Ask A Genius 1273: How did we get on Kevin Bacon again?
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/02/15
Rick Rosner: What should I ask next? I haven’t had many direct experiences. Still, I’ve had brief contact with so many people in show business that it feels surreal—almost like I’m playing the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. What do you think about that? I’m probably only two degrees away from most famous people. I’ve worked with many people, yet I haven’t achieved much. We’ve had valuable discussions, but it’s not the kind of show business where you’d earn a quarter-million dollars a year—probably even more now. Except, of course, that show business is fucked right now, and nobody’s getting paid.
I’ve had opportunities—shots, really—but I’ve missed a lot of my fucking chances. As we drove to do “Lance versus Rick” last night, JD said he thinks of show business as being like lottery tickets. Every decade or so, you get your lottery ticket—sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t. Only a few famous people are guaranteed to work decade after decade; everyone else gets a lottery ticket that might or might not be a winner. In JD’s view, I’ve had a couple of winning lottery tickets and fairly long runs.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In a field as long-standing as this, I suppose the coincidences, weird juxtapositions, and serendipities pile up. Now, what do you think—are high-IQ people more or less prone to mental morbidities like depression or anxiety?
Rosner: No. Take, for example, what Taleb said in his critique of IQ as a useful concept. He argued that if you remove the subset of the population with significant organic cognitive impairments—essentially, the tail end of the bell curve—the remaining group of normally functioning individuals (some of whom are just a bit better at solving IQ puzzles than others) shows little correlation between IQ and quality-of-life measures, including susceptibility to mental health issues. Look at Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player ever—brilliant, yes, but also a tortured, racist, anti-Semitic lunatic. Then consider another wildly smart guy, Chris Cole, whom we both know—utterly even-keeled, able to manage his personal, business, intellectual, and creative affairs efficiently and without pathology. He works hard, thinks hard, creates hard, and while his personal life isn’t perfect, he’s been married for what seems like forever—a stable, reasonable guy. Based on very little evidence, I’d say that most people, in general, don’t suffer from significant mental morbidities, and the same appears to be true for most individuals with super high IQs. However, when someone with a super high IQ goes off the rails, it becomes much more notable—it adds a certain schadenfreude to their downfall.
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