Debunking the Genius Myth w/ Helen Lewis

This week, Scott sits down with acclaimed journalist and Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis to explore her latest book, The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea.

Together, they examine how society defines—and often distorts—the concept of genius. Helen argues that there’s no universal, objective definition of genius, and that the people we anoint as such often reflect what a culture values, rather than any absolute measure of brilliance. This “genius” label, she suggests, grants select individuals undue latitude and props up misleading narratives about creativity, intelligence, and individual achievement.

Scott and Helen also dig into the misuse and limitations of IQ, shared myths about extraordinary minds, and the social consequences of genius worship.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I think the two different things.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Though.

Speaker 1 (00:02):
What I mean is that the achievement stands next to
the personal qualities. So if I think, if you're a
regular person and you don't change your socks for days
on end, people go a bit much. But if you're
Michelangelo and you don't change your socks for days and
then because you're painting the Sistine Chapel, it becomes, oh

(00:22):
my god, he's so devoted to his art that he
doesn't even have time to think about his socks. And
now you've worked in university, so I am at one
hundred percent sure you have worked with people who are
useless at a number of things, and this is taken
as well. They just don't have time to think about
departmental meeting emails because they're just thinking about the big
questions of life and it's what you And that doesn't

(00:43):
happen to bricklayers, right, No one cares if you're a bricklayer.
If you can't do minor admin tasks, they don't take
it as proof that you're actually your mind is occupied
with bricklaying. But it happens at those kind of higher
realms that we read oddness as specialness.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Hello, and Welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In each episode,
we talk with inspiring scientists, thinkers, and other self actualizing
individuals who will give you a greater understanding of yourself, others,
and the world we live in. We even hope to
give you a glimpse into human possibility. Today we feature
Helen Lewis, an English journalists and staff writer for The Atlantic.
In this episode, we discussed Helen's most recent book called

(01:24):
The Genius Myth, A Curious History of a dangerous idea.
Helen argues that since there is no objective definition of genius,
societies anoint exceptional people as geniuses to demonstrate what they value.
In turn, we give those special people latitude that is
not extended to ordinary mortals, and we have a set
of stories about what geniuses are and how they think

(01:44):
and how singular their achievements are, stories that she argues
are often entirely untrue. This was a very stimulating conversation.
Helen and I share similar criticisms of i Q and
the way we treat those we deem genius in our society.
I think this conversation is short as spar lots of
thought and discussion. So with that further Ado, I bring
you Helen Lewis, Helen Louis, thank you so much for

(02:06):
being on the Psychology podcast.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
How you doing, I'm doing good, thank you, and I'm
delighted to be here. I think it turns out you
and I've got a lot of overlapping interests, so this
would be really fun.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
I would say, quite a lot. Yeah, I've read. I
read your book. I devoured your book. I can't think
of a better added. I mean, I literally was like,
this is amazing, this is like like I nerded out.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I had to apologize that psychologists don't come out of
it particularly.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Well yeah, well fair yeah, well fair enough, they didn't.
They didn't come out partically well in my book And
Gifted either, you know, and the History of Psychology. I
don't know if you had a chance to read and Gifted,
But there's so much overlap.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, no, that's the thing I was looking at. You
wrote about the complexity of greatness as well, right, and
all the words on intelligence really chimes with what I've
been thinking and writing about in this book. Yeah, but yeah,
I think probably we both came to the conclusion that
in the twentieth centuries psychologists were wildly overconfident about what
could be known at the time about intelligence and giftedness.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yes, absolutely, I mean there was this real abuse of
a test right at the IQ test, which was not
the original spirit of the test at all offered. Brene
was had a good heart. He wanted to help really
differentiate between those who didn't really need as much resources

(03:27):
from those who really could use the resources. And I'm
sure you saw in your research that he wrote an
essay the last I think month of his life or
so where he's like, I can't believe what the Americans
have done in my test. I mean that's a rough
French translation, but.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah, also, yeah, no, I think that's really sad. But
you're right, it's a story of good intentions about like
how do I work out which kids are falling behind
their peers and that need extra attention, and that somehow,
in that early bit of the twentieth century becomes magically
transmitted into what if everybody has a number floating above
their head that says how worthwhile they are as a
human being? And it was never intended to be to

(04:02):
be read like that. And you know, I saw you
on Sam Harris's podcast usefully pushing back against the idea
that IQ is only what's measured on IQ test, you know,
the very simple glib dismissal that people have of it now.
But you know that does obviously go in both directions.
People wildly underclaim for it now. I think that's a
more fashionable thing to do, but that's almost a reaction
to the twentieth centuries wild overclaims for it.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Yeah, yeah, let's let's let's talk about that. And now
I want to say this up from something I really
liked about your book is you you do have a
lot of nuance, and it's different than some other books
I've read, which are just like IQ bashing books or
just like genius, just just like let's just bash you know,
the whole idea of genius. There are multiple instances where

(04:47):
you're like, well, you know a lot of people will
say that there's no heritable basis ti Q whatever whatsoever,
that it's a completely useless test, that all it measures
IQ and none of that is true. You see, that's
a paraphrase of a of a section he wrote. I
was like, good for Helen, like, yeah, because I you know,
I get I get annoyed when when when I know

(05:09):
certain things aren't true, and and people like make me
say things, you know, So like I did a whole
book where I really seriously criticized the IQ test, called unngifted,
and talked about my own personal experiences how when I
was a kid, I was whole, I was treated I
was in special Ed. I mean, they treated me like
I was really stupid. And so I had a lot
of criticisms. But then I went on the podcast circuit

(05:32):
and everyone was like, it's almost like they wanted me
to say that it's a completely useless test and we
can't gather any information whatsoever, and like all IQ test
makers should go to hell. And I was like, well,
you know, a lot of I count a lot of
IQ test makers as my friends now, you know, like
I published papers with them. I don't think I don'
want I don't want them to go to hell. And

(05:53):
a lot of them are well meaning. A lot of
them want to use the test for educational purposes to
see what are the cognitive deficits that but most need
help with, but not to limit potential. I know that's
the spirit of a lot of modern modern day IQ test makers,
but that's very different than the spirit of early day
So tell me a little bit about tell me a

(06:13):
little about the history of genius, of the phrase genius
and how it was connected to the IQ test.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Well, I think what you're hitting on is the fact
that what people are off for having is an argument
that's behind the actual argument. And that's exactly what the
central thesis of the genius myth is. That kind of
who gets called a genius is often a kind of
argument for something, whether it's an argument for a particular
country being brilliant, or particularly discipline being brilliant, or the
tendency within that field that they represent, you know, putting

(06:41):
your nails, namely your colors on the mast of kind
of one bit of the field or another being important.
That's why you call someone a genius. So there's all
this kind of extra political stuff. It's not, you know,
and I don't think anyone woul really argue that it
is just a simple objective measure, but it's often treated
like that. Effectively, it's often treated like there is some
kind of rational basis for it. It's more interesting to
work out why. And I think you're exactly right about

(07:03):
the way that the IQ test gets treated. I think
a lot of people one of the things I really
love about doing history is you finally find out where
the origin of things that people just say to you
on the Internet are. And I think what I hear
a lot when people bash the IQ test is ground
up bits of Stephen J. Gould's Mismeasure of Man, which
is his famous book that took on phrenology. It took

(07:23):
on you know, the overt racists and new genicists who
ended up deploying the IQ test, but it also dramatically
overstated the kind of environmentalist case for IQ and understated
the heritability of IQ. And what we end up, I
think is a sort of I often find that people
regurgitate a kind of powdered form of that to me
for political reasons, because people don't want to follow the

(07:46):
end of the line of thought to the end and
end up and think suddenly they're on the same page
as people that they find politically a borrent. So yeah,
but this is a very recent idea of genius that
it's got. You know, there is a genius level IQ
before that that I try to return to in the
book is the Greek and Roman sense of a kind
of visiting spirit, of a divine inspiration, something that works

(08:07):
through you. It's a moment, it's a lightning strike. And
I think that's really helpful because you know, neither you
or I are in the process of debunking that some
people are talented or that some things are beautiful.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
To love the thing you caveat it in your book
that I was like, yeah, Helen.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Someone does need to say Monnet is better at painting
than me. Shock it like, here we go. I'm never
you know, I'm never going to solve a deep mathematical problem,
and some people can. And that's actually, that's fine, that's great.
I'm glad. I'm happy for them. I just I don't know.
I wouldn't want that to be me. But you know,
that's that's the thing is that, you know, what I'm
fighting against is that later idea of genius as a

(08:43):
as a type of person. And that's you know, that's
comes in. You can see the shift in the English
dictionaries sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds. So it's happening as we
come out of the Renaissance and into the Industrial Revolution
and modernity essentially, and you know, there's lots of reasons
why that might be. The historian Endarrenment Matthew talks about
it as a kind of product of secularization. You know,

(09:03):
if you start believing that God is ruling everything and
that humans are doing stuff, you're probably more open to
the idea that some humans are essentially demi gods or
secular saints. Is the phrase that gets used a lot.
Then you come to the Romantics, and this is the
one that's funny to me, because you know, we see poetry.
The poets are the kind of great geniuses, and they
are supposed to be men, but who have this very

(09:24):
feminine essence within them. You know, they are tubercular, they're
kind of pale and feverish and not really connected to
this world. Not kind of hearty, stout men, but these
kind of more self like creatures. And then you know,
we get through to the genius level IQ, And now
I think we talk about the kind of tech innovators.
You know, those are the kind of models. It's Sam

(09:45):
Altman's and Elon Musk's and Steve Jobs's and you know,
these people who are you know, who make breakthroughs in
technology are our modern idea of genius. But that's funny
because you know how many great bisexual male poets are
being hailed as the kind of archetype of genius these days.
It's quite a good way to reflect on the fact
that ideas of genius are historically contingent.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah, I was just gonna say, that's tied to the
historic nature of what Will was termin equating i Q genius.
I mean that he has a quote that I that
I quote often where he's like, genius has only recruited
from the lines of high of the high IQ. So
I think I think a lot of that has its
roots in the adoption of the IQ test, right.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
But I also think that's very funny because he renames
his big longitudinal study, this brilliant longitudinal study from genetic
studies of genius to genetic studies of the gifted. Like
there's a very subtle downgrade, isn't there, And like what
he's actually looking for and what he's actually found.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah. What's also I always found interesting about the title
is he never actually looked at genetics. I mean, he's
not like he did a DNA analysis of any of
the kids. I mean, that's just all clear how he's
thinking about the whole thing, which is very galton esque
Carlton esk. I mean Galton was obsessed with genetics.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
To understand that he was a Yeah, he was. He
was a very keen proponent in this very unemotional, unempathetic way.
He just I think he looked at people as sort
of collections of variables rather than any kind of rounded
sense of a kind of other mind at work.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yes, And I'm going to guess and that and say,
you know, he was kind of a genius in a
way like I looked at some of his he's obsessed.
Everything you said is true, and I'm just yes, ending.
I mean, he was obsessed with measurement, and he developed
some modern day statistical techniques that still are very valuable.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
And he's a Victorian, isn't he. Like I think he's
the kind of peak Victorian, Like everything can be classified. Finally,
everything will be reduced to numbers in my perfect gallery
of humanity.

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(12:54):
Human Potential dot com slash SAC. That's Center for Human
Potential dot com slash s a c. Okay, now back
to the show. Yeah yeah, so well tell me let's
back up a second. How do you define the g
What do you see as the as the genius myth
if you had to define it on our podcast, right.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Well, it's the idea that you know that there are
special people, and some people are you know, they are
just all around three hundred and sixty degree special people.
And there's lots of individual genius myths, by which I
mean stories, and you will find that, you know, I
don't know if you've read the bit about Friedrich Gaus,
the mathematician, and this kind of fable that grows up

(13:36):
about him in the schoolroom and they're asked to do
this and add together these numbers and it's kind of
busy work, except he comes up with an equation and
you know, and only seven. And this proves that he's
a kind of genius early on. And one of the
things that a great scientific historian does is trace that
idea through all its different iterations. And first one is,
you know, many years after Gaus died, so it's a fable,

(13:57):
it's a parable, and it's obviously trying to create particular
portrait of what it means to be a child prodigy
and what it means to be talented at maths. And
that's the bit that I find interesting. This is what
I call genius myths. Which are these ideas, these kind
of they're kind of preset patterns, and that reality just
ends up getting hammered into them because we all in
our minds have these ideas, you know, the tortured artist

(14:19):
being another one of them, and they unfortunately the kind
of polarity flows back the other way, and that we
tend to overrate how talented people are based around how
much of a prick they are. Right, it's not just that, oh,
some talented people are also very different to get along with.
It's actually if you are nice and agreeable and conscientious
and you know, a team player, people actually, I think,

(14:40):
tend to underrate your brilliance because they have an image
in their mind of what a brilliant person, a brilliant
man is. I genuinely think it's I think it's something
that although very few of us would think we're competing
with geniuses, I think a lot of us work in
environments where we see prima donnas get rewarded for bad
behavior and actually get treated better because they are stampy feet,

(15:02):
divas and narcissists. So I think that's a bit in
the book that will probably appeal to people in all
kinds of different walks of life is that some people
ask for special treatment and somehow that means that they
get it rather than everybody going God, I say such
hard why can't he print his own emails? You know,
why can't I do this? And whatever it might be?
They get kind of like I have this metaphor in
about the beehive. You know, they get treated like the
queen bee and everybody brings them the royal jelly, whereas

(15:25):
the worker bees, who just get on with it and
don't make so much of a fast people then tend
to just deprecate them and disregard them.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, your point is very well taken. I think that. Well,
just for the sake of conversation, do you think it's
possible to differentiate between genius as great marketing let's call
that a category, and true genius or do you think
there's no such thing as true genius?

Speaker 1 (15:49):
I think either marketing is genius or nothing is. I
think that's the question to say it, right, You can
just say if some people are supremely talented in one domain,
then one of those domains is marketing, and somebody like Picasso,
Pablo Picasso probably was. He was both a technically brilliant artist.
But he was also fully okay with inhabiting the persona

(16:10):
of the great artist and you know, limiting what he
did and selling himself and being stock to by the
right galleries and all that kind of stuff. So the
business side he was brilliant at too. And that's if
if you can be a genius at draftsmanship, then you
can be a genius at marketing. Donald Trump probably is
a genius at marketing. This is maybe this is my
most controversial but anything that comes out of the book,

(16:32):
but you know he is. He has reached the top
through a unique set of circumstances and abilities that nobody,
clearly nobody else can replicate. And that's if you want
to call anything else genius, that probably is genius too.
I'd be happy and not saying any human was a genius.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Right, right. So the point you make in your book
is that you're okay saying there are acts of genius,
but you're not into You're not so under the personhood
aspect of it. You've a quote here quote genius transmutes
odd into special. Could one argue I love playing Devil's advocate?
Could what argue that you're you're real by saying just

(17:10):
they're just odd. That's not fully appreciating how that they're amazing.
Like in some cases it transmutes amazing into special. Could
some people say, oh, hell, and you just have sour grapes?
How do you respond to that?

Speaker 1 (17:24):
I think the two different things, though. What I mean
is that the achievement stands next to the personal qualities.
So if I think, if you're a regular person and
you don't change your socks for days on end, people
go a bit much. But if you're Michelangelo and you
don't change your socks for days and then because you're
painting the Sistine Chapel, it becomes, oh my god, he's

(17:46):
so devoted to his art that he doesn't even have
time to think about his socks. And that you've worked
in university, so I am one hundred percent sure you
have worked with people who are useless at a number
of things, and this is taken as well. They just
don't have time to think about departmental meeting emails because
are just thinking about the big questions of life, and
it's what and that doesn't happen to bricklayers, right, No

(18:08):
one cares if you're a bricklayer. If you can't do
minor admin tasks. They don't take it as proof that
you're actually your mind is occupied with bricklaying. But it
happens at those kind of higher realms that we read
oddness a specialness.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
Wow, I'm going to start taking notes because I want
to get the essence of your argument. I think you
have multiple arguments. Actually, I think one is that we
overwook a lot of geniuses in the way that we
as society think about genius and what falls within the
perview genius. And that's been my lifelong project. So with

(18:43):
that one, where like it's like, oh, soul ligned right.
And then there's another argument you're making, which is that
we give a pass in a lot of ways to
people if we really like one thing they do. But
then there's a third argument I feel like you just made,
which is sometimes we actually treat something it's not really
genius at all, and we treat that as genius. I

(19:04):
feel like that's a third argument you're making. We treat
that as genius because it's like, well, we know they
can do this other stuff, so everything they do must
bee Maybe there's like a Helo effect of genius. There's
a hell effective attractiveness. We know that an attractive, physically
attractive person can get away with anything. Maybe there's as
you're saying, there's a say, there's a hell effect for genius.

(19:25):
We'll just coin that right now.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
I think that's a very good way of describing it. Yeah,
because there is the kind of oh, he must be
playing for d chess and that's just you know, you
don't understand. And you see that a huge amount if
you look on X and you look at kind of
Elon Musk fanboys. You know, like there's that autism capital
account for example, that just follows in mir Grant. The
thing is, you me immortals don't understand the genius behind this,
and it's like ah. Another explanation is that he has

(19:49):
done some incredibly successful things in his life with his companies,
but this one was a bad idea. It looks like
a bad idea because it is a bad idea. And
maybe it's the case that you know, people don' I
don't have that my dis touch and everything they touch
turns to gold. Maybe they're good at some things and
not at others. And I think that's that to me,
is a very obvious example of that halo effect you
we're beingked, you know, we're being asked to consider that

(20:10):
things are four D chess when they're just normal chess.
I guess every old chess is for D chess because
it happens in time. But anyway, five D chess, that's
up the DS on that.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
One, Helen, You've you've really got me thinking. I'm not
because like I'm not ready to completely give away to
get over the phrase genius. I think that the way
I have, the way I have thought about is it
really just represents a really top one percent ability or
achievement in something, whatever it is. And you know, if

(20:44):
everyone's a genius, then then then no one's a genius, right,
Like it's obviously built into the word itself something quite unique,
not necessarily special in a special way of you're talking
about a narcissistic sort of deserving a special special privileges.
That's not what I mean by unique. Unique and have
a differ meaning as well, where you don't feel entired everything.
But if I do, let's get I don't think.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
To be honestly, I'm sure I will continue to casually
use it because it is it is. But you know
what I mean, I just you know, I would like
to say that I'm going to try and think about
stopping using it, but actually it's such a common you know.
I went to the Genius Bar to do my you know,
or look at the I mentioned the Verizon adverts that
got Einstein in them. It's such a completely you know,

(21:27):
a concept that is woven so deeply into our society
that I don't I think. But what I do like
about what you're saying, and I think I would agree with,
is that you don't want to lose the sense of
wonder and transcendence. You don't want to lose the idea.
And I took about this in the book that You
Go and you know, for me, I read about Van
Goff's Almond Blossom, which is one of my favorite painting.
It's very simple painting of this light blue background and

(21:48):
these beautiful white flaves, clearly influenced by Japanese woodblock painting.
It's got his unique brush stroke, and I just I
love everything about it, and looking at it gives me
a deep sense of peace and wonderment. And I don't
need to tear that down and kick it and say, actually,
we've over romanticized Vincent Van Gooff's life into a kind
of neat deal parable about the fact that people are
overlooked during their own lives or mentally ill people can

(22:11):
still be creative. In fact, maybe that's part of their creativity.
All those things can kind of co exist alongside the
fact that simply I am happy that that exists in
the world, and I find it lovely and beautiful. And
I think that's where some of the resistance to the
book comes from, is people who think I want to
take things away from them. And where that does possibly
come into it is when you're talking about the kind

(22:32):
of me too stuff, you know, and the kind of
deconalization of the curriculum, and the kind of idea that
we're going to have to reckon with the fact that
some people who we hail as geniuses were quote unquote bad.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
People, horrible humans.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Yeah, because that is tricky because I don't know about you,
but for me, I can't stop it in some respects
souring how I feel about stuff, because you want if
you love someone's work, you want to love the person too.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (22:55):
I think it's just human to want to do that.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Well, that's very interesting. Maybe that's why a lot of
people overlook. Yeah, a lot of terrible things, you know,
like the Michael Jackson defenders are we shouldn't even go
there because I don't want them coming on my thing.
But you know, I'm not saying I know what Michael
Jackson did, but I'm just saying just the certainty. It's
almost like your belief in Jesus Christ. You know, it's like,

(23:20):
you know, like, don't question you know that a person
could have done anything bad because we love his music
so much. It's like that's not logical.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
But okay, that's turning him into a saint, isn't it,
Because I think you know, I talked about the book
about MJ the musical, and it does make a very
good case. You know, he was abused by his father,
who was violent and domineering, and I feel very sorry
for him about that. He obviously experienced racism and that
has something to do with the body dysmorphia that he felt.
And you know, he became famous very young, which is

(23:49):
for most people a horrible experience. And you can see
that that's why he wanted to build a theme park
and own a chimp and like all of that stuff
is true, but also the allegations are really serious. Well,
and I think it's people who don't necessarily want there
to be someone's music that they enjoy. It's that they
want to they want an icon, and other people are
trying to take that away. And I think you're exactly

(24:11):
right to compare it to religious belief. That kind of
fandom has a lot of overlap with if they believe
in him, and and what you're essentially saying is you're
saying that this is a false prophet and no wonder
people rap really strongly to that.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Yeah. I actually tweeted the other day something and then
deleted it for five seconds. A good idea, but it's
relevant to this conversation. So maybe, Yeah, the purpose of
that was just to have the conversation with you, But
it's that I said, what's the difference between these these
these self help gurus that everyone treats like God and

(24:44):
a cult like a cult figure, a cult leader, Like,
what's the difference? Have you?

Speaker 1 (24:49):
I mean, yeah, Well, the difference is that the difference
is what the effect is, right. I think that one
thing I you know, I did a series about kind
of gurus on the internet, and you know, people will
and Silicon Value will openly say that any good startup
is essentially a cult. You know, it's these people who
have got these you know, there's usually one charismatic guy
at the center of it, lots of people, you know,
who's articulated emission. Lots of people will do things that

(25:12):
people the outside well think are stupid and crazy, like
staying up for twenty hours straight coding or whatever it
might be. But everybody involved has chosen to be there.
Then we talk about the catactics of coercion. They're not
really being violently coerced to stay in the startup. They're
maybe just hoping to be rich, but that's not you know,
that's not coercion, and you know, and ultimately at the

(25:33):
end they may come out of that experience feeling that
it's been good. They if the startup goes to IPO
and they're suddenly rich, and they can spend the rest
of their lives doing what, you know, following their passion.
But the dynamics are eerily similar. And I think that's
probably what you were kind of alluding to a lot
of those self help grew is the method of change
is believe in me. Believe in me, and take my

(25:53):
word as gospel. And if you think that has been
genuinely really good in your life, then you don't think
of it as a cult because we think are inherently bad.
But the mechanisms are extremely similar.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Right, and and specifically zooming in on the idea that
maybe bad behavior will be not only accepted but extalled
as uh, you know, you know, viewed as Oh, have
you noticed there's this thing that if someone is is
the guru or the not just the guru, but like
everyone just idolizes you read you read that that that

(26:28):
level you reach, that level of people of your fans
idolizing you. I've noticed a phenomenon where if there's bad
behavior that in any other context would be bad, maybe
this is this is exactly what you're saying, there's bad
behavior in any other context, it's actually not just accepted,
which is your point, but it's sometimes like twisted into
it's almost like the more that people on the outside,

(26:51):
the outgroup, hate on it, if you're really in the
in group, the more you're like, oh, that's evidence that
that what the person actually did was pretty bad ass.
We're gonna defend them, I defend them, but we're going
to like extol it and celebrate it.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
There's a very brilliant Scott Alexander blog post from now
like a decade ago that he talks about this when
he talks about the animal rights charity Peter Petter Parents,
I think it can be a clear treatment of animals
and how they would go into like atrocities and say
we're going to help all the people, you know who
were hurt by Hurricane Katrina, but only if they become vegan,
and people would get really really angry about that, and

(27:25):
it would generate a huge amount of controversy. Meanwhile, there
are loads of animal charities that are just normal, you know,
they just say maybe eat less meat, or like, who
would you like to adopt a cat? And one of
the things he talks about is the idea that by
making everybody within a group agree something you know reprehensible
is true, it becomes a much greater identity marker. And

(27:46):
he then he goes on to talk about, you know,
Catholics believing in transubstunciation. If you believe that the host
literally becomes the body of Christ and other people go
that's mad, then it really means something if you profess it,
whereas if you just said something like we should all
do good works and be nice to poor people. That
provides no clear boundary between the in group and the outgroup.
And I think that's similar with to what you're talking
about about kind of defending a genius. If someone's actions

(28:09):
become indefensible to most people, you are making a much
stronger in group claim by going along with it anyway.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Definitely, and just the whole idea of myrdom is relevant
here too, Like well, and actually for me, so the
topic of my new book on just people who have
these vi they create a they're not victims at all,
but they create a victim mindset, you know, like they're
a they are a victim, but they're not really You're
not really like you're not really canceled, Like like your

(28:39):
platform is like bigger than anyone else's platform. How are
you canceled? You know that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
I thought that was really interesting observation and I'm really
lookingward to reading that book because isn't it Bertrand Russell
Who's got this idea about the kind of moral purity
of the victim. And I think it's what, Yeah, it's
kind of relaxing because you just you know, I wrote
a piece of a while ago that was about people who
fake their identities and claimed to be black during the
kind of George Floyd up raising Black or Hispanic. And

(29:06):
these were left wing academics, you know, and they would
claim falsely to be black or Hispanic at a time
in which people making big conversations about racial injustice in America.
And I went back and looked at the number of
people who claimed falsely claim to be Holocaust survivors. And
there's a great bit where two fake Holocaust survivors meet
each other for a concert, and you think, did they

(29:27):
at any point go well, I know I'm not really one,
but are you really one? But then you know, and
there was, you know, and it was apparently an established
phenomenon in post ward Germany that people would sort of
think themselves into thinking I was actually Jewish or I
was actually one of the resisters, and they weren't because
people had been presented with a simple moral story and

(29:47):
they wanted to be on the right side of it.
And I think something similar happened with those academics, you know.
I called it kind of munch and social munchaus, and
they wanted essentially a time when we'd heard that white
people were bad. They thought I'm bad. I'm not a
white person, right, rather than kind of trying to assimilate
some slightly more nuanced moral picture. And I think that's
sort of a bit relevant to what you're talking about

(30:09):
in your book, right, is the idea that victims are good,
this identity category of people are good. I must be
a member of this identity category that you can see
all the individual stepped. But it does end up with
this ludicrous situation when the one case I was talking about,
you get an Italian American woman passing herself off as
a Hispanic scholar known as Jessica la Bomballera, and she's

(30:29):
actually called Jessica Krug, and she's from a bit, you know,
perfectly regular bit of America. But it wasn't glamorous in
the same way it's not glamorous to have one of
the hole of fake Holocaust survivors was orphaned as a
kid during the war, but to sort of a non
Jewish family. But that's a sad story of you know,
a very mundane story of dislocation and childhood trauma. Whereas

(30:52):
the one that people got excited about was I survived
Auschwitz and you can see why people ended up gravitating.
This happens with almost every terror, major travity. It happened
with nine to eleven. There was a woman who was
giving nine to eleven tours as if her partner had
died in it and got busted for the fact she
wasn't anywhere near New York on the day. There was
people who claimed falsey to be survivors of the Battle
Clan massacre in France. People just I think your book

(31:15):
is very timely because there is a lot of genuine
Victimo out there. But there is also a kind of
relaxing moral purity about about that at a time when
people are very tense about being morally pure.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, and we found our research that that is correlated
with the dark triad personality.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Remind me, that's machiavellianism.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Nism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Psychopathy.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Some people have posited a dark tetrad which included sadism.
So you're you're the head of the curve on that. Wow, wow, wow, wow.
You just gave me so many examples that I'm kicking
myself for not and including them my book. They would
be no.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
But that's what happens when you write a book. Someone
said to me, oh, have you read Tim Harford's book Messy.
It's all about the fact that creativity is a lot
harder and I think dark and I had the same
thing when I saw your twenty thirteen book. I was like,
where were you when I needed you? Scott's book? I
would love to read this two years ago.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, but you did. You did cite my Complexity of
Greatness book, which I really appreciate, you know, because I
have no problem with the term greatness. I want to
want to keep greatness in the human in the human vocabulary,
so people have something to aspire to, you know, the
people have, and also that we you know, like you said,
I love that you you used it the word transcendence,

(32:30):
you know, and that's I wrote book called transcend and
I'm obsessed with transcendent states of consciousness. So I think
that kind of pointing towards what humans could be is
something very inspiring to young people and older people. But
I think that young people could use a little more
inspiration these days. But so yeah, so thank you, yeah,
thank you.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
No, And I think, well, you'll know, of having lived
in Britain for all that time, I think British culture
is particularly hostile to aspiration and success. We find that
people crally those Yeah, I think there's a kind of
sense of who do you think you are? I I
you know, I report a lot in America now and
people are a lot happy with like openly boasting about
successes that they've had, which is just a complete no

(33:12):
no in British culture. So I think that, you know,
I think that's worthwhile saying working really hard to become
a great painter is good and should be encouraged.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, let's let's shift gears a second and talk about
something that is very near and dear to your heart.
And that's the gendered aspect of the term genius. It
is undeniable. I mean, it's like, it's like you have
a lot of men that have declared themselves and everyone
around them have declared them geniuses. And you have a
lot of women who I think are geniuses, but just

(33:45):
don't have that even have the motivation to be seen
as a genius. I mean, I talked about this in
the same Harris podcast about positions of power. You see
that the dark triad traits, which is which is extremely
high men. You know, if you look at the the
curves of you know, you have more dark triad on
the on the left side of the curve, but also

(34:05):
on the right side you have extremely high proportion and
those are the ones that tend to get into power.
And then on our light triad scale, it's like mostly
women are like triad and they have no motivation, you know,
like on average, there's a very low we find very
low you know, the motivation, the motive for power. Their
motive is, you know, like can we make the world

(34:29):
a good place? You know, like that doesn't count anymore
that a.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
Bunch of losers more ambitious.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah. So you we do see this in our data
in terms of power, in terms of who ends up
in power. How does that relate? Perhaps because I've been
you got me thinking like there's got to be a
connection here to to the gendered aspect of the genius
story as well. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:49):
It's always a really difficult isn't it, Because I you know,
my first book was on feminism, and so I did
a bit of that redcover women it's called The Women,
and I did a bit of that kind of recovering
of women who I think have been on barely forgotten
from history, and that has been a huge feminist project
since the second wave really is rewriting women, and again
that can become its own kind of genius myth. I
think of the painters Artemisia Gentiliski or Lee Krasner, who

(35:14):
was Jackson Pollock's widow. They have both been repackaged for
the art market in recent years as these kind of
you go girl feminist inspirational tales, and Jane Austen has
definitely had that happened to her in terms of writers.
But there are I think it's absolutely undeniable that, you know,
just in material conditions. Until very recently, women weren't excluded
from lots of the things that you needed to be

(35:36):
a genius. So women couldn't join the Royal Society. You know,
someone who's great a physicist as Hertha Ayrton wasn't allowed
to She won a medal, but she wasn't allowed to
join the Royal Society, which then locks you out of
you know, you can't do life drawing classes, whatever it
might be. If you're an artist, if you can't join
the Royal Academy, if you don't join the Royal Society
as a scientist, you can't have a you know, you
can't learn about the latest cutting edge research from all

(35:57):
of your peers and what they're doing all that important stuff.
If you can't go university, which women couldn't for most
of the existence of universities and all the other groups too,
then you're not you know, you're being locked out of
working at the edge of your field basically, and so
all of that social stuff is I think people sort
of think that naively, well, that that all that was

(36:18):
legal discrimination, which luckily we ended all that and there
are no kind of soft repercussions of that that go
on one of them. And you can tell me if
this isn't supported by the latest research. But I think
there is pretty good research that says we more likely
to describe men as brilliant kind of regardless of the achievement.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Oh really, that would actually be really interested in seeing
that research.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
Yeah, well, I will hunt it out because I think
it there's a there's a kind of just a feeling
that you know, you have all of these phrases like
young Turk, although I'm sure hopefully that one's probably been
canceled by now, but the kind of idea that you
get me kind of these bright young men and that
they're you know, and that men are judged on potential
rather than kind of achievement, and so I do think
there is a level of gender stuff. The counterpoint to

(37:01):
that is, as you say, there may be some personality
traits that make men more likely to strive for the
things that we tend to describe as genius, like being
a CEO. They may be more career driven on average,
But I think it's you know, I am. I'm always
trying to urge humility on those kind of very evolutionary

(37:22):
biology and very manner sphere explanations for historical disparities in
achievement of men and women, because you know, those the
equivalents of those people one hundred and fifty years ago
were arguing that women couldn't go to university. You know,
their brains were just too small. And actually, you know,
women's brains do way less. So with these little brains
have this spetical university.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
But they're more efficient, they're more the dend rates are
more efficient.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
That's what. Yeah, Actually the gap between the neurons is smaller,
so it's delightful. But now the big question is, in
lots of like the humanities, how do we get more
men to go to university.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
You know.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
So now we've got to a situation which we've said, well, hang,
if we made universities too friendly to female learning styles
or the thing that I think has probably happened, which
is that men don't like doing feminine coded things, and
the humanities has become pretty feminine coded, and that's been
a big turn off to men in the same way
that writing novels, you know, it was always you know,

(38:18):
women did that all the way through, but in the
eighteenth century that was the ones who had known and
lionized were men, and so more men kind of wanted
to do. Epic poetry was a thing that straight men
were really into in the seventeen hundreds, and it's kind
of not coded like that anymore. And so, you know,
I just think we have to be kind of slightly
humble about before declaring there are simple biological explanations for

(38:40):
these disparities, and see them as a as yet kind
of interesting negotiated blend of possibly biology and but also culture.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, if I may, and there's no pressure, but if
I may, get your email, adders, I'd love to send
you an article I wrote called why don't people care
that More? Men don't choose caregiving professions. And I wrote
for Scientific American in twenty twenty, it's not.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
Give me, give me your highlights though, because my explanation,
it pays really badly and it has no social prestige.
So why would you go into that? Not something else.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
I need to reread miraticle read an article so on
ago where you're like.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
I know, I do that sometimes, and then I laugh
at my own jokes because they were obviously written by
someone with my exact sense of humor. But I've since
in the intervening to I have forgotten them, And then
you think that's weird, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Well done?

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Past me?

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Exactly right. Also consistent with a status value perspective, the
occupations in which men are extremely underrepresented were viewed as
lower in status and therefore less deserving of attention and
social action towards change than stem fields where women are
extremely underrepresented. So that's that's that's in a line with
what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
I think, well, that makes sense, doesn't it. It's aspirational
if you're a woman to go into male dominated, highly paid,
highly prestigious, it might be tough. You know, there may
be all kinds of things keeping you out of that.
But you are trading up in the same way that
women started wearing trousers in the nineteen hundreds and men
didn't start wearing skirts.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
That's a very obvious kind of point of comparison for sure.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
But this research also found, which I think is interesting,
is that both men and women have the same bias.
So on average, both men and women were biased in
their perception of different gender imbalances based on gender representation
of the fields, even after controlling for the earning potential
of the fields. I think there are certain things in
the society ethos that that both men and women buy
into that we need to change something so that everyone

(40:33):
kind of sees something differently.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
Hmm, that's yeah. But this is these are the kind
of questions, as I say, like, I think that the
book is very ambitious, maybe fatally so, but it does
get you into lots of areas that I find interesting.
It it does feel a bit like a kind of
skeleton key that unlocks thinking about lots of psychology, sociology, literature, art,

(40:56):
all of these things, which is one of the reasons
you know, it took me for in a bit years
to write it, and yeah, and I still don't think
I finished it really in the sense that I think
I could keep thinking about these questions for a very
long time.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Well, congratulations on getting it out there. It's it's no
easy feats, and I really appreciate the amount of care
and attention you put into it. The the just to
I'm just thinking about you as a person. You're you're
You're a you are a difficult woman, and I mean
that in the best way possible, right, I mean you
that's the title of your book, right, Yeah, you don't

(41:35):
like you're you're different. Like now, I'm not saying you're
different than women. That's a very sexist thing to say,
but but in some ways you are. I do mean that.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
I'm fine with you saying that. I don't mind saying that.
I know I went I went to an all girls school,
and some of the research shows you that women who
go to all girls schools are more like pushy, right,
they will put their hand up more in class. You
don't get into those situations, I know. And who knows
if I would have been similarly, Maubi, if I'd gone
to a mixed sex school, maybe I would have done.

(42:03):
But yeah, I do I enjoy competing in male domains.
I have lots of male friends. I podcast, which is
just about the malest thing that any human can do, right,
and podcast bro, I am a podcast bro, And I
I really enjoy all of that. And I enjoy arguing
with people.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yes, uh, well but you don't there. But also you
don't you don't take you don't take ship from men,
you know, like I, I mean, there's that epic, famous
conversation we can call it. I guess suppose between you
and Jordan Peterson that that went viral, right, And I
mean you in that whole you didn't. You didn't just

(42:45):
like cow chout of his genius to a self proclaimed genius, right,
Like you're like, wait a minute, Like I disagree with that.
I disagree with that, Like you, you don't mind saying
what you did. But there's also there's something deeper though
that I'm trying to get it about yours.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
But there's also let me tell you that, and that
experience is a very good example of why women might
not do those things. So there are fine we can
have the argument about whether or not women on average
are more assertive, more agreeable, which where they fall on
those scales, But the social penalty for doing those things
is real. You know, if you look at the YouTube
comments under those videos, there are people who think I'm stupid,

(43:22):
who think I'm an NPC, who think that he completely
dominated that conversation, who to this day do weird AI
photoshops of me, like where I've got a little beard
because they think I'm like unacceptedly like haggish and sort
of like, you know, disgusting physically because I'm you know,
I'm unfeminine for having done that. And it's all the
same stuff that was thrown at the suffragettes, right, They

(43:43):
were depicted as monstrous and kind of you know, unfeminine
for doing these things. So there is a very good
reason for women not to do them. If you are
someone who cares about people being very rude about your
looks and intellect on the internet, then you you know,
stay away from big debates with big male intellectualbles would
be my argument.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
But you're also absolutely I mean, you definitely threatened his
fan base. I mean, I've known Jordan for a while
and I think you know that everyone has good and
bad you know, right.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
I made a program called The New Gurus, in which
I talked to a guy who had been a massive
Jordan Pedson fan, and he'd interviewed people from his psychology career,
and I think there was definitely, pre the cancelation and
the benzos, there was somebody who loved his job, loved
educating young people, felt a real kind of sense of
that he wanted to be a shepherd and a steward

(44:33):
for the next generation. And I think that's still there,
It's just buried under fifteen layers of his brain has
been overwhelmed by being an Internet monster and celebrity and
half people loving him and half the people hating him. Right, Like,
I think any of us would probably go a bit
weird after that experience.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Yes, And the point I'm trying to make here as
well is that you that you were one of the first,
I think maybe the first. So he was on a
series of interviews at that time in that epic of
human history. He was on a series where it was
Dunk on woman, this is how this is how I
think it was. Dunk Let's get me talking to a woman,

(45:10):
Dunk and woman, Duncan woman, Dunk and woman, Duncan woman,
all this fans being like, yes, yes, Jordan, Yes, you,
and then you and then your interview I feel like
stopped the train that was happening. I mean, that didn't
stop it, but but it was the first interview I
saw where I was like, yeah, go hell and I did.
I don't know, I didn't know. I didn't know you uh,
no offense. But fine. After that, you know, I was like, Okay, okay,

(45:37):
this woman. I kind of diged this woman because you
were the first episode where you're just like, no, I.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
Know, but I think you'll that's that. I think that
reflects very well on you. No, because I just think
that lots of people didn't see that. They just saw
that as the next woman that he dunked on quite
which again yeah, I mean, you know, people, it was
very funny when I did Sam Harris's podcast because I've
changed my hair, I'm slightly blonding out. They were like,
but hang on a minute halfway through, like they've been cheated.

(46:03):
This is the woman that talked to Jordan Peter. She
seems very reasonable, And I was like, maybe you should
go back and rear praise how that went down, and
did you just come to it with enormous prejudices and
preconceptions about like, oh, here's another feminist whining about women,
and actually listen to what was actually said.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
But yeah, well, I hope people also listen to this podcast, and.

Speaker 1 (46:24):
I hope that everybody goes back and admits that I
was right. That's I hope about all of life. And
I just think that's a great thing to stake my
future happiness on.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yeah, it's funny, it's funny. Well, no, I mean, you
you live, you live, you walk the talk, right, I mean,
you live, you know, difficult women? I mean, but but
but it shouldn't it really, you shouldn't even be phrased
that way. But unfortunately that is how it's phrased. And
in an ideal world, I don't think that's how it
would be phrased, right, it though?

Speaker 1 (46:49):
But do you not think that in some ways you
might be a difficult man, and that you've talked about
your kind of non traditional route to academia, and that
actually those qualities within you have also, like I think,
for if you're going to be somebody who aims to
be an original thinker, then actually a bit of outsider
irishness and a bit of spikeness is a good you know,
you can turn that into your superpower.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
I agree, as long as we don't have a connotation
that we were talking about nasty women, you know, in
like a Trump sense, because I think that's how I was,
you know, kind of association I have when you that's
the social I am. When you say difficult women, I
think nasty women. Yeah, a nasty woman that's in a
bad way. But uh wait, there's just so many things
going through my head right now. Off the record, Mike,

(47:33):
off the record, did you see the new U Jordan
Peterson religion versus Atheists?

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Well, this is what Okay, this is what I mean
about the fact that I think people need to go
back and watch my debate with him and just think
maybe there was just a moment where they felt really
threatened and they thought he represented something that they wanted
to exist in the world, and that therefore they kind
of saw something that wasn't there. Like he does a
lot of the same rhetorical techniques like your Gish gallup,
like the kind of picking on one way, like he's

(48:01):
a whole bit in a minima. He tries to make out,
he projects onto me that I'm arguing that patriarchy is
like tyranny in some ridiculous way, and I'm saying, well
that you know, and he said, well, you know, how
could you live if it was a tyranny? And I
didn't but I didn't say it was a tyranny, but
you know, and he he will argue with something. He
will say you've said something, and then argue with it.
And because he's so fluent, it's very hard to go
but stop the train, like I didn't. I didn't say that,

(48:25):
and he was very good at that, and clearly post
Benzo's post coma post pivoting to the Daily Wires Christian
fan base, he's not quite got it. And then he
also had the misfortune to be fighting Reddit atheists who
are like, while you were out at a party, I
studied the blade. You know, they've heard all those Christian
apologetics archaists before. That's how they practice, that's what they

(48:46):
do for sport.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Well, I think consistently what you just said. I think
they were. They were difficult boys. I don't know. To me,
they look like children because it looked like so I
was like hard for me calling them then, but they
would get mad at me probably if I didn't call
them men. So they're men, but they were probably difficult.
That was a group of difficult men. Yeah, we can.
I will keep that on the record. Then what we

(49:09):
just talked about, because you're.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
Right, because what they weren't they what they weren't was
deferential to the great man I'm saying, And I think
that is a really This is when I come to
about the idea that genius is kind of poisonous to
the geniuses is that I think if you walk into
every interaction expected that you will be treated as if
you're special, then it becomes very weird and impossible for
you to function in places where you're not special, and

(49:32):
that causes people a huge amount of unhappiness. For example,
it causes politicians who've left the limelight enormous unhappiness. They
don't know how to be normal again. Sports stars you
have to retire pretty young, like what's the second neck
of your life? You know, and lots of people. Again,
to go back to Elion Muscow, I do talk about
in the book, I think the great mistake that he
made with Doge was thinking I'm a brilliant businessman. Government

(49:54):
is like a business. I'll be brilliant at this too,
and not having any respect for a different domain. That
probably had different rules and different leavers that you had
to pull. And this is where I think that the
idea of a three six yr own special person makes
the people itself who you know, instead of thinking, God,
I was lucky. Wasn't it great that I just had
that perfect moment and these great collaborators and I was

(50:16):
you know, and I went to such a great university.
If you still in think thinking I am the Nietzschean
superman who moves through the world changing it, then if
that goes away, what are you? What's what's left? You know,
if you just see yourself as this individual glorious island
and then the success goes away, You're you're nothing. Instead

(50:36):
of thinking what do I love doing? What do I
enjoy doing? Who would I enjoy working with?

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Like what? You know?

Speaker 1 (50:41):
What is what is my place in this Brownian motion
of society that I could I could get back to?

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Yeah, there's so much there and just causing the whoop
on on our mutual friend Jordan person he has the
thing that's so painful and I messages with his former
and grad students about this. You know, there's there's so
there was so much potential in the sky and and
and a lot of it is going to be left

(51:09):
unrealized because of some personality quirks, you know, And.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
It's really moving. Like I think it's a bit weird
when he starts crying when he talks about how young
men look up to him, because it looks like emotional
dysregulation at this point, but it comes from a genuine
feeling that he's motivated by in his own mind. And
that's what I mean. I'm sure he was a really
good professor because he was really did invest time in
his students. He really cared about.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Them, and I was like the best of him.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
But the Internet, Yeah, that was the best of him,
and the Internet rewarded the worst of him, and celebrity
and money rewarded the worst of him. And he you know,
I feel like the grail Night. You know, he chose
poorly and he could make a different choice in future.
That's the other thing I think is my reason for
saying I wanted to talk about acts of genius is
that this goes back to your research about the idea

(51:58):
we should think of ourselves in this much more fluid
way and think about what can I do? What is dynamic?
You know, how can I change what I've got these
gifts now they might be the same ones I've got
in ten years time, Like what should i be doing
now to grow? And we can all take something from that.
You don't have to become calcified in this sort of
image of yourself, you know, and like you know, I'm
sure you've written about gifted children and the fact they

(52:20):
struggle in adulthood. Yeah, because it's like you become calcified
in this image of yourself rather than thinking who am
I now? What's the best I can do in the world? Now?

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Oh yeah, I feel you get trapped. You would get
anyone would get trapped in the label of genius. I
mean that's a lot. That's a big thing to live
up to.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
I mean, wow, a difficult second album, right.

Speaker 2 (52:38):
I prefer my whole life to go on to be
the underdog, like I that's my that's the story of
my life. Personally. I like to be the underdog, you know, Helen,
If I had to choose between being deemed the genius
or I mean, people don't expect anything from me and
then I do something people like, Okay, Scott's got something.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
But I think that's made you have a more interesting
career right, And I say this based on having like
you googled you beforehand, because it means that you don't
get stuck doing more of the thing that you've got
famous for or got successful for. I got popular for right.
You go, well, maybe I'm like, I'm intellectually, I've exhausted this,
like I've mined this territory. Where next? And journalism is
a career is very like that. You know, people really

(53:20):
want you to have a beat and you to do it,
and then they know who you are. And I think
I confuse people sometimes because I can't work out whether
or not I'm left wing or right wing, because it's like,
who are you? But yesterday you were criticizing the left
and now you're criticizing the right, and people want you
to be this sort of stable brand.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
They do, but it's way more.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Interesting to be chaotic. Probably not as well rewarded, but
it's more fun and lots of careers.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
I think, well, I completely agree.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Tell me if you agree with the slightly pessimistic conclusion
of the book, which is we will never win. The
people who want to talk about genius in this much
more social contingent way will never win because we like stories.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
And stories depends on winning, right, and I think a
lot about that. I have very different metrics for winning
than I see a lot of people have as metrics
for winning. And I think I need to make peace
with a lot of things, like make peace with am
I okay, you know, not you know, sacrificing quantity of

(54:17):
followers for quality of contribution. And I'm okay with that
making that, But you have to want to make certain sacrifices.
I think a lot of people people make. So many
people talk so much so often about making the sacrifices
to get more followers, but they don't talk about the
others at the other end of the sacrifice, which is
the sacrifice to not get more followers.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I always thought about
what I wanted in my career, and I thought, well,
what I want to do is always be interested. You know,
I never want to be bored. That's the thing. Money
is great, and you know, I'm very like a decent
middle class salary. I'm very happy about that. But beyond that,
would I go and work in a soul destroying job
that I wasn't interested in for big b ucks? No,

(55:02):
I don't you know, what I want is to be
curious and to be kind of like a shark, constantly
moving forward. And I think that, you know, maybe that's
not how everybody feels about happiness, but I think probably
more more people than you think would be happier if
they took more chances and didn't worry as much about
being popular and worried more about being interested.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Yes, and I want to talk about a phenomena, like
a wildfire kind of phenomenal. In a lot of ways,
genius is something people bestow bestow on you, right. Genius
is in some cases there's a confluence between the person
who thinks their whole life they their their whole life
since they were two years old, they thought themselves a genius,
and then and then they're like pune with the public's

(55:43):
catching on. You know, but but but but but Genius
seems to sometimes just be this something. You know. It
could be like someone yodling on TikTok and that catches
fire and now they're the new quote genius, you know,
or maybe they're not described as a genius, but popularity
maybe it's intertwined these days. Genius and popularity. I think

(56:05):
in this generation is something different than like the Da
Vinci kind of eraror genius, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, And I think there's an interesting you're hypothetical yodler
is that somebody who'd be happy to devote the rest
of their life to, you know, maybe smashing the paradigm
of yodling, right, and they event a whole new way
of doing it. And that's actually there are lots of
people who are like that, right, They would rather go
really deep into something or were they somebody who accidentally
this did well for them and it becomes a terrible

(56:34):
prison for them and they're paraded around the world as
the yodler, and you know, the fame weighs heavily upon them,
and you know, you just have to There are micro
versions of that in all of our lives. I think
if you have any kind of creative career that you
just need to work out whether or not do you
still love it the thing that you know that is
currently giving you rewards, And you know, if you don't,

(56:54):
maybe you've got a family and a house and a
mortgage and you kind of need to stick with it anyway.
But I just think long term, try to try to
keep loving it.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
M trying to keep what a beautiful, beautiful thing. We
could own the interview right now, but I'd be remiss
not to have you talk for a couple of minutes
about the deficit model, because it's so central to your book,
you know, can you explain what that is?

Speaker 1 (57:17):
Well? I just I went through a space of watching
biopics which or about geniuses. So it's John Nash in
A Beautiful Mind, which is a Ron Howard Bier pic,
Stephen Hawking in the Theory of Everything, and then Alan
Turing in The Imitation Game. And it was really interesting
that there was a kind of format for all of these,

(57:39):
which was, you get this incredible gift, but here's its
incredible price. And now that a lot of that is
dictated by the kind of need for the like a
movie template. But I think it just applies a lot
more broadly to how we tend to think about gifts.
I've got a book behind me on the shelve that
I read which is called The Price of Greatness, which is.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
About one of my theory.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Yeah, right, but it is all about that, right, It's
all about the kind of you know. One of the
things that it says is, you know, you are more
likely to find high achievement among people who lost a
parent when they were young, and then we.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
Said physically disabled as well.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Yeah, and I think which I think is really interesting
that the kind of what are the internal motives with
people that drive them to extraordinary things? Often they are
pain or loss or a sense in some way of
being missing something, and so that you know, it does
have its roots in reality, but it is also become
baked into how we tell those stories. And it reached

(58:36):
its final kind of apergy when you get to like
the American idol thing, right, and someone comes on and says,
I'm going to sing Ivita and it's for my grandmother
who passed last week, And you think, really, is it though?
Or did you just want to be on TV and
be famous? But you can't say out loud and I'm
going to be singing you know something from Avita because
I practiced really hard at singing and I would like

(58:57):
to do it professionally. You know, we just baked into
it this idea of we need to have kind of
there needs to be a mense struggle, and I think
that's possibly a way for the rest of us of
dealing with our inevitable feelings of envy towards the incredibly successful,
if we want to think that that great success came
at a price and maybe made people unhappy. It's kind
of easier to live in a world in which we're

(59:18):
than you know, the kind of normal sized people, and
we're being surrounded by these giants living these big, successful lives.
But you know, that's it is kind of manipulative in
some sense. I think one of the things I found,
and I only found out quite late in the writing process,
so it's only in there slightly, is that Ron Howard
was looking at a completely different story of a guy,

(59:39):
and it was the story of this guy who was bipolar,
and nonetheless he managed to go to an ivy League
university and he wrote a memoir about it, and he
presented himself as somebody who was, you know, who's able
to kind of keep his paranoid delusions in check, and
his memoir solved for a huge amount of money, and
you know, it was that was going to be a

(01:00:00):
beautiful mind. And then, unfortunately what happened is this guy
who believed his parents were Nazis and doing experiments on him,
murdered his girlfriend, stabbed her a number of times, and
he is now living in a high security mental hospital,
and then that it's no longer such a touching, heartwarming story,
and you know, of kind of somebody who's brilliant but troubled.
It's a much more sad story of somebody who's whose

(01:00:24):
troubles led them eventually down to a really dark place. Indeed,
And I just remember thinking, well, that's the problem, isn't it.
There's a set version of picking winners in those stories.
And I think it's quite hard for people who are
living with mental illness to be told constantly that it
is this thing that should be improving their lives or
there's some kind of nobility and grace in it, when
for lots of people that isn't their experience. It is

(01:00:44):
just a wholly negative one and something that they wish
would go away. But we want it to be kind
of inspirational again, because I think it's more comfortable for
those of us on the on the outside of it
to think that there's a point to it, you know, cosmically,
there's a point to this suffering.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Well that's do you have a couple more minutes? Yeah,
of course, because this is this is I mean, it's
a topic. I've researched the link between mental illness and creativity,
but also I've been a big advocate of neurodiversity and
it's hidden gifts, And so it sounds like perhaps you're
arguing against that view and saying like maybe that's part

(01:01:20):
of the you're saying that's a myth, Scott, is that
is that what you're saying, like for instance, ADHD Often
this kind of inattention is treated in an education context
like a deficit, but in a different context sometimes it's
they have such a rich imagination that can be channeled
towards great creativity. Would would you argue against that view

(01:01:42):
or or how does that relate to what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
I think that's a really reasonable way of saying it.
I was quite struck by that recent New York times pace,
which I thought was a brave and unusual thing for
the New York Times to run, which was a piece
maybe saying we should treat ADHD more fluidly. And actually
one of the things that people who struggle in that
very rigid box of school with adh they often find
careers in which those periods of intense focus but also
you know, struggle to do the boring things. You know,

(01:02:07):
they can cope with that, they can suit them more.
I thought that was a really helpful way of thinking
about it, and I don't think it's bad. I think,
you know, you could say the same about autism and
the current tech scene. Right There's loads and loads of
people if you go to Silicon Valley who are autistic,
and those careers really really suit them. So I don't
have any problem with that at all. I just think
I'm just thinking about people in my own life I

(01:02:28):
know who suffer from very serious mental illnesses, and they
just they find that people around them want it to
be inspirational, they want there to be a kind of
happy ending and tied up with a neat little bow,
and actually they don't find a great deal of meaning
in it. It's just a really horrible and so I
think I'm talking I'm not talking less about developmental issues

(01:02:49):
or neurodivergence. That I am talking about meant severe mental
illness in that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Case, yes, And I think it's a very important distinction
because our researchers full ball and mentalness is not corely
in the creativity, but it's usual a watered down version
of that. The children get so there's some is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
Just the psychoticism theory? Is this the idea that if
you kind of make it going all.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Hands okay, I promise. But but but like schizophrenia, if
you if you're if you're a sibling or not sibling
of your child of someone stophrenia, you get you don't
get the most deabilitating genes, but you get some genes
that are conduced to creativity that are associated with schizophrenia.

(01:03:31):
We call it schizo tippy, which is a personality trait.
It's not a mental illness. It's a personality trait that
we all differ a continuum. But those who score really
highen schizo tippy tend to have someone in their ancestry
that had a much more extreme version of it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
But intuitive sense, doesn't it, because tell me if this
is wrong, that in a way that explains why those
conditions would persist through human history.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
But it's like sickle salinemia, right, Like the single sickle
cell gene gives you resist it's malaria. So if you
live in a malarial climate, having one of them is good.
Having two of them is bad. And I'm really life limiting.
But okay, but that that then explains why you would
you know, why you'd find that persisting in populations through
time is the mild. Mild form is good, severe form
is bad.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
That's the argument. Yeah, we've written papers about the evolutionary
genetics of the psychosis creativity link. I think as the
title of paper we wrote.

Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
So yeah, I'm not I'm not going full hands sizing
on you. If if people read the book, they will
understand that that is a pretty cruel disc but I
would not have I would not have leveled that at you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
Well yeah, well, thank you, and you talk about how
he had his own idea and has head that he
was a genius. Let's end on this because I have
it dawned on me that people really do create their
own self mythologies, and I think that, yes, it's true
that other people can deem reduced, but I think in
a lot of these cases, these individuals they love the

(01:04:55):
sound of their own voice too. I think there's a
correlation there between in both things. You know, the people
who don't love the sound of their own voice but
really are hidden geniuses don't tend to be out there
as much, and so I think there's something there.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
What do you think I think that is that is
possibly true. You know, I asked Walter Isaacson, you know
who's done these big biographies of lates geniuses, and he's
done he does Steve Jobs, He's don't need a musk,
and before that he's done Einstein, And let me think
I would sa Leonard da Vinci. But you know he
said the one of his that didn't actually like wasn't

(01:05:31):
as a bigger seller as Jennifer Dowder, who's been involved
in Crisper in this gene editing research which has the
potential to be absolutely transformative. And you know that people
kind of forget that he did that one because she
has not been a kind of public intellectual in the
same way. Right, she hasn't stepped up to that. You know,
very few scientists do. But somebody like a Richard Dawkins does.

(01:05:52):
You know, They are very eloquent and very willing to
be out in public making their arguments, kind of taking
on all comers. And you know, definitely, I think it
helps if you want to be hailed as a genius,
to play a genius in public, and lots of people
don't want to do that, men and women. They're kind
of quite retiring, They just or personality wise, they'd rather
just be in their lab or in their studio or

(01:06:12):
whatever it might be, just doing the thing, not you know,
doing the public side of it too. And I think
that does unfortunately that if you want to be hailed
as a genius, you have to kind of go, hey,
I'm a genius, and you have to have enough people
agree with you. You know, those are the two things that
probably necessary.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Yeah, exactly, all right, So let's end on a quote
from the great Helen Lewis quote. Because there is no
objective definition of genius and there never can be. Societies
anoint exceptional people as geniuses to demonstrate what they value.
We call some people special to demonstrate what we find special,
and in turn, we give those special people lattitude that

(01:06:50):
is not extended to ordinary mortals. We have a set
of stories about what geniuses are and how they work
and how singular their achievements are, stories that are often
entirely untrue. True. Thank you, helenus for being on the
Psycholic Podcast and sharing your wisdom with us.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
Oh, thank you very much for having me