of a couple of world wars. But we had our own wars you know lots of wars internally and with the Native Americans and the French, the Brits. We had a lot of wars. But what was it that made America so successful?

Now one thing you say is okay was it this Western culture and they brought over. But this book is all about the fact that they weren't all the same culture. I talked about this yesterday I think. Some of the more Puritans and they wanted everybody to be treated equally but they had to be religious or else you were in big trouble. And then there were ones that landed in the more southern part of the country who were slavers. They started by putting white people in slavery and then they literally ran out of white people to enslave. That's why the African slave trade happened. Now the white people they enslaved were what he called indentured servants. And the problem was that after the indentured servants served their time they could go get their own land. So the indentured servants were moving through the system too quickly and there weren't enough new ones. So they had to do a different source of labor and that's where the African slavery came from. So you can't really compare the Puritan culture to the southern culture. Completely different. I mean the Puritans never would have enslaved anybody. So you can't really say there's something about the culture that worked.

So what was it? And this book I just mentioned suggests an answer which also suggests a fix for the inner cities and other parts of the country. Are you ready for it? Part of the reason that people came to the United States is that the king in Great Britain would say if you go there we'll give you you know a land grant which if you do things right will make you very rich. You'll be like a king in your own large piece of territory that I grant you. Now who would the king in England... somebody says it's not Great Britain let's just call it England. So the king of England thus prior to the Great Britain words. So thank you for that correction. So the king of England, who is he going to grant land to in America? Well it's not going to be to a peasant. The king granted land to highly educated people because they also happened to be the well-connected people in England.

So what happened was because of a coincidence of how land was granted the United States became hugely educated instantly. Meaning that the percentage of people with advanced degrees in the early colonial days was sort of through the roof by the standards of those times. There were simply more educated people as a percentage than maybe anywhere in the world. Now I don't know if that's true but I think it's close to true that we may have ended up totally by coincidence with more highly educated people than have ever been in one place at the same time except for maybe Microsoft, right? And then Silicon Valley later.

Now what happened when you put a whole bunch of smart people into a wilderness? They do well. Smart people tend to do well. Am I wrong? Have you ever seen an example? Well name a country where they're highly educated and the economy is doing poorly. Can you name a country that's among the top 10 of education that's doing poorly in economics? Well maybe temporarily if something's going wrong but in general if you put a bunch of smart people in an area they do well.

Now here's the question. Did all of the colonists need to be smart? Absolutely not. The vast majority of the colonists were dumb just like the rest of the world, right? Most of the world is not smart people. So most of the colonists were dumb. So it wasn't just the percentage of smart people. It was that there were a lot of them in numbers. So you need numbers. So here's the question. Where in the United States do we have big concentrations of smart people and things are not heading in the right direction? Nowhere. We're pretty much nowhere. Now somebody says I'm being a bigot but I have not mentioned race whatsoever because it doesn't have anything to do with it. So race has nothing to do with this. I'm just saying that if you put a bunch of people who went to college into a place that needs help it's going to do better.

So what do we normally do in this country when we're trying to fix an urban area? The thing we do when we're trying to fix an urban area is we give them money and resources, mostly money and resources. And it doesn't seem to work for a variety of reasons. What happened when you took Bill Pulte, smart and capable, well-educated, and put him into Pontiac? Good stuff, right? Now money was also involved but money it turns out is the easy part. Do you know what was the hard part? Finding a Bill Pulte. That was the hard part.

So I would suggest this. If we could find something similar to the king of England giving land grants to smart people of every race — so ethnicity has nothing to do with any of this, right? Just smart people of any kind — could we do the same thing with our blighted areas? Now it doesn't necessarily have to be an urban area. It could be Baltimore but it could also be somewhere else. So I suppose you cleared an area of blight and then you said okay all this area that's cleared has almost no economic value but we're going to grant it to only people who have a certain level of let's say educational achievement. So you say all you have to be is you have a master's degree. I'll just use this as an example. So I'm not suggesting that your degree says whether you're smart or not. I'm just saying it's an easy way to know that you're at least that smart. So suppose the city decided we're going to grant this land but instead of doing it the way that you would normally think which is to give it to the community you say no I'm going to create some kings. They could be you know black kings. They could be any kind of king but they're going to be the people who have advanced degrees and they're going to get their own little patch of land and they're going to use their intelligence. If they need money they can figure out how to get it because that's what smart people do. And either they have it or they know how to get it. You put the smart people there and you say here it is. If you can make this work you get an amazing advantage out of it.

So I'm going to put this idea into the world which is that putting physical resources into communities that have trouble might help a little. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. But putting smart people in there especially smart people who you know who can work with the community etc. probably would be a bigger deal. Now I don't know if there's any way to do this in the way our society is functioning but what do I always say? What I always say is that if you can A-B test it that's good enough. If you have a plan that could be tested small and find out whether or not it worked you don't have to ask if it's good. I mean you do want to do a basic filter to see if it's crazy but if you think it might be good but you're not sure as long as you can test it small go ahead.

So take a little place that you think has a problem that has land values that approach zero. Have your political leaders say all right here's all we're going to do. If you've got an advanced degree and the relevant stuff let's say an engineer... what if we limit it to that? What if you say if you are a certain type of engineer and you have a degree we'll give you land as long as you promise to live there and develop it. What would happen if you came back in 20 years? I'm pretty sure people would do okay because smart people tend to succeed no matter where they are.

Somebody said you're a and spelled you were why. Oh you are. I'll tell you there should be one rule as I block that person. There should be a rule that if you insult somebody's intelligence and you spell a word wrong while you're insulting them it doesn't count. That should just be the rule. It doesn't count if you spelled a word wrong. Somebody says it's called gentrification. Nope, nope, no no no no no. Gentrification is when anybody who is doing well sort of creeps into the neighborhood. I am not talking about that. I'm talking about picking people who are smarter than yuppies who just happen to have you know a four-year degree. I'm talking about real smart people. I'm talking about somebody who went to MIT. Because remember the people who settled America were Oxford shaped. They weren't just people who knew how to read. We're talking about Jefferson. All right, Jefferson wasn't just a guy who could read. It was a genius. I'm talking about geniuses. I'm not talking about the yuppie who works in the cubicle and can afford to pay his car payment. That is not who you need to fix the inner cities.

All right, so when you saw recently that Jack Dorsey and Bill Pulte were clearing some blight — they had partnered to clear some blight in St. Louis — and I saw those pictures and I see Jack and you know Bill Pulte standing there I think to myself I'm glad there's money. I'm glad there's equipment to do that. But what you really need is people of you know that level of smart and you know well-meaning to just live there for a while and try to build something. Now not those two guys in particular but it just made me think that maybe bringing in some geniuses — and again of geniuses of every type. None of this is ethnic. None of this is gender. We're not talking about any of that. It doesn't matter who they are. They just have to have a certain skill set and that's it.

Somebody says where does Scott get his degrees? I got my undergraduate at a small private college called Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and I got my MBA at Berkeley here in California to answer your question. But let me say that I would not consider myself qualified for what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people who have more than an MBA. I'm talking about Harvard. I'm talking about MIT. I'm talking about top at the top, right? If you don't pick top at the top this idea falls apart quickly. You know I'm not talking about putting a bunch of B-plus students into Baltimore and see what happens. That's not going to get you there.

All right, let's talk about Iran quickly. So Iran apparently has some technology. It must be Russian technology for spoofing GPS to make you think you're off track. And apparently they can spoof communications and they're fooling ships in the area and causing mischief. A hundred percent of the people talk about Iran say hey war looks like you know it might be a risk. But every single person says the same thing. Iran does not want war. U.S. doesn't want war. Nobody wants war. So I'm pretty sure we're not going to get war. I'm not going to say there isn't you know some bullets fired at some point but the odds of war with Iran I think we should just call it zero because that's what it is. That's what it is. So let's stop worrying about that in terms of you know some kind of slippery slope toward war because something very different would have to happen. Something we don't see coming that would turn this even into an even possible war situation.

And here's part of the reason why Iran doesn't want a war because they would be destroyed. So that's easy to understand. You might ask yourself well why doesn't the U.S. want war because we might win it fairly you know fairly easily and it would remove this risk. And even though people would die or maybe it's worth it but here's the thing. You have to compare war to the alternative and the alternative is just wait. Becaus