Ask A Genius 867: Long-Term Collaboration

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/05

[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I wanted to do a little session or even a medium or long session, depending on how it goes about interacting and working and writing about you for nine years or almost a decade. It’s been a long trip. When we first started collaborating, I reached out to you just for an interview. I really didn’t really know what I was doing. I just wanted to try doing some more interviews. So, I reached out to some people in an area where I was interested: psychology, which is the area of individual differences. I was scared of you at first; you’re aware of this. 

Rick Rosner: If you evinced any of that, I thought you would have been scared of me because I was super cranky because I’d just been fired from Kimmel and so I was not in the happiest frame of mind.

Jacobsen: You were cranky and defensive. Do you know what the defensiveness was around in the questions? I just remembered. 

Rosner: I don’t know. Being smart?

Jacobsen: Potentially. You received the World Genius Directory Genius of the Year Award for the Americas, or whatever the title is for it, from Jason Betts, the founder of The World Genius Directory. In it, I quoted you and asked the following question: You were pissed because I was making you try to parse something that you wrote a little while before and had forgotten, and so you were sort of short with me just saying, “Look, you’re asking me to parse something that’s not even clear… yada yada yada…” [Laughing] It wasn’t too bad, but I was, especially then, very shy and very sensitive. I’ve grown up in sort of an alcoholic home, so there was a lot going on there, basically. So, there’s a context for my interpretation of that, which is a more sensitive thing. Obviously, when I first started working at the ranch, I paid some money out of pocket, saying I’d go to a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist or whatever and just say, “Give me some tools to deal with what I have and let’s talk about everything until you discharge me.” In other words, I’m done with what I need to do.

Rosner: That’s smart. Everybody, if they can afford it, should get shrunk some.

Jacobsen: I worked a lot extra to do that and get some other things. I highly recommend that to everyone just for a sense of ease with life. I mean we always carry these things and so my talking about various things in my background that were quite difficult growing up with. I wish I had done it sooner yet. I was younger and less experienced. I didn’t have the financial resources for that. 

Rosner: It helps you be more transparent to yourself and understand yourself better. We’ve talked about free will, which I don’t believe in. But I believe in informed will, like knowing why you think and do and make the decisions that you do, I mean, one reason you make the decisions you do is because they’re in your best interest. But if your brain’s playing tricks on you and so you’re making decisions that aren’t in your best interest, it’s helpful to know when and why that might happen. Our brain constantly fucks over people in the service of getting sex to perpetuate the species. Trying to get laid and issues around reproduction often involve making decisions that are not optimal for your individual comfort or survival. And getting shrunk… there are other booby traps in people’s thinking that are individual based on an experience, like your experience as you grew up, that can sabotage your behaviour and thinking. It’s good to know about that shit. 

Jacobsen: Absolutely, and I found myself surprisingly more productive when I got… I did not get rid of the stuff, but I resolved those issues and then integrated them into my current self. So, there’s a more rounded sense of not denying what has happened, not being aggressive about what had happened, more accepting it, resolving it, integrating it, and moving forward and accepting that this is now part of sort of my authentic narrative: my story.

Rosner: Yeah, you seem very competent, intrepid, and well-adjusted.

Jacobsen: Thank you.

Rosner: Though maybe a little bit more hardworking. You work amazingly hard. You’re amazingly productive. That part is unusual but to get back to me being cranky about something I said, let me provide further context. I had just been fired from Kimmel for reasons that included an interview; I’d given where they misstated what I said to horrible effect. This was with Fox News.

Jacobsen: And I was asking for an interview; I get it.

Rosner: So, I’d been fucked over by Fox News, published very damaging lies about me in what was supposed to be a friendly interview. I’ve explained what happened a zillion times before, but that helped fuck me out of the best job I’d ever had. 

Jacobsen: Now, what I had noticed in the original comment in those nine and a half years or almost a decade working with you, I’ve come to learn about the difficulty in high-range testing. So, IQ is above 160-164 and 196 on standard deviations of 15, 16, and 24, respectively, of the most common standard deviations used in professional testing.

Rosner: Four standard deviations. So, allegedly, one person in 30,000.

Jacobsen: Approximately, yeah.

Rosner: Which is then… there are plenty of caveats to go with that. 

Jacobsen: Yes, yet, if someone scores high on the test that does measure this particular faculty, this psychological construct well. You can be pretty sure the person will perform well in other academically associated areas too. It doesn’t mean they’ll do well in life; it simply makes cognitive barriers to areas of life less of a nuisance for them. So, in my interactions with you and certainly much less involved interactions with so many other people in the high-range testing community…

Rosner: Yeah, you are the king of talking to high-IQ people.

Jacobsen: Correct. That’s incontestable. It’s not even close, and that depth of interaction and analysis and then also with you who has sort of a semi-legendary status based on the tests that you took from particular test creators, particularly Ronald Hoeflin; those really gave me a sense, the reason, it’s hard to measure, picking my words carefully, above four standard deviations or even three standard deviations in any culturally neutral sense. For the fact that you really need to develop a sort of a second sense of a person, that only comes with time to see the subtlety, the nuance of how someone builds a thought, even when they are tired and just woken up, sleepy, had a parent die. It’s in interaction with you. I have noticed. I am recalling Dr. Robert Jarvik talked about this about Marilyn. It took him a while, I think, to realize how fluid her thought is. It’s similar with you and with others where there can be gaps in sort of social ability. There can be a want to claim a much higher intelligence level than is the reality even though they already have a high score, a respectable score.

Rosner: Yes, because there are benefits to claiming America’s or the world’s highest IQ. Chris Langan got to be on a game show called 1 versus 100 because he had a magazine article written about him, I think in Esquire, that claimed he was America’s smartest person, and I think he went on that game show and won $125,000 [sic], which is not nothing.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Especially when it happened 20 years ago.

Jacobsen: You and him are smart people. I’ve made this commentary in a previous session. I think the framing of the article by Mike Sager in Esquire was journalistically irresponsible because of the importance of IQ in American society. We do have ethical codes written and unwritten really in journalism. 

Rosner: You’re talking about a time when truthfulness and accuracy mattered. I sued a game show in the year 2000 because they didn’t live up to their responsibilities for accuracy. And more than 20 years since, the expectation of fairness and accuracy has been wildly eroded. I was going to talk about this in a different segment: politics. This morning, in the space of half an hour, Trump tweeted out or posted 31 posts on his social media Truth Social, attacking the woman that he has been found legally liable for sexually assaulting, E. Jean Carroll. He lost another ruling, and he’s been found guilty twice for defaming her, but he continues to defame her. This is a guy who’s been found in a court of law. The court found that he sexually assaulted her, and the only reason they found sexual assault instead of rape was that he had her face pushed into the wall and was assaulting her from behind. She couldn’t tell whether what was penetrating her was his fingers or his penis because she couldn’t see what was happening. In New York, I guess for it to be rape, the penetrating instrument has to be the penis. So, since she couldn’t say for sure it was just sexual assault, the judge said that her saying it was rape was substantially true. This guy, this gleeful angry rapist, is the Republican’s front-running candidate by far, which is something that was 20 years ago or even ten years ago when we started talking, just inconceivable. Sorry, that was a lot.

Jacobsen: That’s a fair point. However, the point you made about Christopher Langan, you could make the point about you to a certain degree too, where you did get your play. You have earnestly sought out minor to medium fame.

Rosner: Yes, from time to time, I’ve tried really hard. 

Jacobsen: I don’t think that’s the case now.

Rosner: No, because I’m waiting to see if this book happens. I mean, it’s cost me a lot of years waiting on a book that was sold and was supposed to go. Also, I’ve gotten older and lazier, but I still want fame.

Jacobsen: So, there’s that caveat. I think that the critique could be bidirectional; two-way. So, to the original point. I find an interaction with you once the steam starts rolling in the engine a bit more. You can roll out very sophisticated thought in several paragraphs solo and it’s not pre-fabricated, it’s entirely improvised.

Rosner: Hold on. Sorry, I am interrupting, but I don’t think I’m that fluid; if people want an example of fluid thought on the spot, they might want to tune in to…. Now, I haven’t heard Carolla lately; he’s become very libertarian and embroiled with a bunch of Right-Wing Shysters. I hope that hasn’t degraded the quality of his spontaneous speech, but Carolla is one of the most fluid speakers that I’ve ever heard. He’s just brilliant. He and Kimmel – Kimmel’s also up there. On the Man Show, they ended many episodes by just asking questions from the audience that they had never seen before, and nobody else, no other pair of hosts, would ever dream of doing this. They’d want to see the questions ahead of time. They’d have their writers come up with jokes and talking points ahead of time, but these guys would just get a stack of cards that they’d never seen before where audience members had written the questions before the show started and some producer had picked out the half dozen most interesting questions. They would just go and just talk. I mean, they both came from the radio, which trains you to do that.

Anyway, if you want to hear fluid speech off the cuff, Carolla. Everybody else is garbage, including myself. 

Jacobsen: There’s a limit to the range of topics though too. For most people, they don’t have a pervasive reservoir of information on a wide range of topics to riff. They don’t have it, but you have it. 

Rosner: Some of that is accidental. 

Jacobsen: I don’t think 12 years of college credit in one year is an accident. 

Rosner: So, what happened is, I mean, it starts with… I was pretty smart. I taught myself to read. I was also socially awkward. Had I been born ten years later, I would have been diagnosed with Aspergers because I was socially awkward. I didn’t have social fluidity, so I stayed inside at recess and read. I read all the time. I didn’t succeed, but I tried to work through all the books in my elementary school library. Several times, I prepared for a year for Jeopardy. I prepared for those who Want to be millionaires. I taught how to take standardized tests, and all this stuff kind of worked. It kind of pushed me into a more generalized range of knowledge. Oh, also, being a fuck up where I went to the University of Colorado for six years and flunked so many classes because I didn’t give a shit but was always walking to and from the library with stacks of 12 books where even though I was fucking up in class, the time at CU gave me a bunch of time to pursue whatever was interesting to me. 

Also, just like posing naked for three hours at a time for art classes. Towards the end of my time doing that a lot, I came up with a bunch of poses where I could pose with a freaking book. Those are accidents of personality.

Jacobsen: How much did you study for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the first time, the second time, and the show Jeopardy?

Rosner: So, Jeopardy, if you’re local to LA, they will bump you in favour of people who are from out of town. I tried out for Jeopardy five times. You take a written quiz. Now, it’s an online quiz kind of thing, but then you showed up at the studio, and they asked you 50 questions, and I think people who missed fewer than seven maybe got to play the game in front of the producers to see who was lively and could be on stage okay. Jeopardy, I think, is the most nerd-friendly of the major quiz shows. So, you didn’t have to be that game-showy. So, after the fifth time, I made it all the way through where I was on call, or, I think, for a… they tape a week of shows at a time, they book like 12 contestants, and two are going to get bumped. They’re going to use two new contestants for every show to replace the losers. So, they book enough to do a full week plus two alternates, and the people who sit there all day and then don’t make it onto the show are going to be locals. So, that happened to me at the end of a season of production, and they said we’ll get you on, but it’s not going to be for a few months. So, I’m like, fine. So, with all the trying out and then getting bumped, it was like a full year of studying for Jeopardy. 

Then, for Millionaire, it was a few weeks because I was in the hot seat, and then there was the July 4th break. So, there were a couple of weeks in between that I could cram where I took an almanac with me, and we went to we took our daughter to Disney World, and I walked around Disney World, I tore the almanac into five pieces just for portability and was always walking around with a 200 Page chunk of the almanac looking through it. Sadly, for me, it was the last page of one of those chunks that had the erroneous list of the altitudes of world cities on it from which Millionaire took its factually flawed question about the world’s highest capital city and if I tore the almanac in a different place as when I was tearing it into chunks, I maybe would have seen that chart, and that would have saved me. So, fuck me, fuck them.

Jacobsen: Did you lose on Jeopardy to a double doctorate?

Rosner: I think so. She was studying for a doctorate in international relations and some other thing, I think. If that’s what I said, it was right before the first Gulf War, which was 1991. So, that’s more than 30 years ago. I think she was studying for a double PhD. I know it was for at least one Ph.D. Almost everybody loses on Jeopardy because the winner rolls over. So, more than three-quarters of the people who go on Jeopardy don’t win. During a period where there’s just Ken Jennings rolling through winning 70-something, I think, games, that means that fewer than 1% of the people who go on Jeopardy during that period, the one guy Ken Jennings wins. So, I mean, it’s not unusual to freaking lose on Jeopardy.

Jacobsen: If I reverse that original question, when you’re interacting with people who, in general, will be less intelligent than you, do you find yourself analyzing holes in the arguments or just sort of making your conversation more direct and straightforward elementary?

Rosner: When you look at people’s other organs, we don’t go around judging like who has the best heart or kidneys or liver. I would say that brains are somewhat similar in that. There’s a certain minimal level of a high floor of functionality that most people don’t appear to be stupid in everyday interactions with them. The world is set up to make it negotiable by almost everybody, and people find their niches. So, I generally don’t find people I meet in person stupid. Where I do find a huge difference, like obviously dumb people, is reading stuff from Magas from Trumpers on Twitter. Everybody seems a little stupider on social media because we’ve turned over the editing function to the medium; it’s to whatever social medium we’re using. Nobody pays attention to spell check, and people are sloppy about grammar, and people just type stuff in and let it go without proofing it, figuring that people understand what I’m saying.

So, everybody has a shitload of typos, so everybody sounds a little stupid, but the people who sound way stupid are Trumpers, and this is often because they are, and this is because, for the past 50 years, the Republicans have been courting stupid people because it’s easier to get them to do what you want them to do politically. And after 50 years, there’s a high concentration of loud dipshits; the craziest people are the loudest on social media. I’m sure there are plenty of thoughtful Republicans still, but the loud ones, the trolls, the MAGA trolls, are fucking idiots. So, then I go crazy with troll-ish wrath in calling them out, which itself is pretty stupid because it accomplishes nothing or changes anybody’s mind. It certainly doesn’t change the Maga’s mind because the Maga is a belligerent idiot.

One would hope that it would change the lurkers, the silent observers. Maybe there are some people on the fence who are looking at Twitter discourse, and I would hope I would be persuaded that you’d have to be shamelessly, shamefully stupid to support Trump at this point, but to come back around, I don’t usually find people especially stupid. When I was checking IDs in bars, it was usually pretty clear within a few seconds whether somebody had a legit ID and was of age or was using a fake ID, but in the cases where it was tough to decide, the question almost always was is this person lying about who they are or are they a fucking idiot. It only happens with well less than one person out of a thousand coming into the bar. It’s a rare thing for somebody to be that exceptionally stupid. People’s brains, for the most part, work pretty well. 

[Recording End]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.