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:

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.