For the last 40 years, Oprah and Gayle King Bumpus have had the kind deep intimate friendship that most women can only dream of, sharing secrets, bonding, laughing, and talking on the phone every single day.

The friendship began in 1976 when Oprah was just 22 and was hired to co-anchor the evening news in Baltimore, with a grumpy older white man who did not want to co-host the news with young Oprah.  One day Gayle, who was a 21 year old production assistant, walked up Oprah to say how proud she was to be on such a historic team (at the time, a black women co-anchoring the evening news was considered historic).

One evening there was a snow storm and Gayle was afraid to drive all the way home.

“Stay at my place,” suggested Oprah.

“But I have no underwear,” said Gayle.

“I’ll give you underwear,” said Oprah.

That snowy night in 1976, the two women stayed up all night talking and bonding, and 40 years later, they are still talking and bonding every night.  Although those  early Baltimore years were some of the worst in Oprah’s life, professionally and romantically, Gayle was the constant shining light.

It was Oprah and Gayle against the World. Two young black girls trying to make it in the white male dominated world of TV news, where many simply did not want them.

The two would spend the 1970s hitting the Baltimore bars, looking for sexy black men.  They would stay out all night getting drunk.  Well, Oprah would get drunk.  Teetotaler Gayle would sip on cocoa or order a glass of milk, much to Oprah’s chagrin.

Now in their 60s, the two women must look back with nostalgia to those long nights in bars and night clubs, in their carefree 20s, in the heart of the 1970s.  To quote the song 1973 by James Blunt:

And though time goes by I will always be, in a club with you, in 1973

While Gayle King knew her best friend was “scary smart”, little did she know that her friend’s head circumference measured a superhuman 25.25″ around, and that such a huge brain size would give Oprah the intelligence to rocket out of Baltimore, and become, at her peak, both the World’s richest black and the World’s most influential woman, and that as the loyal best friend, Gayle would come along for the ride, seated in first class.

And what a ride it’s been.

So what is Gayle’s IQ?

Expected IQ of Oprah’s black best friend: 110

If we begin with the fact that on a scale where the average white American has an IQ of 100 (Standard Deviation = 15), the average African American has an IQ of 85 (SD possibly 15, though reports vary).  The average African American thus has a best friend who also has an IQ  of 85.  However Gayle is best friends with Oprah, who I believe has an incredible IQ of 140 (3.66 SD higher than the average best friend of a black American).

It is known that the IQs of spouses correlate at about 0.45.  If we assume the IQs of best friends also correlate at 0.45, then simple regression would predict Gayle’s IQ to be about 45% as far above the black mean as Oprah’s:

0.45(3.66 SD) = 1.65 SD

Being 1.65 SD above the African American mean implies an IQ of 1.65(15) + 85 = 110

Expected IQ of a 5’10” black female boomer: 98

Having a brilliant best friend is not the only sign of intelligence Gayle displays.  Gayle is also 5’10” tall.  The average African American woman over 60 is about 5’3″ (SD = 1.98 inches).  Thus Gayle is an astonishing +3.53 SD in height!  Given the within sex, within race correlation between IQ and height is about 0.24, simple regression would predict an IQ of 0.24(+3.54 SD) =  0.85 above the black mean, which is 98.

Expected IQ of 5’10” black female boomer who is best friends with Oprah: About 120

So based on the IQ of her best friend, we’d expect Gayle to have an IQ of 110, and based on her height, wed expect Gayle to have an IQ of 98.  What happens when both of these predictors are considered together?

Obviously having two signs of intelligence (brilliant best friend AND super tall height) would predict a higher IQ than having just one of these.

It’s tempting to simply add the prediction based on best friend’s IQ to the prediction based on height:

0.45(best friend IQ) + 0.24(height)

However the problem with doing that is that the two predictions are not entirely independent so simply adding them redundantly counts their shared predictive power twice.

According to the brilliant Promethean who introduced me to multiple regression, in order to make predictions from multiple variables, we must first know the correlation between the variables themselves.  If we assume that the IQ of one’s best friend and one’s height only correlate because they both correlate with one’s own IQ, then taking each variable’s correlation with one’s own IQ (0.45 and 0.24 respectively) and multiplying them (0.45 * 0.24 = 0.11), gives the correlation between the variables themselves.

Assuming these two predictors (best friend’s IQ and personal height) correlate 0.11, instead of the predictors having values of 0.45 and 0.24, they are reduced to 0.43 and 0.19, because these slightly lower values reflect their predictive power independent of one another.  Thus Gayle’s expected IQ:

IQ = 0.43(best friend’s IQ) + 0.19(height)

IQ = 0.43(3.66 SD) + 0.19(3.54 SD)

IQ = 1.57 SD  + 0.67 SD

IQ = 2.24 SD

Thus I estimate Gayles’s IQ to be an impressive 2.24 SD above the black mean, or roughly IQ 120.  In other words, I think Gayle is smarter than 99% of black America, and smarter than 90% of white America.

However this is a very crude estimate with a large standard error.  At best we can say with 95% confidence that Gayle’s IQ is anywhere from 95 to 145, with 120 being roughly the best guess.

Gayle & Charlie Rose

You can go pretty far in America with an IQ of 120, especially when your best friend is the most influential woman on the planet.  Several years ago Gayle was hired to host CBS This Morning with Charlie Rosie.  Oprah told Gayle it was a once in a lifetime opportunity so Gayle took the job, and Gayle recently landed a coveted interview with the Obamas.

Gayle would sometimes joke about having a romance with Charlie Rose, and Rose would play along with the joke.  Because Gayle is so tall, the #1 trait she looks for in a man is height, so the 6’3″ Rose might appeal to Gayle.  She would also appreciate the fact that Rose seems highly intelligent, curious, interested in current events, and extremely successful and famous.

So why then has there been so romance between these two seemingly single morning co-stars? Does the erudite Chalie Rose think the gossipy Gayle is just not good enough for him, or is it Gayle who is not interested in Rose?

 

 

 

In honor of St. Patrick’s Week, I decided to post about Irish American comic Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie is one of the most successful talk show hosts in history. At it’s peak, The Rosie O’Donnell show, which ran from 1996 to 2002, was second only to Oprah in the ratings, and when she returned to TV in 2006 as co-host of The View, she single-handedly put that show on the map. Since then, she briefly did a show on Satellite radio and briefly hosted a cable show on The Oprah Winfrey network: OWN. So what is her IQ?

$100 million dollars

Thanks to her incredibley successful talk show in the 1990s, Rosie is worth about $100 million dollars. In another post I cited data suggesting the average self-made U.S. decamillionaire has an IQ of 118 (U.S. norms) and the average self-made U.S. billionaire has an IQ of 133. I do not have any actual data on the IQs of self-made centimillionaires, but we might guess it’s roughly half-way between: IQ 126. The next question is whether Rosie is likely smarter or dumber than the average self-made centimillionaire.

Pumpkin Head

When Rosie appeared on TV, her head would look very big. This caused her former arch nemesis, shock jock Howard Stern to viciously ridicule her for being a “pumpkin head”. One day I saw Rosie come out on her show and ask the audience if anyone had a bigger head than her. One person stood up and shocked the crowd by announcing their head circumfernce was an astonishing 24″. Rosie said hers was 24.5″ and that unless your head is bigger, don’t mention it. 24.5″ is an astonishing five standard deviations above the mean for U.S. baby boomer women. Little did Rosie know that Oprah, the one talk show host she couldn’t beat in the ratings, has an even bigger head.  It’s unlikely either women are aware of the link between intelligence and head size, as this is dismissed as 19th century pseudoscience, at best.

The correlation between IQ and sex adjusted head circumference is about 0.21. If the average self-made centimillionaire has an IQ that is 1.73 standard deviations (SD) above the U.S. mean, then, to over-simplify, we might crudely expect them to have sex adjusted crania that is  1.73 SD(0.21) = 0.36 SD above the U.S. average. That makes Rosie’s crania about 4.64 SD bigger even than the average self-made centimillionaire.

Assuming the 0.21 correlation between IQ and sex-adjusted head size holds among centimillionaires (and it should, given that the full IQ variance surprisingly seems to exist within economic classes), then we’d expect Rosie’s IQ to be 4.64(0.21) = 0.97 SD higher than the average than the average self-made centimillionaire’s. In other words, we’d expect Rosie’s IQ to be about 140 (in both U.S. norms and U.S. white norms).

Is an IQ of 140 plausble?

An IQ of about 140 is extremely high, making Rosie potentially smarter than 99.5% of U.S. whites. Many people would argue that Rosie can’t be that smart since she believes in 9/11 conspiracy theories and turns to actress Suzanne Somers for medical advice. However I heard “American’s smartest man” Chris Langan in an interview express suspicion about 9/11. Further, conservatism is a sign of low IQ, and there’s nothing less conservative than questioning the official story of 9/11 or being distrustful of the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed Rosie is so unconservative that she infamously called Americans terrorists

Rosie, like Oprah and perhaps even Donald Trump, turned against the Iraq war before it began, but Rosie is so unconservative that rather than being proud of her enormous wealth, like Donald Trump and even Oprah, she told Oprah financia guru Suze Orman that she’s embarassed by it.

Rosie vs Trump

Speaking of Trump, Rosie famously made fun of him in 2006 when she was co-host of The View. Rosie’s tirade inspired screams of laughter from the crowd, and when Hillary Clinton appeared as a guest on the show in the next segment, she commented on how funny Rosie was. Trump and Hillary were still friendly at the time, so Trump must have been furious that he could be mocked so successfully on an afternoon lady’s talk show. Indeed Trump was so shell-shocked by Rosie’s attack that he spent weeks calling Rosie a fat low IQ pig loser on every show that would listen.

At the time I was very disappointed in Trump, who I generally like, because I expect a billionaire to behave with more class, and to be smart and secure enough to ignore such taunts, but instead Trump took the bait, diminishing himself while giving Rosie more ratings.

Indeed, Rosie and Obama were perhaps the only two people to get the better of Trump in the exchange of public insults. Obama did so by mocking a red-faced Trump to his face at the White House correspondence dinner, but the difference is, Obama had the best comic writers in America writing his material, while Rosie did it off the cuff. So even though I think Trump is very bright, it’s possible Rosie is 15 IQ points higher.

Indeed it seems Trump still isn’t over Rosie’s attack, as evidenced by him recently losing the Iowa Republican Primary arguably because he didn’t want to debate there, because he was still mad at moderator Megyn Kelly for asking him about Rosie.

On the other hand, Rosie is now a has-been, and Trump is almost the President of the United States.

Other evidence

Further evidence that Rosie has a high IQ is that she appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy and won, which shows an ability to absorb information, and retrieve it rapidly. On her show she was famous for knowing the lyrics of almost every song that came up. I also recall her once boasting about doing well on a game show called Win Lose or Draw, where you draw a picture and others must guess what you’re drawing. This game requires lateral thinking.

On the other hand, I recall Rosie once saying she did not take Advanced Placement classes while in high school and I also seem to recall her saying she got a combined score (verbal + math) in the 700s on the old SAT (way below average for a college bound teen), but she also said it was because she was trying to cheat off a friend, but it didn’t work because the friend had a different copy of the SAT. She has said that growing up, she was great at Geomrtry but bad at Algebra. But academic tests don’t suit Rosie. She’d be better off taking a more holistic intelligence test like the Wechsler, preferabley an older version (adjusted for the Flynn effect) that included fun tests like Picture Arrangement.

Rosie vs Oprah

Overall, I think Rosie, like Oprah, has a genius IQ of around 140. Both women are freakishly extreme on the two most Darwinian correlates of IQ: money and brain size; and both women are examples of how brilliant people with mediocre educations can rise to the top through real world adaptive behavior, drive, personality and luck. Rosie has huge wealth (though not nearly as huge as Oprah’s) and Rosie has a huge head (though not as huge as Oprah’s). You would thus expect Oprah to also have a higher IQ, but because Rosie comes from a much higher IQ race, the two women are probably about the same. Here’s Rosie reflecting on what it was like to compete with Oprah on daytime TV:

As humans evolved from apes, brain size nearly tripled in just the last 4 million years, from 500 cm³ in Australopithecenes to 800 cm³ in Homo habilis to 1000 cm³ in Homo erectus to about 1350 cm³ in modern Homo sapiens (higher in the developed world where nutrition is good), as evolution selected for intelligence…the cognitive ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage. Since humans lacked the adaptive strength, speed, claws, and fur of other animals, we needed large brains to use behavior in an adaptive advantageous way.

With a cranial capacity of perhaps 2,029 cm³, Oprah has just adapted her situation to her advantage, by buying a 10% share in Weight Watchers, and watching the stock roughly triple in a few days, making her potentially $100 million richer in only 36 hours.

This type of power been dubbed the Oprah effect, and was part of the reason Time magazine crowned Oprah the most influential woman on the planet. When she famously vowed to never eat another burger, beef prices plummeted, when she endorsed a work of literature, it zoomed up the best seller list, when she plucked Dr. Phil out of obscurity, he became America’s top psychologist, and when she endorsed Barack Obama, he became the first black president of the United States.

It’s one thing for Oprah to have influence over the overweight soccer moms that watched her hugely successful daytime talk show that ran from 1986-2011, but now she seems to have parlayed her influence into even Wall-street clout, even though Oprah’s touchy-feely new age spirituality is the last thing cynical young white male Wall-street traders would be swayed by.

But they respect her money and power. People respect success, even when it comes in a form they don’t respect.

Meanwhile authoritative Forbes magazine just released their 2015 list of the 400 richest Americans, and you now need an astonishing $1.7 billion just to make last place. It used to be that the billionaire club was much more exclusive than the Forbes 400, but these days, being a billionaire is no longer rich enough for the Forbes 400.

With a net-worth of $3 billion (before the Weight Watchers investment), Oprah is still the only multi-billionaire black in North American history, but she’s no longer the only black on the Forbes 400. She’s been joined by private equity titan Robert Smith who has $2.5 billion.

Smith appears to come from a far higher socio-economic background than Oprah (his father was a PhD, Oprah’s father was a barber and her mother a maid on and off welfare) and unlike Oprah who used to be a bit of a technophobe, Smith was a high tech geek. Forbes writes:

As a junior at Denver’s East High School in the 1970s, Robert F. Smith showed a fascination for the geekiest subject there: Computer science. The transistor held particular wonder for him. This small device, a crucial valve controlling the flow of electrons within a computer, had been invented at Bell Labs. Bell had a nearby office. Maybe he should work at Bell, too.

After securing the number, Smith phoned and inquired about a summer internship. Yes, Bell did have one, he learned, but only college upperclassmen could apply. Smith had straight A’s in math and computer science. Would that count? No, Bell said, it would not. Undaunted by this initial rejection, Smith called back every day for two weeks—HR stopped answering after Day 2—and then cut back on how often he called …to every Monday for five months. Eventually, he was rewarded for his doggedness. After an MIT student didn’t show up in June, Bell called Smith. Could he come in for an interview?

The above anecdote shows that in addition to high IQ, persistence is a hugely important factor in becoming rich. It’s not just about dumb luck, as many people will have us believe. Those who become rich tend to create their own opportunities and then very skillfully exploit them.

I don’t think there’s ever been more than two blacks on the Forbes 400 at any given year, and often there’s only one. Despite being 13.6% of America, blacks are always 0.25% to 0.5% of the Forbes 400, though this may change in the next generation as some of these black billionaires pass on their fortune to children.

Interestingly, America now even has a third black billionaire. Basketball star Michael Jordan is now the third richest African American and recently became the first billionaire athlete in history, but he was not quite rich enough to make the Forbes 400. It is interesting that he recently lashed out at President Obama:

I suspect Jordan, who was at one time perhaps the most worshiped black man in America, resents seeing another black man (Obama), also from Chicago, dethrone him in status by becoming the first black president. Jordan probably subconsciously thinks that as a man of extreme height and athletic talent, he is the one who everyone should worship, and not someone like Obama who Jordan seems to view as an unworthy successor.

A few readers think I’m crazy for thinking Oprah could have an IQ around 140. For some dismiss her as just another mediocre celebrity entertaining the unwashed masses. And 140 is a truly astonishing figure, when one considers that the average white U.S. college graduate has an IQ around 111, the average white PhD has an IQ around 123 and the average U.S. president has an IQ around 130. Many find it unimaginable that overweight black woman who entertains housewives could be so much smarter than all those people.

But the first thing to keep in mind is that Oprah’s not just an entertainer, she’s a billionaire, with a B, and she’s a billionaire several times over. Think about how hard it is to go out and make a million U.S. dollars, and then imagine doing so 3000 times, and keeping every penny, and you have a sense of just much genius is required. The following chart is a very rough approximation for the relationship between money and IQ in America. It’s hard to pin down exact numbers, but a good rule of thumb is that Americans tend to be close to ten IQ points smarter than Americans who earn ten times less than they do, and they tend to be ten IQ points dumber than those who earn ten times more:

Homeless people (three figure income earners): Average IQ 76

The working poor (four figure income earners): Average IQ 86

Average Americans (five figure income earners): Average IQ 96

Self-made millionaires (six figure income becomes seven figure wealth): Average IQ 106

Self-made decamillionaires (seven figure income becomes eight figure wealth): Average IQ 116

Self-made centimillionaires (eight figure income becomes nine figure wealth): Average IQ 126

Self-made billionares (nine figure income becomes ten figure wealth): Average IQ 136

Self-made decabillionaires (ten figure income becomes 11 figure wealth): Average IQ 146

So just the fact that Oprah is a self-made billionaire implies she has a 50% chance of having an IQ of 136 or higher.

The next question that needs to be answered is whether Oprah is likely smarter or dumber than the average self-made billionaire. One indicator is that her head is so big she has to have her hats custom made. Given that the correlation between IQ and head circumference is about 0.23, and billionaires have IQs 2.53 standard deviations above the U.S. mean of 96, we’d expect the average billionaire to have a sex adjusted head size that is 0.23(2.53 SD) = 0.58 SD bigger than normal. But Oprah’s sex adjusted head circumference is an astonishing 6.3 SD bigger than normal, which makes it 5.72 SD bigger than the average billionaire’s.

Assuming the 0.23 correlation between head size and IQ holds among self-made billionaires, Oprah would be expected to be 0.23(5.72 SD) = 1.32 SD smarter than the average self-made billionaire.

On a scale where white Americans have a mean IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, and all Americans have a mean IQ of 96 with an SD of 15.8, self-made U.S. billionaires likely have a mean IQ of 136 with an SD also of 15.8. So the average self-made billionaire with a sex-adjusted head as huge as Oprah’s would have an IQ of:

1.32(15.8) + 136 = 157

But because self-made billionaires are so heterogeneous, and because the correlation between IQ and head size is so weak, you could not have much confidence at all in this estimate. All you could say with 95% confidence is that such a big headed billionaire has an IQ anywhere from 126 to 188.

Of course the typical biggest headed billionaire would be white, and so these stats don’t apply to North America’s first multi-billionaire black.

What happens when race is factored in?

For as long as IQ tests have existed, black Americans have scored about 15 points lower than white Americans. One interesting fact is that this same 15 point IQ gap exists even among high achievers. On page 374 of his book Coming Apart Charles Murray reported IQs for educated white and black Americans. Because Murray reported his IQ data using American norms, I converted to the preferred scale using white American norms:

Whites with a bachelors degree: IQ 111
Blacks with a bachelor degree: IQ 96

Whites with a masters degree: IQ 114
Blacks with a masters degree: IQ 99

Whites with a PhD or professional degree: IQ 123
Blacks with a PhD or professional degree: IQ 110

As can be seen, at each level of accomplishment, blacks score roughly 15 points lower than whites. Extrapolating this trend, the biggest headed billionaire (expected IQ of 157; 95% confidence interval 126 to 188), would have an expected IQ of 157 – 15 = 142 (95% confidence interval of 111 to 173) if she’s black.

Further, an IQ of about 140 is corroborated by Oprah’s computer scored idea density, and a historiometric estimate of her childhood IQ.

Assuming there are about 42 million African Americans, and that they have a mean IQ of 85 with a standard deviation that might be as high as 15, the normal curve predicts there are about 5,162 black Americans with IQs of 140 or higher. Given the new opportunities that emerged in the post-civil rights era, it would not be surprising if one of these 5,162 brilliant blacks rose up to become the richest African American of all time, and another, with her help, went on to become President of the United States.

 

Shortly after Oprah took her low budget Chicago talk show national in 1986, she quickly emerged as the richest woman in entertainment, and then the richest African American of all time, and would eventually become, for several years, the only black billionaire on the planet (excluding a Canadian Blasian billionaire and a Saudi Arabian Blarab billionaire, both of whom seemed less than 50% black). As a compassionate social Darwinist, I watched in great fascination as arguably the biggest brained member of both her race and her gender, emerged as the World’s richest black and the World’s most influential woman.

Many in the industry were shocked that an overweight black woman could be the most successful talk show host in America, and acquire so much wealth, fame and power in the process. Today blacks are considered hip and cool, but back in the 1980s, there was enormous stigma to being black because it meant your ancestors were from Africa, so seeing a dark skinned black looking black woman on TV was incredibly taboo and shocking to people, and it was even more shocking when she started making so much money.

People probably thought, if a black woman can make all that money hosting a sassy talk show, it must be easy, and so pretty soon, the industry exploded with Oprah clones, each one, more sensational than the one before, until the sight of a drag queen became more common on daytime TV than a cooking segment.

Oprah was not pleased that so many people were entering her industry, trying to get a slice of her lucrative pie. “The reason there are so many talk shows, is people came specifically looking for the Oprah deal. They wanted the bucks,” she fumed.

Furious that others would dare think they could compete with her, Oprah watched with glee as as a platoon of competitors bit the dust. It didn’t matter if they were white or black, male or female, fat or thin, everyone who tried to compete against her got clobbered. At her peak, her ratings were an astonishing FOUR TIMES her nearest competitors. It seemed to me her huge brain size was giving her an ability to come up with witty comments, and down-home folksy wisdom that kept the audience entertained. For example when a couple mentioned they had sex on a golf course, Oprah asked “any particular hole?” When a jailed alcoholic praised himself for not drinking for years, Oprah said “I never heard of alcohol being served in prison.”

By the time Oprah was in her 40s, she was disgusted with all the sleaze on daytime TV and vowed to take the high road. No more shows about one night stand reunions, cheating husbands, and Satanic worshipers. More shows about spirituality, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou. Her ratings initially slipped, but she was so rich and so far ahead of her competitors that she could afford to pursue prestige over profits.

Ricki Lake

Then out of nowhere came a young hip Ashkenazi Jewish New Yorker named Ricki Lake, who was rapidly emerging as the fastest growing talk show of all time. She was only 26, and while Oprah had decided to take the high road, Lake was doing shows about taboo sensational sexual topics, that just came across as fun to her young audience, who would chant “Go Ricki! Go Ricki! Your topics, are icky!” Lake’s Ashkenazi genes gave her the verbal IQ to further entertain her audience with one liners like “Dump that zero and get yourself a hero”

Lake quickly beat every single talk show in America, except for Oprah, but was rapidly gaining on her. Oprah was beginning to get pestered by the media, one of whom said something like, “your ratings are down 25%, Ricki’s ratings are up 75%.”

“That means nothing,” Oprah replied. “My ratings are twice hers”

“So you don’t care about ratings. You just want to do a show that uplifts people?”

“That’s right. I’m surprised you got it!”

Still Oprah, was feeling the heat, and she came back from summer holidays with a hip hairstyle and a Beverly Hills 90210 Valley girl persona, to adapt to the young competition:

A few weeks later, Forbes magazine stunned the World by announcing that Oprah’s net worth had hit $340 million, allowing her to replace Bill Cosby as the only black on Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, and was well on track to be a billionaire! Everyone already knew Oprah was the richest woman in entertainment, but to suddenly make the ultra prestigious Forbes 400 put her in a whole new category. For she was now the richest black in all of America, beating out everyone, even Ivy League mulattoes and quadroons. Oprah’s star had risen so high, Lake faded into TV history, but a new Ashkenazi rival was emerging. But first, would come Rosie O’Donnell

Rosie

By the last 1990s, a gentile named Rosie O’Donnell (who incidentally has a head circumference almost as large as Oprah’s) was rapidly emerging as Oprah’s big threat in the ratings, because like Oprah, she could relate to the struggles of gaining weight, and like Oprah, she was acquiring a wholesome family friendly reputation, and on top of that, as a stand-up comic, she had the quick wit to entertain millions.

Jerry Springer

Many were predicting Rosie would be the new Oprah, so the last person anyone ever expected to emerge as the real threat to Oprah’s empire was some boring nerdy mild mannered lawyer in his 50s, but 900 years of intense natural selection for high IQ Jewish genes seemed to give Springer the mental ability to adapt to any challenge. He entered college at a young age earning a Regents scholarship, and went on to get a degree from prestigious Northwestern law school. Jumping from one leadership position to another, Springer began his career as an ultra liberal aid to Robert Kennedy, turned mayor of Cincinnati at only 33, then adapted to a new career in television, becoming Cincinnati’s number-one anchor, winning ten local Emmy Awards for his articulate commentaries. Finally, he was given a nationally syndicated talk show.

At first Springer was too low on the totem-pole for Oprah to even acknowledge, but suddenly he was catching on like wildfire. Exploiting the fact that the Christian right had scared other talk shows out of doing sleazy topics, and Oprah had by now totally abandoned sleaze, and was competing with Rosie to be as wholesome and family friendly as possible, Springer shrewdly adapted; filling the sudden market void, taking sleaze to the extreme with shows about one night stands, interracial sex with drag queens, and having black women pull out each-other’s weaves on national television. And unlike other hosts who had tried to push sleaze to the extreme such as Geraldo and Morton Downey Jr., Springer did not act like a tough guy; instead he stayed true to his cerebral nerdy personality, hiding cowardly in fear behind audience members when the angry black women on his stage got too violent.

The contrast between angry violent low IQ guests beating eachother up, as the nerdy cowardly Springer giving cerebral philosophical commentary from a distance, proved enormously successful. Although Springer’s large cranial capacity was nowhere near as big as Oprah’s or even Rosie’s, as an Ashkenazi Jew, he may have carried unique IQ genes related to Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s and Niemann-Pick, involved in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals.

This superior neurological efficiency may have been what made Springer especially articulate and witty off the cuff. For example, when a young woman in his audience offered to pretend to be bread if Springer would be the butter, Springer joked “the trouble is, at my age I’m toast.” When a naked woman on his show complained that her conservative parents had their panties in a bunch over her nudist life style, Springer said “at least they have panties”.

After each of his witty comebacks, the young audience would chant “JERRY! JERRY! JERRY!”.

The explosive combination of sleaze, nudity, violence, mixed in with Springer’s articulate commentary and witty punchlines, proved incredibly successful, with entire college bars watching Springer every afternoon, even at prestigious universities like Oxford. And then in the late 1990s, the unthinkable happened: Springer made television history by beating Oprah in the ratings, knocking her off the number one spot she held since 1986.

Oprah must have been furious that he was beating her. She didn’t have the option of adding trashy topics to her show, because having publicly abandoned such topics in 1995 for more inspirational shows, turning back would have looked like a hypocritical ratings grab that would have damaged her unique prestige. Thus Oprah had little choice but to wait for the media to shame Springer out of doing sleaze, however Springer’s high Ashkenazi verbal IQ made him especially adept at deflecting criticism.

When reporters would complain that his show was exploiting people, bringing on the poor, disenfranchised, and black, and letting them beat each-other up for the entertainment of rich white college kids, Springer would say he thinks news exploits people, because news forces the camera into the face of people who don’t want to be in the headlines, unlike his show where people beg to come on. He would even paint himself as a kind of liberal crusader who was providing a forum for the black underclass.

Finally Oprah decided to take action. She went on TV and started reading from the Bible, then turned to the audience and said “Springer’s having fights, we’re reading the Bible.” The audience applauded, but more drastic action was needed, so Oprah gave an interview where she threatened to quit television:

I am all talked out.My contract has two years left, then I am getting out of such shows, because I feel they are going to burn themselves out…I am in disbelief about things that are happening on television talk shows. How low can it get? Can public taste keep on sinking? Yes, it can. I have to get out…Up until a few months ago, I felt that Jerry Springer was giving us some serious competition. But I don’t think it is sustainable because his show is such a vulgarity circus.

Unless you are going to kill people on the air, and not just hit them on the head with chairs, and unless you are going to have sexual intercourse – and not just, as I saw the other day, a guy pulling down his pants and pulling out his penis – then there comes a point when you have oversaturated yourself.

As usual, Springer cleverly used his high Ashkenazi verbal IQ and high social IQ to adapt. Realizing it would be bad optics to get into a slug-fest with such a beloved black woman, Springer adapted by becoming self-deprecating while praising Oprah. “She’s the most talented person there is in this business,” he would tell reporters. “I’m a bright guy, but I’m not cut out for this business like she is. She’s unbelievable…Let’s face it, she’s the best there is…She’s the best there ever was. Ten years from now, everyone will remember Oprah, no one will remember me…so she doesn’t like my show, that doesn’t make her a bad person. My own mother would have hated the show, and I love her!”

But big brained Oprah wasn’t falling for his shtick, and neither were her fans, and Springer came under pressure to not have so much violence on his show. His ratings began to drop like a rock, and Oprah regained her status as the number one talk show in syndication, and would soon emerge as the World’s only black billionaire.

Judge Judy

As the 21st century began, it became apparent that no one, no matter how bright, funny, talented, or famous, would ever again have a syndicated talk show that could rival Oprah’s, but another Ashkenazi Jew with a legal background, brilliantly adapted, not by hosting another talk show, but through an entirely new genre of daytime TV: the court show.

The fast talking, quick thinking Judge Judy utterly dominated the court show genre with one-liners like “don’t pee on my leg and tell me its raining” and at her peak, by some estimates, got more viewers than Oprah. Yet unlike so many Ashkenazi Jews, Judy seems to lack the entrepreneurial skills to turn her huge success into a billion dollar empire. She earns about $45 million a year, a truly astonishing figure, far higher than virtually any in TV history, yet still dwarfed by the $315 million a year Oprah was reportedly raking in during the final years of her talk show.

In addition, Oprah parlayed her talk show gig to become a truly iconic figure, one of the ten most worshiped people in American history. Judy has yet to make the leap to that kind of status, but like her co-ethnic Jerry Springer, she is incredibly verbally skilled, and the two of them go down in TV history as the only two syndicated personalities to ever beat Oprah in the ratings.

With Christmas only days away, what better topic to discuss than Martha Stewart and cold winters. Few people better personify the theory that cold winters selected for high IQ, particularly high spatial IQ, than Northern ancestry Martha Stewart, who Oprah describes as a genius for her domestic inventiveness. While most rich people seem to have earned their fortune through verbal or mathematical talents, Martha Stewart got rich by making things: pies, crafts, clothing, omelettes, soap, furniture etc. “I’m a doer”, she likes to say. If there’s one gazillionaire you’d want to be stranded with on a deserted island, it would be Martha Stewart, because she has the adaptability to actually survive without modern ammenities.

Around the turn of the century, Martha Stewart was adaptable enough to briefly overtake Oprah as the richest self-made woman in America, when she took her company public causing her net worth to skyrocket to billionaire level. I estimate the average American billionaire has an IQ around 130 (98 percentile), but because self-made women are so rare at the highest levels, I estimate that both Oprah and Martha tower with an IQ around 140 (99.5 percentile). Despite having such similar overall ability (in my opinion), the two women have opposite cognitive profiles. Oprah (whose ancestors lived in tropical Africa, where evolution favoured talents that helped in mating success; sexual selection) has, in my opinion, a social IQ > spatial IQ profile while Martha (whose ancestors lived in freezing Northern Europe, where evolution favoured talents that helped in survival; natural selection) has a spatial IQ > social IQ profile, so when Martha would appear on Oprah’s show, it was television at its best, because Martha would provide the practical survival skills, while Oprah would make the hour funny and entertaining. Martha would teach the audience how to make their own soap and insist that each guest in her home gets a fresh bar of soap, causing Oprah to inspire roaring laughter by adlibbing “because you wouldn’t anyone else’s hairs, in your nice homemade soap.”

So while Oprah and Martha would bring different cognitive abilities to the table, one day Oprah’s enormous brain size seemed to allow her the higher level cognitive ability that transcended cognitive abilities themselves: Meta cognition; self-awareness, the ability to mazimize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, is not well understood, let alone well measured by IQ tests, but it is pivotal to our ability to adapt situations to our advantage (the essence of intelligence) and in some ways is more important to intelligence than all other intellectual abilities combined, including g (general intelligence). This is something I have long believed and I was incredibley impressed to discover that commenter Santoculto had the same understanding. He wrote:

…the self awareness is the bio-cultural differentiation of human beings compared to other animals, its true soul. And I believe that self awareness is therefore the cognitive component hierarchically superior to all others. It is as if our intelligence were divided into several spaceships, where self awareness is the mothership.

How did Oprah display self-awareness? Martha Stewart began showing Oprah a very efficient way to maneuver a bed sheet, and asked Oprah to grap one corner of the bed sheet. Sensing she didn’t have the spatial ability to perform the task competently and not wanting to look foolish in front of millions of TV viewers, Oprah was forced to adapt. Instead of grabbing the corner of the sheet, Oprah spontaneously ran to the audience to grab a Martha Stewart fan. The woman couldn’t believe her good luck, for Oprah was giving her a chance to maneuvre a bed sheet with her hero. Meanwhile Oprah took the woman’s seat in the audience and watched the two of them on the stage. I don’t know if Martha had enough social IQ to understand Oprah’s true motives in bringing the audience member on stage, but she rolled with it, and began instructing the lady to copy all the elaborate complex rapid twists and turns Martha was doing with her corner of the bed sheet. Not having the spatial IQ to keep up, the lady began twisting and turning the sheet in wrong directions causing Martha to scold the lady for screwing up.

At that point Oprah stood up from the seat in the audience she had taken and yelled “I’m so glad I didn’t do it” and started dancing around with joy as the audience howled and clapped with laughter. This demonstrates how having the self-awareness to know what her strengths and weaknesses were allowed Oprah to adapt a potentially humiliating situation (failing to correctly maneuver a bed sheet) to her advantage (laughter and applause from the audience).

Conversely, a lack of self-awareness would prove to be Martha Stewart’s Archille’s heel. Oprah once said to Martha “I heard your ex-husband got a court order forbidding you to speak to him. I’ve never heard of such a thing”. That was a kind of punishment, Martha explained. “Was it punishment for being too smart?” Oprah asked.

Men are very threatened by women who are smarter than they are, and Martha’s limitless competence at doing work inside and outside the home and making gazillions of dollars in the process, must have made her husband feel inadequate and inferior. But when Martha became a self-made billionaire, she made the whole world feel inferior, with the smug way she embraced her billions, and the world took its revenge by putting her in jail and causing her fortune to tumble. Had Martha Stewart had the self-awareness to know social IQ was not her strength, and had a publicist coach her on dealing with the public, she might still be a billionaire today (though she remains super rich). But this demonstrates the hierarchical nature of intelligence that Santoculto described. You can be brilliant in virtually every area and have extremely high g (general intelligence), but if you lack the self-awareness to know where your blind spots are, your will fail to adapt situations to your advantage, and you will not be intelligent, in the truest sense.

Of course with the amount of jealousy, resentment and hate directed at successful women, perhaps no amount of intelligence is enough to avoid the traps the world sets for you, and Martha continues to be one of the richest women in America, despite no longer being a billionaire. But competition threatens her business, particularly from TV star Rachael Ray. Despite the fact that Ray has a self-described “huge head” and reportedly scored above 150 on an IQ test, she is of Southern European ancestry so her ancestors were not exposed to the extreme cold that pruned the gene pool of spatial incompetence, and Martha regards ray as unworthy competition:

My views on the probable nature of a person having a 400 IQ are as follows…a peace-maker at all levels, (human/human; human/animal; human/environment)…Why do I conceive of this being as so benign? The wisest sages through-out history have all emphasized the oneness and connectedness of all of creation. A truly aware person would see this…

__Member of Prometheus Society, imaging a creature with a 400 IQ

While no human in history has had a deviation IQ much beyond 200, Oprah’s 2,029 cc estimated brain size is arguably around what you would statistically expect from a 400 IQ being, and so was the wisdom she displayed in the run-up to the war in Iraq.  It’s hard to think of a more disastrous decision for America than the 2003 U.S.-lead invasion to remove Saddam Hussein, which cost America an incalculable amount of blood, treasure, security, and political capital, and continues to wreak havoc today, so those who had the intellect, courage, and integrity to oppose the war before it began deserve a large amount of credit, particularly if they did so publicly; and it’s hard to think of anyone who did so more publicly than Oprah, who did so repeatedly.

Of course Oprah was not publicly opposed to the Iraq war from the start.  After being bombarded with hate mail for doing a 2001 show asking whether war with Afghanistan was the only answer, she was not eager to appear anti-war when it came to Iraq too.  Indeed in October 2002 she did an Iraq show that was largely pro-war, and where Oprah was dismissive of an anti-war audience member.

But by November 2002, Oprah had suddenly jumped off the media’s pro-war bandwagon.  In his book Dude where’s my country? anti-war advocate Michael Moore praised her for being the only mainstream media at the time to show footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in the 1980s.

However the most significant anti-war show Oprah would do was a two-day special that aired the day after Colin Powell’s pivotal February 2003 U.N. speech making the case for war, which was credited with shifting public opinion in favor of regime change.  Winfrey recruited reporters from CNN to gather clips from people from countries as diverse as Britain, France, South Africa, Iraq, and Pakistan all trying to persuade America not to go to war, along with anti-war luminaries like Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II.  Here’s a brief clip from that show.

Buzzflash.com claimed there was a deliberate attempt to stop the show from airing in some markets:

Bush pre-empted Oprah for no reason other than to stop her broadcast regarding Iraq and insert his own propaganda!…In the middle of the show a “Special News Report” notice came up, then Peter Jennings announced Bush would be making a MAJOR announcement on Iraq. Then Bush and Powell came in and Bush summarized what Powell had said yesterday at the UN. He spent about 20 minutes in all…The Administration would have known the content and timing of today’s show because it is broadcast live and/or in the morning in many markets such as Oprah’s home base in Chicago. This was in such bad form I couldn’t believe it! I called Harpo Studios in Chicago to let them know and they said they had received a lot of phone calls. I said Oprah should tell her audience what happened and that I thought Bush was purposely interfering with her show. They commented they didn’t know what the reason was and in any case there was no way to prove anything

Academics for Justice made the same assertion:

Today, Oprah Winfrey started a two-part series focusing on the impending U.S. war on Iraq. About halfway through the show the broadcast was pre-empted by coverage of Pres. George Bush, with Colin Powell at his side, reading a prepared statement on Iraq. The coincidental timing of this pre-emptive press statement raised immediate questions about the motives of the White House war strategists. Students of the Civil Rights Movement will recall an incident in 1964 when activist Fannie Lou Hamer sat before a live television audience and gave a riveting account of the oppression she and other Blacks faced in the South. President Lyndon Johnson was so convinced of the power of her appeal to undermine his own political/racial agenda, that he hastily called a press conference to pull cameras away from Hamer’s impassioned revelations…The pre-emption of Winfrey’s show today should be seen in the same light. Oprah’s audience is a vast and powerful—but largely apolitical—force of middle-class white women. It is likely that most did not watch Colin Powell’s live testimony at the U.N. yesterday. In fact, it is likely that this huge audience was being oriented to the issues of the Iraq war for the first time…The first 30 minutes of the show was decidedly anti-war and highlighted not only worldwide unanimity in opposition to the war but presented many of the heretofore unheard voices of ordinary people speaking forcefully against Bush’s motives

Undeterred by the alleged attempt to stop part of her February 2003 anti-war shows from airing, Oprah made one last ditch attempt to stop the war in March 2003. Just 48 hours before the war the began, Oprah aired an anti-war show that included Michael Moore and the following shocking video:

Shortly after the show aired, Harvard Law grad Ben Shapiro condemned the show, calling Oprah a dangerously powerful political force, shaping the views of millions with her ignorant views and wacky reasoning. However Canada’s most respected media critic, John Doyle of the Globe and Mail, praised the show as “an act of extraordinary intelligence from Oprah”

Doyle wrote:

At a time when the consensus in American television is that everybody should pull together and support the men and women in the U.S. military, what Oprah Winfrey did was outright subversion. In the last week, Clear Channel, Worldwide Inc., America’s largest radio conglomerate (and a company looking for a break from the U.S. government), has been organizing pro-Bush and pro-war rallies and then reporting on them. A Nashville TV station has been charging local advertisers to take part in an on-air, support the military campaign and gloating about the profits. That’s just the tip of it…In normal circumstances, the perspectives [Oprah] presented would not be notable, but in the contemporary context, they were amazing.

The decision to invade or not invade Iraq was arguably the most important test of the courage, integrity, and yes, intelligence, that America’s leadership has faced in the last half century.  Thus it seems marvelously symbolic that Oprah, arguably the biggest brained member of America’s elite ultimately passed that test with such flying colours, and got on the right side of history.

One of the dangers of being a minority who rises to prominence in broadcast media is you can be confronted by the most brutal racism on live unedited TV. This is where you need a high IQ to adapt the situation to your advantage (which is how I like to define intelligence). For a great many years I’ve been a HUGE fan of Wolf Blitzer for his no-nonsense attitude and when I heard that he was going to be interviewing David Duke (who in my humble opinion is racist against Jewish people) I was hoping Blitzer would verbally obliterate and humiliate him. Unfortunately, I felt Duke was able to adapt the situation to his advantage by using the forum to unleash all his horrific propaganda and even opportunistically promote his own web page.

I still have enormous respect for Blitzer, but was extremely disappointed in him for doing such an incompetent job standing up for the Jewish people. I know that when the brilliant Lion of the Blogosphere is confronted by anti-Jewish racism, he puts the racists in their place quickly and succinctly, and one of his commentators “The Undiscovered Jew” fights back knowledgeably against any hint of antisemitism.

In contrast to Blitzer’s weak performance above, Oprah’s 2029 cc cranial capacity gave her the IQ to handle racists with style.

When a skinhead called her a monkey and then tried to change the subject, Oprah grabbed him by the arm and said “I want to talk about the monkey business“. This showed lateral thinking because they were literally talking about monkeys but it was a clever pun because the term “monkey business” means “improper or underhanded conduct; trickery” and underhanded trickery perfectly describes the field of racist pseudo-science the skinhead was pushing. Quick wit and one-liners would pave the way for her to become North America’s first multibillionaire black.

When another racist accused Oprah of not doing enough for her people, Oprah shrewdly went for the cheap applause line of “you don’t know me”. Once Oprah got her applause, she cleverly shut her trap rather than allowing the show to become a referendum on how much she does for the less fortunate black people; because back in those days she was less philanthropic and no amount would ever be enough to satisfy her most liberal viewers. While many intelligent people always have something to say, the most intelligent know when to just stop talking.

Lastly, a man asks Oprah whether she approves of inter-racial relationships. Oprah wisely replied “I’m not here to be asked questions.” One of the shrewdest things about Oprah was that that for the first couple decades of her national career, she kept her mouth shut about anything political because she didn’t want to alienate viewers. Instead she just acquired more and more money, and more and more influence to the point that every book she endorsed became a best seller.

Then finally when she was a billionaire and no longer had to worry about making money, she decided to speak out politically for the first time but waited until there was a black person with a serious shot of being president. Because she was so admired and had never before spoken out politically, she possessed an enormous amount of political capital and brilliantly chose to spend it on an election that was close enough that she played the decisive role and thus changed the trajectory of history for black people by catapulting a black man to the white house (a truly unimaginable occurrence).

Any time you speak out politically it’s a huge risk, but the risk Oprah took was brilliant because 1) the odds were good given how close the 2008 Democratic primary was and given how much influence Oprah has, 2) she had made enough money that it was a risk she could afford, and 3) radically changing the trajectory of black history was cause worth risking for. This is how smart people get their way politically; they keep their mouth shut and avoid controversy until they’re in a position of power, and then like a cat waiting for a mouse, they see their opportunity, and they pounce. By contrast dumb publc figures just shoot their mouth off politically without any long-term strategy and are quickly marginalized before achieving the power to create real change.