Stuff You Should Know - How Mensa Works

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Most of us know Mensa’s a smart people club. And that Geena Davis is a member. But did you know it was originally intended as a rolodex when the government needed the UK’s most intelligent minds? And that the Kansas City chapter staged a revolt in the 60s?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland's lurking in the background in this Stuff You Should Know.

Smarty Pancidish. We're doing Mensa, right? Oh, God, no. I thought we were doing a cage-free redux. Oh, no. Yes, this is about Mensa. That's what I have pulled up too, Chuck, so this works out just fine. All right, let's do it. Dave Ruse helped us out with this one. He mentioned a bit of news that if you looked up Mensa recently, it'd be hard to miss, but I believe it was their youngest member ever was inducted into Mensa. Mensa, by the way, for those of you who don't know, bills itself is the high IQ society. It stands for, wait, it doesn't stand for anything. Which is super smart if you stop and think about it. Yeah, it feels like it should be an acronym, but it's not. Definitely. I'm with you, but we'll just go ahead and say it. It means

table in Latin. Yeah. And in Spanish slang, it's a female goofball or dumb person, strangely enough. Oh, the ironies. Head tip to Dave Ruse for pointing that one out. Yeah. So as I was saying, it's a high IQ society. It's a society for smarty pants, as you put it. And they inducted their youngest member recently who was two years old. Two years old. I mean, sure. So they don't discriminate by age, which is great, bully for them. And I believe on their website, they say their membership ranges in ages two to 102. I knew they were going to say that. And I wonder if there's like 104-year-old Mensa members, like what the F? Yeah, I just, I didn't fit in with the cool, whatever, it's not even a rhyme. You know what I mean? Yeah, I've always felt really bad about

the people in, why is that Christmas song kids from one to 92? It's like 93-year-olds still appreciate Christmas. You know, I cut that whole group out. And then you stop and think, this is written in the mid-century and there was like almost no one living to 92 because they were all having coronaries from cigars and scotches and steaks all at once. It's kind of a random age, though. It is, but a rhyme, which is what I think Mensa did here too. But regardless, this two-year-old Kashi Quest just cues a button, has an IQ of 146, which means she's got it all basically. And with an IQ of 146, that puts her well above the minimum requirement to be accepted into Mensa, which is usually about an IQ of about 132. Yeah, so you may have seen that in

the news. If you, and you know, David's right to point out, if you mentioned Mensa, the first thing most people will say, and I don't know how this got so into the public consciousness, but they will generally say, oh, you know, Gina Davis is a Mensa member. She must have mentioned it in an interview or something, but it's been a long time because I've heard that for a long, long time as like the sort of go-to fact for Mensa. Yeah, I also heard another thing about Gina Davis. She used to bake cookies and bring them to like meetings. She was well known for that as well. I heard another thing about Gina Davis because our friend and friend of the show, Jesse Thorn, interviewed her on his great interview show, Bullseye. And he said that Gina Davis is

the best person. And he said, she is exactly what you hope she would be. And everyone just felt like it was their cool aunt. Oh, that's pretty cool. Everyone in the office, like she was just the nicest person. And she sounds like the kind of person who would bake cookies in her Mensa style. Yeah. And Jesse Thorn's hearing this and is like, she didn't bring cookies to our meeting. Maybe she did. So yes, Gina Davis is world-renowned as the most famous member of Mensa. Even though plenty of famous people have been members of Mensa over the years, Bucky Fuller, Arthur C. Clark was the vice president of Mensa International for a while. Sharon Stone famously told people in the 90s that she was in Mensa and was finally called out by Mensa saying like, no, you're not

in Mensa. Yes, she did lie apparently for a good decade until somebody finally said something about it. And then James Woods is often confused as a member of Mensa, but I don't believe he actually is. Who else? The guy who created the antivirus software McAfee, John McAfee. And yeah, there's a handful of people. And then as we'll talk about later, there are a lot of journalists who say, well, I qualified to be in Mensa, but I didn't want to be involved. Yeah, because that's the one thing about Mensa is a lot of the popular press that's done on that group takes easy potshots at them because they are a group of, they're a high IQ group. And they're by definition very smart people. Sure. But also in joining a club like that,

it bestows a bit of an air of superiority on to you. So there's a certain undercurrent of that. And so people who write about them or cover them usually take potshots at them and generally lump them all into one big group. But that's not necessarily fair to say because they are a varied collection of people for sure. There are weird undercurrents that are just tasteful here or there, but overall, they seem to be okay from what I can tell. Yeah. And there are all kinds of Mincons, which is what they're called, from all kinds of backgrounds in socioeconomic strata. I guess we could break down the percentages here if you want to get specific. It is 66% male. This is from their stats, 34% female,

82% to have a four-year degree or more, 63% graduate degree or more, 38% boomers, 31% Gen X, 13 millennial, and then the rest. But it's not a big group, though. Like their total membership is a little less than 150,000 worldwide with about 50,000 of those being in the States and 19,000 being in the UK where it was founded. But a lot more people could be in Mensa that aren't in Mensa. Does that make sense? Dave did the math as if to show off that he could be a member of Mensa if he wanted to. But what Mensa membership means is that you have tested aptitude for intelligence within the top 2% of people. Right.

So in the United States, say there's 300 million just to make it easy, but I think there's much more than that now. That would be 6 million people who would qualify as members of Mensa. And yet, like you said, there's only about 50,000 in there. Yeah. I mean, and I get if some people think that's a weird thing to say because you still have to take these tests. You have to be good at test-taking. But if you just go by numbers of the top 2% of intelligence, then sure. Yes. But it also reveals something that it's not for everybody. Like just by virtue of being smart or testing really well on an intelligence test, that doesn't mean you automatically want to be a member of a group that shares that thing in common.

That's an extra. There's a very slight tranche of people who qualify or who would qualify who actually do want to join Mensa. But the ones who do join Mensa seem to tremendously enjoy and feel very accepted and happy there. Yeah. And that's also in itself a pot shot that journalists have taken commonly, which is these are people who are smart enough to be in Mensa and want to be able to tell everybody that they're in Mensa. And I'm sure there is some of that to some degree. There are people that like to flaunt to their Harvard degree or drop the H-bomb as they say or their Ivy League education or their Mensa membership. But I'm sure there are out of 150,000 people. There are lots of Gina Davises that probably are just like, oh yeah, I'm in that,

but it's really no big deal. Yeah. The worst of the worst are people who are in Mensa, went to Harvard, are on keto and are in the CrossFit. Oh God. Make it stop. And who recently quit social media. Can you imagine? Yeah. Party of one. Should we talk about the history? Yes. Party of one. That's a good joke. So Mensa got its start in 1946, like I mentioned in the UK. And it sort of happened by chance on a train. There was a post-grad student from Oxford named Alansalot Ware, who was coming home for Christmas break, shared a cabin with a 50-year-old named Roland Barrell, or Barrell. And Barrell was like, oh, you got to Oxford. You know what, I wanted to go to Oxford. I couldn't get into Oxford. And it sort of haunted me. And he said,

you know, I'm into all kinds of stuff though. I'm a smart guy. I'm into phrenology and astrology. And Ware said, that's very interesting. I'm into testing intelligence. The younger Lancelot said, he said, I was in the army in Britain. And we did aptitude testing on troops. I became fascinated by it. When I went to Oxford, I was surrounded by smart people. And I thought it would be really cool to form a high IQ society within a school of people that were already super intelligent. And Barrell said, very interesting. I envisioned him clapping his hands together and saying, splendid. Okay, sure. Because you left something out about him. One of the things that usually is touted

about what Barrell was into, or Barrell, is that he had a plan to make all men wear very brightly colored clothing. I could not for the life of me find out why or what the point was, but it's definitely a thing. Yeah. So Barrell said, you know, this is a very great idea. I think we should explore this further. And young Lancelot where postdoc, student at Oxford said, well, you know, older gentlemen who have only just met on this train, why don't you come stay with me at Oxford when I get back to school after Christmas break? And Barrell took him up on it. And it was there that they hatched the plan for Mensa after Barrell was given an intelligence test by Lancelot where and when Lancelot where calculated

the results and said, Mr. Barrell, you are within the top 1% of all people in terms of intelligence. It's widely reported that Roland Barrell cried because he was so happy and touched by that. Right. And had funding to start this thing up, which was key. And so how it really went down was he told them that he cried and said, oh, can I see the results and where quickly wadded them up and said, that's not important. Take my word for it. You're in the top 1%. Make the check out to moi. And Barrell said, splendid. But they needed a name. And like you said, they landed on Mensa. I think initially they wanted to call it Capital ME NS, which was short for the Mental Health Society. That's not even close. No, it's pretty bad. Where's the H?

Yeah, where's the H? And also there was, I think, a gentleman's magazine called Men's. That's in scare quotes. And so they said, well, how about Mensa, which, like you pointed out, is Latin for table because I just envision us like all these smarty pants sitting around a round table talking about wonderful things. And they said, I guess they said, sure, if that's as good a name as any. So originally, if you've ever seen that Simpsons episode where Lisa joins Mensa. I don't remember that one. It's a pretty good one. It's a cautionary tale about Mensa. Letting an intelligent elite determine the fate of everybody else while just completely discounting anyone who's not an intelligent elite, right? Yeah. And like comic book guy and Dr.

Hibbert and a couple other characters, sideshow male, they're all in Mensa with her. And they basically take over the town if I'm not mistaken. And it just goes awry. It ends up going terribly awry. But that's kind of originally what Lancelot Ware and Roland Burrell were envisioning when they founded Mensa, this group of the most intelligent Britishers, Britons. In the UK, who would kind of be assembled to be a group that the government or scientific projects or whoever wanted to tap their intelligence could tap their intelligence? That was the original idea for Mensa. That's right. And by the way, the keen-eared listener would have just picked up on my one word impression of Julius Hibbert.

What did you say? I'm not going to repeat it. It's got, you got to be a keen listener. So if you heard it, then hats off to you. You're not allowed to rewind if you're listening at home. Can I rewind? You can't rewind. Nobody can rewind. You had to have heard it live. Okay. Okay. And like two people will have gotten it. That's fine. And the rest of us are all mad now. Oh, that's okay. I'll do it for you all, Mike. So yeah, they wanted, they wanted a kind of a, from the sounds of it, almost like a rolodex of smarties, because they wanted to not just have that list, but they even said in their charter, they wanted it in the hands of anthropologists and ministers of the crown.

Like they wanted people that mattered to have this list on hand. Like who do, you know, I need a smart person. Let me look at my Mensa list. And their goal, I think, did you mention, was 600 people with their contact information so they could get in touch. And it took them 13 years to get to that, that benchmark in 1959, is when they finally got it. And it wasn't until some American expats joined in England, got written up by the Village Voice in the New York Times, that it kind of really started to gain a little bit more traction in the States and then around the world. So it's crazy that it took them 13 years to what, 1959 to hit 600, because right after that, and I guess it was because of the interest among Americans

that initially started out, like you said, with expats. And then after a couple of articles captured everybody else's attention, that it just took off. Like if you saw a chart, it would look like that hockey stick of global warming, I think it is. Remember that from the 90s, the hockey stick graph? Sure. So that's pretty much what Mensa membership would look like it from 1959 to 1960. And it was largely thanks to a few people over the years. But one of the first people who really kind of helped Mensa take off as an organization was a guy named John Kodela, who was an American PR guy. And he took this group that was, it almost had like fraternity-like origins. Like apparently, Roland Burrell had a, like part of the early rules was to have a woman

seated on a throne wearing a leopard skin and nothing else as part of the meetings. Like it was, it had that kind of vibe to it. Sure, that vibe. And when Kodela, sure, you know, a kind of Anton Lavey vibe. And so when John Kodela came in the picture, he like kind of dusted off all that stuff and turned it into a legitimate type of organization. Definitely legitimized it, if not made it legitimate. Right. So in 59, they had 600 by 67. A mere eight years later, it had swelled up to 12,000 and change. And, you know, that he would get people on TV. It was that kind of thing. Like he was a genuine PR guy. So all of a sudden, there were Mensa members, some very charismatic, that were being sort of bandied about in articles and on television.

Well, there's one in particular, he was the chairman, I believe. And he was the guy who, I think, would go on like Johnny Carson and stuff like that. That's right. That's what I was talking about, Victor Serebryakov. I think so. I've seen it compared to Serebryakov or Serebral. So I think it's Serebryakov. Yeah. There's an extra vowel in there that's coming up the works. That's right on my alley, though. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. Let's take a break. We'll be right back. Who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road? Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because

I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest,

I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic

or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So Mimba is gaining members very steadily. It is growing throughout the decades. If you wanted to be a member, you could mail them some money. And I know a cynical view would be like they're just trying to make money. But it's an organization that needs money to run. I doubt if they have some super rich fund that they dig into because when you look at the things they do, it's really nothing super lavish. They don't have yacht parties and stuff from what I can tell. No. But I've never run across any kind of intimation that it's a money-making scheme

of any sort. Yeah. I just mean for the listener, like, oh yeah, mail them a check and they'll send you a test. But that's how it works. You mail them a check back in the day. They would send you a test. I think it was Cerebrokov who said, you know what? We can also do is we can have these supervised. Like actually someone would come and administer a test. It would be a little more official. It might cost a little more money. We need a constitution. So they said, not a bad idea. And if you read their constitution, the three tenants are really pretty great. It's identifying foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity. No problem there. Encourage research in the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence. Check. And provide a stimulating

intellectual and social environment for members. Sounds good to me. Yeah, of course. And then number four, forced breeding of people according to intelligence. Yeah, no problems, right? No, they didn't do that. No. So there was kind of a heyday, it seems like, in the 60s, I think. And apparently there was a lot of tension at first between UK and US. And within just a couple of years of coming on the scene, the Kansas City chapter staged a revolt against the UK headquarters. They grabbed their six shooters and... Basically, I saw that they launched a poison pen attack where they would write, yes, they would write the employers of these Mensa higher ups and basically accuse them of terrible stuff. And finally got the American

chapters to basically be independent and equal. And that formed Mensa International. But the 60s were kind of a heyday. The 70s seemed to be ho-hum. And then apparently the 80s took off because from what I saw in this article, and I can't remember what maybe the independent from 1996, it said that the kind of the through line of an organization like Mensa, the idea that some people are just naturally more intelligent than others really jibes with that Reagan Thatcher era of mentality, of getting away from the idea that you can achieve if you're given the right kind of stuff. It's like, no, you got this problem over here. We're over here. We're not going to help you because why would we? Because you're beyond help. You're not naturally gifted. That kind

of conservative thread that was really present in the Thatcher Reagan 80s made Mensa a lot more respectable or a lot more appealing during that time from what I saw. Yeah. And I think in England, it peaked in the 90s or 1990 specifically with about 30,000 there and now is fewer than 20,000. So Dave said some of this might be the Mensa image problem, might be to blame. But it's just one of those organizations. It's going to have its ups and downs over the years, I'm sure, as far as membership numbers, you know? Yeah. So how do you get in, Chuck? If you want to get into Mensa, what do you do hotshot? You bake some cookies for Gina Davis. Sure. That doesn't hurt. No, it's really easy actually in practice. You just need to score

within the top 2% of an intelligence test and it's not like you can just take any intelligence test. It depends on, well, I mean, now there's an official Mensa test that you take. But there are also other IQ tests that can qualify the Stanford Benet test, the Katel 3B test. And I think we should hold off on sort of the big reveal, the big twist here for another few minutes. Okay. We'll keep that in our hip pocket. I can't wait to know what it is. An official from your country will administer their tests to you. And it takes a couple hours if you take the official Mensa test. These are those, if you've ever taken an IQ test, you know, it's not like the SAT. It's a logic and reasoning test generally. And the questions are things like

you're doing a lot of sequencing, like look at these shapes, which shape would come next, which number would come next. It does test verbal intelligence and vocabulary and stuff like that. Math is a part of it. But it's timed, which is one of the big sort of, not caveats, but the big thing you have to remember is you have to be a good test taker. And you have to be able to take tests under pressure, timed pressure. Right. Like that one scene in Swordfish with poor Hugh Jackman. I didn't see that. You didn't miss much at all. Okay. So that's the standard Mensa test, Mensa admissions test. And some people say, well, hold on, if you're a non-native English speaker and you're in America, those tests have been shown to be biased toward certain people,

usually based on language. So Mensa also administers what's called the culture fair test. And it's nothing but shapes and symbols and what comes next kind of thing. And I took a test like that. It was, I think, Norwegian in origin. And I got to question six before. I'm like, I have no idea whatsoever what shape would come next. The first few, I was like, okay, I can do this. And then it just got so increasingly difficult that I just, I just stopped. I just had no idea what was next. Was this recently, you did that for this? Yeah, it was yesterday. And I had a little, little blood coming out of my ear. I felt really disoriented and I woke up in a pool of my own urine. Yeah. You can also take a 30 minute online like Mensa workout thing for

free, which is sort of just a moose bouche to see if you might want the full deal. A gift of the chef. I thought about taking one of these for this episode. And then I was like, I don't want to. I don't care. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, that's, I think another thing too is like this, this, like taking a test like that is probably up your alley if you're interested in becoming a Mensa member. Yeah. I don't think I'm great at tests like that. And maybe I don't want to know that I am or am not. Maybe I'm just happy with my life. Yeah. I'm happy doing my New York Times crossword and spelling bee and playing wordle. And that's good enough for me. I think that's fine. I mean, it's not like you're proving anything to anybody by becoming a member of Mensa, except maybe to

yourself. I tried. I mean, honestly, I was like, oh, that'll be fine. I'll take it. And I'll embarrass myself to our listeners by saying what I scored. And every time I went to do it, I went, I don't want to do this. Yeah. So I didn't do it. So there's a, there's a whole hook to that whole thing. A catch, I guess is what you'd say if you use the right word. You can take those tests, the standard test or the culture fair test once, one time each. That's a big one. And if you don't pass, meaning you don't score in the top 2% of the average American, you can never take those tests again. Like you just have been denied admission into Mensa through those tests. There is another way. There's a backdoor man way is what I think they call it at Mensa. Yeah. This was the thing

we were keeping in our hip pocket. You don't have to take this test because two thirds, two thirds of all members did not take that official Mensa test. They, you can also pay a fee, not just people like what, pay like a thousand bucks to get in. No, pay a regular $40 fee and they can accept results from about 150 different standardized intelligence tests that they evaluate based on, you know, the general population. So they'll basically just say, give us your test that you took. We'll see if you're in the top 2% and you can get in that way. That's a big backdoor. It sure is a big backdoor, Chuck. So one of the ways that you could get in is if you qualified for your high schools gifted program, or if you're a super smarty pants, your middle school

or even elementary schools gifted program, they gave you a bunch of different intelligence tests back then. If you're schooled and burned down in a fire, it's possible they still have those records and you could have them via a sealed envelope from the school sent to send your test results to Mensa. Mensa will check it out and be like, yep, you're in buddy, you're in. Now question about these gifted programs, does that mean like the AP classes? Yes. Yes. All right. Here's the deal, my friend. I was in AP English and AP History. Okay. And then when I saw, and we'll go ahead and mention this, you can submit your SAT and ACT

scores, your GRE and your LSATs. And if between 80, I'm sorry, between 74 and 94, if you scored a 1250 or higher on the SAT, you would get into Mensa even retroactively. And buddy, I scored an 1170. I wasn't as far off as I thought. Oh, that's great. You're not in Mensa, but that's great. No, but if I would have known that back then, I might have tried a couple of more times. I took it once. I took it once too. I got a 1090. That's good too. No, it's average. No, no, no. A 1090, I think anything that breaks a thousand is on the higher,

not high high, but it's higher than average, right? I don't think so. I think that's pretty comfortably right in the middle of average. They don't even score it that way anymore though, right? No, they don't. So up to after 94, they won't accept your SAT scores anymore, because the SAT switched from testing general intelligence to testing what you'd learned in school thus far. So it went from being like an IQ test, basically, to an exit exam for high school is kind of what they changed it to. I think I would do worse on that kind of test, actually, would have done worse. Yeah, I think I took the intelligence one.

I don't remember because I definitely took it in, well, now I probably would have taken it before 94. I probably would have taken it in like 93. I think you probably would have taken it your sophomore or junior year, right? Yeah, so it was probably 92, 93 that I took it. So I took the original intelligence test, and I got a 1090. It doesn't feel great, Chuck. I feel good saying it out loud, but it doesn't feel great. Well, that was back then very easy to get into the University of Georgia. It's a lot harder now. They've really tightened it down. Yeah, because of the HOPE grant, which started the year I started to try to get in. So it got

hard to get into Georgia the year that I started to try. I got to tell you, so when I showed up with my 1090 SAT score, I said, keep walking, pal. Do you remember your high school GPA? What? Are you pleading the fifth? I don't even know what that is. I don't remember my GPA. I want to say it wasn't, I mean, my brother, I think, was a 4-0. Of course. But I think I was like a 3-2 or something?

Low threes? I mean, it was slightly above average. I think it was going to be a student. I would think mine was probably lower than that. I was not at all interested in school. I liked history. I thought earth science was pretty cool. No big surprise. You got smart later, huh? It wasn't until I got to college and wanted to go to college. I just suddenly turned from Saul to Paul all of a sudden as far as college is concerned and just completely started to take things seriously and got interested in learning. It was then that I started to become a 4-0 student in college, not at all in high school.

That was never for a student. Well, I went to some easy colleges. I waited Georgia. Well, my deal was I, and I still am like this, I have a hard time tackling anything with enthusiasm that I don't want to do. So I've always been that way since I was a kid. And so in my English classes, I made A's and B's. And in my non-major classes, not all of them, but the ones I wasn't super into, I made C's and a D or two. Oh yeah. And I have those under my belt too, especially math. And it wasn't because I wouldn't try. I just genuinely couldn't get math. And one of the best things I ever did as far as math is

concerned was I took geometry twice in high school. And the second time, it just clicked. Like I was walking around like I was Pythagoras all of a sudden at high school. I just understood geometry that second time around. It was really cool. It was a great feeling to just have something like that click that was so foreign and so difficult before. All of a sudden, I just understood it the second time around. Well, and we went to school in an era when, boy, there were not a lot of accommodations made for different kinds of learning at all, much less different learning disabilities. And it was just, it was a different time. There's so much better now about,

you know, every kid learns in their own way and we can try and accommodate that. And then a lot of schools, not every school obviously, still a lot of work to be done. Yeah, I can't remember. I guess it was probably the NBC Nightly News, the national news. They have like a sweet human interest story, like at the end of every show. And they had one recently. And it was about an integrated school in that like they didn't separate kids with like learning disabilities or physical, I don't even know what you call it. Differences, thank you. And kids who don't have those, like they were all in the same class together. And I was like, Cole, at Cal, it's a huge improvement. You know, because they used to be like,

if you had facial differences and no cognitive disability whatsoever, just facial differences, they would put you in a class with other people. Yeah, I mean, like it was like the dark ages. In the 80s and 90s even, you know, when we were in school. But like now they're just integrating kids at least in this one school. I thought it was so cool. But it was based on this Instagram post where this little kid, I think he was probably about five or six, has cerebral palsy. And he just had a little friend who was a girl who was the same age, who just loved him and just played with him. They were like best friends. She didn't seem to treat him any differently than she did any of the other kids, but it just like so touched her mom.

She posted on Instagram, of course it went viral. And it was a sweet story, but I just thought it was really remarkable. And I was really glad to hear that now they're just like integrating kids by age level, not separating them by anything else. So hats off to school districts doing that. I love it. The final kind of test we should mention that can get you in as if you were in the military prior to 1980, you might be able to use your aptitude test that you took back then. Now they do more vocational aptitude testing. But back pre-80, they would do intelligence testing and you can use some of those if you did. You want to take a break and then talk about what you do if you get into Mensa? Let's do it.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy.

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some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So let's see. If you get into Mensa, there's a lot of things people do. One thing people do is take the test, say, I'm in Mensa and congratulate themselves for a couple of weeks,

and that's it. Other people join Mensa because they have this sense, and rightfully so, that they will probably meet a lot of people like them who are smart, probably really like games, really like trivia, really like Star Trek, that is not a stereotype that is for real, might be into nudism, might really love beer. Just stuff that you would have an interest in, but if you wanted to hang out with other high IQ people who have interests in that, you could do worse than joining Mensa, I think. Yeah. To be an active member, you have to keep up with your dues, which are 79 bucks a year. They have not a sliding scale, but they have if you sign up for and pay multiple years at a time, you can get that number down by average

and stuff like that. Or you can pay for like a lifetime membership, prorated by your age, if you want to pay all at once and save some money. But the dues are 79 bucks a year. And then, like you said, there are what they're called special interest groups. If you want to drill down in your local area and be a member of like the Mensa Investment Club is a really popular one, where I imagine people sit around and talk about finances and smart ways to take care of your money. It's like any other local group that you know, there's probably a Mensa Knitting Group. Oh, I'm guaranteed. Yeah. It's just that you're meeting with people that are like-minded and that they're all good at

taking their IQ and they're good at taking those kind of tests. Right. Right. And again, if you want some like unkind characterizations of, you know, what it's like at some of these, like you can just throw a rock on the internet and you'll find some article about somebody who like took the Mensa test and ended up at a Mensa meetup and now they're writing about it. But they're not really a member kind of thing. There's plenty of stuff out there. But suffice to say that like these are just, they're people who really like board games and really like beer and are probably like really sexually active to a surprising degree. And one thing I saw Chuck that seems to be genuine is that there is a kind of a libertarian

right-leaning bent that seems to be fairly common in the Mensa world. Yeah. In the modern Mensa world, I've seen that in more place than one. And, you know, like you said, someone will go to one of these conferences and then do a write-up about it and say like, there was a lot of drinking late night. There was a lot of people hooking up. It's sort of like any conference you would go to, again, except they're made up of people that are good at taking this kind of test. But there usually is some sort of mention of like, yeah, there seemed to be a sort of right wing bent to, and again, there's 150,000 members. That's a generalization, but at least that's what's being written. Yeah. So the big deal gathering that

they have every year, the big conference is called the annual gathering, the AG. Last year, they had one for, it was like a world gathering because it was the 75th anniversary of Mensa's founding. And they have that in Houston of all places. So the 2022 one is coming up in July. It's at the Golden Nugget in Sparks Reno, Nevada. And they're having the Hidden Figures author Margaret Lee Shatterley. Nice. I think she is the keynote who's going to speak about Hidden Figures. There's also a drag show during a breakfast brunch, probably on Saturday or Sunday. And then the other thing they're going to do is drink, drink, play games, drink, and drink. I think is what else is going to go on at the AG. It's really interesting. There are other smaller

get-togethers. There's one called the colloquium, which is an annual thing. It's just one day. And it's, you know, they'll have like themed topics at this one, like crime scene intelligence would be one. There are mind games, which is a four-day board game extravaganza, where people, this is since 1990, they get together and play board games. And a game can actually qualify as Mensa Select on the label if they deem it so. So technically, the stuff you should know board game might be played at the mind games conference that it might even get that stamp one day. Yeah. You never know. Great. You never know. I mean, apples to apples got it. And our game is at least as popular as that.

Yeah. Taboo got it. Yeah. It's categories. And then there's culture quest. It's obviously Mensa members are probably generally into stuff like trivia. And there's a trivia, Dave calls it a trivia throwdown, where they play trivia games against one another. So one of the other things about Mensa that it's well known for at their meetups is that people will wear name tags. Third try. And then there'll be a dot, a colored dot next to their name. And depending on the color of the dot, it indicates how welcoming they are toward hugs

from other people. And this, by the way, is like, this has been going on for a while. This is kind of like a longstanding Mensa tradition. It's very forward thinking. It is very forward thinking, because frankly, we could all kind of use the green dots or the hug dot system. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, I'm a hugger, but a lot of people don't like to be hugged. And it's one of these things I just learned in the past few years that like, with choosing what you do with your body and what people do to your body, that you shouldn't

just go up and hug somebody. That's, you know, it's just not, some people genuinely don't like that kind of human contact. And it's not like I'd go up and just like tackle everyone I see. Like, I don't think I've ever, I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I made someone uncomfortable or anything like that. But it's good to realize that like, yeah, not everyone is into the same level of human contact. And you shouldn't put your norm on them. And they have a very elegant way of doing that with these green dots, and yellow dots or red dots or blue dots. Yeah. Green is all hugs are welcome. Yellow is asked before hugging.

Well, that's Chuck now. Red dot, no hugs at all. That's you. Blue. Yeah. It should say burns like acid. Blue dot means I'm single. I think that means more than I'm single. I think that means like lead with your hips when you're hugging me, please. Yeah, I think so.

So what else, Chuck? What else do we have to say about Mensa? Well, I mean, I think we've talked about their image problem a bit. Like you said, you can throw a rock on the internet and open almost any article and you will see someone bagging on Mensa in kind of a snotty way. And I don't know, man. The more I read about it, the more I just thought, you know what, but these are probably a lot of these people probably got teased growing up because they may be fairly bookish and like stop now. Like your adults don't continue this sort of bullying

in newspapers by saying, yeah, I went to these things and it was a bunch of dorks playing board games and trying to get laid. Like they literally say that stuff in these articles. They do. And so I don't think it's just out of meanness. I think whether they're picking up on it unconsciously or overtly, it's the people who write those kind of articles typically are not right-leaning. So they're picking up on that right-leaning undercurrent. And then they're also kind of pointing to like some disturbing and alarming and just

straight up gross ideas that people from Mensa have supported over the years or it is proposed. And so like when you take a group that focuses on IQ and inherently suggests that some people are superior to others, that can lead you to all sorts of like unsavory rabbit holes. And some people on Mensa or part of Mensa are not afraid to like go down those rabbit holes and discuss them and talk about them. Free speech is a huge, huge thing among Mentans and they very much resent not being able to say whatever they want to say. So with those articles, it's revealing there's like a culture clash between the person who's writing the article and the Mentans that are like the foil to them.

That seems to be like the crux of those articles. Yeah. And there was a lot of news made kind of more recently when a comedian named Jamie Loftus who by the way has a podcast on our network called The Bechtel Cast. Great show, movie show. Jamie's a comedian who did a four-part episode called My Year in Mensa where she joined Mensa. I think the story was sort of just took the test one morning while hungover and then didn't have a good experience and became the target. There's this Facebook group, a Mensa Facebook group that's unmoderated called Firehouse which can be very unkind. And I think Loftus had a bad experience there and again with the sort of alt-right undercurrent.

And so that's what the basis of that podcast was. So I'm certainly not defending that stuff, you know. So yeah, I mean, no, anytime anybody's attacked online, that sucks. But Dave, I think kind of discovered like the genuine criticism that you could level against Mensa as a whole. And that is they're basing everything on IQ and IQ tests test a certain kind of smartness, completely leaves out things like emotional intelligence, street smarts, creativity. Yeah, that kind of stuff. It's a group of people who do really well on aptitude tests. It's a society of people who do really well on aptitude tests and like the idea that they're joining the ranks of people who are in the top 2% of that group of people, that type of person.

So the fact that it's kind of bandied about is like the society for intelligent people. It kind of misses a lot. But he also points out that they don't build themselves as that. They build themselves as the high IQ society, which is a much narrower definition. And if you take it on its face value, then that makes sense. But most people out in the general public who hear about Mensa don't kind of differentiate between those two things. Right. And if you get 150,000 of any people together in a group, you're going to have a couple of 100 that are pretty bad people that do bad things on Facebook. So it's like, I just have a hard time sometimes when entire organizations get lumped in because of, and I don't want to say a

few bad apples, but just the actions of what's clearly a minority. Sure. You know what I mean? Yeah. Except Nazis. Yeah. Yeah, they were nothing but bad apples. That's right. Well, if you want to know more about Mensa, you can start poking around on the internet. And since I said you can start poking around on the internet, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a young listener. Now, hey guys, brand new listener to the show. I first heard about you through the new book, which I checked out of the library the day before my baby was born. After my husband returned to work, I was trying to figure out a way to get the baby to sleep and tried reading to her. So I picked up stuff you should know, hoping the soothing sound

of my voice would lull her to sleep. And that is how my husband walked in on me reading about Jacob working into a three week old and put a temporary moratorium on reading to her. I think that's probably a joke. Well, I was hooked. And now that I've returned to work, I'm going through the backlog of episodes and learning while in the car. Thanks for helping me get through that postpartum period, Jessica. That's fantastic. I'm glad you're bringing up young Jessica. Thanks very much. And congratulations on your little gift to the world. Yes, that's right. Well, if you want to be like Jessica and let us know about your late night readings or listening or goings on or anything like that,

or if you've had experiences in Mensa, if you're a member of Mensa, we want to hear from you. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never,

ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.