Born to do Math 192 – Legendary IQ Test-Taker in a Niche Community
November 8, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How many IQ tests have you taken?
Rick Rosner: Probably 40 if you include the SAT and GRE, they can be converted to IQ scores. I have easily taken 40 IQ and IQ-type tests.
Jacobsen: Do you take more alternative tests or mainstream tests?
Rosner: I’m pushing 30 alternative tests. I’ve gotten the highest score ever recorded on more high-end IQ tests than anyone else.
Jacobsen: Is that why you’re legendary within that niche community?
Rosner: One reason I am legendary is there aren’t that many people in the community.
Jacobsen: I like the way Tim Roberts characterized it. He characterized the community as stamp collectors. You’re the one with the rarest and most stamps.
Rosner: It’s a sport nobody plays. It’s like the world’s strongest man, but with fewer competitors. It is really niche, because it is niche; people involved with it know each other. You said, “What about unmeasurable genius? The people who take all these tests.” [Ed. Before the recording.]
There is no person who maxes out the tests all the time. Nobody does that. The reason I have done that well myself on these tests; not because it is easy, but because I have put in the time and work. I worked hard on the tests. I did the research and the deduction, and, to a great extent, the profiling of the various authors of the tests.
Because when an author has written multiple tests like Ronald Hoeflin, like Paul Cooijmans, like out of Tasmania Jason Betts. It is really helpful to take multiple tests by the same person. Because you learn their habits of item construction.
It is easier for me to do well on the Titan Test. Maybe, Hoeflin’s toughest test, but I spent a lot of time on the Mega Test, probably Hoeflin’s second-toughest test. There was a show, Scorpion, which was a show about a real-life genius.
But it was turned into an adventure show about a squad of geniuses that didn’t have much to do with the actual guy’s life. I wrote to them a couple of times, “You should have me in for an interview to write for the show. This is right up my alley, because it is a show about geniuses.” There’s a big production show a mile away from where I live.
But nothing, I thought a good episode of that show would be to have a high-IQ guy, who doesn’t feel acknowledged by the world and starts sending bombs to people. Booby-traps that you have to be really smart to figure out the puzzles built into the bombs.
Jacobsen: Like the misnamed Unabomber?
Rosner: He didn’t want people to disarm bombs. He wanted his bombs to go off. This is for the purposes of the show. The world has not acknowledged his gifts, so he will get revenge on the world by sending these high-IQ booby-traps to people.
“If you think you’re so smart, if you’re as smart as me, you’ll be smart enough to solve this bomb puzzle.” That’d be a great plot for one of those shitty shows.
Jacobsen: Isn’t that setting a bad example in the media?
Rosner: I don’t think so because there are shows about serial killers. Do shows about serial killers make more serial killers? Maybe, I don’t know. But nobody is saying those shows have to be shut down because they are making people into serial killers.
I haven’t gone to a meeting and to present my idea. So, it’s not like that show is going to be made, except that it was kind of the third Die Hard as a series of riddles for Bruce Willis and Samuel T. Jackson to solve, Samuel Jackson. Does he have a middle initial? I don’t know.
What I am saying, a component of that show if turned into an actual episode, a component would be profiling the guy who is sending out these booby-traps. As much as solving the puzzles, you’re solving the person. That’s what is happening when you’re solving these tests.
Like Paul Cooijmans without giving too much away, some of the analogies are rooted in the culture he grew up in.
Jacobsen: What is your full range of scores here? Yes, bottom-bottom to top-top.
Rosner: When I was a kid, I scored a 135 on of the tests administered to every kid in the class. Then I was given an individual administered test to see if I was going to skip first or second grade. I scored high enough that they discussed skipping me.
But they saw me on the school ground and saw that I had no friends and thought that it would be a bad idea to make me even more socially awkward by skipping me a grade. On that test, I scored a 140. Those are toward the bottom of the recorded range.
There were a bunch of these tests. There might have even been a 128 on one of these group-administered tests when I was a little-little kid. The highest I ever scored on one of these group-administered tests was 151.
The reason I believe that I didn’t score higher is that is as high as it went, which was about 150. They don’t go higher. There’s not point, which we’ve discussed before. The bottom of the scale is about 130. The top of the scale is in the mid-190s.
Jacobsen: On S.D. 15 or S.D. 16?
Rosner: I don’t know. Maybe, 192 S.D. 15 and 198 S.D. 16, I believe, even 199.
Jacobsen: 199 on what?
Rosner: I think on a Cooijmans test.
Jacobsen: Who else has done 199 S.D. 16?
Rosner: I don’t know. Evangelos Katsioulis and some others who have scored in that range. There’s a little bit of luck involved, where you find a test that fits your abilities or you find a test where the scoring is, maybe, a little bit loose.
It’s tight enough for the scoring to be accepted for people who look at the scoring, but loose enough that it might be easier to score in the 190s on one test than it is to score that on another test because norming tests is an imprecise thing.
I was always looking for slutty tests. Tests where it was within my ability to score over 100. But I never got there on an adult test.
Jacobsen: Are you still working on them?
Rosner: There’s one where I did a lot of work on and thought I had a decent shot at, but I haven’t worked on it in years. This is not prime time for doing well on these tests. Maybe, it would take a pretty big time commitment to go through it again.
I could take a look at the tests that have come along since the last time I took a real push to take one of these tests… somebody is setting off firecrackers right now. It is spooky.
Jacobsen: Jesus. Okay, then, if you were to take all those scores in a fair assessment, what do you think is the tight range of, maybe, plus or minus two points on either side?
Rosner: You’ve got applied IQ. Where, supposedly, IQ is some inherent thing that you have or born with, it is supposed to stay the same throughout your life. That’s bullshitty. How effective your IQ is, it is connected to how hard you are willing to work on problems.
I don’t know. Give everything, probably in the 180s, the 190s might be me working hard, especially harder than might be appropriate – putting in 120, 150, 170 hours on a test. That’s a lot of time. Most people would not waste 4 40-hour weeks that could be used productively in other ways to kick ass on a test.
Jacobsen: Are a lot of the highest scores test junkies? I know you’ve taken a lot. I know Evangelos has taken a lot.
Rosner: When people claim, and people claim, that they got above 45 out of 48 on the Titan Test or the Mega Test and did it in 8 hours. I know they’re full of shit, because it is impossible to do that. I would be surprised somebody got above 45 out of 48 on the Titan Test without spending, at least, 80 hours or working as part of a team.
I know people have tried that.
Jacobsen: Ron told me people tried that on the Mega Test.
Rosner: I tried that on one super hard, crazy hard, test. I didn’t want to put in 100 hours. I wanted to see by teaming up with somebody if that would make it possible to do really well without a time investment. So, each person, it was something that I wanted to try.
We turned in our test. We got a pretty high score. Although, some of the problems were just impossible. They required some specialized training in logic and paradoxes. It was highly specialized. I don’t think we could have solved any of those problems without the specialized background.
We turned it in under a pseudonym. The guy was excited. The test was so brutal. Some o these tests are so hard that one person or even anybody turns in a set of answers. That was the case for this one.
We were the only ones who turned in answers. Initially, he was excited. I said, “We were two people.” He felt violated. Our deal was not to deceive him. Our deal was to, at least, get a score to see how the combined effort worked and then tell the truth. The guy was a little bit Aspergery.
So, it took lots of apologizing on our part.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 