Speaker 1: First of all, you need to know them for your own life. Because, you gotta know that there are differences in intelligence. It's really important. If you go into a job, and you're not smart enough for that job, you're gonna have one bloody miserable time. And you're gonna make life wretched for the people around you, because you won't be able to handle the position. And as you climb hierarchies of competence, the demand on fluid intelligence increases. And so, unless you wanna fail, you don't put yourself in over your head. Well, what's over your head? Well, that's a tricky thing to figure out. I mean, you have to figure that out with intelligence. You have to figure it out with conscientiousness. You have to figure it out with creativity. You have to figure it out with stress tolerance. With agreeableness, because you wanna go into a cooperative environment, and not a competitive one, if you're agreeable. And with neuroticism, you probably wanna keep the stress level of your job relatively low. Because those are all places that you can break down. And most people have at least one significant weakness in their intelligence, personality, makeup. And you gotta be careful not to place yourself in a position where that's gonna be a fatal flaw. But what you really wanna do, as far as I can tell, if you wanna maximize your chances for both success and, let's say, well-being, is you wanna find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile. That's perfect. Then you're a big fish in a small pond. And you don't wanna be the stupidest guy in the room. It's a bloody rough place to be. So, and you probably don't wanna be the smartest guy in the room either, because what that probably means is you should be in a different room. Right? You should look at a place where, if you're right at the top, you've mastered it. It's time to go somewhere where you're a little lower, so that you've got something to climb up for. So, and if you're not hyper-conscientious, for example, you're probably not gonna want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at. Because you're just not wired up that way. You'd rather have some leisure and, like, more power to you. If that's how you're wired up, there's nothing wrong with having some leisure. But if you're someone who can't stand sitting around doing nothing ever, then maybe you can go into a job that's gonna require you to work 75 hours a week. And almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance hierarchies require very high intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness. As well, generally speaking, as pretty damn high levels of stress tolerance. You know, because that can knock you out too. Because there's gonna be sharp fluctuations in your career, generally speaking, at the higher levels of a structure. And you have to make very complicated decisions, often with very short time horizons. So you have to decide if that's what you want. So, okay, so how smart do you have to be to be different things in life? Well, if you have an IQ of 116 to 130, which is 85th percentile and above, so it's one person in eight up to one person in... 130, I believe, is 85, 90, 95, is it 95? I think it's 95. One person in eight to one person in 20. Then you can be an attorney, a research analyst, an editor, an advertising manager, a chemist, an engineer, an executive manager, etc. That's the... Now, that's not the high end for IQ, by the way. You know, it can go up... Well, it can go up indefinitely. Although there's fewer and fewer people as it goes up. So if you want to be the best at what you're doing, bar none, then having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity. And maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations. And maybe that's making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000. And then also, to really be good at it, you probably have to be reasonably stress-tolerant and also somewhat conscientious. So, you know, people... You think, well, why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies? And the answer to that, in part, is because they get there first, right? I mean, everything's a race, roughly speaking. And the faster you are, the more likely you are to be at the forefront of the pack. And intelligence, in large part, is speed. That's not all of it is. So if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly, the faster people are going to get there first. So IQ of 110 to 115, so that's 75th to 85th percentile. Copywriter, accountant, manager, sales manager. Sales analyst, general manager, purchasing agent, registered nurse, sales account executive. If you look at universities, the smartest people are... They're above this. Who are the smartest people at university? What do you think? Mathematicians. Physicists and mathematicians. Right, right. I could tell you who's on the other end, but I won't. Yeah, I'd like to, though. Anyways, okay. Going down the... Now, 103 to 108 is slightly above average, right? 60th to 70th percentile. Store manager, bookkeeper, credit clerk, lab tester, general sales, telephone sales, accounting clerk, computer operator, customer service rep, technician, clerk, typist. So you see, at this level, people have some technical skill and some ability to deal with complex things. Okay, that's dead average. 100 is average. Dispatcher in a general office. Police patrol officer. Receptionist, cashier, general clerical, inside sales clerk, meter reader, printer, teller, data entry, electrical helper. 95th to 98. Machinist, food department manager, quality control checker, security guard, unskilled labor, maintenance, arc welder, die setter, mechanic. Good IQ range for relatively qualified tradespeople. 87 to 93. Messenger, factory production worker, assembler, food service worker, nurse's aide, warehouse man, custodian, janitor, material handler, packer. Now, what you're seeing, what you're starting to see is that as you move down the hierarchy, the jobs get simpler, they're more likely to be assigned by other people, or they're repetitive. Because what IQ predicts, to some degree, is how rapidly you can learn something. But once you've learned it, it doesn't predict how, necessarily, how well you do at it. And so, the more repetitive jobs tend... People with lower IQs are more suited to more repetitive jobs. Under 87, is there something? Well, no. Right. That's a big problem. And it's something our society has not addressed at all. Jobs for people with IQs of less than 85 are very, very rare. So what the hell are those people supposed to do? It's like one... It's 15% of the population. What are they supposed to do? Well, we better figure it out. Because one of the things that's happening, too, is that as the high IQ tech geeks get a hold of the world, the demand for cognitive power is increasing, not decreasing, right? You want to be a teller? Well, you know, those checkout machines? They're not so simple. You want to work at McDonald's? You think that's a simple job? You don't see robots working at McDonald's. And the reason for that is that what McDonald's workers do is too complex for robots to do. So... Well, so this is a discussion that no one wants to have. But that's okay. It's still a problem. And it has to be dealt with. So the U.S. government... I think I told you this at one point already. It's illegal to induct anyone into the U.S. Army if they have an IQ of less than 83. Right? It's about 10% of the population. Because the U.S. Army... And they've been doing IQ testing since IQ testing began. Because they want everybody they can possibly get into the army. Because in peacetime, they use it as a way of moving people up the socioeconomic ladder. And in wartime, well, obviously, you need as many soldiers as you can get your hands on. And so you're not going to be any pickier than you have to be. So when the U.S. Army says it's illegal to induct anybody into the armed forces if they have an IQ of less than 83, then you know that they've done it for absolute necessity. Right? And when people have made a finding that contradicts what they want to hear, and they're doing it out of absolute necessity, you can be reasonably true that it's one of those facts that just won't bloody well go away. And so you might think, well, if there's nothing for someone with an IQ of less than 83 to do in the army, what makes you think that there's something that they can do in the general population? And then the issue is, you know, because the conservatives will say, well, they should just work harder. It's like, sorry, that ain't gonna fly. And the liberals will say, well, there's no difference between people anyhow. And you can just train people to do everything. And that's wrong. So they're both wrong. And they're seriously wrong. And the fact that neither side of the political perspective will take a good, cold, hard look at this problem means that we're going to increasingly have a structural problem in our societies. Because we're complexifying everything so rapidly that you can't find employment, increasingly, unless you're intelligent. You guys are really gonna face this, you know. Lawyers are disappearing like mad. And the reason for that is, you can look it up online. Increasingly, you can do things yourself if you're smart. And so, like the working class people have been wiped out pretty nicely over the last 30 years by automation and various other things. It's the low end of the white-collar class that's coming up next. So I'm not saying that lawyers are in the low end. But low-end lawyers are in the low end of the white-collar class. So there's still gonna be plenty of positions for people who are creative and fast on their feet and super smart. In fact, those people are gonna have all the money. And that's already happening to a great degree.