The video discusses the concept of "intelligent idiots," exemplified by Malcolm Caldwell, a prominent intellectual who tragically misjudged the realities of the Cambodian regime, leading to his untimely death. Caldwell, despite his extensive knowledge of Southeast Asia and strong Marxist beliefs, failed to grasp the dangerous nature of Pol Pot’s regime. This story is used to highlight how highly intelligent individuals can sometimes cling to their models of understanding despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which can have dire consequences.

The narrator further explores the phenomenon by discussing various instances where experts, including behavioral scientists, fund managers, and professional wine tasters, have been proven wrong in their predictions or expertise. The video highlights the limitations of intellectual models, showcasing Robert McNamara's reliance on data during the Vietnam War as a key example of how quantitative approaches can fail to capture the full complexity of real-world situations.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. consummate [ˈkɒnsəmət] - (adjective) - Complete or perfect in the highest degree. - Synonyms: (accomplished, expert, skilled)

Malcolm Caldwell was a consummate intellectual, and as we'll see, he was also a complete and total idiot.

2. staunch [stɔːntʃ] - (adjective) - Very loyal and committed in attitude. - Synonyms: (steadfast, loyal, dedicated)

As a result, Caldwell became a staunch Marxist.

3. euphoric [juːˈfɒrɪk] - (adjective) - Characterized by intense excitement and happiness. - Synonyms: (elated, delighted, ecstatic)

Now, reportedly, Caldwell was euphoric with excitement and anticipation.

4. quantitative [ˈkwɒntɪtətɪv] - (adjective) - Relating to, measuring, or measured by the quantity of something rather than its quality. - Synonyms: (measurable, numerical, statistical)

McNamara's big innovation is that he is going to bring quantitative analysis of manufacturing into the actual battlefield.

5. seismic [ˈsaɪzmɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to or denoting geological surveying methods involving vibrations produced artificially by explosions. - Synonyms: (earth-shattering, monumental, significant)

This is a seismic decision as McNamara is a completely unconventional choice.

6. satiated [ˈseɪʃieɪtɪd] - (adjective) - Satisfied to the full; satiated. - Synonyms: (satisfied, fulfilled, fed up)

The more emotionally satiated you are with the relationships in your life, the less you will need to rely on some bullshit intellectual model to emotionally satisfy you.

7. catastrophic [ˌkætəˈstrɒfɪk] - (adjective) - Involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering. - Synonyms: (disastrous, calamitous, devastating)

The model makes some catastrophic predictions.

8. immeasurable [ɪˈmeʒərəbl] - (adjective) - Too large, extensive, or extreme to measure. - Synonyms: (incalculable, vast, endless)

And if it turns out that the immeasurable factors are actually more important than what's measurable, well then like McNamara, you're kind of screwed.

9. luminary [ˈluːmɪnəri] - (noun) - A person who inspires or influences others, especially one prominent in a particular sphere. - Synonyms: (influencer, leader, notable)

Ehrlich became an internationally celebrated thought leader and luminary.

10. binomial [baɪˈnoʊmiəl] - (noun / adjective) - An algebraic expression of the sum or the difference of two terms. - Synonyms: (dual, pair, couple)

You see, because if you factor the binobial of the quantum rate of the social construct and divide by zero, you'll discover, just like Plato once said, that what is right is right.

Why Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots

December 19, 1978. Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London, boards a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It's an opportunity so rare that Caldwell and his friends hope that it could potentially change the world forever. Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable. Malcolm Caldwell was a consummate intellectual, and as we'll see, he was also a complete and total idiot.

He spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. As a result, Caldwell became a staunch Marxist. Just to give you an idea, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s, and he came away saying good things about it. So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia in 1974, Caldwell was enthusiastic. The new Communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot, and he had a radical new agenda of how to create a communist utopia. Caldwell believed that Pol Pot could finally be the communist leader that he's been waiting for. But the truth is that Pol Pot is as insane as he is cruel. And at the time, this is obvious to pretty much anyone paying attention. In the four years Pol Pot is in power, it's estimated that he is responsible for the death of more than 20% of the entire population. But when this news of genocide and atrocities began to leak out to the wider world, Caldwell refused to believe it. This unwavering support eventually earns him an invitation to visit Cambodia by the regime he accepts.

In December of 1978, he boards that fateful plane to Asia. Caldwell spends a few days touring the country. On the last day, he is granted an audience with Pol Pot himself. Now, reportedly, Caldwell was euphoric with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for Cambodia. And at some point, he likely said something that Pol Pot took to be criticism because, well, soon after the conversation ended, Pol Pot had Caldwell killed. Now, Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, yet absolutely no idea how to use any of it. And that's what this video is about, intelligent idiots. Because today's world seems to be full of them and it's. Well, it's becoming a problem.

Take the recent study that asked 30 behavioral scientists to predict which interventions would motivate people to go to the gym more often. Not only were these scientists' predictions horribly wrong, but get this, they were worse than random guesses of a person off the street. Or consider the fact that over 91% of fund managers cannot beat the market despite the fact that the entire purpose of a hedge fund is to explicitly create better returns than the market. Or an ongoing 20-year study that has consistently found that 90% of professional wine tasters are no better in blind taste tests than random chance at identifying more expensive wine. What the hell is going on here?

Well, to explain, we need to start in a very strange place. A president, a CEO, and a horribly unsuccessful war. March 28, 1961. The newly elected President John F. Kennedy appoints the CEO of Ford Motors, Robert McNamara, to become his Secretary of Defense. This is a seismic decision as McNamara is a completely unconventional choice. A CEO from the private sector with no military background, no Washington connections, a total outsider, and to boot the youngest Secretary of Defense in US history.

McNamara is also an intellectual. He's a statistician. He's a lover of data and predictive models. And upon confirmation, McNamara's big innovation is that he is going to bring quantitative analysis of manufacturing into the actual battlefield. The US Military is about to get a serious upgrade in efficiency.

Now, a few years later, the US enters the Vietnam War. Partly on the basis of McNamara's confidence, of his own ability to use data analytics to read the battlefield, he decides to measure everything. Armaments, troop counts, casualties, supply chains. And makes sure that every decision is based solely on the facts on the ground. Once in the war, his data analysis consistently shows the same result. The US is winning easily, handily, year after year. They are committing fewer resources, fewer troops, sustaining fewer casualties, and controlling more land than the enemy. Military victory, McNamara promises, is right around the corner. Or at least that's what the intellectuals claimed.

But the years go on and the victory never comes. Because here's what McNamara's data doesn't measure: the North Vietnamese willingness to suffer and die for their country, the poor morale of the US troops, the corruption of the South Vietnamese government, the shifting political winds at home. The truth is, the US is losing and has been losing for almost the entire war. And everyone kind of knows it except McNamara.

Intellectuals create models of the world. That's kind of their purpose. That's what makes them intellectuals. In theory, these models reflect and measure reality in a way that allows us to quantify progress and predict the future. The problem is you can't measure everything. It's impossible. And if it turns out that the immeasurable factors are actually more important than what's measurable, well then like McNamara, you're kind of screwed. But here's another major issue – getting accurate data in the first place.

On the surface, data seems really straightforward. You just go out and measure whatever you need to measure. But what if the way you choose to measure something actually changes the results? For example, there's a popular concept in the health and nutrition world known as Blue Zones. You've probably heard of them. So explain the Blue Zones: places around the world where people live extremely long lives. Is there anything scientifically different about these Blue Zones? A lot of the Blue Zones eat lemons. We can Blue Zone our own house if we want to.

Blue Zones are communities around the world that produce a higher amount of hundred-year-olds. People have suggested that we should study these Blue Zones to figure out how to live longer. And as a result, the Blue Zone model of health has become incredibly popular over the past 20 years, spawning best-selling books, a multi-million dollar business, and a Netflix documentary. Not to mention hundreds of YouTube videos. Here's to the beginning of our Blue Zone adventure.

And this is great. Except it wasn't. See, it turns out that upon closer inspection, a lot of the data behind the Blue Zones is, well, bad. For example, each of the Blue Zones happened to be in places where birth certificates were either adopted oddly late or were largely destroyed in a war. All of the Blue Zones involved countries that were at war in the mid-20th century and had drafts with upper age limits, giving young people incentives to lie about their age. Two of the five Blue Zones had major pension law changes that gave older people more money, another incentive to lie about one's age. And most interestingly, while the Blue Zones are overrepresented in 100-year-olds, they are underrepresented in 90-year-olds.

Interesting. The point here is that the Blue Zone model of health and longevity isn't necessarily a bad model. The problem is that it's built on top of bad data. Therefore, it's not accurately reflecting reality. Yet, of course, nobody thinks about that. Netflix definitely didn't.

But here's the real problem. Intellectuals forget that models are just models. Instead, they come to believe that their models are reality. And the consequences can be disastrous. Malcolm Caldwell spent 20 years studying Southeast Asian history and development. He created a model of understanding that part of the world that was largely Marxist. Then when he actually went to Southeast Asia and met an actual Marxist and tried to tell that Marxist all about his model, it didn't end so well.

When an intellectual model and reality collide, reality always wins. Yet when their models are contradicted by reality, most intellectuals do not side with reality. On the contrary, most intellectuals will double down on their models, and this is what makes them idiots.

By the way, do you want to avoid being an idiot? Of course, you do.

Moving on in 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich began his book the Population Bomb with the following statement: the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. In the book, Ehrlich builds a case that the world is overpopulated and we would soon experience catastrophic social, economic, and environmental collapse. He predicted that all marine life would die by 1980, that over a billion people would die due to famine by 1990, and that England would no longer exist by the year 2000.

We're very close to a worldwide plague that could kill virtually everybody. The book was a massive hit, and it inspired political and social movements across the world. There's too many people, and we'd like to see people have fewer children and better ones. Ehrlich became an internationally celebrated thought leader and luminary. You have to get the death rate and birth rate in balance, and there's only two ways to do it. One is to bring the birth rate down. The other is to push the death rate up.

He was featured in newspapers and appeared on television all over the world. He was achieving what every intellectual hopes to achieve: real impact, except that he was completely and utterly wrong about everything.

But Ehrlich didn't let that stop him. In 1990, he doubled down with another book. In 2004, he stated in an interview that his only mistake in his first book was that his predictions were too optimistic. In 2008, he argued that governments should not allow people to have more than two children. Even last year, in 2024, he was interviewed on 60 Minutes, one of the most prestigious news programs in the United States.

Ehrlich is the poster child for an intellectual idiot. Here you have a guy, super educated professor at Stanford, spends decades thinking about sustainability, and he comes up with a model. The model makes some catastrophic predictions. He is then rewarded for the model. He's told he's a genius, he's a visionary, oh, my God, he's saving the planet and humanity. And the baby seals. Oh, my God, the baby seals. He gets paid for this model. He wins awards for this model.

He becomes world-famous for this model. But reality eventually makes a fool of every model. And the intellectuals who cling to their models in the face of reality become idiots.

Idiots don't update their views about the world when new information comes out. Idiots try to shut down discourse rather than engage with it. Idiots will look at something plain and obvious and claim that it's actually really complicated. You see, because if you factor the binomial of the quantum rate of the social construct and divide by zero, you'll discover, just like Plato once said, that what is right is right if only what is right is left, and what's left alleviates the burden of the proletariat to the liberation of all peoples, even under God, whenever it ever came in.

Look, the world is a scary and unpredictable place. It is human nature to crave some model to give it some sense of predictability. But the real problem is that our models of reality also give us an identity and a sense of belonging. I mean, look at these fucking niblets.

Do you think this is really about climate change? No. These are empty, angry human beings desperate for their lives to mean something in the face of the void. And their apocalyptic climate change model has done that for them.

But we all have to be careful, because the fact that our models give our lives a sense of meaning means that all of us are susceptible to becoming idiots if we're not careful. And this is how we prevent that. You get a lot of information from the Internet. That's great, because you can be conscious of what you're consuming and choose whether to learn more about a topic or not. But the fact that you are choosing which models to adopt and believe in for yourself means that you are an intellectual now.

And as an intellectual, you are never far from turning into an idiot. All this alternative media, if I can call it that, has a kind of paradox to it. On the one hand, it is great at exposing the disconnect between the intellectual elite and the actual on-the-ground reality of millions of people.

Idiots like Malcolm Caldwell can now be spotted a mile away on Twitter and before they even have a chance to get shot in the face by a communist.

But there is something more subtle happening as well, and it concerns me deeply on the Internet. The models of the world that travel the furthest are not the most accurate, but the most attention-grabbing. They are the models that appeal most strongly to our base instincts, prejudices, and emotional needs. And by and large, these attention-grabbing models of the world are inaccurate at best and actively destructive at worst.

And because we're spending more time on our devices removed from the real world, we are less likely to suffer the consequences that a faulty model can give us. Put another way, the less time we spend in the real world, the less of a cost we experience for being detached from it. And you and I, and everyone must go through pains to remember this all the time.

This is not reality. This is a cheap 2D rendition of reality, A funhouse mirror of reality. It is a cheap imitation and temporary substitute for reality. So what does that mean?

That means less time on this stupid device and more time out in the world. That means meet more people face to face, talk to them, connect with them, disagree with them, care about them. The more emotionally satiated you are with the relationships in your life, the less you will need to rely on some bullshit intellectual model to emotionally satisfy you. And then, with the emotional sustenance of real-world relationships supporting you, approach the models of the world with a healthy dose of skepticism. All models are wrong, but some can be useful. If a model is useful, use it. But the moment it's not, abandon it and move on.

INTELLECTUAL, SKEPTICISM, REALITY, EDUCATION, PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY, MARK MANSON