English Audio Request

I met Nathan Haselbauer a few weeks ago over lobster bisque at a hip hotel in Manhattan, where he told me that he left Wall Street when his new hobby became all-consuming. 'Working for a corporation you can hit a ceiling,' he said, 'but with the IQ site I felt I could really make a difference. I wanted this to be the thing people remembered me by.' It was also important to him that the venture did not stagnate for another reason: he claimed he had spent $350,000 on its design and promotion.
Haselbauer wears his intelligence lightly. His conversation ranged over many topics, and none of them was Star Trek. He explained that the New York High IQ Society became the International High IQ Society when people started asking whether it was OK to join from abroad. Haselbauer claims a paid-up membership of 7,000, with 20,000 more who have passed one of the tests but have yet to hand over their credit card details. His software has also logged 360,000 unique visitors every month, one in three of whom takes one of the tests. Of these, 17 per cent pass, and 10-20 people sign up each day; 26 per cent of his members are women, and 80 per cent are 35 or younger.
I asked Haselbauer why, with all his smart members and all this internet traffic, he was still stuck with an unwieldy name like the IHIQS, rather than a snappy one like Mensa(Latin for table, symbolising 'a round table society where all members are equal'). He said many of his finest minds had been thinking about this for a long time.
I also asked him about the shades of elitism attached to high IQ societies, and he said that by lowering the entrance bar the IHIQS was less elitist than some, and anyway wasn't really elitist at all, 'although obviously there is some cachet involved in joining an exclusive club'. He believed that people would dismiss the notion that he was running a scam as soon as they joined, and he became unusually animated.
'Most of the other online IQ tests are absolute garbage,' he offered. 'They overinflate their scores because they're selling [character/intelligence] profiles. You're more likely to buy one of their profiles if they tell you you're a genius.'(I tried to gain entry to the IHIQS by deliberately filling in incorrect or guessed answers to the tests: I failed.) 'We decided to become the gold standard online,' Haselbauer continued. 'We have come up with questions that have never been done before. Most people do folding cubes, where you have to fold it up and say what shape it will make, but anyone can do that. I said, "Let's do a folding rhombic icosidodecahedron. Try folding that up!"'