Debunking the Genius Myth w/ Helen Lewis

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0:30I think they're two different things though. What I mean is that the achievement stands next to the personal qualities. So 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 on end because you're painting the Sistine Chapel, it becomes, oh 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 100% sure you have worked with people who are useless at a number of things.

1:04And 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 that doesn't 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 actually your mind is occupied with bricklaying. But it happens at those kind of higher realms that we read oddness as specialness. Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In each episode, we talk with inspiring scientists, thinkers, and other self-actualizing individuals

1:39who 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 journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic. In this episode, we discuss Helen's most recent book called 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.

2:11And we have a set of stories about what geniuses are and how they think 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 IQ and the way we treat those we deem genius in our society. I think this conversation is sure to spark lots of thought and discussion. So without further ado, I bring you Helen Lewis. Helen Lewis, thank you so much for being on the Psychology Podcast. How are you doing? I'm doing good, thank you. And I'm delighted to be here.

2:42I think it turns out you and I have got a lot of overlapping interests. So this will be really fun. I would say quite a lot. Yeah, I devoured your book. I can't think of a better adjective. I mean, I literally was like, this is amazing. This is like, I nerded out with myself. I have to apologize that psychologists don't come out of it particularly well. Yeah, well, fair. Yeah, well, fair enough. They didn't come out particularly well in my book on Gifted either, you know, and the

3:12history of psychology. I don't know if you had a chance to read on Gifted, but there's so much overlap. Well, no, that's the thing. And I was looking at you wrote about the complexity of greatness as well, right? And all the work 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 20th century, psychologists were wildly overconfident about what could be known at the time about intelligence and giftedness. Yes, absolutely. I mean, there was this real abuse of a test, right? The IQ test, which was not the original spirit of the test at all.

3:46Alfred Brené had a good heart. He wanted to help really differentiate between those who didn't really need as much resources 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 to my test. I mean, that's a rough French translation. Yeah, of course. 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

4:17their peers and that need extra attention? And that somehow in that early bit of the 20th century becomes magically transmuted 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 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 tests. You know, there's 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.

4:47I think that's the more fashionable thing to do. But that's almost a reaction to the 20th century's wild overclaims for it. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's let's talk about that. Now, I want to say this up front. 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 you're like, well, you know, a lot of people will

5:20say that there's no heritable basis to IQ, whatever whatsoever, that it's a completely useless test that all measures IQ and none of that is true. See, that's that's a paraphrasing of of a section you wrote. And I was like, good for Helen. Like, yeah, because I, you know, I get I get annoyed when when when I know 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 Ungifted and talked about my own personal experiences.

5:51How when I was a kid, I was whole I was treat 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 and everyone was like, it's almost like they were 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, I count a lot of IQ test makers as my friends now, you know, like I publish papers with them.

6:21I don't think I want I don't want to go to hell. And a lot of them are well-meaning. A lot of them want to use the test for educational purposes to see what 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 little about the history of genius of the phrase genius and how it was connected to the IQ test. Well, I think what you're hitting on is the fact that what people are off for having is

6:53an 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 a particular discipline being brilliant, or the tendency within that field that they represent, you know, putting your nails, nailing your colours 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 would really argue that it is just a simple

7:24objective measure, but it's often treated like that effectively. It's often treated like there is some kind of rational basis for it. And it's more interesting to work out why. And I think you're exactly right about 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 like 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 Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man, which is his famous book that took on phrenology. It took on, you know, the overt racists and eugenicists who ended up deploying the IQ test.

8:00But 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 end, the line of thought to the end and end up and think suddenly they're, they're on the same page as people that they find politically abhorrent. 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. And the sense that I try to return to in the book is the Greek and Roman sense of a kind

8:34of visiting spirit of a divine inspiration, something that works 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 to look at. Another thing you caveated in your book that I was like, go Helen! Someone does need to say Monet 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.

9:05I just, I don't, I wouldn't want that to be me. Um, 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, as a type of person. And that's, you know, that's comes in, you can see the shift in the English dictionaries, 1600s, 1700s. 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 Darren McMahon talks about it as a kind of product of secularization. You know, if you, if you start believing that God is ruling everything and that humans are

9:37doing stuff, you're probably more open to the idea that some humans are essentially demigods 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 feminine essence within them. You know, they are tubercular, they're kind of pale and feverish and, and not really connected to this world, not kind of hearty, stout men, but these kind of more self-like creatures.

10:07And then, you know, we get through to the, 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 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. Yeah. I was just going to say that's tied to the historic nature of Lewis Terman equating IQ

10:43with genius. I mean, he has a quote that I, that I quote often where he's like, genius is only recruited from the lines of high, of the high IQ. So I think, I think a lot of that has its roots in, in, in the adoption of the IQ test, right? 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, you know, sort of downgrade, isn't there? And like what he's actually looking for and what he's actually found. Yeah. What's also, I always found interesting about the title is he never actually looked at

11:14genetics. I mean, it's not like he did a DNA analysis of any of the kids. He, I mean, that's just all clear of how he's thinking about the whole thing, which is very Galton-esque, Galton-esque. I mean, Galton was obsessed with genetics. Yeah. That's an understatement. That's an understatement. I mean, he was a, yeah, he was, he was a very keen proponent in this very unemotional, unempathetic way. He just, I think he looked as, at people as sort of collections of variables rather than any kind of rounded sense of a kind of other mind at work.

11:46Like, yes, and I'm going to yes end that and say, you know, he was a kind of a genius in a way. Like I looked at some of his, he's obsessed. He was obsessed. Everything you said is true. And I'm just yes ending. I mean, he was obsessed with measurement and he, he developed some modern day statistical techniques that still are very valuable. And he's so 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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13:20You can learn more about the course and register by going to centerforhumanpotential.com slash S-A-C. That's centerforhumanpotential.com slash S-A-C. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah, yeah. So tell me, let's back up a second. How do you define the genius? What do you see as the genius myth, if you had to define it on a podcast right now? Well, it's the idea that, you know, that there are special people and some people are,

13:51you know, they are just all around 360 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 Gauss, the mathematician, and this kind of fable that grows up about him in the school room and they're asked to do this, add together these numbers and it's kind of busy work, except he comes up with an equation and, you know, and he's 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

14:22its different iterations. And the first one is, you know, many years after Gauss died. So it's a fable, it's a parable. And it's obviously trying to create a 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. There's 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 being another one of them. And unfortunately, the kind of polarity flows back the other way and that we tend

14:55to 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, 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 behaviour

15:28and actually get treated better because they are stampy feet 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, he's such a hard one. Why can't he print his own emails? You know, why can't he do this? Whatever it might be. They get kind of, I have this metaphor about the beehive, you know, they get treated like the queen bee and everybody brings them the royal jelly. Whereas the worker bees who just get on with it and don't make so much of a fuss, people then tend to just deprecate them and disregard them.

16:02Yeah, 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? I think either marketing is genius or nothing is. I think that's the way 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, he was both a technically brilliant

16:36artist, but he was also fully okay with inhabiting the persona of the great artist and, you know, limiting what he did and selling himself and being stalked by the right gallerist and all that kind of stuff. So the business side, he was brilliant at too. And that's, if you can be a genius at draftsmanship, then you can be a genius at marketing. Donald Trump probably is a genius at marketing, right? This is my most controversial opinion that comes out of the book. But, you know, he has reached the top through a unique set of circumstances and abilities that clearly nobody

17:10else can replicate. And that's, if you want to call anything else genius, that probably is genius too. I'd be happy in not saying any human was a genius. 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 so into the personhood aspect of it. You have a quote here, quote, genius transmutes odd into special. Um, could one argue, I love playing devil's advocate. Could one argue that, um, you're, you're real by saying just, they're just odd. That's not fully

17:43appreciating how that they're amazing. Like in some cases it transmutes amazing into special. Um, could some people say, Oh, Helen, you just have sour grapes. How do you respond to that? I think they're 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 on end, because you're painting the Sistine Chapel, it becomes, Oh my God, he's so devoted to

18:17his art that he doesn't even have time to think about his, his socks and that you've worked in university. So I am 100% 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 know, and that would, that doesn't 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 kinds of higher realms that

18:47we read oddness as specialness. 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 overlook a lot of geniuses in the way that we, as society, think about genius and what falls within the purview of genius. And that's been my lifelong project. So with that one, we're like, it's like, oh, so aligned. Right. And then there's another argument you're making,

19:19which 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 that's not really genius at all. And we treat that as genius. I 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 be genius. Maybe there's like a halo effect of genius. There's a halo effect of attractiveness. We know that a physically attractive person can get away with anything. Maybe there's a, you're saying there's

19:54a halo effect for genius. We'll just coin that right now. I think that's a very good way of describing it. Yeah. Because there is the kind of, oh, he must be playing 4D chess. And that's just, you know, you don't understand. And you see that a huge amount. Like 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 him around going, the thing is you mere mortals don't understand the genius behind this. And it's like, or another explanation is that he has 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

20:29case that, you know, people don't have that Midas 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. We're being, you know, we're being asked to consider that things are 4D chess when they're just normal chess. I guess every, all chess is 4D chess because it happens in time. But anyway, 5D chess, let's up the Ds on that one. Helen, you've, you've really got me thinking a lot because like I'm not ready to completely give away to, to, to, to get over the phrase genius. I think that the way I have, way I have thought

21:03about it is it really just represents, um, uh, a really like top 1% ability or achievement in something, whatever it is. And, you know, if, if everyone's a genius, then the, then the known's a genius, right? Like it's obviously built into the word itself, something quite unique, not necessarily special in, in, in a special way of a, you're talking about a narcissistic sort of deserving a special, special privileges. That's not what I mean by unique. Unique can have a different meaning as well, where you don't feel entitled to everything. But if I do, let's, let's get ready.

21:35I don't think, to be honest with you, I, I, 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, 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, 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, a concept that is woven so deeply into our society that I don't, I think, but what I, 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

22:09want to lose the idea. And I took about this in the book that you go and I, you know, for me, I write about Van Gogh's Almond Blossom, which is one of my favorite paintings, very simple painting of this light blue background and these beautiful white flowers clearly influenced by Japanese woodblock painting. It's got his unique brushstroke 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 Gogh's life into a kind of neat little parable about the fact that people are overlooked during their own lives or mentally ill people can still

22:42be creative. In fact, maybe that's part of their creativity. All of those things can kind of coexist 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 of me too stuff, you know, and the kind of decolonization 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 people. Horrible humans. Yeah. Because that is tricky because I don't

23:17know 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. I think it's just human to want to do that. Well, that's very interesting. Maybe that's why a lot of people overlook 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,

23:49it's like, you know, like don't question, you know, that, that a person could have done anything bad because we love his music so bad, so much. It's like, that's not logical, but okay. But that's turning him into a saint, isn't it? Because I think, you know, I talk 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 for most people a horrible experience. And you can see

24:22that 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 as 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 right to compare it to religious belief. That kind of fandom has a lot of overlap with it. They believe in him. And what you're essentially saying is you're saying that this is a false prophet and no wonder people react really strongly to that. Yeah. I actually tweeted the other day something and then deleted it

24:55after five seconds. Good idea. Always 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 a cult, like an occult figure, a cult leader, like what's the difference?

25:19Have you, I mean, yeah. Well, the difference is that the difference is what the effect is, right? Um, I think that one thing I, you know, I did a series about kind of gurus on the internet and, you know, people will in Silicon Valley 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 a mission. Lots of people will do things that people in the outside world think are stupid and crazy, like staying up for 20 hours straight coding or whatever it might be. But everybody involved has chosen to be there. Then we talk

25:53about the tactics of coercion. They're not really being violently coerced to stay in a startup. They may be just hoping to be rich, but that's not, you know, that's not coercion. And, you know, and ultimately at the end, they may come out of that experience feeling that it's been good if they, if the startup goes to IPO and they're suddenly rich and they can spend the rest of their lives doing, 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 gurus, the method of change is believe in me, believe in me and take my word as gospel. And if you think that has been genuinely really

26:27good in your life, then you don't think of it as a cult because we think cults are inherently bad, but the mechanisms are extremely similar. Right. And, and specifically zooming in, um, on the idea that, um, maybe bad behavior will be not only accepted, but extolled as, uh, you know, you know, viewed as, Oh, yeah. Have you noticed there's this thing that if someone is, is the guru or the, um, not just a guru, but like everyone just idolizes you, you read, you read that, that, that level, you reach that level of people,

27:00of 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 in the outside, um, the out group 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 going to defend them. Not even

27:31defend them, but we're going to like extoll it and celebrate it. There's a very brilliant, um, Scott Alexander blog post from now, like a decade ago that he talks about this. I mean, he talks about the animal rights charity, Peter, Petter, however we pronounce that people, the ethical treatment of animals and how they would go into like atrocities and say, yeah, we're going to help all the people, um, you know, who were hurt by Hurricane Katrina, but only if they become vegan and people would get really, really angry about that. And 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

28:03like 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 then he goes on to talk about, you know, Catholics believing in transubstantiation. 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 out group. And I think that's similar to what you're talking

28:36about, about kind of defending a genius. If someone's actions become indefensible to most people, you are making a much stronger in group claim by going along with it anyway. Definitely. And just the whole idea of martyrdom is relevant here too. Like, well, and, uh, actually, if I may, so the topic of my new book on, um, just people who have these, 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

29:07canceled. Like, like your platform is like bigger than anyone else's platform. How are you canceled? You know, that sort of thing. I thought that was a really interesting observation. And I'm really looking forward to reading that book because there's, isn't it Bertrand Russell, who's got this idea about the kind of moral purity of the victim. Um, and I think it's what, yeah, it's kind of relaxing because you just, you know, I, I wrote a piece a while ago that was about people who faked, uh, their identities and claimed to be black during the kind of George Floyd uprising, black or Hispanic. And these were left-wing academics,

29:38you know, um, and they would claim falsely to be black or Hispanic at a time in which people were making big conversations about, um, racial injustice in America. And I went back and looked at the number of people who claimed falsely claimed 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 at any point go, well, I know I'm not really one, but are you really one? But then it, you know, and there was, you know, and it was apparently an established phenomenon in post-war Germany that people would sort of think themselves into thinking I was actually Jewish, or I was actually one of the

30:12resistors and they, they weren't because people have been presented with a simple moral story and 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 Munchausen, social Munchausens. They wanted essentially a time when we'd heard that white people were bad. They thought, I'm not 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 that, what you're talking about 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

30:45identity category that you can see all the individual steps, but it does end up with this ludicrous situation when the one case I was talking about, you get a Italian American woman passing herself off as a Hispanic scholar known as Jessica La Bombalera. And she's 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 whole of fake Holocaust survivors was orphaned as a kid during the war, but to a sort of a non-Jewish family. And that, but that's a sad story

31:16of, you know, a very mundane story of, um, of dislocation and childhood trauma. Whereas the one that people got excited about was I survived Auschwitz. Um, and you can see why people ended up gravitating. This happens with almost every terrible major tragedy. It happened with 9-11. There was a woman who was giving 9-11 tours as if her partner had died in it and she got busted for the fact she wasn't anywhere near New York on the day. There was people who claimed Falsy to be survivors of the Bataclan massacre in, um, in France. People just, like, I think your, your book is very timely because there is a lot of genuine victimhood out there, but there is also a kind of relaxing moral purity

31:52about, about that at a time when people are very tense about being morally pure. Yeah. And, uh, we, we found in our research that that is correlated with the dark triad personality. Remind me, that's Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, psychopathy. Okay. Well, some people posited a dark tetrad, which includes sadism. So you're, you're, you're, you're ahead of the curve, uh, on that. Um, wow, wow, wow, wow. You just gave me so many examples that I'm kicking myself for not including them in my book. They would have been perfect.

32:22No, but that's what happens when you write a book. Someone said to me, oh, have you read, um, Tim Harford's book, Messy? It's all about the fact that creativity is a lot harder. And I think, and I had the same thing when I saw your 2013 book, I was like, where, where were you when I needed you? Scott's book. I would have loved to read this two years ago. Yeah. But you, you did, you did cite my, uh, complexity of greatness book, which I really appreciate. Um, you know, cause I have no problem with the, uh, the term greatness. I want to, want to keep greatness in, in the human, in the human vocabulary. So people have something to aspire to, you know, that people

32:54have, and also that we, you know, like you said, I love that you, you, you used it, the word transcendence, you know, and that's, uh, I wrote a book called transcend and I'm obsessed with, uh, transcendent states of consciousness. So, um, I think that kind of pointing towards, uh, what humans could be is something very inspiring to young people and, and older people. But, um, I think that young people could use a little more inspiration these days, but so, yeah. So thank you. Thank you. No. And I think, um, well, you'll know from having lived in Britain for all that time, I think British culture is particularly hostile to aspiration and success. We find that people

33:28kind of 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 happier with like openly boasting about successes that they've had, which is just a complete no, no in British culture. Um, so I think that, you know, I think that's worthwhile saying, but working really hard to become a great painter is good and, and should be encouraged. Yeah. Let's, let's shift gears a second and talk about something that is, um, very near and dear to your heart. And that's the gendered aspect of the term genius. It is undeniable. I mean,

34:04it's like, it's like you have a lot of men that have declared themselves geniuses and everyone around them have declared them geniuses. And you have a lot of women who I think are geniuses, but just don't have that even have the motivation to be seen as a genius. I mean, I talked about this on the Sam Harris podcast about positions of power. You see that, um, uh, 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 on the right side, you have extremely high

34:39proportion. And those are the ones that tend to get into power. And then on our light triad scale, it's like mostly women 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, um, can we make the world a good place? That doesn't count anymore. That, that one. We're a bunch of losers. Why aren't they more ambitious? Yeah. So you, we do see this in our data in terms of power, in terms of who ends up in power,

35:10how does that relate perhaps? Cause I've been, you got me thinking like there, there's gotta be a connection here to, to the gendered aspect of the genius story as well. Yeah. It's always a really difficult, isn't it? Cause my, you know, my first book was on feminism. And so I did a bit of that recovering. Difficult women. It's called Difficult Women. And I did a bit of that kind of recovering of women who I think have been unfairly 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 I think of the painters, um, Artemisa Gentiliski or, uh, Lee Krasner, who was Jackson Pollock's

35:45widow. They have both been repackaged for the art market in recent years as these kind of you go girl, um, feminist inspirational tales. And Jane Austen has definitely had that happen to her in terms of writers. So, but there are, I think it's absolutely undeniable that, you know, just in material conditions until very recently, women were excluded from lots of the things that you needed to be a genius. So women couldn't join the Royal Society. You know, someone as 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

36:19be. 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 of your peers and what they're doing, all that important stuff. If you can't go to university, which women couldn't for most of the existence of universities and all the, you know, 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 legal discrimination, which luckily we ended all that.

36:51And 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're more likely to describe men as brilliant, kind of regardless of achievement. Oh, really? I would actually be really interested in seeing that research. 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 kind of these bright young men and that they're, you know, and the men are judged on potential

37:25rather than kind of achievement. And so I do think there is a level of gender stuff. The counterpoint to 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 biology and very manosphere explanations for historical

37:57disparities in achievement of men and women, because, you know, those, the equivalence of those people 150 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 they, with these little brains, how are they supposed to go to university? Yeah, but they're more efficient. They're more, the dendrites are more efficient. That's what, yeah, actually the gap between the neurons is smaller. So it's, it's delightful. But, but now the big question is in lots of like the humanities, how do we get more men to go to university? You know, so now we've got to a situation in which we've said, well, hang on a

38:31minute, have 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 turnoff to men in the same way that writing novels, you know, was always, you know, women did that all the way through, but in the 18th century, that was the ones who were known and lionized were men. And so more men kind of wanted to do it. Epic poetry was a thing that straight men were really into in the 1700s

39:01and it's kind of not coded like that anymore. And so I, you know, I just think we have to be kind of slightly humble about before declaring there are simple biological explanations for these disparities and see them as a, as yet kind of interesting negotiated blend of possibly biology, but also culture. Yeah. If I may, and there's no pressure, but if I may get your email address, 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 that for Scientific American in 2020.

39:33It's not just- Give me your highlights though, because my explanation would be it pays really badly and it has no social prestige. So why would you go into that, not something else?

39:44I need to reread my article to see what it is. Have you ever read an article so long ago where you're like- 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 time forgotten them. And then you think that's weird, isn't it? Well done past me. 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.

40:17So that's in line with what you're saying, 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 kind of keeping you out of that, but you are trading up. In the same way that women started wearing trousers in the 1900s and men didn't start wearing skirts, right? That's a very obvious kind of point of comparison. For sure. But this research also found, which I think is interesting, is both men and women have the same bias. So on average, both men and women were biased in their perception of different gender

40:49imbalances 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 both men and women buy into, that we need to change something so that everyone kind of sees something differently. Yeah. But these are the kind of questions, as I say, 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 does feel a bit like a kind of skeleton key that unlocks thinking about lots of psychology, sociology, literature,

41:25art, all of these things, which is one of the reasons I, you know, it took me four and 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.

41:43Well, congratulations on getting it out there. It's no easy feat. And I really appreciate the amount of care and attention you put into it. Um, 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? You don't like, you're, you're different. Like, no, 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. I'm fine with you saying that. I don't mind

42:14saying that. I, you know, I, uh, I went to an all girls school and some of the research shows you that, um, 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 mouthy if I'd gone to a mixed sex school, maybe I would have done, 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 I, I am a podcast, bro. And I, I, I, I really

42:49enjoy all of that. Um, and, and I enjoy arguing with people. Yes. Uh, well, but, but you don't, but also you don't, you don't take, you don't take shit 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 interview, you didn't, you didn't just like kowtow to his genius, to his self-proclaimed genius, right? Like,

43:19you're like, wait a minute, like, I disagree with that. I disagree with that. Like, I mean, you, you, you don't mind saying what you did, but there, there's also, there's something deeper though that I'm trying to get at about you is, um, 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

43:51people who think I'm stupid, 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 unacceptably like haggish and sort of like, you know, disgusting physically to, 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 were depicted as monstrous and kind of, you know, unfeminine for, for doing these things. So there is a very good reason for women

44:21not 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, you know, stay away from big debates with big male intellectuals would be my, my argument. But you were also, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you, you definitely threatened his, his fan base. Um, I mean, I've known Jordan for a while and, um, I think, you know, that everyone has good and bad, you know, aspects. I made a, I made a program called the new gurus in which I talked to a guy who had been a massive Jordan Peterson fan and he'd interviewed people from his psychology career. And I think

44:52there was definitely pre the cancellation and the benzos. There was somebody who, 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 for the next generation. And I think that's still there. It's just buried under 15 layers of his brain has been, you know, 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. Yes. And the point I'm trying to make here as well is that you, though that you were one

45:26of the first, I think maybe the first that, 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, dunk on woman, dunk on woman, dunk on woman, dunk on woman, all of his fans being like, yes, yes, Jordan. Yes. And then you, and then your interview, I feel like stopped a train that was happening. I mean, I didn't stop it, but, but it was the first interview I saw where I was like, yeah, go hell. And I didn't, I don't know. I didn't know. I didn't know you, uh, no offense,

46:00but, um, I knew you after that. I was like, okay, okay. I kind of dig this woman. I kind of dig this woman because you were the first episode where you're just like, no. I know. But I think you all, that's, I think that reflects very well on you. No. Cause I just think that lots of people didn't see that. They just saw that as the next woman that he dunked on. Um, quite honestly, which again, I mean, I, you know, people, I was very funny when I did Sam Harris's podcast that I, cause I've changed my hair. I'm slightly

46:31blonder now. They were like, but hang on a minute, halfway through, like they've been cheated. This is the woman that talked to Jordan Peterson. She seems very reasonable. And I was like, maybe you should go back and reappraise 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. But yeah. Well, I hope people also listen to this podcast and. I hope that everybody goes back and admits that I was right. That's what I hope about all of life. And I just think that's a great thing to stake my future happiness on. Yeah.

47:02That's funny. It's funny. Well, no, I mean, you, you live, you live, you walk the talk, right? I mean, you live, um, you know, difficult women, you know, I mean, but, but, but it shouldn't, it really 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. You agree with me? I don't mind it though, 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

47:32to be an original thinker, then actually a bit of outsiderishness and a bit of spikiness is a good, you know, you can turn that into your superpower. I agree. As long as we don't have a connotation that we're talking about nasty woman, 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 association I have when you say difficult women, I think. Nasty women. Yeah. A nasty woman. Nasty in a bad way. But, um, uh, wait, there's just so many things going through my head right Now, um, off the record, uh, Mike, off the record, did you see the new, uh, Jordan Peterson,

48:06um, religion versus atheist? 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's does a lot of the same rhetorical techniques, like your gish gallop, like the kind of picking on one way, like he's a whole bit in a minute where 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

48:39saying, well, no, you know, and he said, well, you know, how could you live if it was a tyranny? And I'm like, I didn't, but I, I didn't say it was a tyranny, but you know, and he, he will argue with some, 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. Um, and he was very good at that. And clearly post Benzos, 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,

49:10you know, they've, they've, they've heard all those Christian apologetics before. That's how they practice, what they do for sport. Well, I think consistent with what you just said, I think they were, they were difficult boys. I don't know how old they are. Difficult men. To me, they look like children because they're like 21. They look like my students. So I was like, it's hard for me calling them men, but they would get mad at me probably if I didn't call them men. So they're men. Um, but they were probably difficult. That was a group of difficult men. Um, yeah, my, we can, we can, uh, I will keep that on the record then what we just talked about.

49:40That's fine by me because you're right. Cause what they weren't, they, what they weren't was deferential to the great man. That's what 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 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 who have to retire pretty young. Like what's the

50:15second act of your life? Um, you know, and lots of people, again, to go back to Elon Musk, who 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 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 levers that you had to pull. And this is why I think that the idea of a 360 or an 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 I had these great collaborators and I was,

50:46you know, and I went to such a great university. If you stood in 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 of thinking, what do I love doing? What do I enjoy doing? Who would I enjoy working with? Like what, you know, what is, what is my place in this Brownian motion of society that I could, I could get back to?

51:18Yeah, there, there's so much there. And, uh, you know, just closing the, the, the, the loop on, on our, our mutual friend, Jordan Peterson. Um, it, he has, you know, the thing that's so painful and I, and I have messages with his former grad students about this, you know, is that there's, there's so, there was so much potential in this guy and, um, and, and, and a lot of it is going to be left unrealized because of some personality quirks, you know? And, uh, it's really moving. Like, I think it's a bit weird when he starts crying, when he talks about how young men look

51:48up 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 really did invest time in his students. He really cared about them. And researcher, and researcher of personality. That was the best of him. 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,

52:20but 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 it, this goes back to your research about the idea 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? I've got these gifts now. They might not be the same ones I've got in 10 years time. 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 that they struggle in adulthood. Yeah. Because it's like you become calcified in this image of yourself

52:55rather than thinking, who am I now? What's the best I can do in the world now? Oh yeah. I feel like you get trapped, you would get, anyone would get trapped in the label of genius. I mean, that's a, that's a big thing to live up to. I mean, wow. I mean, you're about a difficult second album, right? 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, I like to be the underdog, you know, Helen, if I had to choose between being deemed the genius or, you know, I mean, people don't expect anything from me. And then I just, and then I do something. People are like, okay, Scott's got something.

53:29But I think that's made you have a more interesting career, right? And I say this based on having, like, Googled you beforehand, because it means that you don't get stuck doing more of the thing that you got famous for or got successful for or got popular for, right? You go, well, maybe I'm, I like, I'm, I'm intellectual. I've exhausted this. Like I've, I've mined this territory. Where next? And journalism as a career is very like that. You know, people really 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 they 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.

54:03And I, and I, and your people want you to be this sort of stable brand, but it's way more interesting to be chaotic, probably not as well rewarded, but it's more fun in lots of careers. I think. Well, I completely agree. Tell me if you agree with the like 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, we'll never win because we like stories and stories. That's how you define winning. Depends how you define 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

54:36winning. And, um, I think I need to make peace with a lot of things like make peace with, um, am I okay? You know, not, you know, sacrificing, uh, quantity of followers for quality of, of contribution. And I'm okay with that, making that, but you have to, you have to want to make certain sacrifices. I don't 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 other, the other end of the sacrifice, which is the sacrifice to not get more followers. Does that make sense?

55:09Yeah, no, I think that's right. I, I always thought about what I wanted in my career and I thought, well, I, 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, I like earn 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 bucks? No, I, I, you know, I, what I want is to be curious and to be kind of like a shark constantly moving forward. Um, and I think

55:39that, 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 so much about being popular and worried more about being interested. Yes. And I want to talk about a phenomenon, like a wildfire kind of phenomenon in a lot of ways. Genius is something people 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

56:12like, fine, we, the public's catching up, you know, but, but, but, but, but genius seems to sometimes just be this, you know, it could be like someone yodeling on TikTok and that catches fire. And then now they're the new quote genius, you know, or maybe they're not described as a genius, but popularity, maybe it's so intertwined these days. Um, genius and popularity, I think in this generation is, is, is something different than like the, the Da Vinci kind of era genius. Do you know what I mean?

56:42Yeah. And I think there's an interesting, if you're, you're a hypothetical yodeler, is that someone who'd be happy to devote the rest of their life to, you know, maybe smashing the paradigm of yodeling, right? And they invent 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 prison for them. And they're paraded around the world as the yodeler and, you know, the fame weighs heavily upon them. And, you know, you just have to, there are micro versions of

57:13that in all of our lives. I think if you have any kind of, um, 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, 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. Try to keep, what a beautiful, beautiful thing. Um, we could end the interview right now, but I'd be remiss not to have you talk for a couple minutes about the deficit model because

57:43it's so central to your book, you know, can you explain what that is? Well, I just, I went through a spate of watching biopics, um, which were about geniuses. Um, so it's, um, John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, uh, which is a Ron Howard biopic, uh, Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and then, uh, Alan Turing in, um, The Imitation Game. And it was really interesting that there was a kind of format for all of these, which was you get this incredible gift, but here's its incredible price. And now that a lot of that

58:15is dictated by the kind of need for the, like a movie template, but it, I think it just applies a lot more broadly to how we tend to think about, um, gifts. I've got a book behind me on the shelf that I read, which is called The Price of Greatness, which is about exactly- One of my favorite books. Yeah, right. And, but it is all about that, right? And 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, um, lost a parent when they were young. Um, and then we said- Physically disabled as well.

58:46Yeah. And I think, which I think is really interesting that the kind of, what are the internal motors with people that, that drive them to do extraordinary things? Often they are pain or loss, um, or a sense in some way of, of being missing something. Um, and so that, you know, it, it does have its roots in reality, but it is also become baked into how we tell those stories. And it reached its final kind of apogee when you get to like the American Idol thing, right? And someone comes on and I'm says, I'm going to sing Evita 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

59:19famous, but you can't say out loud, and I'm going to be singing, um, you know, something from Evita because I practiced really hard at singing and I would like to do it professionally. You know, it, it, we just baked into it, this idea of we need to have kind of, there needs to be immense struggle. And I think that's possibly a way of 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 the, you know, the kind of normal sized people and we're being surrounded by these giants living these

59:52big successful lives. Um, but you know, that's, it, it, 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. And it was the story of this guy who was, um, bipolar and nonetheless, he managed to go to, um, uh, 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 this memoir

1:00:26sold for a huge amount of money. And, you know, it was, that was, that was going to be a 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 it's no longer such a touching, heartwarming story and of kind of somebody who was brilliant, but, but troubled. It's a much more sad story of somebody whose, whose troubles led them eventually down to a really dark place indeed. And I just remember

1:00:58thinking, well, that's the problem, isn't it? There's a subtle 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 just a wholly negative one and something that they wish would go away. Um, 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. Well, let's, uh, do you have a couple more minutes? Yeah, of course. Because,

1:01:33uh, this is, this is, I mean, it's a topic I've researched, um, you know, the link between mental illness and creativity, but also I've been a big advocate of neurodiversity and its, uh, hidden gifts. And so it sounds like perhaps you're arguing against that view and saying, like, maybe that's part of the, you're saying that's a myth, Scott. Is that, is that what you're saying? Like for instance, ADHD, um, often this kind of inattention is treated in an education context, like a deficit, but in a different context, sometimes, um, it's, they have such a rich imagination that can be

1:02:08channeled towards great creativity. Would, would you argue against that view or, or how does that relate to what you're saying? I think that's a really reasonable way of saying it. I was quite struck by that recent New York times piece, 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 ADHD often find careers in which those periods of intense focus, but also, you know, struggle to do boring things, you know, they can cope with that. They can suit them more. I thought that was a

1:02:40really 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, um, 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. Um, 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 know who suffered from very serious mental illnesses and they just, they, 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. Um, and, and actually they don't find a great deal

1:03:13of meaning in it. It's just a really horrible. And so I'm, I think I'm talking, I'm not talking less about developmental issues or neurodivergence than I am talking about severe mental illness in that case. Yes. And I think it's a very important distinction because our research shows full-blown mental illness is not correlated with creativity, but it's usually a watered down version of that the children get. Um, so there's some, uh, is this the psychoticism theory? Is this the idea that if you kind of making, I'm not going all Hans Isaac. Okay. I promise. But, um, but, um, but, um, like

1:03:47schizophrenia, if you, if you're, if you're a sibling or not sibling, you're a child of someone with schizophrenia, you get, you don't get the most debilitating genes, but you get some genes that are conducive to creativity that are associated with schizophrenia. We can call it schizotypy, 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 high in schizotypy tend to have someone in their ancestry that had a, a, a much more extreme version of it. But like intuitive sense, doesn't

1:04:18it? Because, and tell me if this is wrong, the, in a way that explains why those conditions would persist through human history, even though they are maladaptive. Right. But it's like sickle cell anemia, right? But like the single sickle cell gene gives you resistance to 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 I get that. That then explains why you would, you know, why you'd find that persisting in populations through times. The mild, mild form is good. Severe form is, is bad. Well, that's the argument. Um, we've written papers about the evolutionary genetics of the

1:04:50psychosis creativity link. I think that's the title of the paper we wrote. So yeah. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not going full hand sizing on you. If you, if people read the book, they will understand that that is a pretty cruel disc, but I would not have, uh, I would not have leveled that at you. Yeah. Well, thank you. And you, and you talk about how he had his own idea in his head that he was a genius. Let's end on this because I, 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

1:05:21deem you just, but I think in a lot of these cases, these individuals, they love the sound of their own voice too. I think there's a correlation there between 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. What do you think? I think that is, that is possibly true. You know, I asked, um, Walter Isaacson, you know, who's done these big biographies of ladies and geniuses and he's done, he does Steve Jobs.

1:05:51He's done Elon Musk. And before that he's done Einstein and, um, uh, let me think, I would say Leonardo da Vinci, but you know, he said the one of his that didn't actually like, wasn't as a big a seller is Jennifer Dowder, who's been involved in CRISPR 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, you

1:06:22know, 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 whatever it might be, just doing the thing, not, you know, doing the public side of it too. Right. Yeah. 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

1:06:56know, those are the two things that probably are necessary. Yeah. Exactly. All right. So let's end on a quote from the great, 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 latitude that is not extended to ordinary mortals. We have a set of stories about what geniuses are and how they work and how singular their

1:07:26achievements are. Stories that are often entirely untrue. Thank you, Helen Lewis, for being on the Psycholi podcast and sharing your wisdom with us. Well, thank you very much for having me.