67 or whatever.
Now, these are very, very predictive measures.
There is a very strong correlation between IQ and income, IQ and health outcomes.
Like IQ people tend to be, frankly, taller.
Of course, the highest IQ people have the least hair.
We'll put the disclaimer in below.
And here's your argument on both sides, completely, completely confirmed.
Right.
Well, you see, the brain is so active, it has to suck in the hair.
I understand.
No, mine's barely functioning, and that's why they let all this moss grow up.
It's like sucking in spaghetti.
Yeah, it's a nice cool damp environment up here for me and it works real well.
Mossy thoughts continue.
It's very predictive in terms of life outcome.
High IQ people, of course, generally get better education, more literate naturally, tend to stay married.
If they get married, they stay married, tend to be better parents, healthier.
They tend to commit far fewer crimes.
Of course, there are Bernie Madoff exceptions, but the evil genius tends to be more of a myth than a reality.
The unfortunate thing is that the highest peak of criminality occurs at around IQ 85, which has something to do with some ways to go towards explaining the prevalence of criminal behavior among certain sections of the black population in the United States.
And this has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority.
That's really, really important to understand.
It's merely adaptation to local circumstances.
Nobody would say that a polar bear is superior to a brown bear.
All we say is the polar bear is better adapted to snow and the brown bear is better adapted to the woods.
That's all it is.
And so the argument goes something like this, that about 50,000 years ago, humanity went in vastly different directions and Some, of course, ended up in Siberia.
Some stayed in Africa.
Some went to Northern Europe.
Now, once you go past a certain latitude, you get these godforsaken winters.
I'm actually, of course, broadcasting as usual from an igloo because I'm in Canada and that's all we live in, as everybody knows.
Big blue suit out in the window behind you.
So the idea is that if you don't have a deferral of gratification capacity, then you're going to eat your seed crop.
Once you get into agriculture and so on, then you are not going to be able to survive.
So you need very close social cohesion, social cooperation, and you need to be able to defer gratification.
You need to work very hard in the now for stuff which may not pay off for a year or two in terms of clearing the land, seeding the land and all that.
Yeah.
It's just one of these byproducts of the need biologically to defer gratification.
In other words, I don't think nature could figure out how to get you to defer gratification without making you more intelligent, seeing further over the horizon.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
My understanding of the study of the evolution of the brain is that the connection between the brain and the hand is a feedback loop and that the first tool users were using their brains and their hands in such a way that each one basically developed the other.
The more precise work you're able to do with your hands.
the more you're able to think about what kind of precise tools you could make and that gave you better control of your fingers and there's kind of a feedback loop here.
The part about this discussion that I'm most interested in is Look, we have enormous societal problems to solve, enormous.
And we have world problems to solve, too, obviously.
And I'm not one of these guys who has to go around and fix all the world's problems, but I am interested in protecting my country and my country's values and Western values.
I mean, that's, to me, the reason I do the work I do.
It disturbs so many people.
It disturbs me, to be perfectly honest with you.
But it's not a question of whether or not this is true.
It's a question of what do we do with What appears to be overwhelming information that IQ correlates to a lot of our social problems, and one of the things you said in an interview, I've forgotten her name, she was...
Linda Gottfridson?
Yes, that's right, Linda.
She said that when you really get down to it, it's not that we have a, in terms of really rigid poverty, it's not that we have a money problem.
We have a cognitive problem.
They don't have access to cognition, I think, is what she said.
My experience, you know, just for the record here, I mean, I spent pretty much two decades of my life stone-cold broke.
I mean, power getting turned off every month.
And, you know, you write a $7 check and get a $32 bounce check fee for that.
I mean, I'm really familiar with all this.
Wait, you wouldn't have happened to be in the arts at that time.
That's exactly right.
There you go.
I was exactly right.
And the reason I was that poor was because I was a...
I'm determined to follow my wandering minstrel desire.
Certainly at any time I could have gotten a job that would have paid the bills.
But I understand what that kind of poverty is like.
And I think the thing that's most interesting, people say, no, you couldn't understand what it's like because you could have gotten out of it.
I do know what it's like.
In college, I was 6'1", and I was 119 pounds.
We'd pool $3.80 so the three of us could get hamburgers.
I'm not joking either.
I'm really serious.
Oh, I did the let's all go to the salad bar.
Everyone else will order drinks.
One guy would get the all-you-can-eat salad bar and we'll pass the plate around like a sermon of Jesus.
Yeah, I was 119 pounds and it was from not having the money to eat anything.
So the reason I think that needs to be said is because… I think we have to really, if we're really going to be honest with ourselves, because I would like everybody in this country to be happy, and I'd like everybody to be fulfilled and successful and have a hope and some control over their lives instead of being on this dependency farm that the liberals want people to be on.
Basically, they're boat harvesting.
They get them to work for two hours every two years, and I don't like seeing millions and millions and millions of my countrymen dependent and hopeless and filled with rage and anger because They've got nowhere to go.
The issue is Ben Shapiro got...
Virtually, literally, like physically torn apart when he suggested that poverty was a series of bad decisions.
The teacher at that point threw the circuit breaker.
This was too alarming for some students, too triggering.
So once he said that, he was removed from the school and the teacher basically threw his or her body in front of the students because an idea like that simply cannot be allowed to penetrate their precious little brains.
She just threw the circuit breakers on the whole argument.
And I find that extremely offensive because If you really want to solve a problem, you can't solve the problem until you know what the problem is.
And one of the things I will tell you is that of all the people – the first public speaking I did was up in Utah Valley University and Southern Utah University.
I'd never met the Mormons before.
But they gave me a tour of – I think what they called Welfare Square, which is a rather unfortunate name, but basically they gave me a tour of their facilities up there and they have people who are out of work up there, people who are destitute.
They take them in and they give them jobs and they teach them how to work and they do all this stuff and they give them...
So basically, what the Mormons did was they didn't just give them money.
They gave them jobs.
They trained them how to do the jobs.
But the most important thing, I thought, that contributed to their tremendous success rate, this is the entire issue for me, was that they took these people into their homes.
They taught them how to cook.
They taught them how to make rice and chicken.
They taught them how to budget.
They taught them how to do all of these things.
These people had never had any experience with this at all whatsoever.
We keep throwing money at problems that certainly now after several trillions of dollars of wealth redistribution have made our cities much, much, much more violent than they used to be.
So what do we do about it?
And one of the problems of course is that we're moving out of the pretty much almost effectively completely moved out of an industrial age where people might have a simple task and you're moving into an information age where every single day Yeah,
and a society that is around the free market, the free market seems to, at least according to most of the available evidence, relentlessly sought by IQ. Now, when you say that there's monetary value in having a higher IQ, of course, we're not sort of saying everyone with a high IQ makes more money and everyone with a lower IQ makes less money.
I think Muhammad Ali's IQ was in the 70s or low 80s and was a fantastic guy and a great boxer and inspiration to millions.
So it's not an absolute kind of IQ determinism, but when you zoom out enough, you see these larger trends.
Now, a free market The deferral of gratification, which is the capacity to invest, the capacity to do things that are difficult in order to reap the rewards later, which comes from a cold climate, but not so cold it snows all the time and you can't get an agriculture going.
But a climate which rewards the deferral of gratification is naturally, in a way, going to end up With the development of a free market system, the free market system, like agriculture, rewards the deferral of gratification.
So we would expect those with the highest IQs to have the highest income.
And when you look at the income aggregations by ethnicities, it falls exactly along the IQ bands.
The highest incomes are Jews, followed by East Asians, followed by Whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by Blacks.
The standard argument from the left is everyone's equal, and therefore, all group disparities must result out of prejudice, racism, and so on.
Yeah, that's right.
Now, what the IQ paradigm, and once you sort of take these foggy lefty glasses on and look at the world with true statistical and biological clarity, it is heartbreaking.
I mean, because, boy, wouldn't it be great if everyone was the same.
I mean, as far as opportunities, if we were all in the same bell curve, that would be a wonderful, wonderful thing.
It would be kind of against evolution, right?
The brain consumes like 20% of our body's energy, but it's only 3% of our mass.
So the idea that the brain, which is our most expensive organ in terms of energy, that our brain would not adapt to wildly differing, if not downright opposing environments, would make no sense.
You know, the idea that skin adapts, nose adapts, even the number of twins that the races have adapts to the environment.
But this giant brain we have somehow has this magnetic shield that keeps...
Evolution from touching it at all doesn't make any sense.
But it does explain why, you know, this argument from the left that white societies are racist societies, it doesn't explain why Jews and East Asians make more money than whites.
Or if they say, well, the IQ test is biased towards white people, it doesn't explain why East Asians and Jews score higher on these supposedly white preferential IQ tests.
So when you look at success in society and you only look downwards rather than looking at the groups that are doing better than white people, the East Asians and the Ashkenazi Jews, then you get a very skewed view.
And this view upwards on the IQ scale is relentlessly denied by leftists because it really throws a pooch into the machinery of the whole paradigm that, you know, all non-white groups do worse than white people because of white racism.
But if you look upwards, this is clearly not the case, but it follows exactly the IQ lines.
Yeah, I think that's really true.
And certainly my experience has been that the people who...
I think the smartest guy on the map is Thomas Sowell.
I really do.
I think Thomas Sowell is simply the smartest guy I've ever read.
And Thomas Sowell doesn't talk about race at all.
Thomas Sowell talks about philosophy.
He...
He's not one of these people that are blaming his lack of success or crediting his success to anything other than his own ability to be a brilliant thinker and a big success.
One of the things that's a problem when you start talking about these things is everybody, as you say, wants to look at the problems and one of the problems is that you ignore the top end.
I mean, there's God knows how many programs that we spend a fortune on for remedial work for students that I'm in favor of spending that.
Obviously, you know, I want everybody to learn to the limit of their ability.
But there's very little out there in terms of structure for people who are breakaway smart.
And those people are the people that are going to change society for the better.
They're the people that are going to change.
They're the people that are going to come up with the cures for cancer and they're going to come up with the telecommunications breakthroughs and they're going to come up with whatever.
And I certainly think they could use a little more assistance in terms of some of the programs for them and mostly that consists of just leaving them alone.
I was in independent study and I just started reading about ion drives in fifth grade because I was interested in that kind of stuff.
But I think there's another point here that's interesting to me, Stephan, and this may seem counterintuitive but I actually don't think it is.
I am overwhelmed at how stupid intellectuals can be.
My definition of intellectualism is intelligence that's been left out in the sun too long.
And I think an intellectual is somebody who's been educated past the limit of their intelligence.
And usually an intellectual who's shielded from free market forces in academia or some think tank or some political attachment or something.
That's exactly right.
So one of the problems we have on the other end of the spectrum is you have these pretty bright people who are university professors of medieval literature or something, and they're very bright people in many cases.
But because they're bright in certain areas, they think that they're bright in all areas.
This is the intellectual trap that interests me so much.
And I'll give you my little theory since we're talking about IQ today.
I love this little theory.
I'm just so happy with it.
So I think it explains the difference between left-wing and right-wing philosophers.
My theory is called Island 120.
It's called Island 120.
And my general thesis is this.
People with an IQ of 100 or above, 105, 108, 110, somewhere in that ballpark, right?
They all want to seem smart.
They listen to smart people, and they don't want to be seen to be stupider than those people.
And the people that they're listening to, guys like Bill Maher and Michael Moore and this kind of thing, these guys might have an IQ of 120-something in that general ballpark.
So all of the cultural forces on these intellectuals is to move them up to Island 120, where everybody thinks the same on this island, everybody votes the same, everybody believes in the same things, Everybody's there to save the planet while they fly their own private jets.
Everybody is there to have a special ribbon on their thing.
Everybody votes Democrat.
Everybody loves Michael Moore.
Everybody laments the lack of diversity in the Oscars and that's what everybody on Island 120 believes because there's so many people want to be seen to be on that island.
When you get into breakout intelligence, it's like guys like Thomas Sowell or Victor Davis Hanson or some of these other philosophers.
I don't see any philosophers on the left.
Noam Chomsky is 109 years old, and I never thought his political ideas had any value.
His linguistic ideas did.
But my point is, once you hit a certain level of cognitive ability, Island 120 is behind you.
And things that seem so...
So much the part of this kind of liberal intellectual mantra.
Like socialism, for example.
Once you blow past that, it's like this doesn't make any sense at all.
It doesn't make any sense that it doesn't work.
People believe it because it's trendy to believe.
They make you think you're smart if you believe in it.
But it doesn't make any sense.
And the point that actually really fascinates me the most is that common sense, what we used to call common sense, in my mind, common sense is the ability, in America anyway, of 318 million processors running local data in real time, forming networks and of 318 million processors running local data in real time, forming networks and solutions that come and go as easily And that this is an enormous pool of collected intelligence, which 10 people in a room in Washington think they're smarter than.
That is something I simply will never believe.
The idea that you might have 5 or 10 people in a room in Washington with 120, 130 IQs.
Who are we kidding?
If they're in Washington, they probably have 80 IQs.
But the idea that a room full of 4 or 5 people could direct something like an economy is this incredible form of arrogance that comes with this kind of intelligence that has hit its limit, I think.
Yeah, and so when people look at group disparities, which are undoubtable, indisputable, the group disparities, not just, of course, within American society, but across the world.
You look at places like Haiti versus Singapore.
Well, Haiti has a very low IQ population in Agritic, and Singapore has one of the highest IQ populations on the planet.
And so if you look at these two societies, Singapore, of course, once the intelligence was liberated by free market principles, Then it was able to assume its place at the forefront of human achievement, whereas Haiti has not been able to achieve that.
And, you know, they've been largely self-governed for 400 years.
They've had, you know, billions of dollars of aid poured into the country, and they're unable to And that is, tragically, one of the results, arguably, of not facing the winnowing out of winter.
You know, when the Europeans first came to sub-Saharan Africa, they met a population that had no written language.
They met a population that had not discovered or invented the wheel.
That had not built a two-story structure.
And this, of course, was thousands of years after these things had been achieved in most other countries and cultures.
Now, it can't have been the effect of racism because this was the first time in about 50,000 years that the two racists had run into each other.
And so this basic reality that in Africa, for a variety of reasons, the winnowing out of lower IQ populations and the horrifying and genocidal selection for high intelligence, the giant scar tissue trailing behind white Sashkenazi Jews and East Asians, these factors didn't operate.
And the idea that, you know, I used this metaphor in a show last night, but this idea that you take a polar bear I think we're good to go.
Would the polar bear be just in saying, well, I'm failing because of anti-polar bear bigotry on the part of the brown bears?
Well, no.
You're just in the wrong environment for what you've adapted to.
And when I've pointed out that the Australian aboriginals have low IQs on average, very low, and people have written to me and said, well, yeah, but they've got desert smarts and they can survive in their environment a lot better than you can.
I'm like, absolutely.
There's no question.
Yeah.
That's the point, that organisms have adapted to their local environments, and that has resulted in significant differences between ethnicities.
And I have no problem with ethnicities being together.
But the problem is if the disparities, particularly in intelligence, in aggregate, are not admitted, then you end up with an incredibly frustrated, resentful, angry, embittered, enraged population, which is on the lower IQ side.
And you end up with a hysterically appeasing and defensive and jumpy and guilty population on the higher IQ side.
Whereas we don't look at the NBA and say, well, they must be racist against Asians because there aren't a lot of Asians playing there.
Because if somebody said that, we'd say, well, Asians generally are pretty short.
And therefore, you know, height being a very helpful thing in basketball.
And so if you don't know the IQ stuff, the friction doesn't come from the IQ differences.
The friction comes from ignoring the IQ differences.
I want a world where my daughter doesn't grow up being told that she's a racist for things that 50,000 years of evolution has put just a little bit beyond her control.
Well, you know, it's interesting when somebody would say that a bushman in Australia survives in the desert much better than you could.
That's undoubtedly true.
But the part that they're leaving out is that with several months or weeks or a year of being with the aborigines, you could learn those techniques about as well as they could or certainly well enough to survive.
The question is could they learn the techniques that you use in order to do what you do for a living and the answer apparently is not.
That's the thing about intelligence is it can adapt down but you can't adapt beyond your ability.
This is the essential problem of socialism and that's why this whole thing is so interesting to me and why it ties into so many things.
The charge, Bernie Sanders has got 85% of the support of young American kids who are very bright kids.
Usually they're just college kids.
And he's got this incredible support among them because he's demonized wealth inequality.
We talk in this country all the time about income inequality.
That's all we ever hear from the left is income inequality.
We never talk about output inequality.
No one ever has that conversation, ever.
No one ever has the conversation about output inequality.
And when you ask people what's fair and they say, well, it's not fair that this guy should have billions of dollars and this person should have none, you kind of have to back up and ask yourself, well, if this guy is a multimillionaire because he's a brain surgeon like Ben Carson, let's say, is it fair that a guy with Ben Carson's abilities spends 20 years of his life and probably a quarter of a million dollars, at least that, in debt, in order to become a leading brain surgeon,
is it fair that he makes as much money as a guy who smokes doobies out in the back of the 7-Eleven all day? is it fair that he makes as much money as Is that fair?
It's not fair.
And it's not only not fair, it's completely destructive because if you enforce more or If you want to get rid of income equality and you want a brain surgeon like Ben Carson to make as much money as a 7-Eleven clerk, then there won't be any brain surgeons.
Why would there be any brain surgeons?
This is why socialism fails.
The difference between equality of opportunity and quality of result, as you well know, is that quality of opportunity means we have a starting line and nobody gets a start ahead and nobody gets a start behind.
I consider that a fair society.
Bang!
The gun goes off when you're born.
And you can run as fast as you can or as slow as you want to and you get to determine your own life.
But if socialism is the world where everybody has to cross the finish line at the same time, if everybody has to end up with the same salary, the same size house, the same kind of car, the same kind of everything, then the race has to by definition proceed at the rate of the slowest runner, right?
No one can run faster than their fastest.
And if everybody's going to cross the finish line at the same time and you have 100 people in the race, my version of equality, equality of opportunity, means everybody gets to go as fast as they can or want to.
And if you don't want to run fast, fine.
I think we're good to go.
We're going to just be throwing money at problems and I thought what you said just now was very eloquent.
You're going to end up with these opposing camps of people who aren't talking to each other on any real way.
Just a hostility rage on one hand and guilt and disdain on the other.
We're trying to solve this problem by getting to the root of the problem.
And as I said, the thing that so impressed me about the Mormons, who I found to be extremely bright people, not just bright, not just bright, disciplined, unbelievably disciplined.
I met these two kids.
They weren't kids.
I was the kid.
I was 50.
These two Mormon men were 22 years old.
They're taking me around...
Salt Lake City.
And at 22, these guys had already done five years of missionary service.
They had $200,000 in the bank.
They had a year's supply of food in the basement downstairs ready to go.
I mean, these guys are just like Vulcans or elves or something.
I'm walking around here going, my God, what an incredible...
What an incredible society.
But what they do when they offer assistance to people is they don't just hand them a check and they don't just say, here you go and walk away.
They bring them into their culture and teach them the things that they need to know how to do so that they don't walk out of here and have to come back for a check again in a month or so.
And we're not doing any of that that I can see.
No, poverty is the result of bad decisions and it's also the result of lower intelligence and also the average person or the average family in poverty has two adults working an average of 10 hours a week.
It's also a lack of And again, these things are all fine.
I mean, I'm not some Protestant whipmaster that says you've got to go work 16 hours a day to fulfill God's plan for your accumulation of wealth, but choices have consequences.
And you have a right to say, well, now I shouldn't have to work 120 hours a week to pay for somebody who's working for 10 hours a week.
And that's really what it comes down to now, because that's really what we're seeing.
And I think that's why both the Bernie Sanders and the Donald Trump's What's wrong is… We've been told what to believe by the left and we've been told that any belief other than
what they tell us to be believed makes you pure evil and therefore shut up and do what we say.
And we can't get past the problems that the left has spun into this country without doing this.
For example, the immigration thing.
I mean you could have as many immigrants in this country as you wanted to so long as there was no social services.
If it was just a question of jobs needing to be filled… And you didn't get any social services, then people would come in and work until the market was saturated, at which point there would be no jobs for these people and they wouldn't come because they'd be starving on the streets here.
And the other side of that argument, of course, the immigration argument and the Muslim immigration argument with Syrians and so on is, don't...
Don't these people have an obligation to fight for and to improve their own societies?
When you see these Syrian immigrants or these Muslim immigrants in Europe and 9 out of 10 of them are 28-year-old males, what kind of a person is that?
I mean, where's your mom?
Where's your sister?
Where's your wife?
Where's your daughter?
Did you leave them behind in this death zone that you've been so eager to escape?
Or did you use them for flotation devices?
I mean, what...
Oh, no.
They're doing what Muslims have been doing for 1,400 years, which is conquering by immigration.
I mean, that's not, they're not like, oh, we fled and left our, you know, they're going to try and take over Europe to bring their families with them.
I mean, this is like the 80th country that this has happened to.
And so it's not that hard to see the next domino in the Muslim plan, which has been going on since it was founded.
The reason I bring it up is because the left always – the left has no – there is no data and there is no evidence and there's no history and there's no logic on the left that I can see which is why I've abandoned so many of these positions.
What they have is this unearned moral superiority.
They have this sense of I'm better than you are.
You're a horrible person.
I'm a wonderful person because I welcome these Syrian refugees into my country.
And when – the reason I think that argument that I made is interesting is because this argument isn't an argument about the head.
It's a hard argument.
You can say if there are so many of these young men, well, they're fleeing oppression.
Okay, well, if these hordes of young men are fleeing oppression and we need to take them in because they're refugees, where are their moms?
Where are their daughters?
Where are their sisters?
Did they leave them behind?
It's now a moral argument.
What kind of people are they?
You know, what kind of people are they?
They're warriors is what kind of people they are.
Yeah, and this is one of the great challenges if people don't understand the IQ reality of the world, and in particular the Middle East.
I'll go through some numbers in just a second.
But the first, you know, one of my great influences as a young man, as a teenager, was a friend of mine's father who was, he refused to say Iranian.
He always referred to himself as Persian.
Persian, yeah.
A wonderful, wonderful man, smart as a whip, compassionate, kind, very, very inspiring to me in so many ways.
But the reality is that the smartest people from the Middle East have already left and come to the West, and they've been doing it for decades.
And they do this not because they want to come and take over.
But now we're getting the people who were left behind during the first nine different waves of the smartest people leaving.
And so, you know, here's some numbers that should put the fear of God into anybody who understands this kind of stuff.
And some of these numbers are cobbled together.
We're going to get the researcher on next week to talk about these in more detail.
So these may have some variability.
But if we look at Iraq, you got an average IQ of 87.
Iran, you got an average IQ of 84.
Egypt is 81.
Syria, 83.
Libya, 83.
Afghanistan, 84.
United Arab Emirates, 84 Saudi Arabia, 84 Equatorial Guinea is actually the lowest sorry, it's at 59 and this a lot of this has to do with culture, with being bred for ferocity, with high intelligence people not doing very well in a brutal medieval theocracy I think that's just, you know, if you're a skeptic, if you're willing to think for yourself you're not going to last very long you know, your very large head will soon be rolling in a basket somewhere underneath a sword that's why you're going to the priesthood
Yeah, and the blood-related marriages is a huge problem.
You know, blood-related marriages, consanguine marriages, cousin marriages, and so on, have been shown to reduce IQ between 8 and 16 points because of lack of genetic diversity.
And this in a group that is very inbred and has a policy against marrying outsiders.
And this ranges, you know, Nubia as 80%.
Cousin marriages.
Egypt is 33%.
Iraq, 60%.
Jordan, 64%.
Kuwait, 64%.
Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, 67%.
So more than two-thirds of the marriages are cousin or blood-related marriages.
Syria is 40%.
And so you have, again, on average, lots of exceptions like my friend's father when I was growing up.
But you have, on average, very inbred, low IQ, relatively ferocious, 1,400 years of selecting for conformity, ferocity, and aggression.
You are having these people come crashing in to a European society that is founded on – it's founded by people with incredibly high IQs.
Like, I mean, the people who – the founding fathers and John Locke and all of the people who founded – Any one of them would be remarkable on their own, yeah.
Astonishing geniuses.
I think they're all collected in one place.
It's just astonishing.
And so you have a high IQ design society populated by relatively high IQ people and then you have a low IQ contingent coming in and that's not good in and of itself but because people won't recognize and accept the problem with blood relations and with lower IQ, blood relation marriage, the problem is then these people are going to fail and they're going to fail en masse in this society in the same way that a polar bear is going to starve to death in the woods because every rabbit can see it coming six miles away.
And so they're going to fail and because people don't understand the genetic problems brought about by inbreeding and because they don't understand the IQ problem, who is going to get blamed for the failure of this group that is inevitably going to fail?
In other words, what else could it possibly be?
You're exactly right.
It's got to be the racism.
It's got to be the intentional, willful holding back of people just because we don't like them.
You know, I've heard this occasionally from leftists.
They say, you know, you capitalists, you want people to be poor so that you have a cheap labor force.
And it's like, well, first of all, it's just a vile and repugnant thing to say.
We don't want people to be – we'd rather have customers than cheap laborers.
You know, we want people to be successful.
We want people to have money.
We want people to be successful and to do well.
When you're – this problem is much worse now than it would have been 100 years ago because, as I mentioned briefly, you can take people – With relatively low cognitive skills and teach them one job on an assembly line in an industrial society.
But when you start getting into an information-based society, and it's not like this is a trend or anything.
Every day that goes by, that attribute of G for general intelligence gets more and more selected for your ability not just to prosper but very soon to survive in Western culture.
You're going to have to – if you put government welfare programs aside, as this society becomes more and more complex and more and more driven by G, these people become ever more disadvantaged, even more disadvantaged than they would be 100 years ago.
I think the ferocity is an important point too.
I think it's a very important point because there – I've seen some of your shows.
I read some of the books as well, and I think there's a lot of correlation to this.
This whole idea that the people who are very successful businessmen actually have relatively low testosterone.
They're relatively unaggressive.
Successful people in the West are not these...
You know, they may be type A people in terms of wanting to succeed, but their testosterone levels are not particularly high, but they're quite low.
Then you run into this story of this guy, this Syrian refugee, or I know he's an Iraqi refugee, who raped a 10-year-old boy in a swimming pool in Austria.
And he said his excuse was, well, he'd gone weeks without having any kind of sex at all.
It was a sexual emergency.
That's what he called it.
Yep, that's exactly right.
So, when you get into really high testosterone societies, you tend to find societies that are very small and tribal, and they're very brutal, and they're very violent.
And that's bred for.
And you could make the case that in a desert environment where resources are so small, there's so little actual resources there, ferocity and the ability to inflict violence is selected for.
And if we don't understand this, if we're not willing to have the guts to talk about this, Then we're going to sit here wondering why the columns are collapsing into dust around our feet and everything's on fire.
You know, everybody knows that things are collapsing and everybody knows that they're on fire.
That's what this general discontent is about.
But no one has the courage to talk about why.
We're not talking about morally better people, morally worse people.
We're talking about people's ability to adapt and fit into our society without changing our society into theirs.
And again, this is the problem, right?
If this IQ difference is real, it certainly seems to be real, then it is not a two-way street.
Forgive me for going back to my entire studio, which is nothing but a museum of Star Trek, right?
But I mean, there was a really fascinating point, and I remember hearing it when I was probably seven, eight, nine years old when I heard it.
And it's from the classic, classic episode called Mirror, Mirror, where they teleport into the alternate universe, and Spock has a goatee, much like yours.
I think in the good universe, you're probably clean-shaven.
I'm talking to evil Stefan now.
Let's say I had a goatee.
So we're living in this alternate universe, and Kirk in the alternate universe succeeds because of his savagery and his ruthlessness, right?
Here's the whole line.
They finally solve all this stuff.
They beam back to their own ships, and the universes go their separate ways.
And Spock says to Kirk, he says, you as a civilized man had a much easier time portraying a barbarian than a barbarian ever could as a civilized man.
And I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it, right?
We have...
I just want to clear up some of the stuff about the IQ test.
I said my friend flunked the IQ test on purpose to get combat infantry.
That was for the Korean War, and God knows there were lots and lots and lots of great people out there, but our soldiers now, I think, are extremely high IQ, and some of the Special Forces guys are shockingly smart because they have to process information very quickly with very fatal outcomes.
And So all of this stuff ties together.
It's just society is changing.
Everybody knows it's changing.
The reason inner cities are in such dire trouble is because, number one, are the government projects to give people money, bribe them to not burn things down.
But it's also due to the fact that when industrial jobs leave the inner cities, as they did in the last 50, 60, 70 years or so, They're not replaced with jobs that are accessible.
They're not replaced with jobs of any kind at all.
And they just become a zip code where people live and grow up.
But there's no economic opportunities.
There's no...
I guarantee you, if you and I were born into one of these neighborhoods, we'd both be drug dealers because that's where the entrepreneurs are.
Those people are making deals and they're trying to control their lives and they're trying to make something happen.
When you really get down to it, you really just have to ask yourself, what are we doing and why are we doing it and what do we want?
What do we want?
I want to live in a world where everybody around me is happy.
That's what I want.
I want to live in a world where everybody around me is happy and they're not a threat because they're happy and they get to develop their lives to their maximum happiness and that's what I want.
I'm seeing this getting worse and worse every day.
You mentioned Bernie Sanders.
Let's just take the IQ lens and look at Bernie Sanders' campaign, just one aspect of it.
Within a few minutes, we can clear up exactly what's happening here.
In the cause and effect reversal, people say, Men and women who go to college end up with really high-paying jobs, right?
So the way that we can get more people to have high-paying jobs is we can lower the standards and get more people into college, which again is drafting people to make them tall.
So what's happened over the past generation Is scores have been relentlessly downsized, like the requirements have been relentlessly downsized, and this has been driven by a wide variety of factors, socialist egalitarianism plus a lot of funding from the government that's dependent upon proportional representation from underrepresented groups and so on.
But basically what's happened is a whole bunch of people have bought into this promise that if I go to college, I'm going to get a six-figure salary pretty soon after coming out, because in the past that was not wildly off base.
But what's happened is they have let lower IQ people into college.
And you can see the effects of this in the political correctness, in people showing up and chanting and smashing down things in their safe rooms.
This is all low IQ phenomenon who can't handle opposing opinions.
And so what's happened is all of these people have gone and taken in a lot of debt with the idea and the promise that, you know, they go to college, they can make a lot of money.
Admissions in the past was an effective intelligence and it actually didn't matter fundamentally whether you went to college in terms of your overall earnings.
If you didn't go to college, you look at Bill Gates and Martin Zuckerberg and all these other people.
If you didn't finish college, you're Steve Jobs.
If you were really smart, you'd make a lot of money whether you went to college or not.
College had its pluses and minuses.
But these people have been told, well, if you go to college, you'll make as much money as the people who went to college in the past, but you won't.
They've graduated and the market is assessing, not politically correct market, the actual you've got to produce value market.
The market is assessing their skills and saying, you are not worth the previous generation of college grads because I can't trust whether you're there because of innate intelligence or you're there because of preferential treatment.
They're in, you know, they've landed in the Starbucks barista universe that their IQ may have destined them for in the beginning, and they're completely unable to pay their student loans.
And in comes, you know, a wild-haired Santa Claus himself, Bernie Sanders, to say, I'll pay off your student loans.
Now, in the past, you didn't usually need that help because the smartest people would go to college, they'd get good jobs after to be able to pay off the loans, but by lowering the standards, you've created a giant trillion-dollar-plus debt student bubble, which people are desperate to get out from under.
And this is, again, if you don't understand IQ, it really doesn't make any sense.
But if you do understand IQ, you understand that changing the standards does not change the biology.
That's right.
And when they come out with that incredible debt, it also means they don't have the ability to borrow money to start businesses or anything else that people used to do.
Which they could have done if they hadn't gone to college.
Exactly.
Making them unhappy.
No, it's this idea that if you go to college, you're going to come out rich.
It's a cargo cult mentality.
Remember the cargo cults?
For those viewers who aren't, during the island hopping campaign in the Pacific, the US would find an island that was useful for them in terms of launching the next series of steps to the Japanese mainland.
And all of a sudden, the full force and might of the most powerful industrial country in the world lands on this little, tiny, little island.
And then two years later, the war's over, and then they leave.
And the Americans had brought in all of these goods and all of these supplies, just jeeps and trucks and just everything.
And anthropologists went back many years later, and they found out that some of these populations on these islands had built structures that looked like control towers and built structures that looked like airplanes because they believed that these were what drew...
That's what brought the Americans were these totems on the ground.
That's what brought them.
It got the thing completely backwards, obviously.
In other words, we're going to erect these kind of statues to what we saw when they were here, things that looked like control towers and airplanes in the hope of bringing them back.
That's kind of what college has become.
It's become a kind of a cargo cult where you assume that if you go to Yale, you're going to come out with a big salary.
And, of course, the biggest part of this, too, is this idea that...
Not only the falling standards and just this government guaranteed loans which then mean the tuition goes up to ridiculous levels and so on, but there's also something in there too.
These colleges become – they become – here's what I'm trying to say.
It used to be that you would go to college to get a degree in engineering or math or something like that, and you'd get a degree which would lead to a high-paying job.
But as more and more of these colleges are trying to accommodate people who are only in college to have the college experience, and you get women's studies and gender studies, and you get people majoring in things that are maybe actual discipline, like medieval renaissance poetry is my favorite, and that's fine.
If you want to major in that, that's fine.
That's a hobby.
That's right.
And if you want to major in medieval renaissance poetry and make a living out of it, the only way you'll do it is by teaching it to other people.
And if you think you can take out a $300,000 loan in order to get a four-year degree in that, then you're fooling yourself.
And it's not a very bright thing to do.
One of the things that I've seen that I saw a cartoon that was so interesting, so many of the campus feminists are saying, we need to get more women into STEM. We're good to go.
Christine Hoff Summers, who's a feminist I really respect, was challenged, right?
So somebody came up and said, why aren't there...
A woman came up to her and said in a speech, why aren't there more women in STEM? It's really, really bad.
And she said, well, what are you taking?
The woman said, well, women's studies.
She said, well, why didn't you take STEM and solve the problem?
And then she fainted and...
Because the answer solves itself.
It's because it's harder.
That's why.
Being an engineering student is harder.
And it's an insult to the female engineering students out there as well, you know, to say, you know, we should get more people into engineering.
We should get as many people in engineering as people who want to and are capable of becoming engineers.
That's the number of people we should have in engineering.
If you have the ability and the desire to do it, then great.
level the society out, when the left decides that there's a mixture of things and a proportion of things and limits on things, it always results in individual people getting squashed on the top down.
And on the bottom up, it results in people being taken above their abilities to the point where they're unhappy too.
Oh, this resentment?
I mean, I see this.
It's this big tsunami of resentment that comes out whenever I put videos out about this topic.
And this is page after page of these YouTube comments and emails and messages of people like, oh, those rich scumbags.
They don't earn their money.
They inherit it.
They get it by gaming the system.
I hate those rich guys.
They got to pay them.
It's a lynch mob mentality.
And if I were an evil genius rich guy, I'd love that story because what it would do is it would make the poor people who were liable to undercut me.
Poor people have a great advantage.
If wealth was the only standard that mattered in the free market, there'd never be any small companies.
There'd never be any new companies.
New companies, smaller companies.
I co-founded a company.
We grew it to a good size.
It's still in operation.
We beat out IBM. We beat out other big companies because we were smaller, willing to work harder.
The mammals get the food that the dinosaurs don't.
Exactly.
This idea that it's just wealth and power and I'm going to hate the rich people.
When I was a kid, I looked at the rich people and said, well, I want me some of that.
I wasn't like, those bastards have stolen everything from me.
That rage, that resentment that is fostered by the left creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where this underclass of resentment looks up and is angry at the rich and thinks that being rich is immoral and thinks that being rich is being exploitive and you're just some evil capitalist with a stereotypical monopoly monocle in your face and you're stepping on the necks of the poor to get to your gold lame bathtub.
It's horrible because it seals the poor in this cyst and biosphere of resentment where they can't break out because they hate that which they kind of want, which is more stuff.
Exactly, and this is kind of where we started the discussion.
The reason I'm talking about this and the reason you're talking about it is because that is in fact exactly what happens.
You know, there's a big difference obviously between IQ and happiness.
In fact, you can make a fairly compelling case that in many cases there's an inverse relationship between the two of them.
But just look at this from a point of – I mean happiness ultimately is it, right?
I mean you can talk about what's the point of living your life.
We have goals for our society.
We have goals that we'd like to see and we have things we'd like to protect and rights and all this.
But basically when it comes right down to it, what makes your life worth living?
It's a sense of happiness and fulfillment and usually the two are the same.
This is something the health doesn't understand at all.
I think the Greek definition of happiness was using all of your powers to their full ability.
It didn't say how many powers.
It didn't say what kind of powers.
It said using your talents to your maximum ability is the fundamental core sense of gratification, happiness and fulfillment.
And if we're not ready to address that issue, then we're going to continue to have these problems.
The problem with telling black people that they're being kept down by this racist system is that it absolutely deprives them of the ability...
To take control over their own lives and have a measure of personal happiness.
I would be as miserable, I'd be a drug addict with a needle in my arm if I thought that my destiny was absolutely going to be the same week after week, that no matter what I did, there was somebody trying to keep me down, that there were giant forces at work preventing me from being successful, that whatever hard work I decided to achieve would be kept away from me by whatever nefarious secret forces.
I'd be under a bridge with a needle in my arm too.
What would be the point of getting up in any particular day if you felt that way?
This particular thing has nothing really to do with IQ. It has to do with the sense of ownership of your own life.
We have to address this issue because We are finding that these intellectuals on the left are making rules and trying to engineer society in a way that makes things worse, makes it worse every day.
If you just left people alone, if you just left them alone and didn't either force them to do things or not do things, people would generally find their level of happiness.
If you left them alone and if you didn't subsidize their, well, just for lack of a better word, their laziness and inactivity, because I'm talking from experience here too.
I mentioned being really poor for most of my life, which was a series of choices that I made.
And there was a period there when my life was subsidized by my friends, and they did that for a year.
And when they decided for my own good that it was time for me to move out of the garage, I was furious with them, furious, because they'd gone to all the trouble of helping me and putting all of these resources and time and effort and discomfort and inconvenience into helping me.
And when they cut that off, I was enraged.
Now, fortunately, I've made amends for all of this stuff so I can live with myself.
And that kind of dependence not just rots the mind, it rots the soul.
It robs you of your ability to be the master of your own destiny, which I think is the fundamental determinant of happiness anywhere, anytime, any race, anytime in history.
Yeah, I love what Aristotle said.
He said that happiness is the one thing that we accept, not as a means to something else, but as an end in itself.
You know, I eat food, so I don't feel hungry, so I stay alive.
But happiness is the one thing, it's not a stepping stone to anything else.
It's got to be the end goal.
And this, you know, this general sense of, and Donald Trump is really talking about this a lot, the sense that America has reached the top of the arc, you know, that it's now beginning to slide and go down.
Which statistically is very valid.
It's a very valid reaction to what's been going on, particularly for middle class salaries over the last sort of generation, generation and a half.
And my argument has been that there are some people who are fantastic at maximizing and expanding the resources in society.
You know, we all have very precious, the seed crop, the capital that we have, the savings of our forefathers, the investment of the infrastructure that was made in the past.
These are all very precious things and they can vanish like that.
Just look at the fall of Rome.
Like one year, there's 1.2 million people.
Two years later, there's 17,000 people living among the ruins.
It can end very quickly.
And there are certain people who are fantastic, just geniuses at expanding society's resources, at creating wealth, you know, the Steve Jobs and so on.
And in the past, the fact that wealthy people controlled a lot of resources was fantastic for society because generally they'd gotten wealthy by hard work and entrepreneurship And that's still the case.
People are surprised that actually the number of rich people in America who got there through hard work is higher now than it was a generation ago because of the barrier to entry from computers.
It's really lowered.
That's absolutely right.
I wouldn't be in this business and neither would you likely if it hadn't for the fact that it's essentially free for us to do what we do.
Right.
So if a society, through the free market, what's going to naturally happen is the resources are going to accumulate the most to those who are best able to increase them.
If there's one farmer who can produce 10 times the crops from another farmer, that farmer should have the most land because he's going to produce the most crops.
If you say, well, let's carve off half the land from the good farmer and give it to the crappy farmer, everyone starts.
That's precisely what happened in the show.
Yeah, you want to let resources flow to those with the best capacity to increase them.
That way, everybody gets wealth.
Everybody gets wealthier.
So this hatred of wealth disparity says, well, let's take basically the fundamental thing that happens is let's take land from the really great farmers and give it to the bad farmers so they feel better, so that they get a little bit more in the moment.
But everybody, this is why we're taking resources from those best able to maximize and increase them.
And squandering them on those who are going to waste them in terms of the long term.
And this is why the arc of America is beginning to decay.
And until we liberalize that and it's tough to convince poor people that the richer the rich people are, the wealthier they'll be because that requires a level of intelligence and deferral of gratification that is a challenge for a lot of poor people if that's low IQ population.
The free market does it, but in politics to appeal to the vanity of the masses is almost irresistible for politicians.
It's funny you mention that.
Just now I'm going to go down and shoot an afterburner called humility basically.
I was just teeing off with the difference between Cam Newton's speech and Peyton Manning's two years ago when he got wiped out in the Super Bowl and how humility helps you under adversity.
But basically what humility does more than anything is it allows you to realize – once you realize you're not the smartest guy in the world or the smartest guy in the room – if I'm the smartest guy in the room, it's usually a small room and I should be in a better room.
But the ability for you to look at things and get your ego out of it maximizes your personal ability to succeed and societies.
One of these great business expressions that I love so much is A-list talent hires A-list talent and B-list talent hires C-list talent because smart people and people who have confidence and successful people like to be surrounded by people who are very good.
They don't feel like they have to be outshined.
The fact that they've hired such smart people is a sign of how good they are.
But people who are insecure about these things hire people who are not going to outperform them and their companies just go down the hill and people who don't have that ego problem, their company goes up the hill.
So I just want to kind of close with this because your farm analogy is very simple to understand and it's the kind of thing that we sometimes just have to deal with when we're trying to deal with these people who are trying to demonize the whole process.
When you say something like The people who are the best farmers should get the most land.
What we really have to be concentrating on here is we have to say, look, what's the end result and what is our intended goal?
The goal is to have as much food as possible, right?
That's what we want.
We want as much food as possible.
And if you're going to take – this is exactly precisely what Stalin did in the 20s and 30s in Russia.
There were kulaks.
These kulaks were relatively rich peasants.
I think the term means hoarders in Russian.
But when I say relatively rich, they may have one or two guys working for them.
Maybe they have two oxen or something.
And he appealed to all the people that didn't have the oxen to kill these guys and take their stuff.
Well, that's exactly what they did.
They killed them and took their stuff and moved all their grain into the inner cities.
And then 7, 8, 10, 20, 30 million of them starved.
The whole country was starving.
There was less food because the government came in and took from the people who knew how to farm and gave it to people who didn't, either through intelligence or laziness or whatever.
And the total food supply went down and everybody starves.
So you don't get the moral argument that the left wants all the time.
They don't get to own this moral argument.
We're not talking about taking things away from people.
We're talking about maximizing output, which is good for everybody.
The more food there is, the cheaper the food is.
That's good for poor people more than it's good for rich people because rich people have more disposable income.
If you're talking about your farm analogy, you want the best farmers on the job.
And you don't want to give farms to people who can't farm at all In a sense of fairness, which is going to starve everybody universally, but the lower class is more than anyone because they have the fewer resources to do it.
So if it works on a farm, it should work on the entire culture, right?
It should work on the entire culture because what we're talking about is an increase of wealth, not money.
You can print money.
You can't print wealth.
When you have a society like we have in the United States where the poorest Americans are richer than 93% of the people currently living on planet Earth, When people who are below the poverty line in the United States routinely, I mean just constantly, they have colored televisions, they have cell phones, they have $200 sneakers in some of these cases.
I'm not saying there's not poverty in America, but I am saying that if poverty is defined by a bell curve, here's the very rich, here's the middle, here's the very poor.
You can't cut a bell curve in half and have half a bell curve.
You cut a bell curve in half and you have a new bell curve, right?
So one of the sentences that I liked a lot, I used this many years ago, but in a club of billionaires, the guy with 900 million is a chump, right?
He's the waiter.
So what you're really talking about is you're talking about everything going up and it benefits, it may disproportionately benefit the people who are doing most of the work and most of the invention and most of the wealth creation.
They may move ahead.
But this idea that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer is just not true.
The rich get richer and the poor get richer too.
And yeah, the last point I'd make is just a sort of thought experiment for people out there who are sports fans.
You want – like the only way the NBA survives is by having the very highest levels of athleticism on display.
Correct.
If the NBA was populated by people who are bad at basketball, there would be no NBA.
And so when you lower the standards, you don't end up with a worse NBA.
You end up with no NBA whatsoever because nobody is going to come and watch a bunch of people bounce the ball, hit themselves on the head and fall over it.
Maybe a few people who like funny videos.
Who wants to pay $40 to see an average basketball player?
Right.
And there's no music industry if the best singers and musicians and songwriters don't get the most recording contracts.
Like, you can say, well, I want to get a recording contract because it looks like a lot of fun, but, you know, they can give me Taylor Swift's outfits, they can give me her songs, they can put me on her stage, and nobody's showing up.
Not even my wife.
In the music industry, you want the resources to aggregate towards those who are the best at doing it.
Same thing with basketball, and it's the same thing with entrepreneurship, with capitalism, with wealth.
There's an old exchange between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I think F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the rich are different from you and I, and Hemingway said, yeah, they've got more money.
That's a really sort of left and right wing thing, at least for me.
The rich are very good at maximizing their resources and they're willing to do things that I don't want to do.
Donald Trump sleeps five hours a night and works god-awful and burned through three marriages.
I don't want to do that.
So, you know, have the $10 billion.
I'd rather have a happy marriage and get a good night's sleep.
So, they're willing to do things I don't want to do and that's perfectly fine.
I don't want to be a surgeon because I don't like cutting into things other than a good potato.
So the fact is that the rich are different, and if the IQ thing is, they're biologically different.
Like, if you're born with a great singing voice, that's your great singing voice.
Other people can get singing training, but they can't get that same singing voice.
And so there are some things we're born with, and the more that we interfere with that, the more impoverished everyone becomes in the long run.
Yeah, and it's so interesting that you mentioned NBA and music because people out there who are protesting a guy who's a CEO, let's say, of a company and he makes $5 million a year.
Well, he's got a company that's maybe employing 25,000 people, let's say, and they're all going home with salaries, but his salary is 300 times or 30 times or whatever the average is.
So he's running a company that's employing 25,000 people and he's taking home $5 million a year and it's an outrage.
Beyonce takes on fifty million dollars a year by herself, right?
She's not By herself, and it's wonderful, and it's just great, and everybody just applauds her to the skies.
It's like, you see, this is the difference between, this is why people visualize these things differently.
Beyonce or Taylor Swift are individuals, and they directly provide a service that people want because they're going to line up and pay for their music, and they're going to buy the iPhone the day it comes out.
They directly pay for it.
so much of what the people who have established wealth in this country have produced is the invisible infrastructure of things like dry cleaning chains and financial institutions.
What does it take to build a skyscraper?
You say, well, it's concrete.
It takes copper plumbing and it takes electrical.
It takes money first.
The first thing you have to have is money to buy all that stuff.
Somebody has to risk that money so that your vision can come true.
And it just never ceases to amaze me how people will talk about a CEO who makes $5 million as some kind of vampire working on the backs of, you know, paying salaries for 25,000 people with his company.
And then somebody else who goes out and makes songs is making 10 times that amount.
And they're just wonderful.
Let's just worship them through the skies and put out nine different magazines and four different TV shows about them every single day.
Well, I think it's fair to say that most singers are a little bit more photogenic than most CEOs, and we do have a habit of deferring to pretty people.
But, you know, I had this argument when I was a waiter when I was a teenager, and people would be like, oh, the boss, he makes so much money and so on.
It's like, but that's why the boss risks his capital to build this restaurant.
You try carrying plates around in a field and see how much you make.
You know, there has to be a restaurant around you in order for you.
Anyway.
And would you be willing – this is the part you have to say to the people that make this argument, to other waiters.
He makes all this money.
It's like would you be willing to take everything you own and put it on the line?
Would you be willing to put everything on the line and would you be also willing to make sure that every single person got paid before you did?
Right?
Because you can't run a business without employees.
You can run a business without profit.
You can run a business at a loss, but you can't run it without employees.
And then you might also ask that restaurant person, if we do well, we pay you more money, but would you be willing to take less money if we were doing worse?
Would you be willing?
Just as an employee, you're making $15 an hour, whatever the number is, and the company's doing this, and if it succeeds, we'll take you up to $17, but if we're having a bad year, we're going to knock you down to $10.
People would recoil at this.
Or if it fails, like I remember in my business, we had to cover payroll once.
I had to sign jaw-dropping things for the bank that basically would have had them rent my kidney out for the rest of my life.
Not only a loss in pay, would you be willing to walk away with $50,000 in debt if the restaurant fails?
Well, probably not.
Not.
And $50,000 in debt that you can't pay because you just went out of business.
And so what these people either consciously or subconsciously are talking about is they do not understand also that the reward is predicated on the risk.
It's not just the work.
It's the risk and it's the vision.
It's all those things.
You hear people say, well, there's 250,000 people making iPhones.
Why aren't they making what Steve Jobs made?
Because there's only one guy that invented the iPhone to the degree that he saw it as a possibility.
All of his engineers said, we can't do this.
He, in the chain of going from iron ore to an iPhone, He is the only indispensable element.
He's the only indispensable element, which is why he's worth so much money.
There are people below him on the pyramid who are high-level engineers who are very, very, very important part of making that happen, but they're not indispensable, so they make considerably less than he does.
Then there are people who assemble these things, which largely can be done by just about anybody, and there's huge numbers of people who can do that job, and they are even less indispensable to the creation of the product.
But everybody...
And everybody who's rich in this country has either, with the exceptions of those people who've taken their money through crony capitalism and government subsidies and locking out other business, but as a general rule.
I know a lot of rich people, and they're the hardest working people I ever met.
They got there early.
They stayed there late.
They were the first ones in.
They were the last ones out.
Over 20 years of hard work.
Finally, they start seeing some rewards.
And the second that they start getting something back for the risks and the rewards they've taken, people line up to take their stuff that they made out of thin air, and they want it without risk, and they want it without the work.
They just want it.
It's a lot easier to want to pick up the kill that somebody else hunted than go hunt yourself.
All right.
Well, let's close off.
I just wanted to remind everyone to go to BillWhittle.com and, of course, check out your work.
We'll put links on PJ Media.
Always a great pleasure to chat, my friend.
I'm sure we'll do it again soon, and maybe next time we can talk about what's going on in the U.S. election, which I find myself getting all kinds of things about.
