How Mensa Works

So um. Dave Russe helped us out with this one. And um he mentioned a bit of news that if you looked up MENSA recently, would be hard to miss. But I believe it was their youngest member ever was inducted into MENSA. Mensa by the way, UM, for those of you who don't know, IS bills itself as the High i Q Society. It stands for it doesn't stand for anything, so, 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 it will just go ahead and say it means table in Latin yeah, and in Spanish slang it's a female goofball or dumb person. Strangely enough, the irony Is had tip to Dave Rus for putting that one out. So as I was saying, it's a high i Q society, it's society for smarty pants, as you put it, and they inducted they inducted their youngest member recently, who was

two years old. Two years old, sure, and they don't so they don't discriminate by age, which is great bully for them. And I believe on their website they say they're their membership ranges and ages two to a hundred and two. I knew they were going to say that, and I wonder if there's like a hundred and four year old MENSUM members, Like what the F Yeah, I just I didn't fit in with the cool uh whatever.

It's not even a rhyme, you know what I mean. Yeah, I've always felt really bad about UM, the people in Uh. Why what is that Christmas song? Kids from one too? It's like 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 ninety two because they were all having coroneries from cigars and scotches and

steaks all at once. It's kind of a random age, though it is, but it rhyme, which is what I think means it did here too. But regardless of this two year old cache quest, um, just a queues a button has an i Q of on, which means she's got it all basically, and with an i q of ont six, that puts her well above the minimum wronment to be accepted in a MENSA, which is usually about

an i q of about one thirty two. Yeah, so you may have seen that in the news if you and uh, you know, David is 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. Uh, she must have mentioned 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 Gene Davis. She used to bake cookies and bring them to like meetings. She was. Well. I heard another thing about Gina Davis because our our friend and friend of the show, Jesse Thorne, interviewed her on his great interview show Bulls Eye, 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 Everyone in the office like she was just the nicest person and it she sounds like the kind of person who would bake cookies in her MENSA style. Yeah, and Jesse Thorn's hearing this and it's like she didn't bring cookies to Army. Maybe she did so, um so Yes. Gina Davis is world renowned as the uh, 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 a vice president of MENSA International for a while. Sharon Stone famously told people in the nineties that she was in MENSA, and she 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 anti virus software McAfee John McAfee. Uh. And yeah, there's 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

men says. A lot of the popular press that's done on that group takes easy pot shots at them because they are a group of of their a high i Q group and they're by definition very smart people, but also enjoying a club like that it bestows a bit of an air of superiority onto you. So there's a there's a certain undercurrent of that, and so people who write about them, recover them, usually take pot shots at them and generally lump them all into one big group.

But that's not necessarily fair to say, because they are a very collection of people. For sure, there are weird undercurrents that are distasteful here there um, but overall, um, they seem to be okay from what I can tell. Yeah, and they are all kinds of mensines, which is what they're called, uh, from all kinds of backgrounds in socio

economic strata. I guess we could break down the percentages here if you want to get specific, U it is sixty six percent uh male, this is from their stats, thirty four percent female, UH, two percent to have a four year degree or more, sixty three graduate degree or more, thirty percent boomers, Gen X thirteen millennial, and then the rest.

But it's it's not a big group though. UM like their total membership is a little less than a hundred and fifty thousand worldwide, with about fifty thousand of those being in the States, UH and nineteen thousand mean in the UK where it was founded. But it's uh a lot more people could be in MENSA that aren't in MENSA. Does that make sense? Dave did them ath 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 in aptitude for intelligence within the top two of people. So in the United States, say there's three million, just to make it easy, but I think there's much more than that. Now, UM that would be six million people who would who would qualify as members of MENSA, and yet, like you said, there's

only about fifty thousand 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 two percent 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 that shares that in calm, and 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 who are smart enough to be in MENSA and want to be able to tell everybody that they're in MENSA. And you know, I'm sure there is some of that to

some degree. There are people that like to to flaunt their Harvard degree or you know, drop the H bomb as they say, or or their Ivy League education or their MENSA membership. But I'm sure there are out of a hundred and fifty thousand people, there are lots of Gina davis Is 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 cross fit Oh God, make it stop, and who recently quit social media. Can you imagine? Ye? Should we talk about the history party of one? That's a good joke. Uh So MENSA got its start in six 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 a Lancelot where who was coming home for Christmas.

Break shared a cabin with a fifty year old named Roland Barrel or Beryl, and Burrill 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 uh, he said, you know, I'm into all kinds of stuff. Though I'm a smart guy. I'm into chronology and astrology, and where said, that's 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 i Q society within a school of people that were already super intelligent. And Burrell said, very interesting, huh. I envisioned him clapping his hands together and saying splendid. Okay,

because you left something out about him. One of the things that usually is touted about, um what what Beryl was into a barrel um is that he had a plan to make all men were very brightly colored clothing. I could not, for the life of me find out why or what the point was, but it's yeah, so so so. Barrell said, you know, this is a very great idea. I think we should we should explore this further.

And young Lancelot, where post doc UH 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 Burrell took him up on it, and um, it was there that they hatched the plan for MENSA after Burrell was given an intelligence test UM by Lancelot Where and When when Lancelot Where calculated the results and said, Mr Burrell, you are within the top one percent of

all people in terms of intelligence. It's widely reported that Roland Burrell cried because he was so happy and touched by that right and had funding uh 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 watted them up and said that's not important. Take my word for it. You're in the top one percent. Make the

checkout dumoi and Burrell said splendid. Uh. But they needed a name, and like you said, uh, they landed on MENSA. I think initially they wanted to call it UM Capital mm E n S, which was short for the Mental Health Society. That's just not even close. No, it's pretty where yeah, where's the h H? And also there was I think a a gentleman's magazine called Men's. Uh 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 envisioned its like all these smarty pants sitting around a round table talking about wonderful things. And they said, I guess they said, shut, that's as good a name as any. So originally, if you've ever seen that Simpson's episode where Lisa joins Mensa, UM, I don't remember that one.

It's it's a pretty good one. Uh. It's a cautionary tale about um mensa, letting an intelligent elite determine the fate of everybody else at the while just completely discounting anyone who's not an intelligent elite, right, Um, And like Comic Book Guy and Dr Hibbert and a couple of other character Sideshow mel, they're all in. 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. Um, But that's kind of originally what Lancelot where and Roland Barrel were, Um, we're envisioning when they founded mensa, this group of the most intelligent uh Britishers Britton's say, yeah, um in 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 mensah. And by the way, the keen eared listener would have just picked up on my one word impression of Juliu Sibbert. What did you say. I'm not going to repeat. It's got You've gotta be a keen listener man. So, uh, 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? Uh And and like two people will have gotten it and one person and the rest of us are all mad. Now, Oh that's okay, I'll do it for you off Mike. Uh So, yeah, they wanted they wanted to kind of 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 who?

You know? I need a smart person, let me look at my mental list. Uh. And their goal, I think, did you mention was six d people with their contact information so they could get in touch. And it took them thirteen years uh to get to that. That benchmark in nineteen fifty nine is when they finally got it.

And it wasn't until some American ex pats 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 it's crazy that it took him thirteen years to what because right after that, and I guess it was because of the interest among Americans, UM that initially started out, like you said, with ex pats, and then after a couple of articles captured everybody else's attention, UM that it just took off. Like if you saw a chart, it would look like that hockey stick of um of global warming. I think it is. Remember that

from the nineties the hockey stick crash. So that's pretty much what mentsa UM membership would look like it from nineteen sixty UM. And it was largely thanks to a

few people UM over the years. But one of the first people who really kind of helped meant to take off as an organization was a guy named John Cardella, who was an American pr guy UM, and he took this group that was almost had like fraternity like origins, like apparently Roland Barrel UM had a uh like part of the early rules was to have a woman seated on a throne wearing a leopard skin and nothing else UM as part of the meetings. Like it was they

had that kind of vibe to it. And when Cadella sure, you know, and it kind of Anton LaVey vibe UM. And so when John Cadella UM came in the picture, he like kind of dusted off all that stuff and UM turned it into a legitimate type of organization, definitely legitimized it, if not made it legitimate, right, So in fifty nine they had six hundred. By sixty seven, a mere eight years later, uh, it had swelled up to twelve thousand and change. And uh, 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 we're 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. Uh. True. M Sarah Briakoff, I think so I've seen it, seen it

compared to or Cerebral. So I think it's Cerebriakoff. Yeah, there's an extra vowel in there that's coming up the works. That's right up my alley. Though. Should we take a break, Sure, all right, let's take a break. We'll be right back, all right. So member member MENSA is gaining members very steadily. Uh, it is growing throughout the decades. You could, 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 like trying to make money, but it's an organization that that you know, that needs money to run. Um. I doubt if they like or have some super rich fund that they dig into but is when you look at the things they do, it's really nothing like super lavish. They don't have like 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, uh 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 um. They I think it was Cerebrakov who said, you know what we can also do is we can have these supervised like actually someone would come and administer a test. Uh, it would be a little

more official, 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 us stimulating in a alectual 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. So UM, there was kind of a heyday. It seems like, uh in the sixties, I think, And apparently there's a lot of attention at first between UK and US and UM. Within just a couple of years of coming on the scene, the Kansas City chapter stage of revolt against the UK headquarters six shooters, and basically I saw that they launched like a poison pen

attack where they were right. Yes, they would write the employers of these MENSA like higher ups and like and basically accused them of terrible stuff and and finally got the American chapters to basically be independent and equal UM, and that formed Mensa International. But the sixties were kind

of a heyday. The seven seemed to be hohum. And then apparently the eighties took off because UM, from what I saw in this article, and I can't remember what what maybe the independent from 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 UM, of getting away from the idea that you know you can achieve if you're given the right kind of stuff.

It's like, no, you got this problem over here, We got that you know, we're over here. We're not gonna help you, because why would we, Because you're you're beyond help, You're not naturally gifted. That kind of conservative uh thread that was really present in the in the Thatcher Reagan eighties 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 nineties or specifically with about thirty thousand there and now as fewer than twenty thou So, uh, Dave said, you know, some of this might be, you know, the MENSA image problem might be to blame. But you know, it's just one of those organizations. It's gonna have its ups and downs over the years. I'm sure as far as membership numbers, you know. Yeah, So, um, how do you get in, Chuck,

If you want to get into MENSA? What do you do? Hot shot? You bake some cookies for Gina Davis? Sure that doesn't hurt Uh, No, you it's really easy, actually, uh. In in practice, you just need to score within the top two percent of an intelligence test and that it's it's not like you can just take any intelligence test.

It depends on UM. Well, I mean, now there's an official MENSA test that that you take, but uh, there are also other i Q tests that can qualify, the Stanford Benet test, the Catel three B test, and I think we should hold off on sort of the the big reveal, the big twist here for another few minutes. Okay, Uh, we'll keep that in her hip pocket. Uh. An official from your country will administer uh their tests to you, and uh it takes a couple hours if you take

the official ment to test. These are those If you've ever taken an i Q test, you know it's not like the s A T. It's it's a logic and reasoning test generally. Uh. And the questions are things like, uh, you're you're doing a lot of sequencing, like look at these shapes, which shape would come next? Which number would come next? Uh. It does test verbal intelligence and vocabulary and stuff like that. Math is a part of it, but it's times, 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 time to pressure, right, like that one scene in Swordfish with poor poor Hugh Jackman. I didn't see that. You didn't miss much at all. Ok So, um, that's

the standard mentor test menta admissions test. Um. And some people say, well, hold on, if you're a non native English speaker and you're in America, that that's those tests are have been shown to be biased towards certain people, usually based on language. So Mental also administers what's called the culture fair test, and it's nothing like yeah, it's nothing but shapes and symbols and um, you know what what comes next kind of thing. And I took a

test like that. It was I think Norwegian in origin, and I got to like 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 stop. I just had no idea what was next? This recently? You did that for this? Yeah, I was yesterday, um, and I I a little a 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 thirty minute online like MENSA workout thing for free, which is sort of just an amuse bush uh to see if you might want the full deal, the 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 cross word and spelling be and playing word all 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 don't want to do this. Yeah, so I didn't do it. So they 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. Um. You can take those tests, the Standard test or the culture Fair Test once one time each and if you don't pass, meaning you don't score in the top two percent of the average American UM, 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 back door man way. That is what I think they call all it at MENSA. Yeah, this was the

thing we were keeping in our hip pocket. Uh, 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 forty dollar fee, and they can accept results from about a hundred and fifty 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 two percent, and you can get in that way. That's a big back door. It sure is a big backdoor, chuck um so Uh. One of the ways that you could get in is if you qualified for your high school's gifted program, or if you're super smarty pants, your middle school or even elementary school's gifted program. They gave you a bunch

of different telligence tests back then. If your school didn't burn down in a fire, it's possible they still have those records and you could have them via a sealed envelope from the school, uh sent to send your your test results. SEMENSA mental will check it out and be like, yeah, you're in, buddy, you're in now. Question about these gifted programs? Does that mean like the AP classes? All right, here's the deal. My friend, I was in AP English and AP History and then when I saw and we'll go

ahead and mention this. You can submit your S A T and a C T scores, your g R and your ls ats uh and if between eighty I'm sorry, between seventy four and ninety four, if you scored A twelve, if ye're higher on the S A T, you would get into MENSA even retroactively. Yeah, and buddy, I scored in eleven seventy. 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. Once I

took it once too, I got a ten ninety. That's good too. No, it's it's average. No, no, no, to ninety. I think. I think anything that breaks a thousand is on the higher side, not high high, but it's higher than average, right, I don't. 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 ninety four, they won't accept your s a T scores anymore because the s a T switched from testing general intelligence to testing what you've learned in school thus far. So it was like it went from being like an i Q test basically to a um an exit exam for for high school. I think that they changed it would do worse on that kind of tests, actually would have done worse. Yeah,

I think I took the intelligence one. I don't remember because it's I definitely took it in well, now, I probably were taking a ninety or I probably would have taken it in like ninety three. I think you would have taken it your sophomore or junior year, right, Yeah, so it's probably that I took it. So I took the the original intelligence test tonight. I got a ten ninety and it doesn't feel great, Chuck. I feel good

saying it out loud, but it doesn't feel great. Uh. Well, that got I mean that was back then very easy to get into the University of Georgia. It's a lot harder now. They've really tightened 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. And I gotta tell you so when I showed up with my ten ninety s A T score keep walking Pale, did you do you remember your high school g p A?

What are you bleating the fist? I don't even know what that is. I don't remember my g p A. I want to say it was, it wasn't. I mean, my brother I think was a four, oh, of course, but I think I was like a three two or something. Both threes. I mean it was pretty slightly above average, because I would think mine was probably lower than that. Like, I was not at all interested in school. I liked history,

I thought earth science was pretty cool. It wasn't until I got to college and wanted to like go to college. I just suddenly, like 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. And it was then that I started to become like a four oh student in college, not not at all in high school for a student. Uh well, I went to some easy colleges the way to Georgia.

Well my deal was I and I still am like this. I have a hard time tackling anything with enthusiasm that 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, 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 understood, 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 to just have something like that click that was so foreign, it's 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 disabilit at ease, and uh, 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 uh, 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 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 um um physical uh, I don't even know what you call it differences, thank you um and kids who don't have those, Like they were all in the same class together, and I was like, holy cow, 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 Yeah. I mean, like it was like the dark cages in the eighties and nineties even you know when we were in school. Um, but the 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, uh, 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 like like and just played with them. They were like best friends. She didn't seem to treat him any differently than she did any of the other kids. But it's 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 and not separating them by anything else. So hats off to school districts doing that. The final kind of test we should mention that can get you in uh as. If you were in the military prior to night you might be able to use your aptitude tests that you took back then.

Now they do more vocational aptitude testing, but back pre eight 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, okay, Chuck, so um, 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 like you know, congratulate themselves for a couple of weeks and that's it.

Other people like 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, Um, might be into nudism, might really love beer, just stuff that you would have like an interest in. But if you if you wanted to hang out with other high i Q people who have interests in that, you could do worse than joining MENSA.

I think. Yeah, Um, you have to be an active member. You have to keep up with your dues, which you're seventy nine bucks a year. Uh, And it's they have not a sliding scale, but they have a 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 pro rated by your age if you want to pay all at once and save some money. But the

dues are seventy nine bucks a year. And then like you said, there are are they're what they're called special interest groups. If you want to um drill down in your local area and be a member of like the MENSA Investment Club is a really popular one where imagine people sit around and talk about finances in smart ways to take care of your money. Um, it's like any other you know, local group that you you know, there's

probably a MENSA Knitting group. Uh, it's just it's just that you're meeting with people that are like minded and that they're all good at take their high Q and they're good at taking those kind of tests right, right.

And again, if you want some like unkind um characterizations of you know, what it's like at some of these, like you, 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 meet up 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 there're people who really like board games and really like um uh beer and are probably like really sexually active to a surprising degree. Um. 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 mental world. Yeah, and the modern mental world. I've seen that in more

place than one. Uh. And you know, I, 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 there usually is some sort of mention of like, yeah, there seemed to be a sort of right wing bent two uh, and again there's a hundred fifty thousand members. That's a generalization, but at least that's what's being written. Yeah. So, UM, the the big deal gathering that they have every year, the big conference is called the Annual Gathering the a

g UM. Last year they had one for it was like a world gathering because it was the seventy five anniversary of Mensas founding UM and they had that in Houston of all places. UM. So 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 Shadow Lee, who's I think she is the keynote who's going to speak about Hidden Figures. There's also a drag show during

a breakfast brunch UM I probably on Saturday or Sunday. UM. And then the other thing they're going to do is drink, drink, play games, drink and drink. I think is what what else is going to go on at the a G It's really interesting. There are other smaller get together as. There's one called the UH 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. Uh. There are mind Games, which is a four day board game extravaganza where people this is since nineteen they get together and play board games and You're 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 uh might be played at the mind Games conference that it might even get that stamp one day. Yeah, you never know, 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 uh. 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 throw down

where they play trivia games against one another. So one of the other things about MENTA that it's well known for at their meetups is that people will wear name tags UM, third try and the the There'll be a dot, a colored dot next to their UM 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 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, uh, it's one of these things I just learned m in the past few years that like with uh, 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. Mm hmm. 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 go up and just like tackle everyone I see, Like, I don't think I've ever uh, I don't think I've ever been in a situation, in a situation where I made someone uncomfortable 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 chugs ask 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. You know what. I think that means like lead with your hips when you're hugging. Yeah, I think so. So what else, Chuck, What else do we have to say about MENA? Well, I mean, I think we've talked about their image problem

a bit. Like you said that you can throw a rock on the internet and and open almost any article and you will see someone bagging on mensa, uh 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, these are probably a lot of these people probably got teased growing up because they may be fairly bookish, and uh like stop now, like your adults don't continue this sort of bullying in 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 um unconsciously or overtly, um, 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 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 at least proposed um. And so like, when you take a group that focuses on i Q 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 or parliaments are not afraid to like go down those rabbit holes and discuss them and talk about them free speech is a huge, huge, um thing among mentions, and they very much resent not being able to say whatever they want to say. UM. So it's it's it's with those articles. It's revealing there's like a culture clash between the person who's writing the article and the mentions that 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 UM 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, UM. Jamie's comedian who did a four part episode called My Year in Mensa where she joined Mensa. UM. 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 a moderated called Firehouse, which can be very unkind and I think she uh loft has 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. Um. 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 i Q and i Q tests test a certain kind of smartness, completely leaves out things like emotional intelligence, street smarts, Yeah, that kind of stuff like, um, like it's a group of

people who do really well on aptitude tests. Who 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 two percent of that group of people, that type of person So um, the fact that it's it's kind of bandied about is like the the the society for intelligent people. Um, 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 i Q 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. And if you get a hundred and fifty in of any people together in a group. Uh, you're gonna have a couple of hundred that are pretty

bad people that do bad things on Facebook. Um. So it's like, I just have a hard time sometimes when entire organizations get lumped in because of it. I don't want to say a few bad apples, but just the actions of 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. Uh, Well, if you want to know more about mental you can start poking

around the internet. And uh, since I said you can start poking around the internet, that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this a young listener. Hey, guys, brand new listener to the show. I first heard about you through the new book, which I checked out of the library a day the day before my baby was born. After my has been 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 soothings out of my voice would laller to sleep. And that is all My husband walked in on me reading about Jack of ORKI into a three week old and put a temporary moratorium on reading to her. Uh, I think that's probably a joke. Um, 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 them up, young Jessica. Thanks you ver 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 um readings or listenings 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 Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H