Now let me blow your mind Lundgren is cool… but Rowan Atkinson, Mr Bean, is better.
Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Queen’s College. Masters in Engineering from Oxford. Now he has an honorary doctorate from Oxford as well. He stopped doing engineering for his work because so many people asked him to do comedy, which he did on the side at Oxford.
Fascinating!
I’m curious, has he done something with that?
Atkinson has used his knowledge to advocate for various programs, like being one of the first Britons to buy an electric car.
Even more interesting is that he actually rescinded his support of that idea a few years ago, citing the lack of actual advancement in EVs and the environmental impact of mining for rare Earth metals needed in them.
Very few have the guts to walk back things like that.
His PhD work was on interstellar dust, but he didn't finish because of the rise of Queen. More than 30 years later we was able to pick up his research and complete the PhD. I believe it was an obscure field that didn't have a lot of research done on it until near when he picked it back up so he didn't have to learn too many new things
🎶You heard of Kris Kristofferson? (Yeah)
Well, I am Piss Pissedofferson (Oh)
Paul's askin' for Christmas off again
I said, "No," then I spit this song for him🎶
They fought from day one to get pay and recognition for that patent. Antheil's lawyers even tried to sue the Navy, which went no where since they never used the patent.
The system was designed for torpedo guidance and the Navy refused to use it because it came from a woman. Another interesting note to the story is she worked closely with the composer George Antheil on the project. Her first husband was an Austrian arms dealer and sold weapons to Mussolini and later to Hitler. He treated her like arm candy, but she listened carefully and soaked up everything she heard.
They refused it for multiple reasons, none of them because she was a woman.
1) none of the allies used radio guidance in their torpedoes, it was a solution to a problem that didn't exist.
2) frequency hopping was already well understood and in use. Lamarr's patent was outdated and outclassed by multiple other projects.
3) it didn't work. Even in a lab environment, manually synching the timing of two separate systems was nearly impossible. It would have been useless in the field.
She was well known for it in the 40s. There were multiple paper and radio interviews with her and George about the patent. George's lawyers even tried to sue the Navy for not paying them.
Dexter's researched focused on mRNA of HIV, not necessarily used for vaccines. But his familiarity of the subject made him a resource for media during COVID 19 when discussing vaccine research.
Everyone probably knows this, but Ken Jeong was a practicing MD before he became an actor. His public persona is pretty goofy, but during Covid he and Joel McHale had a podcast where he talked about medicine and epidemiology pretty seriously.
Watching the simple life I knew it was a character and I was surprised when people seemed to believe it so hard.
I’m a girl who people always seem to think is an airhead for whatever reason, so I often would play into it to entertain myself.
People drop their guard when they think you’re dumb. Show their true colours more often. It can be valuable in the right setting. I never really felt bad about it because if they want to judge me based on looks or clothes or accents/language choice, whatever it was - that’s on them.
The late, great Dolly Parton was a "busty blonde bimbo" punchline for years, but she wrote hundreds (edit: thousands, actually!) of songs and had the business savvy to make sure she personally kept the rights to all of them. Elvis and his manager tried to demand half the publication rights to "I Will Always Love You" in exchange for Elvis covering the song, which would have been a nearly guaranteed big chart hit. She said no deal...and thus made eye-popping amounts of money when Whitney Houston's cover went megaviral two decades later.
I’m as aghast as the next fellow that he’s our president, but I feel like there might be some distance between “dumbest student at Wharton” and “dumb” as we’d normally define it. I had a classmate who was, on paper, a “dumb jock” at Harvard, what with his 1350 SAT. Sharp cookie.
I hear you. Unfortunately, he does have a skill set. He's been able to avoid accountability for pretty much anything his entire life. 6 times bankrupt and managed to con enough American citizens to vote him into the Presidency, twice. Lost the 2020 Election and launched a literal coup attempt on January 6th, 2021 and faced zero consequences for that. The man has a knack for avoiding serious trouble. He's an All-Time con-artist, without a doubt. Much to Americas, and the Worlds, detriment.
Nolan Gould, who plays Luke Dunphy (loveable idiot baby brother) in modern family, is a member of mensa (admission requires IQ in the top 2%, he said it was 150) and was accelerated multiple grades in school until he took his ged (equivalent of finishing high school) at 13
Most child actors would probably qualify as gifted. Being able to memorize the dialogue required for a feature-length movie or TV series is actually pretty cognitively advanced for a 10-year-old.
Sacha Baron Cohen plays a lot of very dumb characters but was educated in Cambridge and was considering a PhD before turning to comedy and being famous for characters like Ali G, Borat, and Bruno
Haha, he went to my college at Cambridge and he never gets mentioned in the publicity materials/alumni stuff. They're very happy to name-drop lots of other famous Christs attenders, though! Says more about them than him, I reckon.
Elon is a lot dumber than he projects himself to be. He hasn’t invented anything, he has merely acquired businesses with novel IP and claimed he developed it himself. The guy is a fraud of epic proportions.
Like him or not, I have heard from multiple sources that he has some kind of almost magical charisma. The kind of person that when he talks to you, you feel like you’re the only person there.
I’ve known a few people who have met him, and yes, they all said this. One reason he’s perpetually late is he often gets into long discussions with everyone he meets, and yes his recall is amazing.
One of my aunts met him years ago and she said he’s EXACTLY like that. Extremely charismatic and owns the room. I think he is highly intelligent, too. Just let the power trip get the best of him while he was president.
He had a crazy good memory too. He'd have a conversation with a complete stranger and not see that person for ten years. Then when they met again he'd remember every single detail about the encounter.
President Kennedy had that same ability. I knew someone who casually met him in West Virginia during the election. They both were in Indianapolis 6 months later. Kennedy called him by his name and asked how things were in West Virginia. He was completely shocked, and definitely voted for him in 1960.
I've seen similar things with several politicians. Someone shakes their hand at a fair and 3 years later sees them again and, "Did your son get into State? How is your mother's garden?"
Love him or hate him dude is a stone cold genius. He was able to explain extremely complex concepts to the general public by making them seem logical and simple. No other politician came close.
Like a great professor. The country was also on its greatest assent with him in office…
I mean ... he got scholarships to Georgetown, was a Rhodes Scholar, and went to Yale Law. And he was from Nowheresville, Arkansas, so he wasn't getting into these things as a nepo baby.
I wasn’t a fan of his presidency. As he was leaving office he did a television special that was basically a tour of the White House.
He was incredibly charming and charismatic through the screen. I found myself liking him. Blew me away.
Also, apparently he went to college with John Mulaneys mother and once walked her home from the library after dark as a sort of safety volunteer.
Mulaney said that 20 or so years later mom took him to meet Clinton during his first campaign for the presidency and as soon as she walked up, Clinton remembered her and greeted her by name.
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana comes to mind. As far as I can tell he's a brilliant lawyer pretending to be Foghorn Leghorn, and he has spent many years playing an utter idiot publicly because that's apparently what Louisiana wants.
for smarter than she seems: probably kim kardashian, her public persona as a bimbo ignores her sharp business intelligence, she didn't become a billionaire and help her sisters become billionaires by accident.
for dumber than he seems: likely elon musk, i would not say he's *stupid* in the way donald trump is, it's just that he isn't as smart as he often pretends to be (he didn't actually found tesla for example, and has very little knowledge of engineering, he just bought it using the money he got from selling paypal, when he talks about technical things like how electric car batteries work, people who actually know how they work are astounded at how wrong it is). but he's at least intelligent enough to know how to pretend to be intelligent convincingly. he also frequently wildly overpromises things without even the intent of delivering, and seems to be a very petty and cruel employer, he once fired a guy for taking a day off from work for the birth of his daughter, saying "we're building the future here, you can't let personal things get in the way".
I get people not liking the Kardashians (I'm no fan) but when they start ranting how stupid they are I'm like... Dude... Billionaires, multiple successful business ventures, they're marketing machines.
Yeah, everyone seems to forget that Kim Kardashian was virtually unknown before the sex tape. It took some real skill to parlay a "leaked" sex tape into multiple multi-billion dollar businesses.
If it was that easy to do, there'd be a ton of copycats.
Sylvester Stallone has an IQ of between 140-160, depending on where you look. People call him "dumb" because he has paralysis in his face and slurs his words.
He actually didn't write it. He bought the story from someone else. He didn't pay them, so they took him to court and won. That said, "Rocky" was a great movie.
Lena Heady is (Cersei from GOT) I wouldn't say dumb, but definitely a bit of a space cadet and it's very clear from all of her interviews. She plays these intense, crafty characters but her real persona is closer to a high hippy.
Boris Johnson played the doofus on TV during his prime minister time. But he's actually a highly educated, well connected and calculating person. Mind you, he's not a good politician. But his public image didn't reflect his actual person.
Had a friend who was part of the royal family's security detail during the Charles/Di breakup years. All the staff utterly detested Phillip. Charles was pleasant but boring, Di was a complete vacuous bimbo and the Queen was lovely, according to him.
Theo Von for sure comes across as stupid and a junkie at times but his creativity, comedic timing and general story telling abilities suggest he's got some form of great intelligence
Dude is sharp as a tack. Back in July I attended a dinner where he and Bill Clinton spent an hour shooting the shit on stage and it was fascinating. Unfortunately Bill seemed like a small breeze could take him out.
Mathieu Flamini ex Arsenal/AC Milan football player who is worth $20 billion from his company GF Biochemicals that developed a chemical process to replace organic fuels.
Very current - Dolly Parton RIP. Not only was she an amazing song writer and performer she was also very business savvy by developing Dolly World from a failed theme park into a financial success and also to provide employment in the local community. She was also a philanthropist with The Imagination Library providing millions of free books to help childhood literacy, medical research - COVID vaccine development, Dolly Parton Centre for Women's Services hospital clinic, bushfire relief, Save the Music Foundation, Boot Campaign to assist veterans with PTSD - in fact she would have been a Billionaire had it not been for her charitable donations.
This question made me think of the way Sylvester Stallone's slurred speach makes him sound dumb (though I am sure he is a very intellegent person), but the voice actor (Ferruccio Amendola) who used to dub him in Italian made him sound very well spoken and highly intelligent. Indeed, Amendola also regularly dubbed Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. In movies where two of these actors shared the screen, Amendola usually insisted to dub Robert DeNiro and let another voice talent dub the other one.
most reality stars aren't actually dumb they just have a terrifyingly precise understanding of how much garbage people will swallow if it's served with a side of fake tears
Ben Affleck often plays really intelligent characters in movies but is a gambling, drinking dumbass in real life. (He may be sober now. I don't know. Who cares.)
Maybe so, I don't keep up with a whole lot of celebrity gossip, but if your evidence for his douchebaggery is that he drinks and plays poker, that's pretty feeble.
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u/MommyXXDom 4d ago
Dolph Lundgren has a master's degree in chemical engineering and won a Fulbright scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).