5-6-25 - 7am - Low IQ and Doom Scrolling

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael, You're still saying it wrong. It's bogada bogada bogadah.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Did you teach Bush how to say nuclear bogue ada,
not bowd googa bogada?

Speaker 1 (00:15):
So she flipped both the D and the G and
the emphasis and everything.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
We need to We need to get Joel a panic button.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, we do.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
He's got a bogada out there, he does.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
We We have an account exact that has h on
the opposite side of his little cubicle. He set up
a little.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Bodega in the empty desk, but we have empty desks
around here behind him that he actually has space to
put a bogada.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Weird. You and I could put a super Walmart right
out here. Joe's got a little Joe's got a little
bodega in the empty cubicle behind him. You and I
could bill an f and Super Walmart out here in
this empty space.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
That's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
By the way, what time is it you? Did you
check the clock?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
What time is it? Eight fifty eight.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Fifty Yeah, that's what time it was. When I checked it.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Too, twenty minutes ago, it was still eight to fifty. Huh.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
My My son and daughter in Ella have o'clock in
there in there like dining area, and it's battery operated,
and they're always forgetting to change the battery.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, I got one over the kitchen table, but it's
really I need I need to get the ladder out
to get it done.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
But so you never you never change the battery, do you.
So the clock just stay, it just stays.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
It's still got the daylight saving time or standard times. Yeah,
we're not in Well, there will die it's an hour and.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
It will go there for dinner. It'll be the same time.
You know, first of all, it stays the same throughout dinner,
and then I'll realize, oh, this was the same time
it was when the last time I was here.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
It never changes, It's just a decorative piece at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
No, I finally, I think I finally bugged him about
it so much they finally put a battery in it,
and then I noticed that it was working. And then
the last time I was over there, which just like
I don't know, maybe a week ago, I don't think
it was working again. So maybe I should just buy
a pack of batteries and just tape them to it
or something. Someday.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
At least there's easy to get to Yes, yeah, it's
very easy, said mine. I have to get the step
ladder out in order to get to it because it's
it's pretty high up on the wall. But you know,
I've got an excuse. Your kids don't.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Yeah, they don't have an excuse. They just don't care.
They just don't care. You know, I talk about stupid
people a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
And why are you looking at me?

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Well, like I said, I talk about I talk about
and two stupid people a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
But while you're looking at the window.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Everywhere, okay, I should you know. I was walking down
the hallway this morning when I.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Said those days, it's one of those days.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
It is one of those days. So I won't say
which one of our newspeople, but one of our newspeople
was coming back, I assume from the restroom or something.
And you know, it was kind of dark because it's
you know, it's like five o'clock in the morning or something.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
And smart it doesn't like to turn on any lights
around here, right.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
And and I just made some joke about you're kind
of slinking or loitering around, and I know he heard me,
but he just turned his head and looked down like,
oh oh, I got caught like, like I really caught
him loitering. That was just being a wise ass, And
I thought, man, are we that we that touchy around

(03:36):
here that we're afraid that somebody's going to accuse it?
I mean, you and I loiter for four hours every morning,
very much. So yeah. So, oh, but I do talk
about stupid people a lot that whole last hour. You
think about how stupid that is in terms of, oh,
we're going to close down food trucks because they attract crowds. Well,

(03:58):
if the problem is they attract crowds that want you to
shut down the bars and the restaurants in downtown Denver,
because obviously the cops and the mayor and the governor
believe that there's a causal link between crowds and crime.
So you get rid of if that's a causal link,
then you get rid of the crowds by getting rid
of the cause of the crowds. Oh, there's a story

(04:24):
that it's a Brittish story from nineteen oh six Plymouth, England.
A polymath which is just a brilliant person. Sir Francis
Galton was at a country fair in Plymouth, England, and
a bull had been tethered for slaughter. Eight hundred locals

(04:47):
were invited. I think it was a bull. It may
have been, you know, a big elk or something, but
the town local has been invited to guess the dressed weight.
Let's just say it was a bull. To eight hundred
locals invited to guess the dressed weight, how heavy was

(05:09):
it going to be after they butchered it? So, Sir
Galton was an obsessive measure of people, weather intelligence, and
he liked to gather all the entries. He liked to
gather all the info. He was always doing calculations that
I would say are about intelligence or conversely stupidity.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
Well, he.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Gathered all of the calculations of all of the eight
hundred citizens of this little local town that had gathered together.
Ill like guessing the number of you know, jellybeans or
something in a jar, Well, guess the weight. He calculated
the average and found something amazing. Crowd's collective estimate came

(06:02):
within a single pound of the actual weight. Now that's
pretty amazing, but it became one of the founding truisms
of modern democratic thought. Galton has shown that while individuals
may make mistakes, the group written large the group in

(06:25):
the aggregate can reason with uncanny accuracy impressions. He had
discovered the wisdom of crowds, and that's where we get
that phrase, the wisdom of crowds. Twenty years later, after
that occurred, back in nineteen oh six, much of the

(06:46):
Western world had granted the vote to all adults univals.
We then had universal suffrage. But that quaint rural fair
was more than a century ago. We're in twenty twenty five.
We're almost a twenty twenty six today. What are the

(07:07):
masses doing, whether they're not getting a way to lifetock,
everybody's hunched over their smartphones, everybody's rage posting about vaccines.
Everybody's chasing TikTok or Facebook video dopamine hits. I find
it fascinating when I see every once in a while

(07:28):
iub doing doing show prep, will find like videos about
new math adding fractions or understanding graphs X and y axes,
and they're really struggling to do so. They are, in
my opinion, we are, in my opinion, getting more stupid.

(07:54):
And that's a problem for any sort of representation, representative democracy,
a constitutional republic, because the dumber people get well, that's
the kind of government we're going to get.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, the movie Idiocracy was supposed to be satire, not
a guide book.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Right, not exactly, that's exactly right, Dragon. So first, the
data on cognitive decline is unambiguous. IQ scores across the
developed world have been falling for decades. Their studies out
of Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and yes,

(08:37):
even here. According to a twenty twenty three study in
the journal Intelligence US, IQ's declined significantly. I don't know,
I don't know why, but the greatest decline was between
the years two thousand and six and twenty eighteen are
a mere what ten seven years ago, and the losses

(09:01):
were most acute in people under the age of twenty. Now,
this is frightening to me, dwelling IQs. There is actually
a name for it. I you know, this is what
I love about AI and doing show prep. There's actually
a name for this. It's called the reverse Flynn effect.

(09:26):
A psychometrician by the name of James Flynn in New
Zealand came up with it. He's the first one that
detected that IQ's had been rising throughout the twentieth century,
and then observed that the trend had suddenly spiraled downward,
it had gone negative. Of course, if this was merely

(09:48):
an issue with IQ we it would just be an
interesting statistical study. Maybe IQ tests are too crude of
a mismeasure of man, of the mismeasure of our actual intelligence.
But the problem goes deeper. John burn Burn Murdoch, who's

(10:08):
a data editor to the Financial Times the Ft the
Pink Paper, compiled international test scores in reading, math and science,
and he found that they peaked around twenty twelve and
they've been falling ever since. And he believes that the
fall He hasn't been able to prove it yet, but
he thinks that the decline is accelerating. In other words,
we're getting doune or faster, particularly in reading, math and

(10:31):
science in high income countries. Fully, of twenty five percent
of adults can't use basic mathematical reasoning. They're unable to
verify a statement like if a jacket originally costs two
hundred dollars and is now on sale for twenty five
percent off, the new price is one hundred and fifty

(10:51):
dollars in this country, and I'm not very trust me.
I'm not very good at math. I've got to really
stop and think about, like, if you present me with
a with a Now that one's easy, two hundred dollars,

(11:11):
you're taking a fourth of it off. Okay, yeah, how
two hundred dollars divided by four is what fifty?

Speaker 2 (11:19):
You didn't even need to take off your shoes to
do that math problem.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, that was That's an easy one for me. But
they calculate that the section of American society that is
mathematically incapable, not just slow and stupid like me, but
absolutely incapable, is fully a third of the country. And

(11:43):
then you know this is true because once again I
would say that even Dragon and I are have a
problem with this. Attention spans have absolutely collapsed.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
What did you say, I wasn't paying attention.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
See, you're honor. I rest my case.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
I heard my name. That's all I got.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
That's all he got. Because and I'm one of these
guys that also maintains that you really can't truly multitask.
That you might be able to do different things at
the same time, but your brain is in nanoseconds jumping
back and forth between those different tasks. That your brain

(12:22):
is not at the same time, focusing on all of
those things at the same time. But you know, I
might be wrong about that. That's the three that I've got.
There's a study conducted by the University of Michigan that
since the nineteen it's called Monitoring the Future attract eighteen
year old's self reported ability, self reported ability to think,

(12:46):
concentrate to learn, and their responses. They've been doing this
since the nineteen eighties. The responses were stable for decades
until twenty fourteen, when the numbers reporting cognitive difficulty began
to accelerate. Now, at the same time, less than fifty

(13:09):
percent of Americans say they read books. In the United Kingdom,
thirty five percent of adults are what they refer to
as lapsed readers. They used to read, but now they've stopped.
As of twenty twenty three, thirty six more than a
third of Spaniards reported that they never are almost never
read books. So if you scroll back, that means that

(13:32):
across Western civilization we are passively scrolling instead of actively pondering,
We're reacting instead of reasoning. We're slowing down, and we're
becoming more and more distracted. So what does all they
had to do with politics. If if a democratic republic

(13:59):
depends on the wisdom of the crowd, the sir Gallic idea,
I'm sorry, the Sir Galton idea, that the electorate is
on average capable of advanced rational thought. What happens if
that assumption goes away? What happens when asked the audience
is stupid? Now, you think in theory we'd be okay,

(14:24):
because democracy is and I think to a certain degree
still is self correcting. And I think we just saw that.
I think that in the most recent leg in the
November twenty twenty four election, I think we saw that
the Democrats pushed so dramatically Progressives pushed so far toward Marxism, socialism, communism,

(14:46):
all the isms that we had a visceral reaction to that,
and the crowd, if you will, said no, we're not
going to do that. You know. Now, granted it was
a small majority, but thankfully at least it was a majority.
So the crowd still did react and we did self correct. Now,

(15:06):
my fear is that because we doomsday scroll all the time,
or we doomsday listen to the sound bites all day long,
that the in fact, there's a story where they talk
about how Trump is doing nothing. But I think again

(15:29):
on one of my sound bites for this morning, where
all they talk about is Trump's just creating chaos. Well,
if you're doom scrolling or you're just listening to the
cabal and all they're doing is feeding you, which is
essentially the same thing as doom scrolling, then you're going

(15:50):
to believe that. Oh yeah, indeed, we're just in a
period where it really is just chaos here. It is
Michigan Secretary of State, Listen to.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
This, Larry Ben said, tell me about Michigan right now.
You know the beginning of the Trump administration of this state.
You know that has gone both ways the last couple
of elections, but always closely what are what are voting
voters thinking about it? I say, watch the beginning of

(16:25):
this administration unfault.

Speaker 5 (16:27):
Oh in the last one hundred days has been nothing
but chaos and confusion for all of our residents.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
Whether now, if that is all you hear, If if
you've been sucked up into the cabal and the only
thing that you hear is this happens to be MSNBC
and that's all you hear, then pretty soon that becomes
like a self fulfilling promisee or it certainly is confirmation
biased because you didn't like Trump to begin with, which

(16:54):
is why you're over at MSNBC and you're being you're
being told, yes, you're believe your gut feeling that there's
a lot of chaos or confusion around here. I'm here,
as the Michigan Secretary of State to affirm your perception.

Speaker 5 (17:10):
They voted for the president or not, because the reckless
tariffs and the other economic policies we've seen come out
of Washington have only increased the cost of living in
our state. When a lot of these voters who supported
the president, we're expecting him to drive down the cost
of living. But whether it's affordable housing or being able
to simply just buy eggs and pay for childcare and
not have.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
To seize between the two, all of that is.

Speaker 5 (17:32):
Front of mine for people right now. And it's really
confirming because.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
The point is cable television is no different than doom
scrolling through X or Facebook.

Speaker 6 (17:48):
Michael, it seems like blaming food trucks violence. It's the
same kind of logic that blames comes for violence. It
misses the reality all together that it's people that are
treating wild.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Yeah, and to argue that somehow the food trucks attract
crowds and that therefore leads to the crime. Then if
you wanted to apply their logic, then you would eliminate
the source of the crowds, which would include the bars
in the restaurants. But they don't want to do that

(18:25):
because why the bars in the restaurants are members of
you know, chambers of commerce. They've got you know, they've
got the uh, they got the elites behind them. Who
wants to shut down you know, the favorite speakeasy and
speakeasy and lodo who wants to do that? Well, the
Mayor's not going to do that. But we can go
after someone who's, you know, working to make a halfway

(18:49):
decent living running a food truck. Well, they don't have
any political muscle. They're just food truck owners. They're the
little people. So of course Denver goes after them. I mean,
I just find it despicable. And don't forget nobody, nobody.

(19:12):
I don't care whether you look at four seven nine
or thirty one or even PBS and Denver, nobody draws
any sort of correlation between oh, sixteenth Street mall sucks
and we've got shootings going on right in the same area.
Whether it's Market Street or Sixteenth Street or Blake or Larimer,

(19:33):
it's the same area, which is why I don't like
to go down there anymore. Nuts. You know, the story
I'm talking about is how we are all becoming dumber
and dumber. But I haven't become that dumb yet. So
back to the idea that these IQs are dropping off,
that nobody's ready anymore, that we're all doom scrolling through Facebook,

(19:56):
or we're just you know who, staring at the at
the boob tube all day and just feeding what, you know,
just swallowing whatever it is that the cabala is feeding you. Yes,
I do think that democracy and the republic is generally
self correcting, and I think that's what we just went through.

(20:16):
But the problem is, think about what we're just talking
about with regards to Denver, because we are led by
people who themselves are often pretty vacuous, vacant, stupid themselves,

(20:38):
and when they're not, they pretend to be so they
you know, they do stupid things, like you know, Polus
is always posting things about you know, he's all into gaming,
and he's all into say don't. I'm not saying there's
anything wrong with gaming. I'm just saying that he tries

(20:58):
to present himself as being something other than the elitist
he is. Now. I don't know what police's reading habits are.
I do know he's on excell lot because I you know,
and whether he's doing it where he's got a staff
for doing it, I don't know. Some of them seem
to be fairly personal, so I think, and he has
both a personal and an official account, but they don't
want to look, you know, elitists or smug on Facebook

(21:21):
or Instagram or ex or anything else. But that begs
the question why is or why why are our IQs declining?
I couldn't find a single explanation. There's lots of different reasons.
What they're given migration between countries that have varying average IQs.

(21:47):
In other words, people who come from craphole third world
countries that invade another country bring with them their lack
of education, their kind of backass word culture, and they
bring it into a first world country. So if you

(22:08):
imagine a first world country just like the United States,
and it's a glass and we are three fourths of
the way full because of declining birth rates and everything else.
And then you take another glass of water that is

(22:30):
from all mixtures of third world countries where they're uneducated,
where they don't have the same values and principles that
we do, and you pour it into the water the
glass that contains the United States. It dilutes us, and
we become less intelligent. It degrades the culture. Now some people,

(22:58):
I've read some stories where they are well, there aren't
enough smart people having enough babies, so called dysgenic drift.
Dysgenic drift. I'd never heard that phrase before. But then
if they're smart, why aren't they having babies? And then
other scientists, which is part of the Make America Healthy

(23:19):
Again movement, looks to nutrition, industrial toxins, that exposure, maybe
a change in educational styles. But none of these things
cover all the bases. In other words, we can find
individual reasons and then collectively throw them all together into
a big stepot. Then we might realize that it's all

(23:41):
of this stuff that is causing an actual decline in intelligence.
By the way, somebody asks where the source of this
monologue is and the origin of it is The March thirteenth,
twenty twenty five Financial Times, the Pink Paper, which count
me digging into all of this, but I don't it's

(24:03):
I don't think they have free version.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah it is paywalld. But I have found a companion
article in Yahoo, so I was able to look that up.
Michael says, go here at the time. It's got a
lot of similar information.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Can you see me because I haven't seen them? Can
you send me that link? Can you have a chance
to thank you? So for some people there is one
obvious culprit. Let's go to the Michigan Cognition Data because
they're the ones that've been doing the longest study. Twenty fourteen.
That is the year, coincidentally that Instagram exploded, and the

(24:37):
saying goes for a lot of those decline, they coincide
with the advent of the iPhone and then all of
the apps that we all now put on our iPhone.
So it's it's not hard to jump to a conclusion
that the invention of social media, along with the advent
of the so called which is kind of funny, the
smart phone has done something bad to attention spans while

(25:02):
eroding the need to attain and retain knowledge. I think
about this. I don't know my daughter's cell phone number.
If if I, if I were laying, you know, dying somewhere,
I barely know tam or cell phone number. I don't.

(25:22):
I have to only know it because I pay, I
pay our cell phone bills every month. I don't know
dragon cell phone number. I don't. I honestly don't know
my mom's cell phone number because on my iPhone, I've
got Mom Home, Mom Mobile. So neither one of my children.

(25:43):
I don't know those phones. But I could tell I
can still tell you my grandparents' home phone number, because
I had to know that I didn't have something over
here that I could just look up grandparents and hit
dial and it would just dial it four oh five, three,

(26:07):
three eight, blah blah blah blah. I know exactly what
the number was. They've been dead thirty years, forty years.
I know what their numbers. I know what their phone
number is. And then you think about mental arithmetic, how
many times you know? Sometimes I do this just to

(26:28):
exercise the brain. So there might be a complicated, not complicated,
but a not a simple multiplication problem like nine times six.
But if I got a multiplication problem that is one
hundred and thirty seven times twenty two. I will rather
than go to my phone just to exercise the brain,

(26:51):
I will go work it out or division, I'll go
work it out otherwise, or if I'm in a hurry, no,
I'll just quote do it on the phone. The point is,
why bother with mental arithmetic? Why bother with mental math?
Because we've all got pocket calculators right there on our phones,
and that process is widening. I sat down with a

(27:14):
young man who is working on a revamp of one
of my web pages, and he showed me what AI
was able to do with a website. I felt like
an absolute idiot looking at how amazing that he could use.

(27:35):
And then I was amazed too at the number of
artificial intelligence applications there are. I mean, I thought, I'll
just I'll concede my ignorance. I thought there were maybe
a dozen artificial intelligence applications. There are hundreds of them,
and they all do very specific things. So you know,

(27:59):
maybe we can find solace in these machines. But I
kind of doubt it. I just think that people, and
I think, you know, whether you know, I do mock
public education, and I know that, but God bless them
for trying. God bless anybody whose parents are really trying

(28:19):
to get their kids to learn to critically think for themselves,
because without that, I'm not sure that democratic republican forms
of government can survive because it takes an informed citizenry
for it to do it. And for the first time,
while doing show prep running across that article, I find, oh,

(28:43):
perhaps it won't survive.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Michael, I'm not so sure that at least the Democrats
are having trouble with maths. They seem to be doing
pretty good. I mean the equation if you let over
ten million illegal immigrants into the country, how many congressional
seats will you earn.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
Oh, they're very good at that kind of math, very
very good at polymath, at political math. Unfortunately, they're very
good at that. In North Korea, only thought criminals are

(29:29):
century education camps, right, and we have lots of evidence
of that. In contrast, we have special camps for indoctrination
in this country that are open to any kids that
have liberal parents that can afford it. And the more
unnatural the brainwashing because these parents are also stupid because

(29:54):
they've bought into the wokism that is infecting the country.
I mean, the other thing that that if you're dead
scrolling through Instagram or Facebook or x and you're not
really thinking about what you're reading or just blindly going
through it, then and you already are a liberal, so
you are a trend follower, well then you are going

(30:19):
to be susceptible to unnatural brainwashing. That's why something called
the Unicorn Daycamp in Pasadena explicitly targets transgender and gender
and getting get it out transgender and gender non binary
kids ages six to nine. Huh yes, And if you

(30:46):
send your kids to one of these places, the children
will participate in affirming activities, so that the camp is
actually egging them on to pursue the gender journey that
they think they're on or that their parents want them
to be on. It isn't cheap, but then again, how

(31:09):
can parents obviously put a price on having their own
transsexual trophy child, just like the Hollywood deteradi do the
U The Unicorn Day Camp, that's actually the name of it.
It's at gendercamps dot com. You go find yourself gender

(31:29):
camps dot com. Unicorn Day Camp is a summer summer
program for transgender, non binary and gender expansive kids ages
six to nine. It is four exciting days of arts, crafts, games,
singing in lots of unicorn magic. Isn't kind of ironic
that they use a unicorn as their example, and of

(31:50):
course they indicate that you won't want to miss this
unique experience alongside kids on similar gender journeys. When I
talk about the culture being degraded, it's not just being
degraded from third world countries. It's being degraded from within

(32:13):
because we're being chastised. I've had this conversation with a
couple of friends. In fact, hey, he's now deceased, but
a good friend of mine who has a transgender daughter,
and I've asked specifically, well, when do you think that

(32:35):
your son who became a daughter thought that he was that?
And he said, well, we don't really know, but we
think it may have been as early as his you know,
under the age of twelve, before he became a teenager.
What were the indications, Well, not really shared, just behavior

(32:58):
and you know some of the things he liked to
do or play with. I said, so did you you know?
My question was did you encourage it? No, we just
let it play out. And then when he reached the
age of eighteen and was old enough to make the
decision on his own. We let him make those decisions
on his own, and indeed, the Sun didn't end up transitioning.
But that's no longer acceptable Now. The least little indication,

(33:23):
or I shouldn't say indication, the least little thing that
a parent sees as a sign, becomes somehow a factor
that says, now you have to pursue it. And sure enough,
there are things like gendercamps dot com that help you
go pursue it. Wow, talk about stupidity.