Assimilation, IQ Thresholds, and the Limits of First-World Cultural Transfer. https://t.co/lIq1KI6NDG pic.twitter.com/YRkKLGdMuy
— Andrew Branca Show (@TheBrancaShow) February 28, 2026
Aaron Clarey [online] with Andrew Branca.
The worst people to take advice from about success, happiness, love are the average Americans because they are miserable, fat, poor, and stupid . . .
And they can't figure it out. There's another facet to this. It's more than just pure IQ, right. It's pure IQ and it's whatever you want to call it, it's hustle, it's drive, it's being clever, it's being aggressive. Because when I did consulting work, like one of the first companies, boutique consulting companies I ever worked for, they did a pharmaceutical company consulting research and development consulting. I don't have a science degree in anything, but it turns out consulting is mostly storytelling. It's not that much different than law. You're mostly telling stories to people that they want to pay you to tell them, you know, you tell them what they want to hear, of course. But I was working with this company, they held dozens of scientific conferences every year, thousands, tens of thousands of people would come to these conferences, and the internet was just coming on board; it was the 90s. And so all their marketing was still, like they would send postcards; they would mail physical postcards out to people about the next conference. And somehow I finagled access into the back end of their database system and they had started collecting email, this new thing email addresses. But they had very few. They had a few hundred out of hundreds of thousands of accounts. But I'm looking at these emails and I'm like, "You know, Pfizer. We got like 20,000 people at Pfizer. We have hardly any emails, but the emails we all have are . . . they're all the same syntax, they're all first initial, last name @Pfizer.com." I said, you know what, I bet I can fill in all these blank fields, and apply that . . . so I did that, and then I started sending, you know, doing internet polling, and we made a shitload of money because . . . also, I was running these surveys and then publishing signed expert reports, thought-leader reports based on these surveys. And there's no one else at this 200 person company who would have thought of that stupid . . . . now, it's probably against the law today to do that, so I don't recommend anyone doing that. There's probably, you know, internet laws against it, but at the time the internet was the Wild West. So it was just a clever trick I discerned that made us a ton of money. At the same time, we had people in our consulting firm who were PhDs in biology, in chemistry, in engineering, and they were supposed to be doing consulting work. They were supposed to be doing storytelling for us. They couldn't do it. They couldn't do it. They would physically shake standing in front of a client and trying to make a pitch for their expertise. And I observed that these people with PhDs had a high degree of expertise in a very very narrow silo, in a very narrow sense, and whatever that was they were really great at it. No question about it. But the moment you try to move them outside their comfort zone, they collapsed. They utterly collapsed. They just couldn't do what I considered the simplest thing in the world, which is to tell a story to compel people to give you money. But they had a high IQ there's no question about about it, but they had some other disability that would not allow them to be more broadly successful.
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