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[Music] [Music] [Music] Are you seeing me right now through that monitor in front of you? The answer is yes or no. And if you can't choose, you can't perceive me. You don't know whether I'm here or not. One or zero. Yes or no. Binary logic is something you depend on.
Without it, you can't have so much as a single perception. If we can base insight to God on binary logic, we've got it made. We don't need faith anymore. It's extraneous, irrelevant. I am closer to absolute truth than any man has been before me. Do I think that makes me better than everybody else? No. I still work in a bar.
I was working construction during the day and I was working in a bar at night. And I happened to see a copy of Omni magazine. It said, "The world's most difficult IQ test consists of 48 problems, some of which are extremely difficult." I think, "Gee, that's interesting." You know, that's interesting. I always wanted to know what my IQ was. The verbal problems were all pretty easy, so I just greased through them. I happen to have a large with an average vocabulary. The really difficult ones were some of the spatial problems and the number sequences. Actually highly difficult. So as it turned out, I ended up setting a record score on that test. The Guinness Book was actually going to switch the world's highest IQ title to me, but then they dropped the highest IQ listing. IQ is not really a PC concept anymore, and I guess the Guinness Book fell victim to PC. My IQ would be somewhere between 190 and 210. 210 seems very, very, very high. Does seem that way, doesn't it? Albert Einstein was estimated at between 180 and 190. Charles Darwin was way down there, and the toilet had 135.
[Music] Are you a genius? Well, you're kind of putting me on the spot here, aren't you? Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're for you're forcing me to either say no, in which case, you know, it's all hype, or you're forcing me to say yes. I'll say probably yes. I am a genius by most of the criteria, the definitive criteria of genius. I think you'd have to consider me a genius. Yeah.
At the age of six or seven months, I started pointing objects and giving their correct names. Little red pair of shoes with, uh, with little brass buckles on them that I really loved. And I thought that buckle was a beautiful word. So I pointed to the buckle on one of these shoes and said, "buckle." Shortly thereafter, I started talking in sentences. I seemed to have an understanding of syntax, and so I was a very early talker. I heard my mother talking about this little girl, Becky, already knew how to read. I thought, "Well, I'm certainly not going to be beaten by her." She didn't seem especially intelligent to me, and I just knew I could out-accelerate her. At the age of three or four, I started writing a book. It's an illustrated volume on snakes, lizards, and turtles. I had this just this knowledge, this, this utter knowledge that someday I would do something. Qualified me as being a genius. I could get straight A's in school without doing a thing. So I skipped a few grades. Everybody would look at me and say, "Well, this kid must be smarter, otherwise he wouldn't be so much younger than we are." By the same token, he's weaker than we are. So why don't we pick on him a little? You know, kids don't like other kids around them that are praised for being smarter than they are. "Why can't you be more like that kid? That kid is so much smarter than you are. Look at that kid's work, so much better than yours is." I mean, that's got to be an unpleasant thing.
We were always the poorest family in town. All kinds of welts on our bodies and fat lips. Kids are like sharks. They made the mistake of thinking these welts and things were signs of me being weaker than they were. They rapidly found out that wasn't the case. My actual father had died. This was only one of the bad breaks that my mother got in the man department. They had a habit of dying or disappearing. The only one that really hung around, which was my stepfather, turned out to be a total psychopath, just a mean and brutal guy. That's all. A bastard. Yeah, a rat bastard. Jack did not like to be in the presence of anyone more intelligent than he was. I saw him put on this pair of leather gloves. "I've noticed you're a pretty smart kid," he said. "You probably know how many miles it is to the sun, don't you?" And I said, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do know how many miles it is to the sun. It's, you know, between 92 and 93 million miles." Kablam, right in the mouth. The reason he put on the gloves was that he wouldn't skin his knuckles. In this world, if you pretend to be too much smarter than other people, you're going to get into trouble for that. He was going to be the vehicle of my enlightenment.
[Music] We got a horse. The horse's name was Witco. If the fence wasn't high enough, and they were never high enough, this horse would just get away. So he entrusted me with making sure the horse did not escape. The first time the horse got away, you know, the old man beat the crap out of me, just like I knew he would. Next, he went down and got himself a heavy galvanized dog chain and a couple of padlocks. Puts one end of the dog chain around the horse's neck and padlocks it. He says, "Come here." And I went over there, and he put the other end around my waist and he padlocked that. And he drives up. It was only a matter of time. The horse naturally went through the barbed wire fence, and it dragged me up a dirt street and part of the way down Main Street before the chain broke. I was covered with blood. Blood in my eyes, you know, I was like wiping my eyes. Now, finally, I managed to get home, and I'm walking up the front steps, and all of a sudden, cup, bam! I find myself flat on my back. I couldn't breathe. There's the old man standing over me and says, "I told you not to let that blanket horse get away."
[Music] Until finally, when I was 14, I just booted his ass out. Beat him half to death and told him that if he ever came back, that was going to be the end of him. I found the whole experience of school to be highly annoying. I think I could have wrapped the whole thing up in a couple of years. Instead, they managed to keep me around for 12. I spent most of the last two years sitting in the library. I just had had it. I told them I was tired of it and wasn't going to take it anymore. Wasn't going to be showing up unless they made some special provision for me. And when I wasn't in the library, I wasn't there at all. My teachers just didn't particularly care for me. "Here's a kid, he's ragged, he looks mangy and hungry, he's known for getting into fights." The rule was either total indifference or outright hostility. Would have been nice if somebody had said, "We've been keeping this kid down too long. Let's send them away to college university." But nobody gave enough of a hoot. The ball, they're doing that. So that's it. Maybe by that point, they thought I was too far gone. Maybe they were right. I wasn't invited to my graduation. My head was too large to be fitted for a cap. The cranial circumference was too great. Couldn't buy a motorcycle helmet either.
So you have a large head? Yes. Near as I can determine, it's about six standard deviations above the norm. The odds against having a head the size of mine are millions to one. And the odds of having an intelligence such as yours, also millions to one. But we can't necessarily infer from that there's a correlation. We'd have to have more cases of big-headed intelligent people. My own personal opinion is yes, head size does influence intelligence. Size does matter. It has to. Size does matter. I mean, if you take a very small creature with a very small head, you're never going to see a lot of intelligence out of it. Take a centipede. How smart are they? Not very smart. On the other hand, take a house cat. Well, that's somewhat smarter. Take a larger-headed creature or monkey. Even smarter than a house cat. Now take a really large-brained creature like a man. Smarter still. Seems that there is some kind of correlation going there. What would be the volume of your brain? Don't know. Haven't actually done it. I could do it by volumetric displacement using the Archimedean method of submerging my head in a tub of water, seeing how much water is displaced by doing that. But I haven't done that yet.
[Music] I show up at Reed College, which was at the time one of the top liberal arts institutions in the country, very exclusive. They had a different style in the classroom than I was used to. You couldn't get a word in edgewise. I mean, these kids were constantly talking, asking questions, and that's a healthy way to learn. I mean, I don't hold it against him. It's just that it was a lot of culture shock. Also the marijuana. I mean, I wasn't used to the drug use that was all around. They crammed me in a room with three other guys banging their girlfriends on the bunk above me. And the other room, there were some other things too that had gone wrong. My roommates had become involved in some kind of riot or demonstration. Cars were turned over and burned. They were insisting that I should have been expelled, despite the fact that I had nothing to do with this incident. I was in the library. They never even called me. No one wanted to talk to me to ask whether I had been there. Maybe that's one of the reasons nobody came to me and said, "Hey, where's your parents' financial statement?" This is an easy way to get rid of him. We just, you know, won't make any waves and hope that he doesn't get that statement in on time. Once I found this out, I simply left. I didn't take my finals or anything like that. Academia stinks, and it's not always a student's fault when something like that happens. Academia is a heartless, cold bureaucracy.
[Music] I had to hold a bag of plasma for a guy who had 11 pieces of double hot bucking better than him. He was shot through a door with a 12-gauge shotgun. I've been shot out on numerous occasions. I've seen a lot of guys stabbed with knives. I've seen people throw each other off 20 or 30-foot balconies. I've seen people stab each other with sticks. And I was just there to try to prevent the situation from getting any worse than it had to be. Bar bouncing, being a security guy in nightclubs.
[Music] It was a Ramada Inn in Bozeman, Montana, where you have a lot of cowboys and, uh, kickers. Cowboys get drunk, start fights, and try to put the make on each other's women. That's essentially their lifestyle. That's that's what a cowboy does. There were a few incidents that I helped out with. The bar owner decided it might be a good thing to have me around there every night and to pay me. Police fall into being policemen for roughly the same reason psychologically. They're just in that mode. "I want to apply authority to other people. I want to apply it forcefully if need be." I'm not really doing anything differently than they are, except I'm taking a lot more risks for a lot less money and fewer benefits.
[Music] You've got to concentrate on what you're doing when you're breaking up a fight. But the rest of the time, my mind is usually someplace else, often another world, a mental world, my own private space, despite the fact that very loud music is playing.
[Music] I've actually had some very good ideas while I'm bouncing. I used to carry around a little pad and a pencil. One thing that I noticed was if I had some complex stuff in memory and a bar fight happened, and I had to go indulge in some physical violence, that usually my memory was erased when I'd get done with the fight. I mean, it would be gone, irretrievable. One time I was thinking about artificial intelligence, then that evolved into a whole new way of looking at neural networks. Suddenly this horrible fight erupted. I set the page down, and I've mopped up the fight, and I came back over, and my piece of paper was gone. I tried and tried and tried to find that piece of paper. Nobody could tell me where it was, and I couldn't remember what the hell I'd written on it. Well, why do you want to be in an environment where there's violence? What makes you think that I want to be in these environments? Did I say that I wanted to be in these environments? I fell into this line of work in order to get out of a line of work. You've got to get into something else. Well, I did. I got into construction. I, I was a forest service firefighter for a long time. These things take a toll on you. I have a trick knee now. My lower back one on me. Do hard labor for 20 or 25 years, and it's going to take its toll. And finally, you're grateful for the chance to have a job where you just stand there and watch most of the time. If I can ever get out of it, then I will be happy to do so. I would love it. I don't think we should live in a violent world. I think that everybody should be wonderful and kind to each other. But let's face facts, shall we? Very few people are kind to each other. It's not the kind of world we live in yet. If I have anything to say about it, it will be the kind of world we live in someday.
[Music] This is a feeding frenzy we're in here. Everybody is trying to ring as much out of this planet as they possibly can. Pollution, overpopulation, militarism on the parts of foreign governments, poverty problems. We've got a lot of people starving to death, diseases out there on the horizon that need to be cured, forms of pollution we couldn't even have imagined a century ago, including radioactive waste. The sea is becoming a desert. We're running out of farmland. We're losing the ozone layer. Polar ice caps are melting. We have a lot of problems now. How do we do what's right? How do we fulfill our destiny here on planet Earth and beyond? Colleges and universities purport to be harnessing intelligence for the good of mankind. They're a breeding house for parrots. People are allowed to make little tentative moves forward, but they're not really allowed to do anything too radical. What does academia claim to have a solution to the ills of the world? As soon as you announce that you have a little bit of money to spend, virtually every hand, and there will be a lot of hands that reach out for that money, will belong to a professional academic. They're hogging all the resources that should go to solving these problems. We need an alternative to academia, and the alternative to academia is the ultra-high IQ community. Smart people are vastly outnumbered by average people. It's the nature of the bell curve. So in any kind of democratic society, average people are going to end up calling the shots. At the very top of our economic and sociopolitical structure are dunces. El stupido.
[Music] People who don't have a clue. When you turn a bunch of dunces loose, this is what tends to happen. Duncicle equilibrium. Mediocrity has triumphed everywhere you look. You see signs of mediocrity. The stupid person thinks that he's as smart or smarter than the smart person, and therein lies his stupidity. A lot of them call themselves CEOs. To succeed, you have to learn how to kiss up, kiss your way up the ladder of success. How do you change that balance of power? I think it has to be changed at the individual level. We have to reshape the image of what it means to be a human being. We have to create a new kind of person. You can't run a democracy with a citizenry that really doesn't know how to make valid decisions. Most people don't even know what decision theory is. They don't know what maximization of utility is. We live in a highly complex technological world, and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively. We have to have an educated and intelligent citizenry, which I regret to say we don't necessarily have at the present time. Say you had the opportunity to run the world. How would you do it? Oh, well, one of the first things that I would do is I would institute something like the Manhattan Project for a safe, long-lasting means of birth control. Simply implant that in all children at age 10. That would solve our population problem right off the bat. That would also enable us to practice a benign form of eugenics. I should probably say anti-dysgenics, prevent undesirable genetic mutations in the human genome. People who wanted to have children would apply to make sure they had no diseases. Whether we have to do it through genetic engineering or we have to let only the fit breed. We like to think that it is our right to breed as incontinently as we want to, have as many kids with whomever we want to. Future generations of mankind are being saddled with the results of what we do or don't do. Freedom is not necessarily a right. It is a privilege that you have to earn. A lot of people abuse their freedom, and that is something that people have to be trained not to do. But who, who does this training? Well, I'd be perfectly willing to do it myself. Just put me in charge.
[Music] We have to have a philosophical framework, an actual ethical structure that we can look at and say, "Well, this is without a doubt the right way of thinking." Within that framework, we derive an advanced ethics, an ethic that can be taught without fear in elementary school, grade school, secondary school, and in our colleges and universities. We have to start looking for possible alternative sources of leadership. I don't see anybody on the top of the heap now who is capable of doing this. They've all been co-opted by the system. They have too much to lose by deviating from what is now a barren path. It's going to take somebody else, somebody coming in from outside, somebody, uh, rising to the top from the bottom, shall we say. Could it be you? Who knows? It could be you.
[Music] But could you provide such a framework? Yes, I could. I've already done so. Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, the CTMU. It shows that we're all a part of the same universal self. All men are related in ways they can't necessarily discern on this plane of reality. We're all the same. We all share a basic fundamental identity with each other, which means that we should all be trying to help each other and cooperate with each other to make this a better place to live. As it is now, everybody's trying to run his own show here. We can't have that. But everyone would have to agree.
[Music] Well, it's kind of hard to disagree with the premise that two plus two equals four, isn't it? We have to establish a fundamental basis for agreement, otherwise we're going to end up using up what we have and killing each other over the remains. Humanity is going to perish. Faith is dead. People no longer have faith in anything. So we're going to have to make logic do where faith once stood. A world of pure mind. Yes, we can call the universe, for what of a better term, the mind of God. God is the principle of consistency, principle of cohesion that holds the universe together. We're all little pieces of God.
[Music] We're all one. In such a world, the ultra-high IQ, what role do they play? They are no better and no worse than anybody else, but they do have more responsibility by virtue of their greater ability. Problems that they can solve that can't be solved by other people, it naturally falls upon them to solve those problems. That's what high intelligence does for you. It enables you to hold many different things in your mind simultaneously and all their interrelationships. I would hope to hold the whole universe in my mind. That's the dream of a lot of people, a lot of physicists, a lot of cosmologists, a lot of theologians and philosophers, and me. What would that feel like to hold the whole world in your mind? It would feel pretty good, wouldn't it? Holding the whole world in your mind, would that make you God? As I think I explained, every human being is an endomorphic image of the mind of God. So yes, not with the power of God, not with the extent of God. I would still have to be humble inside of God, but I would have a certain identity. I would share an ultimate essence with God himself.
[Music] These vessels of meat, these prisons of flesh, they have windows. We can get a view to the levels above by looking through the window of mind, the window of intellect. One day, we'll all be able to take a good long look through that window.
[Music] The high IQ community can be a valuable step in the evolution of mankind by providing reportage that that window exists and of what can be glimpsed through the window. Is this a priesthood of intellect? An elite who have the ability to partake of those higher levels? Yes, I'd say that there's probably an element of priesthood to it. A church not based on faith, a church that's based on logic, mathematics, a basis for cooperation that cannot be destroyed by religious quibbling, by theological differences. Have you ever met someone smarter than yourself? As near as I can tell, no. And if somebody walked up right now and claimed to be smarter than me, I'd put him through his paces. I'd try to find out how sophisticated a picture of reality he'd evolved. Try to see what he was holding in his mind simultaneously and what he could do. I wouldn't give him necessarily an IQ test. I'd look at his productions. Am I capable of understanding his productions? Is he capable of understanding mine? If the answer to that were in his favor, then I'd have to say he's more intelligent than I am. But that wouldn't necessarily stop me from doing what I have to do. Is he out there? I doubt it. Could be. I don't rule it out. I'm not in complete control of reality. There could be somebody a lot smarter than I am out there. There could be an entire planet full of beings, every single one of which is a lot smarter than I am. I can't say. But I do know that in my life, I have not encountered many people with the depth of understanding that, uh, that I have regarding certain things, in particular, the overall nature of the reality we inhabit. Do I think that makes me better than everybody else? No. I still work in a bar. How good could I possibly think I am?
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] You.