NZ Skeptics Articles

Chris Langan - Smartest Man in the World?

Mark Honeychurch - 17 March 2025

A couple of years ago, I wrote about some of the most elite “High IQ” societies, and how they mostly seemed to be nothing more than vanity projects created by self-professed polymaths who had built up cult-like followings. The supposed pinnacle of these groups was the New Zealand based Tera Society; headed up by Roddy Young, and with an entry requirement of a one-in-a-trillion IQ. In reality I suspect Roddy wouldn’t even manage to pass the Mensa IQ test.

Dubious IQ Claim

One person who I’ve had my eye on for a while is the creator of the Mega Foundation high IQ society, Chris Langan (or, more formally as he likes to use at times, Christopher Michael Langan). Chris claims to be the “smartest man in the world” (although, via false modesty, he often convinces others to call him this, and then waffles on about how many people are clever in their own way), and says he has an IQ north of 200. This claim is based on him taking the Mega IQ test many years ago, back when you had to apply to be mailed a copy of the test, and then mail a copy of your answers back to the test’s creator and moderator, Ronald Hoeflin.

Now, there are definite issues with the Mega test, as well as other similar high IQ tests that were floating around in the 80s and 90s. Not least of these is the fact that, up in the rarefied air of the top of the IQ bellcurve, there are so few people that it’s impossible to verify that a test is accurately working to determine someone’s IQ.

On top of this, mail-in tests suffer from being non-invigilated and un-timed - allowing test takers to take as long as they like answering the test, and visiting their local library as often as they need to look up facts and try to validate their answers before submitting their completed test. This, then, may be considered more a test of someone’s perseverance and ability to learn new concepts than of their intelligence. The only protection the Mega test had was that there was a limit of each test-taker only being allowed to take the test once.

So, with all of this flexibility, you’d expect that Chris Langan, with a little smarts and enough motivation to spend a good amount of time working on his answers, would be able to get a perfect score. However, from what I can tell, he only scored fairly well (42 out of 48), until he re-took the test under a pseudonym (Eric Hart) and managed a score of 47 out of 48. Of course, Chris denies this cheating, but it’s telling that it looks like he’s refused to take any formal IQ tests since he received this spectacular result back in the 1980s.

Having apparently cheated his way into the Mega Society (for people who received a score of 43 or above in the Mega test), Chris went about making his own high IQ society, called the Mega Foundation. Unsurprisingly this ended up in court, due to his foundation name’s similarity to the Mega Society.

When it comes to accrediting Chris’ high IQ claims, he seems to have suckered the Guinness Book of Records into listing him as one of the smartest people in the world. NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere was also on the Guinness high IQ list (as well as being another high-scorer of the Mega test), so it seems that Guinness really wasn’t doing its job very well when it comes to weeding out nonsense - at least until 1990, when they discontinued the record after realising that measuring IQ is not an exact science, and that the high-IQ landscape is filled with pretenders to the throne. Incidentally, the third person listed by Guinness as one of the smartest in the world was Marilyn Vos Savant - and I may end up taking a dive into her high IQ claims in another article.

Now, Chris is an interesting character. His method of convincing people he’s smart (apart from waving around his supposed 210 IQ and calling himself the smartest man in the world) seems to be to throw as many sciencey buzzwords as he can at people, in the hope that they are dazzled by his brilliance and don’t ask too many questions. I’ve watched enough interviews with him to see this pattern repeating itself.

I don’t think Chris is a stupid man - at the very least in interviews Chris is able to string together sentences of big words in a way that sounds smart, and I think that both learning these terms, and being able to weave them together in a way that sounds intelligent, takes skill, regardless of whether they make sense or not as a whole. It seems likely that Chris has a half-decent brain, along with the ability to memorise things well, and these attributes have allowed him to give the appearance of being “smart”.

And what’s Chris done with his ultra-high IQ? Of course he’s not working in a physics department, or building successful companies. He’s spent 20 years of his life as a bouncer, and now lives a quiet life on a farm with his wife, a once-successful chess player called Gina Lynne LoSasso. Part of the reason for this lowly life of an everyman is supposedly that, as a genius, he’s been both misunderstood and deliberately suppressed - DEI has kept him from getting a more prestigious job than being a bouncer, and nobody can see his genius for what it is.

The CTMU - it’s all in the Name

Thankfully these roadblocks haven’t stopped Chris. He’s used that big brain of his to figure out the answers to life, the universe and everything - the CTMU (Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe). These days Chris spends most of his time promoting his CTMU theory, talking to anyone with a podcast or YouTube channel who will listen. I’ve tried to understand it, reading blog posts and watching videos of Chris explaining it, but I didn’t do very well. Here’s what I managed…

Apparently the CTMU is “the language that reality uses to speak to itself about itself”, and as far as I can tell this all relates to Chris’ attempts to tie his ideas with religion using Logos, “the word”, which is mentioned in the bible (in John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, in Revelation, etc). There are ideas thrown around about manifolds and sets within sets, and lots of maths-sounding waffle to try to make Chris’ idea sound sciencey.

I’d like to be able to break down the CTMU into simple terms, so that I could tell you the basics. But sadly, every source I watch or read has a differing, confusing explanation of the theory. “Reality is a language”, “reality consists of our perceptions and everything relevant to explaining them”, “reality takes the form of an algebraic structure”, “reality is self-caused”, “reality triples as choice, chooser and chosen”, “the purpose of reality is to optimally self-actualize”, “reality is the syntactic operator”, “reality is the mind of God”, “reality is actually logico-geometric”, “reality is a self-simulation”, “reality is cognitive and perceptual”. You get the picture.

The CTMU is apparently not science, it’s metaphysics. And so Chris claims that you can’t use science to test any of his claims, you either have to use “logical induction” (or at least Chris’ own idea about what logical induction is, which he claims is more precise than science’s “empirical induction”) to understand and follow his word salad, or you have to trust him.

Despite Chris’ claims that the CTMU is just metaphysics, and therefore immune to criticism via scientific methods, he doesn’t shy away from using his theory to make all manner of pronouncements about science and mathematics, often simply asserting that scientists are wrong because of his theory, without actually explaining or describing any of his evidence - probably because he doesn’t have any.

One of Chris’ main beliefs is that his theory proves the existence of the Christian God, which should instantly make anyone suspicious. On top of this, his expansive IQ has allowed him to prove that all of his conservative religious views are logical and correct. Back in the ’90s, Chris was a major proponent of Intelligent Design, serving on the board of a group called ISCID. He’s anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, and anti-mixed marriages. He’s also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, although his brazen version of this conspiracy theory is that the 9/11 attacks were all about him; apparently 9/11 was planned as a way to distract people from learning about his CTMU theory. He’s a believer in the Great Displacement theory, a supposed plan to replace white people in the US with immigrants. This belief can be seen in nonsense quotes like this one, an obituary Chris wrote for Koko the gorilla:

Koko’s elevated level of thought would have been all but incomprehensible to nearly half the population of Somalia (average IQ 68). Yet the nations of Europe and North America are being flooded with millions of unvetted Somalian refugees who are not (initially) kept in cages despite what appears to be the world’s highest rate of violent crime.

Media “Fame”

In Chris’ pursuit of fame, he’s managed to scam some fairly high profile people into profiling him, including one of my favourite music video and movie directors - Spike Jonze:

Chris scammed filmmaker Errol Morris to make an episode of the TV show “First Person” about him:

In this video, Chris shares his eugenics idea - that everyone should have a birth control implant, and that then when people want children, they would have to apply for permission to have the implant temporarily removed. And who should be in control of this decision-making? Why, Chris of course.

Chris also appears to have scammed writers, including Esquire magazine. Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about him in his popular book Outliers. Gladwell’s thesis is that success is based on who you know, not what you know, and in this theory the “genius” Chris Langan is one of the Outliers who hasn’t succeeded because he lacked support. As Wikipedia summarises:

Gladwell continuously reminds the reader that genius is not the only or even the most important thing when determining a person’s success. Using an anecdote to illustrate his claim, he discusses the story of Christopher Langan, a man who ended up owning a horse farm in rural Missouri despite having an IQ of 195 (Gladwell claims that Einstein’s was 150). Gladwell points out that Langan has not reached a high level of success because of the destitute, dysfunctional environment in which he grew up. With no one in Langan’s life and nothing in his background to help him take advantage of his exceptional gifts, he had to find success by himself. “No one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone”, writes Gladwell.

Gladwell notes how many of the richest men in history were fortunate to come of age during decades of technological boom, or be born at times of low birth rates when universities and job opportunities were more open to applicants. Later, Gladwell compares Langan with Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Noting that they typify innate natural abilities that should have helped them both succeed in life, Gladwell argues that Oppenheimer’s upbringing made a pivotal difference in his life.

Those comparisons to Einstein and Oppenheimer must do wonders for Chris’ self esteem! And this doesn’t really match with Chris’ own story, which at least when told to the Daily Wire was that Affirmative Action was what stopped him from being able to progress beyond being a bouncer for 25 years.

Chris has also recently scammed the Daily Wire (Ben Shapiro’s online TV channel) into recording a two hour long interview with him, titled “Michael & The Smartest Man in the World”, where he just spouts gobbledygook at the host, Michael Knowles:

This video was never released, presumably because either someone at The Daily Wire did their homework, or someone disagreed with Chris’ heretical statements about topics like lucifer and the devil. In the video, Chris says a lot of unskeptical dumbfuckery, including:

He also walks a fine line in this interview he’s well known for - talking about the Jewish Elite who are ruling the world, without actually mentioning them by name. Instead, he talks about the Globalist elite, families who are pulling the strings of puppet governments and “run everything”, whose “endgame is world domination”. Elsewhere he talks about ZioBanksters as a pseudonym for Jewish people working in finance.

Thankfully, for the Daily Wire video at least, there’s a decent takedown of Chris’ nonsense by “Professor Dave”:

Chris is a shameless self-promoter, despite constantly talking about how humble he is. In the First Person show, he says “I am closer to absolute truth than any man has been before me”, but then follows it up by saying “do I think that makes me better than everybody else? No”. Then he says “My IQ would be somewhere between 190 and 210” - something we’re meant to take on faith. And these, near the end of the video, there’s this humble bragging exchange:

Have you ever met someone smarter than yourself?

As near as I can tell, no. And if somebody walked up right now and claimed to be smarter than me I’d put him through his paces. I’d try to find out how sophisticated a picture of reality he’d evolved, try to see what he was holding in his mind simultaneously, and what he could do. I wouldn’t give him, necessarily, an IQ test, I’d look at his productions. Am I capable of understanding his productions? Is he capable of understanding mine? If the answer to that were in his favor then I’d have to say he’s more intelligent than I am, but that wouldn’t necessarily stop me from doing what I have to do. Is he out there? I doubt it. Could be, I don’t rule it out. I’m not in complete control of reality, there could be somebody a lot smarter than I am out there… I do know that in my life I have not encountered many people with the depth of understanding that uh that I have regarding certain things, in particular the overall nature of the reality we inhabit.

There’s also this slightly less humble video from 2017, where Chris says: “If you took the very best minds from the very best universities in the world, they wouldn’t be able to put a dent in me and my theory”:

Putting Sokal to shame

Despite Chris’ claims of being the smartest man alive, his actual output looks a lot less like a physics or mathematics paper than it does a Sokal-level cultural studies presentation. To give you some examples of the kind of twaddle that Chris Langan outputs, here’s one I found on the snarky-but-also-skeptical Rational Wiki:

Now, if the universe were pluralistic or reducible to its parts, this would make God, who coincides with the universe itself, a pluralistic entity with no internal cohesion. But because the mutual syntactic consistency of parts is enforced by a unitary holistic manifold with logical ascendancy over the parts themselves — because the universe is a dual-aspected monic entity consisting of essentially homogeneous, self-consistent infocognition — God retains monotheistic unity despite being distributed over reality at large.

And here’s one from an online magazine called The Baffler, where the author does a great job of dissecting Chris’ nonsense.

Telic recursion is a fundamental process that tends to maximize a cosmic self-selection parameter, generalized utility, over a set of possible syntax-state relationships in light of the self-configurative freedom of the universe.

If you’re a real sucker for punishment, you can try reading Chris’ 60 page “paper” on the CTMU. You can also check out his and his organisation’s SubStack website, which are chock-full of awful, un-skeptical articles, and also seem to be shilling some kind of motivational self-help course - the CTMU Teleologic Living Plan - billed as a “comprehensive 9-level lifestyle program that utilizes the principles of the Golden Rule at each tier of Stratified Identity, promoting optimal self-actualization and enhancing the connection to Source”.

The Scamming Game

It really looks from these SubStacks like Chris has been reduced to acting like a run of the mill scammer, taking money from his many adoring fans in return for uncritical articles and advice about the Schumann Resonance, detox programs, angels, the power of prayer, the Global Consciousness Project (which is currently in my Big List of topics to write about), Neuro-Linguistic Programming, demonic possession, Microdosing (also in my Big List), grounding (yourself, not your electrical appliances), the New World Order, Solfeggio Frequencies, Near Death Experiences, binaural beats and remote healing, as well as some pretty horrific political takes. Honestly, looking at his article list it’s almost as if I could throw away my Big List of articles to write and just work through Chris’ awful hot takes in his blog posts.

Chris appears to have monetised any outlet he’s able to, so not only can you spend over $2,500 a year supporting both of his blogs, you can also spend $9,600 a year as a “Guardian of Logos” supporting his YouTube channel:

It’s on this Channel - called “CMTU Radio” - that Chris constantly posts interviews and podcast episodes about him, and then small snippets of those shows, ad infinitum. Lots, and lots, and lots of videos to show just how smart he sounds.

Having watched and read far too much material about Chris Langan, it seems obvious to me that he’s nothing more than a con man who’s managed to fool a lot of people. He’s trying hard to play the part of a super-intelligent genius, but he’s bogged down by some very ignorant political and ethical views that, although commonly held in the USA, seem surprising coming from someone with a high IQ. He has a Theory of Everything that he claims is immune from analysis - basically, “trust me bro” - and he himself has been conned by, and now disseminates, a whole host of conspiracy theories and bad ideas. He’s not the smartest person in the world - in fact, given that he’s married to an International Master chess player with a PhD in neuropsychology, I suspect he’s not even the smartest person in his house.

I’d like to finish on a high note, by giving you all a contrasting example of a couple of academics who are legitimately intelligent, and who do a good job of speaking plainly, staying humble and understanding the limits of their own understanding, as well as not promoting pseudoscientific nonsense. The first is Sean Carroll. Sean is a theoretical physicist who has done a great job over the last 20 years or so of explaining science concepts in terms simple enough for laypeople like me to understand the basics. The second is A C Grayling, a philosopher who somehow manages to speak in a way that is both confident and soft-spoken when explaining the intricacies of philosophical thought and religious belief. Enjoy!

UPDATE: About a week after I wrote this article, but before publishing it, one of my new favourite podcasts - Decoding the Gurus - released a three hour long episode on Chris Langan. It’s long, but worth a listen - and interesting to hear how many of the same points I picked up on they also noticed about Chris.