Human beings are getting dumber. That’s a fact, according to several researchers who have raised concerns about the state of our collective brainpower. According to them, IQs are taking a dive, while functional illiteracy is on the rise in several countries around the world. We’d hazard a guess that common sense is also being used a lot less than it once was.

Is it any surprise, then, that even the slightest display of intelligence nowadays can elicit a round of applause? As one person put it: “This made me realize I’m surrounded by stupid people.” They were reacting to a thread in which netizens relayed the times they witnessed pure genius in motion. To be fair, many of the responses were quite impressive… Others, not so much.

Bored Panda has compiled a list of posts that prove that, while we may be heading towards the Age of Stupid, we aren’t quite there — just yet. We also take a look at why experts say we’re not as smart as we once were. You’ll find that info between the images.

#1

My brother’s hamster. We used to have these hamster cages. The hamster would stuff it’s pouches completely full of food, climb up to the 2nd story (the blue floor) put its front paws on top of the door, then jump off and swing down, knocking the door open. This way it would escape the closed cage to go on a little hamster adventure with enough food to sustain itself for a few days. It was by far the smartest animal I’ve ever seen. After that we put clips on the cage doors to keep them shut.

© Photo: thescottman25

We had much to celebrate in the 1980s, when a New Zealand intelligence researcher revealed that humanity was getting smarter. James R. Flynn’s research found that there had been a consistent rise in IQ test scores across the world throughout the 20th century.

The phenomenon became known as the Flynn Effect. Some credited better nutrition, education, and healthcare for the boost in our collective brainpower. Whatever it was, it was working and we were clearly doing something right. 

#2

I enjoy playing chess, and I’d say I’m probably better than the average person on the street. I once played a guy who absolutely destroyed me in about five minutes, and the only reason it took him that long was because he was also playing five other people at the same time (six different boards) and he beat all of us. One guy was particularly good so it took probably twenty minutes to beat him. My game was over in about 15 moves. He was playing so fast at the beginning that he didn’t even really stop moving his feet…he just kind of kept walking slowly from board to board constantly.

© Photo: WBuffettJr

#3

I was at the zoo and witnessed an orangutan place a blanket flat on the ground, then placed hay and leaves in the centre of it, and folded the blanket to make a pillow. A pillow. I was amazed.

© Photo: burger_plop

Sadly, the celebration would be short-lived… Just ten years later, it emerged that IQ scores were declining in developed countries around the world. Flynn himself noted that teenagers in the U.K. tested lower in the 2000s than their 1980s counterparts.

But years earlier, Norwegian experts had already sounded the alarm. “Because of its compulsory military service, the country had amassed a massive database of cognitive testing—covering more than 730,000 young men from 1962 to today,” explains Cezary Pietrasik, co-owner of Synerise, an AI company that specializes in human behavior prediction. “What researchers found was stunning: IQ scores peaked among those born around 1975 and have been declining since. The average drop is about 7 points per generation.”

#4

Lived next to a guy in college who could just simply play any musical instrument you put in his hands. Drums, guitar, keyboards, an oboe, sax… you name it.

And any song he could hear just once and play it back.. just bonkers.

© Photo: Aught_To

#5

Had a buddy in highschool with an eidetic memory and an IQ of 80 who was still in all the gifted classes.

He could recite entire pages, down to the number of the page, of any book he read. (And he was very, very well read.)

I guess he brute forced his way through school on nothing but an impressive memory. Maintained pretty standard A’s and B’s throughout his course work, which was surprising given his lowish IQ.

It was actually pretty eerie.

Actually a really cool guy. Used to debate philosophy and psychology based issues with him because we used both subjects as a hobby. He taught me more than my teachers.

© Photo: KingRat92

#6

When my friend started studying at university, she was an engineering major. After a while, she decided that she wanted to change her major. Because there wasn’t enough math. Now she’s studying just straight up math.

Sometimes she makes the 9 hour drive back home, and she plays a game to keep herself alert.

She adds up the numbers that she sees on license plates of passing cars and then add all of the cars’ totals’ together. She tries to go as long as she can.

I think she’s brilliant and insane.

EDIT: she hopes to work as a research intern for NASA this summer. She loves space.

© Photo: TimeWarpTalia

“The world is dumber, and we all know it,” wrote Lane Brown for New York magazine in 2025. “Lately, it feels like that culture-wide upgrade to our mental operating systems has been rolled back to an older and buggier version.”

So what is going on that’s causing this continued dip in intelligence? Some say it’s because we’re depending on AI to do the jobs our brains once handled. Others blame social media and say we’re glued to our screens instead of stuck in good books. Then there are those who believe that COVID-19 played a part.

#7

My parents have a papillon – a little fluffy dog with giant ears – who is cute as hell. If no one wants to play with her, she will pick up her little ball and throw it for herself.

Well, she tossed it one day and it got stuck in someone’s shoe. She dug her nose in to try getting it out, but it didn’t work. She dragged the shoe over to another shoe and tugged at it until it was on top, then pushed it over. We all stopped what we were doing to look. She put the shoe back on top of the other again and gave it another shove with a little more force.

The ball came tumbling out and she ran off like nothing happened. It was awesome.

© Photo: anon

#8

A guy who joined my year in sixth form (last 2 years of high school for Americans). I somehow became friends with him, one of probably only 2 friends he had in the whole school.

This guy was a genius. He had already done the entire syllabus (A-Levels) and spent all of his time in classes working on university level problems. In class, he would sit there, working on some unsolvable theorem, while we morons were being taught matrices, calculus, normal dist, and other basic stuff he probably learnt when he was 5 years old. He would only interact when the entire class was stumped on a particular question, he glances up and tells us the answer. Pretty sure he won all the science and general academic achievement awards too. Later he went to Cambridge, and I joked with him if he was top 5 in his year in maths. ‘Top 5,’ he said, ‘Hmm, maybe top 10’.

I know some seriously clever people, people who’ve gone to Oxbridge, Harvard, people studying PhDs in economics, etc, but this guy was miles ahead of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if he won a Nobel Prize at some point. That reminds me, got to keep in contact with him…

© Photo: WittyBanker

#9

I know this girl at work that is good at nearly everything she does.

Software engineer, interned at several large tech companies and currently works at one. Fantastic programmer and engineer. She’s even designed her own PCBs for electronics projects she’s done.

Knows several languages including French, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, Tamil, and some Spanish and German.

Has an immense amount of general knowledge, not sure how she knows so much. I guess she has a good brain for storing information because she reads a lot of comics and plays a lot of games and it always seems like she knows 100% of the lore for those things.

She plays a bunch of instruments as well, including piano, electric guitar, bass, and violin.

And she is a really good artist. Not talking about “oh, that’s nice” kind of art. Like she could be a full blown game or movie concept artist, her art is just that fantastic.

Finally, she’s also just really good at reading people, which is a hugely underrated talent.

Not sure how some people can be like that. Makes me feel so inadequate.

Forgot to add: she’s also a jewelry designer and an author. Lol.

© Photo: feelinglikeatool

But not everyone believes that the world is getting dumber and dumber. Some experts argue that we shouldn’t use traditional IQ scores to measure collective intelligence. One of them is Dr Philip Njemanze, a neurologist and Chairman of the International Institutes of Advanced Research and Training Centre at Chidicon Medical Centre in Nigeria.

Njemanze says that older IQ tests were not designed to measure things like digital navigation, rapid visual processing, multitasking across screens, and filtering large amounts of online information.

“General intelligence, in simple terms, is the brain’s overall ability to reason, solve problems, and adapt to new situations,” he explains, adding that, “We may not be witnessing a loss of intelligence, but rather a shift in the type of cognitive skills being developed in a digital environment.”

#10

My 10 year old brother got a Rubik’s cube as a gift and immediately reprogrammed a simple robot he’d also gotten as a gift to recognise each colour and solve the cube for him. He built working arms for it so all he had to do was place the cube in a compartment, turn on the robot and wait approx. 2 minutes for it to be solved.

© Photo: RayShell95

#11

I had a teacher in high school that could write a sentence using both hands. He would start on opposite ends and meet in the center perfect every time.

He also spoke four lauguages, and won the shot-put gold in the Senior Olympics. Why the Hell he was teaching high school Spanish and drivers ed puzzles me every time I think about it.

© Photo: Punch_Drunk_AA

#12

One of my colleagues mentioned a few years ago that he’d gotten an offer from his bank for a credit card with 0% interest for a year and a max of $10000. So he took the offer and opened a saving certificate *at the same bank* for $10000 at 12 months and something like 5% interest, paying for it with his credit card. So he got $500 from the bank for free. Fits the bill of smart but strange pretty well.

© Photo: tecg

Pietrasik, however, isn’t convinced. He says even if we don’t consider the IQ decline, we’re still facing a situation where there is an increase in functional illiteracy. He defines this as the “inability to perform basic reading and math tasks necessary for everyday life.”

The expert backs up his warning with some sobering stats from the U.K. “1 in 10 people couldn’t identify the better deal between a 10% discount and a £30 discount on a £250 television (the latter saves more money, but sounds less appealing to the innumerate),” Pietrasik writes. “In the EU, up to 40% of adults in countries like Romania and Portugal are considered functionally illiterate. Even in high-performing Sweden, that number is still 8%.”

#13

My two cousins standing on a deck, watching the sun set. One says, “man, what a pretty sunset. I wonder when the sun will hit the horizon.”

The other cousin stands there staring at the horizon for about 15 minutes, comes over to our table and says “6:36.”

When we figured out what he was telling us; he stood there and figured out the variables and calculated when the sun would set. In his head!

We tracked the sun. At 6:36, it hits the horizon. The dude is just a quiet guy. We know he’s smart, but forget how smart because he’s never loud about it.

© Photo: theresites

#14

I have a female friend who has almost superhuman memory. But only when it comes to conversations she partook in. She can remember whole conversations, who said what in what order etc., that happened 10-15 years ago. Like it’s really creepy. But if she reads a book, she has a hard time holding on to what she learned from reading. She started taking a pilots certificate last year, but had to give up, because she would read and read and read and keep forgetting what she read.

© Photo: FarRip8320

#15

I said something about my car to a coworker and she said something like “Is yours the one with the license plate 8HR32G?” I wasn’t even sure, but I checked and she was right. I asked how she knew, and she said she knew everyone’s plates. And she did – people were coming up to her and she would rattle off their plates. There were about 40 people in our office. So strange and impressive.

© Photo: andiam03

Things aren’t much better across the pond in the United States, he says.

“Roughly 45 million Americans read below a fifth-grade level,” reveals the expert. “And in 2018, a Pew Research study found that only 26% of Americans could reliably distinguish fact from opinion in written text. Among 15-year-olds globally, that number drops to just 14%.”

#16

Someone I knew once memorized a full deck of cards in under 2 minutes, *while* holding a conversation, still don’t know how their brain works like that.

© Photo: upstoreplsthrowaway

#17

I used to do graphics design on all kinds of material that used bar codes, and I would do the coding on the system that generates the bar codes. After many years working with this, I started being able to “read” barcodes, recognize which coding had been used etc. I couldn’t exactly read the code in the sense that I could read the content of the code, but I could recognize barcodes belongings to different items, like “this barcode is for milk”, and I could recognize which coding had been used, if the coding was right etc., just from looking at the barcode itself.

My colleagues used to test me by introducing errors in the system, enter the wrong codes, doing the format wrong etc., if they entered data in to the system to get the barcodes they needed, just to see if I would spot the errors. I caught it every time.

On one occasion, a wrong code had been printed on the label for a box, that a courier was picking up, and he freaked out, because in passing, I saw that the barcode on the label was a nonsense code, so I told him to wait while I made a new label for him.

#18

I had an elementary student who was incredibly accurate at picking things up and guessing its weight.

We later found out he was raised in a [trap] house.

In his view, the dumbing down of the global population has less to do with failing education systems or student laziness and more to do with what’s deemed ‘normal’ by society.

“It’s about a culture in which intellectual laziness is not only tolerated but increasingly rewarded,” he warns. “When celebrity status trumps expertise, when emotional outrage outweighs rational discourse, and when the loudest voice wins over the most informed—what hope is there for cognitive resilience?”

What do you think? Are we getting dumber by the day or are we right where we’re meant to be? Let us know in the comments below…

#19

I remember this kid in my speech/debate class. Asian kid, introverted, has facial twitches, but brilliant. We had to give spontaneous talks on topics literally pulled from a hat. We’d reach in, read the topic, and get about a minute to prepare a 3 minute talk. His had to give an ad hoc speech on how science made the world better. And he gave something that sounded like he’d researched it for weeks starting with Galileo and ending with the fact that we had all survived childhood in a place where alligators and disease carrying mosquitoes roamed.

© Photo: frank-sarno

#20

I once saw a man successfully cancel not one, but two jobs he had sent to the printer.

© Photo: hobnobbinbobthegob

#21

My exgirlfriend’s boyfriend (poly relationship) was amazing at chess. Nationally ranked master. She would laugh when I said I was going to beat him eventually. We called him a robot. For a promotion once, a local ice cream shop hired him to play against customers and anyone who beat him got free ice cream.

There was no free ice cream given on that day.

© Photo: dak0tah

#22

A friend of mine is fluent in 5 languages, not just fluent but he will joke, fully use double entendre, slang, etc. I’ve seen him pick up girls in all of those languages.

EDIT: A bit more context. We live in Prague, and in here is not uncommon to be in a group of people where everybody has a different nationality and a different language, so in that context imagine if you are in this group of people and there’s a guy speaking fluently in every persons language, it’s actually quite impressive.

© Photo: vanoranje

#23

A guy that I used to play poker with in college got really, really good after he left school. So good that he breezed his way through the Ohio Poker Championship help at one of the Cincinnati area casino riverboats (I forget which one.) It was a three day tourney (sometime around 2005 or 2006) and I remember talking with him both of the first two days on the phone after they halted action for the day. He was reading really well and of course, catching some cards.

I ended up skipping classes that day to hang with him during the final round. Every two hours or so we’d catch a smoke and talk strategy outside the room. He was onfire that day – I’ve never seen anyone play better poker over a six hour period than him that day. Keep in mind, I beat this guy out of several grand during the year I spent at Ohio State. He used to be my whipping boy and here he is lighting dudes up.

The most ultimate hand was him heads up against a guy at the end of the table. My friend had been reading this guy so well for two days – just OWNING him. During the hand the guy is betting into my friend, and on fourth street and fifth street my friend calls both bets. Now, if you know much about poker you know that it’s never good if you’re just calling a guy. Generally you want to be the one pushing the action – you want to be the one raising or folding, never just calling. But call is exactly what my friend did on the last two rounds of betting. They were pretty hefty bets too.

At the end he flips up his hand and says, “Queen high. That’s good, right?” as confidently as I’ve ever heard him. The guy at the end of the table just crumpled in his chair. My friends busted him a few hands later and ended up winning the tourney (and 50k) later that afternoon.

#24

Saw a guy wire a grinder to a dimmer switch so he could slow down the rpm without buying a new grinder.

© Photo: ddavis113

#25

My high school history teacher blew our class away when we had visitors from various countries sit in on a few classes. At the end of their time in our class they had the chance to ask him some questions but, none of them spoke English well enough to properly articulate what they wanted to say. So my teacher casually went back and forth answering questions in Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, you name it, he spoke it. After they had left he just went right back to teaching as if that was not impressive at all.

© Photo: Synkroniser

#26

I once had a friend who managed to top the entrance exams of the Philippines top 3 universities. He literally made our valedictorian look cute.

#27

I once had two guys come pull my truck out of a tall, steep ditch. The amount of “common man” physics these guys had in play to not only pull the truck out of a peat bog, but also keep it from tipping over while it was creeping up the ditch bank was incredible. I almost had them call it off and I’d figure something else out, but they assured me there was nothing to worry about. Sure enough they got it done without any trouble. It took a while, because they were continually stopping to recalculate (in their minds), but I was amazed.

© Photo: BoltActionRifleman

#28

Met an autistic savant once. I think that’s what his diagnosis was, I could be wrong though..

Anyway, somebody said for me to ask him what day of the week I was born on, by simply telling him my birthdate: month, day and year.

So I did, he quickly said IT WAS A TUESDAY.

Hmm, says me. My mother always said It was a Thursday.

So I googled it. He was right, mom was wrong.

Amazing.

© Photo: Less_Campaign_6956

#29

I knew a guy that could remember everyone’s phone number, name, and employer. He was in sales and was a living database.

© Photo: Odd_Awareness1444

#30

The little sister of a friend of mine was one of those kids who develop language at a freakishly early age. She was younger than two, I was eating dinner at their place, and she knocked her sippy cup off her high chair table. She shrugged and said “a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”.

© Photo: rapiertwit

#31

A guy in high school could basically do any addition, subtraction, multiplication or division in his head and give an answer quicker than you could type it on a calculator. I can’t remember how far we pushed it with number size but could instantly do a three digit number by another three digit number.

#32

I have a child in my class who is scraping a pass. She struggles with focus and is a bad test taker as a result.

But the observations this girl makes are incredible. She sees connections between things that are amazing.

She is also tiny, which has meant she has a lot of sass to make up for being physically so small. I have seen her command a group of boys that are all older and bigger than her and get them to work on the task at hand.

She is going to do great things with her life.

#33

My dads boss has an idedic memory or whatever it’s called where she remembers absolutely literally everything she’s ever seen or heard etc.
during meetings apparently they’ll be discussing strategies for what machines to use and how (it’s a tech manufacturing plant) and their reasoning and someone might be saying “well machine #2 was having this issue three or four times in the last month…” and she will interject and cite the exact numbers for all of machine 2’s reports in the last three years and extrapolate trends in her head from the multi-page long data reports on hundreds of machines daily from the past year.
And when one of the people under her tries to lie or whatever she catches them every single time because she just has to LOOK at the data once and she just…knows it forever. Like if someone says “yeah I cleaned that machine two weeks ago. I’m 100% sure of it”, if she’s seen the logs for it she will reply, “no, you signed off in blue pen on this date at this time that the machine was cleaned and it has not been cleaned since. Two weeks ago you cleaned machine #8 and John cleaned machine 12, and last week you took a long lunch from 12:31 to 1:45. Pull up the logs and you’ll see.”.

#34

I once saw a guy perfectly fold back a map at the first try.

The legend says he went back to his planet after blowing his cover with this move.

#35

I installed cable internet for a man from Ghana. In our conversation I discovered that he was a research physician at the University and he needed the Internet connection because he is the system admin for his brother’s Internet based business. While he was happily chatting away about the research project he was doing his fingers were clacking away at a pretty decent clip writing lines of code.

I can’t type and talk at the same time unless I’m saying the words that I’m typing. This guy was coding while talking about something completely unrelated at the same time. It makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

#36

In a classical mechanics lecture, our lecturer wanders in and tells us about a girl he was walking behind whose pony tail was swinging back and forth. He then proceeded to determine the resonant frequency of oscillation of the pony tail and the derive the forcing frequency of her walking to determine how close she was to oscillating her ponytail at resonance…like a baws.

#37

My human anatomy and physiology professor last semester. You could ask him anything about the human body and no matter how irrelevant to the current topic, he would go extremely in-depth and finish off with a simple metaphor to help explain.

#38

My brother could explain techtonic plate theory before he could spell his full name.

A kid I babysit knew the scientific names of different kinds of clouds when he was three.

#39

I don’t know her in person, technically, but a friend of mine of a few years online is, quite probably, a genius. She is a chemist, with a PhD now — I’m fairly certain she’ll win a Nobel prize someday. What really impressed me, though, wasn’t her Chemistry stuff, since I didn’t know any of that, but her amazing language learning skills. I was a Japanese major, and she had a passing interest. She decided to learn some kanji from memrise, and in two or three weeks, she had learned enough kanji for a student who had studied three years of Japanese at high school. A few more weeks and she had learned enough for the international Japanese Standard, level two — around ~1000 different characters. Keep in mind she didn’t know ANY grammar — she was just purely remembering the characters. A few weeks later she was actually reading Chinese perfectly well (since Chinese is 100% kanji) — and not even that, but also Classical Chinese. Perhaps the smartest person I have ever known. Also, she has a couple novels completed, and the ideas in them are always absolutely genius. She was also our Game Master in roleplaying frequently and did some really interesting scenarios.

Another good candidate is my university professor. He has about eight or nine different degrees and speaks around ten languages: English, Japanese + Classical Japanese, Chinese + Classical Chinese, Korean + Classical Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish… he was our Classical Japanese teacher, and he would quite calmly explain grammar points in Chinese, and then turn to the Korean student and explain something in Korean. Absurdly smart. When he was teaching us he was taking another degree in Geology, I think a Masters. And he’s only around 50 years old…

#40

One of the times I was in a mental hospital, there was this guy named Ben. He grabbed a piece of paper and a crayon one day, and started writing. He wrote 17 different types of nuts. Then he went on to list the country of origin of EACH DIFFERENT NUT. Every single one was a different country.

There were more great people in each hospital than I have ever met on the outside. I just don’t understand why they have to lock up such beautiful and intelligent people who have fallen on hard times.

#41

My cousin’s son had some very thorough and well thought out ideas about time travel, string theory, and other dimensions. He’s nine with AS. The kicker is that his true scientific interests lie in geology. The other stuff is more of a hobby for him.

#42

Anytime my family friend speaks. He’s a retired plastic surgeon and he can speak about anything in the world. He knows a significant amount of knowledge from any topic you can pull out of [thin air]. One time, we were eating dinner and he spoke about music, dance, stocks, investments, and what places to eat in New Orleans… everything had a vast amount of detail.

So. Envious.

#43

My husband is the Leonardo Da Vinci of anything related to your house for building and repairs. He grew up on a construction site with his dad.
one day he was watching ESPN and talking to his BFF about which wire goes where. Very detailed instructions. I thought he was reading a data sheet on his lap, out of my line of vision. Nope, it’s all in his head and he’s flipping thru ESPN like an a kid off of ritalyn. He was helping his bff rewire his 100 year old house.

#44

I knew a 17 year old girl who got paid $100,000 to skip high school and go to college to do her groundbreaking PHD research in new-age mathematics and physics, sponsored by the Thiel Foundation.

#45

Me and a close friend both have some form of High Functioning Autism and we sit next to each other in our High School English Class. Whenever the class reads a novel for an assignment both of us are done reading it weeks before the rest of the class. So when the teacher decides that high school seniors are incapable of reading on their own (pretty much ever day we’re supposed to read) he read the book to us. so well the rest of the class exists in various stages of comatose. we just write stuff in the corner of are notebooks and show the other, these goes on until one of us realizes that even the most bored of “ordinary” students won’t even bother converting 11 kilometers 372 meters and 3 centimeters into the corresponding imperial units, let alone do such things with out use of a calculator or scratch paper.

#46

My grandfather never finished high school, but could add a full page of 4 or 5 digit numbers just by looking at it.  Couldn’t divide or multiply without struggling, and algebra was just gibberish to him.  
But he had this gift of adding numbers in his head at a glance.  .

#47

I know two chemistry professors in different countries who can do the same trick.

Advances in chemistry are published in papers, and retrieving the paper involves knowing the journal, year, and page number (with some journals you may also need volume and issue numbers, but it’s usually just those three). Both these profs can remember the entire reference for any paper they recall. They’ll just be like, “oh yeah I remember in Tetrahedron Letters 1995, page 4857 someone oxidized an alcohol with hypervalent iodine for the first time.

#48

Dude on a Reddit comment yesterday worked out how long a man had done his job based on how many steps he’d done. He was only two months off.

#49

I knew a merchandiser for a soda distributor who could glance at a display and know exactly how many packages of each flavor were needed.

No standing in front of it. No counting. No notes. Just a short walk around the store aisles, to the back room, and “24 Pepsi 12 packs, 31 Mountain Dew, etc..”

I was impressed every time.
I think it was a mixture of him being very experienced, being the person who merchandised he displays last time, and some form of neurodivergence.

#50

I can tell the square footage of any corporate meeting room within 15 seconds.

I also know how to count ceiling tiles and multiply.

#51

My boyfriend manipulating me.

#52

I knew this guy in high school with buck teeth and a mullet, talking to him, you’d definitely assume he was mentally handicapped, and extremely high…….. however, one day he brought in a rubik’s cube and just blasted it out in a few seconds without looking at it. Then we were in class one day and I think someone was doing algebra homework near him so he just looked over and started giving them the answers. apparently this guy can just look at an algebra equation and drop the correct answer with only a glance. I’m pretty sure he’s living in a trailer somewhere with no shirt on.

#53

I was involved in a real fracas from my company. It got litigious, and both sides were lawyered up – all men.

After months of legal negotiating I hired this very senior female partner to get it over the line. On a call with her and their lawyers, they threatened it was my last chance to agree before they fired me. There was a lot of testosterone flowing.

She paused, and then said “well, if you do that tomorrow morning we shall certainly be in court by the afternoon. And clearly no one benefits from that. So let’s agree not to do that so we can agree on a deal and end this sooner rather than later.” My employer’s lawyers completely caved, and caved to my final objections in a few days.

What I am not conveying yet is her tone. When she said it, she sounded like she was a mom telling her thing boy and his friend s from doing whatever they were up to she disapproved of. Every guy lost his testosterone buzz quickly after being scolded.

I’ve been involved in a lot of corporate litigation, and some personal. She did this for a flat rate (a lot of money). Even I would be shocked at what I paid per hour. But it’s the most effective legal spending I have ever seen.

This was a lot of EQ, but she was also an unbelievable lawyer. So she could back up her threats.

I’m sure I’ll get questions about this so I’ll explain why they didn’t just fire me. This typically happens when you are senior employee, but due to politics they want to get rid of you. But they don’t want you to go to certain competitors and have the headline “joe smith has surprisingly moved from company ABC to company XYZ.” It happens a lot in entertainment.

It may be one reason they did not just fire Jimmy Kimmel. He undoubtedly has a contract but things change: ten years down the road competitors, you may have new competitors they never thought of.

There is a lesson here. If you ever have legal problems, hire the most expensive lawyer you can find. Other lawyers know their reputation and tend to want to not go to court against that lawyer. Most people hire the cheapest. You can always change lawyers later, but you’d be surprised how fast things get settled when tho other side starts worrying about losing in court.

#54

I have an in-law that moved to Hong Kong and became fluent in Cantonese AND Mandarin.

#55

A guy i was in college with didnt speak one word of english and didnt use a calculator he was from china.. he did everything in his head including logarithms. He got 100 percent on everything…. Insane intelligence.

#56

My father was an Ichthyologist. The amount of information he knew about fish from all over the world was amazing. In our main fish store (1,000 salt and freshwater tanks), we had a “fish hospital” where people would bring their beloved 10 cent goldfish or $500 exotic fish to be healed! They were isolated in a separate room with pH tests, medications, etc.

It seemed so normal as an 80’s kid – but now that I write this it seems crazy (people don’t even have fish tanks any more).

#57

I knew a guy in a bike club who had several PHDs. You’d never know unless you started asking him questions.

#58

My classmate knew the capital city of every country!

#59

One of my closest friends. Not a single instance, but he just seems to excel in most things he tries. He does exceedingly well in school, studied biology, chemistry, he’s accomplished at math, he can play guitar, drums, bass, self taught piano, he can paint and do art pretty well, he cooks really nice looking dishes on a near daily basis, very organised, well read in the area of politics, world affairs, social stuff and history. He’s also not socially inept (though I do possess a bit more natural social adeptness then him…so he claims).

I think the dude is brilliant.

#60

There is this kid in my class. He literally got to the max number you can get on 2048 which is like 32000+.

#61

I have a friend who is incredibly smart. She’s in almost all advanced classes, was taking a senior level physics class last year (during freshman year of high school), is fluent in Latin and Japanese, and was reading books that even Shakespeare would find difficult by the end of middle school.

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