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- [00:02]
Mike Pesca
You know that feeling when someone shows up for you just when you need it most? That's what Uber is all about, not just a ride or dinner at your door. It's how Uber helps you show up for the moments that matter. Because showing up can turn a tough day around or make a good one even better. Whatever it is, big or small, Uber is on the way. So you can be on yours. Uber on our way. Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report. Tomorrow we are going live on Substack with Nate Silver. Nate is the guy who invented FiveThirtyEight. Not just the numbers. No, the numbers. And also he has a very good Trump popularity tracker. Want to see how he did after the parade after the no Kings rally? He's really good. Nate is in terms of analyzing things like what the Democrats might be doing better to appeal to regular voters. I think we'll also weigh in on the New York mayoral primary. That's kind of interesting, no, isn't it? Indeed it is. Nate Silver knows what he's talking about. I'm going to get him on Substack live from Las Vegas. Because he's not just a political expert, he's also very good at poker. Why don't we Talk about the NBA Finals as well? Go to Mike pesca.substack.com to sign up for free and to see me and Nate Silver 12:30pm Eastern Wednesday. Well, it's pretty early in the morning, Las Vegas time. It's Tuesday, June 17, 2025. From peach fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Negotiations are good according to diplomats. Well, they give diplomats jobs. But I will say this as a counterpoint. Negotiations, talks, diplomacy are good or bad as they relate to the achievement of a policy goal. We understood this in Trump's first term. He always talked about what's wrong with talks with the North Koreans. What's wrong with sitting down and negotiating with Kim Jong Un? People criticize me for wanting talks and negotiations. I think talks and negotiations are good for him. They seemed like the end, but they're not the end. They're just the means to the policy goal. We saw that during Trump's first term, maybe because Trump was the object of our criticism. Now we see Israel attacking Iran and Iran attacking back, and we're told, well, let me quote Christiane Amanpour on the podcast she does with her ex husband.
- [03:04]
Helen Lewis
But this was a successful campaign to end the negotiation process, the diplomatic process.
- [03:12]
Mike Pesca
But again, negotiations aren't the goal. Or to quote New York Times op ed written by Rosemary Kalanick, the Director of Middle East Programs at Defense Priorities, Israel's surprise attack on Iran on Friday has almost certainly blown up any chance of reaching the nuclear deal the United States was pursuing for months. I could have stopped reading after blown up and cut all the way to Iran. But yeah, Israel didn't just blow up much of Iran's nuclear program. They certainly did blow up a chance of reaching the nuclear deal. But what was the chance of reaching the nuclear deal absent the attacks? I would say, and not just me, but the Iranians were saying over and over again it was basically nothing. Amanpour was correct as a factual matter, just like Helanic, that the attack blew up negotiations. But Amanpour was also critical of that fact. Here she is talking about Israel's targeting of top Iranian officials.
- [04:10]
Helen Lewis
It's a direct attack. In my analysis on the idea of negotiations. Bibi Netanyahu has never wanted negotiations.
- [04:19]
Mike Pesca
That's not wrong, but it's not helpful. Bibi Netanyahu never wanted negotiations. True, but it's not that helpful. What's helpful is to say Bibi Netanyahu has never wanted Iran to get nuclear weapons and he has assessed that negotiations would not achieve his policy goal. Now you could say, well, no one wants Iran to to get nuclear weapons. Some don't mind it more than others. Remember Rosemary Kalanick? She wrote an op ed in Foreign Policy. It was titled the False Binary at the Heart of Trump's Iran Strategy. Diplomats like talking about false binaries. And the point was the United States already lives with a near nuclear Iran and has for some time. Well, guess what? It probably shouldn't have to. And guess what else? Israel, not thousands of miles away, but 600 miles away, also doesn't want to. I'm not saying that strikes were the best way to stop Iran's nuclear program. If Iran doesn't dismantle the Fado facility, I don't know what the strikes all mean. It's a little bit of a setback, but not a dismantling. But again, negotiations are not an end goal. Don't trust coverage that portrays them as such the end goal is Iran without a nuclear weapon. That is the end goal. Yes, I know Iran's breakout time in 2018 was supposedly a year, but now it's 2025. And you know what's happened since? The JCPOA was torn up, the armed Iranian proxy Hamas attacked Israel, killed over a thousand people, and made clear that Iran's goal is to kill as many Israelis as possible. And therefore Israel said, you know, having to live with negotiations, it's less a guarantee of getting to live than we once thought. But you can't say it was a mistake because it's the enemy of negotiations. The only way you can actually call it a mistake is to make the case that the strikes make it more likely for Iran to get a nuclear weapon, or that these strikes make it equally unlikely of Iran getting a nuclear weapon as these talks did. These never ending talks, these round and round fruitless talks in the face of Iran's absolute insistence that it get a nuclear weapon. Negotiations aren't good or bad on their own. They're only good or bad ways to achieve a policy objective. And no fair person could say that these negotiations were looking like a good way to achieve that objective. On the show today, I'll read from Paul Bloom's substack Best podcast. Guest question mark One of the best has to be Helen Lewis, a sharp thinker who always cracks me up here. Here Helen is here to talk about her new book, the Genius Myth, a curious history of a dangerous idea. It's a full show and I would have given her to if my contract allowed it. Helen Lewis up next, gear that's built to work looks like it. Attractive clothing sometimes looks like it. I think definitionally, if it's attractive, it looks attractive. But clothing or gear that looks like it's rugged and can deal with hot roof, rooftops or hard jobs. I guess most of this kind of clothing isn't made to look good on you. Except TrueWerk is. TrueWerk was built to meet the bar of gear that works harder, moves better, and proves itself every time. Today I was wearing a pair of my beloved TrueWerk pants. Many a zipper, certainly rugged, quite attractive. I feel very good in them. They have two buttons at the top. I don't know why, but it's all kind of cool. It's designed and engineered, really truly engineered for maximum comfort, protection and efficiency with minimum bulk or extra weight. You know, cotton, denim. It hasn't changed much in 200 years. Then TrueWerk comes along and blows the entire field of gear and clothing that also works hard out of the water while wicking away the water in many cases. I love wearing my true work stuff. I think you will too. Check out the full lineup and get 15% off your first order@truework.com the gist that's 15% off at t r u e w e r k.com the the gist this message is sponsored by Greenlight As a kid Summertime. Well, it could mean a lot of things and these days many a kid are left to rot. It's called rotting when you don't program them incessantly. But you know, even if they're gonna rot, they might wanna chase the ice cream man and buy an ice pop. Am I speaking like I'm Beaver Cleaver? Anyway, yeah, kids have expenses and you gotta give them money. But you should also teach them about money. I was taught pretty well by my father who's financially responsible but also was good at imparting a lesson. And money was easier then. It was green, sometimes silvery and could be exchanged for goods and services. Now you really need help. And Greenlight is that help. Greenlight is a debit card and a money app made for families that helps kids learn how to save, invest and spend wisely. And you could know as a parent that your kids are able to access money but also able to learn about money and to build lessons and confidence in how they interact with money. They also have a chores feature, sort of hey, you want the money? Clean the room. I did the allowance thing for the kids for a little bit. It wasn't enough. Tied to in a direct way. Here's what money is, here's what it does and here's why I'm giving it to you. This is why Greenlight is just a of matter. Much better choice. Easy, convenient, parents can raise financially smart kids. Millions of parents trust Green Light to orient their kids and help them learn about money. Don't wait to teach your kids real world money skills. Start your risk free Greenlight trial today@greenlight.com the gist that's greenlight.com the gist to get started greenlight.com the gist I've liked everything that Helen Lewis has done. She has a great substack, she has a great BBC show, She's a wonderful writer for the Atlantic. Dare I call her a genius? I would have before I read the book the Genius Myth. A Curious history of a Dangerous idea. Helen Not a fan of the entire mythology or construction of what we call a genius. Why? Well, she quotes an early and respected genius hunter or taxonomist he thought that you could put together a portrait of a genius. And this is what he wrote. Clearly he should be male, of middle or upper middle parentage and preferably come from a Jewish background. All right, for that he should receive intellectual stimulation at home, but ought to lose one parent before the age of 10. I don't know if that would be misplacement or at 9 years and 11 months. The two parents who are very into the development of their child look at each other and says, one of us has got to go. He should be born in February and died 30 or 90, but at no account at 60. It goes on. He assesses the amount of solar activity in the life of this genius. Helen Lewis. I don't know how many of those traits apply to you?
- [12:11]
Helen Lewis
Almost none. I'm screwed. I'm really screwed. Although the only thing is I do have to hang on in now until I'm 90. I've, I've officially passed the kind of like, oh, you know, she's gone too soon. All the, all the. What she could have done. No, no, that's. I've left it far behind.
- [12:25]
Mike Pesca
So who was this guy?
- [12:26]
Helen Lewis
That was Hans Eysenck, who is one of the kind of towering figures of 20th century psychology. I think at one point he was in the top 10 most cited research scientists. He died a couple of days either before or after Princess Diana in 1997 and where she was the people's princess. He was described as the people's psychologist. Now let me shock you. He was obsessed with genius. He wrote a book called Genius. He now appears really to have been a massive research fraud. We haven't, no one has gone back and looked through his work on personality and genius, but they have gone back and looked through his work on what he called the cancer prone personality. And I think he will forever be regarded with a slight question mark over him. Some of the papers have been withdrawn by the university, but he took money from tobacco companies and perhaps entirely coincidentally developed a theory that maybe it wasn't smoking that gave you lung cancer but your cancer prone personality. And you know, so I was really interested in him as one of the people who was so involved in the kind of 20th century conception of what genius was and trying to make it seem a kind of scientific concept. And surprise, surprise, he may have had, there may have been a few methodological questions about his own work, even logically.
- [13:36]
Mike Pesca
Because he did believe in the heredity in heritability of genius. But if one of your parents should be dead before 10, but it's good for a genius to live until 90. This doesn't really actually have internal logic, Right. Because then you have all these geniuses giving birth to genius kids, but we're offing them before the kid turns 10.
- [13:56]
Helen Lewis
No, the problem is that geniuses don't have genius kids. So there's a kind of, they call it reversion to the mean in statistics. So even if you have an exceptional level of all these personality levels, you can expect your kids will be much more close to the median in the population. The point about it is, it's really interesting and does seem to stand up, is that a number of people with really high achievement in later life, whether you want to call them geniuses or whatever, like CEOs, businessmen, whatever writers often have had a really unstable childhood. Matthew Paris, who's a broadcaster I love, he does a series on the BBC called Great Lives, which is biographies of people who had massive achievements. And he wrote a book called Fracture because the one thing he noticed was coming up again and again and again and again was that people who had achieved a huge amount in their lives had had some kind of real misery in their childhood. The theory being that if you have a nice, well adjusted childhood, you have a nice, well adjusted life, but you don't necessarily have this kind of dark engine within you that drives you to do whatever it might be risk taking, overcome. Yeah, like risk taking in business.
- [15:00]
Mike Pesca
Elon Musk, Barack Obama, these search for parents, these, they definitely have skill and cleverness within them, but without the dislocation of their early life, would they have been so driven?
- [15:13]
Helen Lewis
Yeah. And then, you know, further researchers kind of looked into the fact it's very hard to compare that across history. Right. Because more people used to lose a parent in childhood. One of the great advances of medicine mean that most, that's something that most of us haven't had to have a live with. But even despite that, when you take that into account, there are still more than you would expect. Stories of people who have achieved greatly and then come and say, well actually, you know, I have this great rupture in my childhood.
- [15:39]
Mike Pesca
Other than eye sync, I encounter through your book, other genius whisperers or people who defined what genius was. And maybe this is just a curated traips through the meadow, but they all seemed very disreputable. Is this common in the people who defined genius for us?
- [15:58]
Helen Lewis
I think it probably is because it's an attempt to kind of codify something that really resists analysis. Right. That's the thing that has maddened people about genius for so long is the fact that it just seems like a such a lightning strike. You know, people have attempted to talk about the heritability of intelligence, and there definitely is a heritable component to intelligence. But you also get these situations in which a kid born to completely normal workaday parents, maybe parents were even illiterate in previous centuries, is just suddenly this insane prodigy. I'm thinking of Ramanujan in India, the great mathematician. Or Gauss. Friedrich Gaussian, the mathematician. Perfectly normal parents. And then there's just some kind of, you know, they just have this extreme brain, and no one really seems to be able to understand why. And people sort of drive themselves mad in the attempt to explain why. So I think that's why it does attract sort of quite flamboyant people, should we say?
- [16:52]
Mike Pesca
Yes, but also, myth is story making. And with Gauss in particular, when someone is a genius, we invent stories about them. And you trace this story of Gauss's perspicacity at the age of seven to doing a fairly complex mathematical equation. And it really is like George Washington with the cherry tree. But instead of an illustration of rectitude, it's an illustration of genius, which is pretty common with the people that we call or recognize as geniuses. They can't just be. They can't just be a possession of some mental facilities. They have to have an almost superhero quality and origin myth.
- [17:29]
Helen Lewis
Right. We really want the biography to be. Is just as impressive as the work. So I think if, you know, tomorrow you, you know, this podcast gets hailed as a work of genius, okay, Then what people will then do is go and say, what is it? What was it about Mike that led him to this great pinnacle of achievement? And they will go and find some story from when you were seven, and they will say, oh, it all traces down to the day that, you know, a great teacher said to Mike, you can't do this. And he said, no, I can have the best podcast in the world. I believe in myself. You know what I mean?
- [17:59]
Mike Pesca
Like, and that teacher will sometimes be portrayed as having a whip.
- [18:02]
Helen Lewis
Yeah.
- [18:02]
Mike Pesca
And sometimes be. Yes. And sometimes be portrayed as very sniveling and very, very skeptical of my podcasting abilities. Back in 1989. Yeah.
- [18:11]
Helen Lewis
Yes. Very presciently foreseeing the domain of podcasts back in 1989. Right. But you know what I mean? Like, there's a kind of. It's a reverse engineering. And that's what the story of Gauss does. There's this myth about Gauss in The schoolroom and the, you know, the teacher is setting them some sort of busy make work in this German schoolroom and says, you know, add up all the numbers between 1 and 100. And, you know, the story evolves over time as it gets told. There's a pretty simple formula you can do that will allow you kind of to instantly come up with the answer to that. And the idea is that Gauss instantly works it out. Ping, click, and then he goes and writes it down. But you just watch the versions of this story change and change and change. Another really obvious example is, you know, Galileo and the Inquisition, right? And being tortured and saying, you know, but EPI e si move. But still it moves. And the fact that comes out when you read the biographies of Galileo, which I hadn't internalized at all, was that he died in his bed, right? He wasn't burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. What he said was controversial and contrary to church doctrine, but he handled that with a level of political skill that meant he didn't get killed as a heretic, unlike many other people in Renaissance Europe. But we have this because the image is so incredible, like one man, one iconoclastic man who stands up for himself against the establishment is so appealing that the story just mutates towards that. And, you know, you see that in all kinds. And Semmelweis is another example. The guy who came up with the germ theory of disease, he saw that women in childbirth, hospitals, those who were attended by midwives, were doing a lot better than those who were attended by doctors. And it was because doctors had come from doing postmortems on corpses. But because he didn't, sorry, I say, he had the germ theory of disease. He didn't, unfortunately, at that point, he thought they were bringing in corpse particles, which is a kind of good word for bacteria and viruses, really miasmic, because everyone else didn't have that vocabulary to explain the mechanism by which this was happening. They told him that he was mad and he got driven out. And so many more women died in childbirth than they needed to. But that's so appealing to us now, the idea that it was one guy and everyone said he was wrong, but he was still right. And I think you can draw a line between that to sort of, I would say one in three guests on Joe Rogan who are all convinced that they are the one guy who has seen, like, who it was who really built the pyramids or what really happened in Covid, or what really happened, you know, with vaccines, right? And it's such or climate change. It's such an appealing story that maybe the establishment is wrong and this one maverick is right. It's just so appealing.
- [20:40]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. Although, to be fair to the Rogan guests, some of them have really cracked the code on leg locks. They are very good at that.
- [20:47]
Helen Lewis
Oh, you mean like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu? Yes, yes. My brain. I defer to Lego and then Legolas. And then I was like, what is he talking about?
- [20:56]
Mike Pesca
But yes, they've cracked the code on Lord of the Ring. Elfin characters probably, too. I don't know. Those are the Lost episodes.
- [21:02]
Helen Lewis
Right. But you also have people like Terence Howard come on and explain how he's come up with a completely new type of maths. Right. This is a guy who was a former Marvel actor, and sure, one in every 100,000 people who say they've come up with a new form of maths has. It's just that there's probably quite a high strike rate of people who are just saying mad things in that too. And, you know, this isn't to say that those people are stupid. So one of my examples in the book is Isaac Newton, an incredible mind by anyone's standards, to formulate the theory of gravity. But he spent most of the rest of his life obsessed with alchemy, the idea you could transmute base metals into gold, which obviously, unfortunately, turns out not to be true. But that kind of unbounded, untamed creativity and willingness to be open to marginal ideas is clearly vital to human progress. But it's not infallible. Right, But. But we want it. We always want it to be true, because it would be so cool if it was.
- [21:56]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And when you talk about Galileo and he never said, and. And thus it moves. Take Shakespeare as you do. Shakespeare has the body of work, whether he was the Oxfordian Shakespeare or the Stratfordian Shakespeare. There's a guy who. Who probably was Shakespeare, and he probably wrote all the things he wrote, maybe not one or two of the plays, and that is there. And we can look at it and we could regard it as genius, and we probably should. And yet still there is so much myth making around Shakespeare that it A, illustrates your point, but B, this is what I was thinking. Sometimes with Shakespeare, you know, there are just stage directions and there are just whole plays that maybe have one or two decent lines or don't work from a dramatic tolergical standpoint, but we still have to ascribe genius to it. And I sometimes wonder if we. If Shakespeare didn't exist, but Christopher Marlowe did Would we be doing the same things with the Jew of Malta and the Alchemist? Would we be. I know Christopher Marlowe only wrote 10 or so plays versus Shakespeare's dozens, but would we be calling him the genius and finding portions of his text that we ascribe genius to and poring over every single line and elevating it to a status that maybe even he would say, well, that's just to get from point A to point B with my two characters.
- [23:21]
Helen Lewis
I think you're right. There's a kind of halo effect when someone gets to be a genius of the level of Shakespeare. And his case, what I think happened to him is he became England's national playwright at a time when England had these very expansionist ideas. You know, it had founded the nation of America, however you want to present that. But, like, then it had went and tried. Had an impact.
- [23:39]
Mike Pesca
I take no offense, I think, but.
- [23:40]
Helen Lewis
You know what I mean? Like, it was. It was spreading the English language and the idea of, like, England as the kind of mother country to a load of places. And Shakespeare was really important to that in a way that Marlowe wasn't. So you're right. People went back and there's plays like Double Falsehood, King John that have probably got. They were probably punched up to use the language, right? Like, Shakespeare was brought in to kind of script doctor them or whatever it might be. But they are much more exciting to people as a result. And the Royal Shakespeare Company will perform them. Whereas if they didn't have that kind of little tinge of Shakespeare about them, people would be like, well, yeah, it's all right, it's fine. And so there is a kind of. Yeah, there is a feeling that everything that the hand touches is kind of exciting. And you're right. But the other thing that Shakespeare is a good example. The lack of biographical data about Shakespeare drives people mad because he died a popular playwright, but not kind of this mythical, revered figure that he became very quickly. A lot of the plays only really survived because of the First Folio, which his friends put together. Without that, we wouldn't have Macbeth, for example. So there's a. You know, there's a kind of huge element of luck in the survival of those plays. But then about 80 years later, when they become really popular, people go, well, hang on it. Who was this guy? And they just. They can't sort of almost can't deal with the fact that they don't know anything about him. And that's when I think some of the kind of conspiracy theories you mentioned, the Oxfordian one. Right. So that's the idea that he was actually really an aristocrat. He was actually really the Earl of Oxford. There's a much more recent feminist one, which is that he was really a woman. He was really Amelia Lanier. And in both cases, I don't. My way of looking at it is. This is what I mean about. I write in the book about genius being a kind of political argument, is from the feminist point of view, and I consider myself feminist. It would be amazing if it turned out that Shakespeare was a woman, because we'd all get to go. The thing is, women were repressed through history. We were held down and we did great things and we never got any acknowledgement for it. And, you know, it would just be the most incredible feminist parable. Right. Ever. And the same thing was probably true to previous generations about it being the Earl of Oxford. They didn't like the idea it could be this grammar school boy. They wanted it to be someone who was inherently noble. And so if it turned out to be an aristocrat, that restored the kind of Victorian theory that everybody had got their correct place in society. So this is what I mean about the idea of. Yeah, that genius is not a neutral term that we apply to someone who's done really good stuff. There are usually reasons behind why we call someone a genius that are not maybe immediately apparent.
- [26:03]
Mike Pesca
Right. And I want to pull back right now and just lay your general thesis on the table, which is that there are variations in something that we call iq. Some people are very smart. There are people who commit great acts or think of great things or add to society. All this is true. But you're really analyzing the attendant notions that go along with the idea of genius. And you're really analyzing the kind of excuses we make for them, the kind of latitude we give them. The things that they haven't maybe done that we ascribe to them. So this is your critique. It's not that there is no such thing as genius. It's that we've elevated genius to a mythical place. The myth of genius is that genius, as we consider it is a myth.
- [26:55]
Helen Lewis
Right. And that's what I mean. It's not exactly a myth in the sense of being not real. People are different in their talents. And some people, you know, I write about looking at Van Gogh's almond blossom or, like, thinking how anyone came up with the idea of the airplane, right. That they just knew that if you turned a propeller, you could. Could fly. These are things that are completely beyond my brain. I Just I couldn't ever do them in a thousand years. So it's not a kind of denial that people are different and some people have unique talents, but it's a, it's an exploration of the stories that we tell about those talents and why two people of equal achievement and talents, one of them becomes a kind of. This is what I mean by a mythical figure. So some, you know, my two big examples, I think the people this happened to would be Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. There are, you know, Pablo Picasso is undeniably a technic, incredibly technically gifted painter who then oversaw a revolution in modern art by. With Cubism and Demoiselle d' Avignon in 1909. However, he also turned himself into the symbol of something, right. Which was sort of a kind of macho, rule breaking artist. You know, everything he touched was incredible. He was, he was wee, bless him. He was very small, but he was like. He was the bullfighter, the picador. You know, everybody revolved around him. There's a terrible story his granddaughter told about the fact that he made a paper animal for her and let her play with it. And then when she went home at the end of the visit, he went, you can't keep this. This is the work of Picasso, right? He just had this very keen sense that he wanted to live this big public life where he was the symbol of something. And Einstein fulfilled a similar role in physics too. Undeniably brilliant achievements, breakthrough and special relativity. But at the same time he became a symbol of the new physics. And then after he. Because he was stateless and he moved to America and you know, he was conflicted about the atom bomb, he became a symbol of the idea of the physicist as somebody who sees, you know, a kind of sage, essentially. Which is how you see him depicted in the film Oppenheimer, right, that he's.
- [28:47]
Mike Pesca
This kind of great gorgon in the background and. Yeah, hovering above it.
- [28:52]
Helen Lewis
Right. And his cardigan and he's Tom Conti.
- [28:55]
Mike Pesca
Didn't Tom Conti play him?
- [28:56]
Helen Lewis
I feel like it might have been Tom Conti, but. Yeah, but essentially like the Oppenheimer goes to see him and he's this guy who's had visions of what nuclear war would look like. And they both become symbols of something that is bigger than themselves and why. And I was really interested by why that happens to some people and not others. You know, there were many other painters who are, you know, who are brilliant, but not all of them end up with the kind of reputation, the fame of Picasso.
- [29:23]
Mike Pesca
We'll be back with More of Helen Lewis and her assessment and display of genius in a second. Craftsman days are here at Lowe's with big savings on the tools you need. Save $100 on the Craftsman V26 Tool Power Tool Combo Kit now at $199. No matter what the project is, Craftsman's high high quality high performance products empower you to build on. Stop by your nearest Lowe's store and check out the full line of Craftsmen tools today valid through 618 while supplies last selection varies by location. Put us in a box. Go ahead. That just gives us something to break out of because the next generation 2025 GMC terrain elevation is raising the standard of what comes standard. As far as expectations go, why meet them when you can shatter them? What we choose to challenge, we challenge completely. We are professional grade. Visit gmc.com to learn more. Helen Lewis is the author of the Genius Myth, A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. So one of my theories is that that in order to achieve enormous wealth you have to have, well, you could be lucky, you have to have great talent, but you also have to do one or two unbelievably daring things and they have to pay off. And then after that you could maybe coast. But the personality traits that this level of success selects for are in many ways maladaptive and in many ways not what you'd want your friends to have. So it's Elon Musk has that and probably Andreessen has that. And it's probably true. I don't know about Einstein. Maybe I like Einstein too much. That one picture with him with his tongue out is probably doing a lot of work in my head for me Liking Einstein.
- [31:26]
Helen Lewis
Yeah.
- [31:27]
Mike Pesca
But it's probably true with Picasso. It's probably true with you can't take Shakespeare because he wasn't into this self creation of his myth. But it is probably true that you have the body of work that is unassailable and then you have a whole bunch of call it sociopathy, call it whatever you will, but these really negative dark triad type traits and that is a part of the genius, especially with tech geniuses in our modern age.
- [31:56]
Helen Lewis
I think that's true. You know, they talk about this thing that if you heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, right? Which is when you fire a load of bullets at a board and then you draw a circle around all the ones in the same place and you claim that's what you were aiming at. I think there's a something similar like you say with those kind of tech geniuses so in Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, he says the thing that really defines him above everything else is this insane appetite for risk taking. You know, he will gamble everything. It's like he pushes it all onto red and spins the wheel. I think there is a think that is. You know, it's not necessarily a bad quality to have, but I think it forgets the fact that there are probably a lot of other people who have those qualities. And for them, the bet is, did not go off. So what we've kind of done is we've taken the one in a hundred, one in a thousand, whatever it might be, people for whom this worked out, and we've drawn the circle around them, saying these are the personality traits you need to succeed. So, yeah, I think that's. I think also narcissism, quite frankly, is part of it. You have to be willing to have people look at you. You have to want to be interviewed by the press. You have to want to live within this kind of celebrity image, play up to it, or often, right? That's what you see is people. And again, to go back to Musk as an example, you know, you give interviews about how you're extremely hardcore and you sleep on the floor and, you know, nothing less than that will be accepted. You know, you just. You talk about your odd personal habits or whatever they might be. You. You are willing to inhabit this role. William Goldman, in his book about Hollywood, the screenwriter said that no one really becomes a star unless they want it. The difference between an actor and a star is, is that the stars want it. They want to walk into the restaurant and have everybody go, you know, and I think there's a similar thing with the people who end up being called geniuses is that they. They court it often. I mean, sometimes, you know, you can have the obverse of that, which is somebody who denies it all and refuses to do any publicity, and that becomes part of the mythology, right? You can twist it the other way. You can be a Bob Dylan and send Patti Smith to pick up your Nobel for you because, you know, you're too cool or Woody Allen doesn't go to the Oscars, you know, that you're. You're just too cool for all of this.
- [33:56]
Mike Pesca
But nonetheless, you know, that that is as considered as Picasso denying his granddaughter the paper animal.
- [34:04]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, exactly. It's all part of the construction of it, right? It's not just you turn up.
- [34:08]
Mike Pesca
Dylan understands myth.
- [34:10]
Helen Lewis
Yes, right. You turn up and you give a boring speech and you go home again. No one would care. But if you ostentatiously don't go, that's as big a statement as you going and wearing like a clown outfit or whatever it might be. I'm not saying I don't know why I don't think Bob Dylan would wear a clown outfit.
- [34:24]
Mike Pesca
Just to clarify, Joker maybe bolstering Joker, man, you know, there are, there are, there are use cases for Dylan in a clown outfit. So do you think what is the cost. What is the cost of misapprehending what true genius is?
- [34:37]
Helen Lewis
Well, I think it, I think it's bad for the people themselves because often they can't understand that. They don't, you know, that the lightning struck and it might not strike again. And I think that can be quite tough for people. And actually to go back to musk, I think there was a, you know, there's hubris and nemesis in that story, isn't there? There's the kind of why hasn't Doge worked out? When every time I go in somewhere with my lieutenants and cut this to the bone, it's like, it's good, it works. And the fact is that the government doesn't run in the same way as a private company. And actually, had he a little bit more humility, he might have achieved more with his time in government. But he's become addicted to the idea of being a sort of special person. And I think that's been, you know, that's not helped his ability to carry on achieving at the high level that he previously had. The other thing is that you mentioned very briefly early on, this idea of the kind of licensing scheme, the problem when somebody gets to be that personal brand and the brand is all about them as the genius, that they have this huge distorting effect. My colleague Karen has just published a book. She's got this new book about OpenAI, which talks about the attempted ousting of Sam Altman. And I think you can see very clearly there that that's a company that became. It's him. The company is him and he is the company. And actually there were people who thought he was taking the company in the wrong direction. But everybody else quite quickly concludes that there is no company without him. That's what the investors want. He's the guarantor of the success of that company ultimately. Is that going to be healthy for that company and for AI as a whole? I'm not entirely sure that it is. And that's a, you know, that's a very mild case when we're talking about Lots of other ones. I talk about someone like Michael Jackson in the book. You know, lots of people wanted to keep that show on the road. They wanted to keep the genius of Michael Jackson. Isn't it kind of kooky and delightful that he's got a chimp? Right. And. And people didn't want a whistleblow on what they were seeing because you don't debunk the genius. People love the myth.
- [36:34]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And we interviewed Keech Hagee who wrote a book on Sam Altman and we haven't. Well, we touch on it, you and I, a little bit with the Shakespeare. What if she was a woman? The board of OpenAI who was. Who voted for his ouster. In fact, I think all the women on the board and one of the men voted for his ouster and all the other men did not. It was very much broken down along gender lines. And all the women on the board had backgrounds not in earning billion dollars in tech, but they're smart people. They understood tech, they understood coding. They were normally affiliated with universities. So that comes into play as well. You can't take out the genius is so baked in manliness and masculinity. There are almost no exceptions in the book.
- [37:19]
Helen Lewis
Yeah. Well, also I think it's political. Right. Which is. Do you think it's. It's an argument always about the right versus left in terms of the individual versus the collective. Which is why I think AI is a really good example of that. Should the money, you know, from AI breakthroughs, which are real, they're really impressive, go to a handful of people, even though they are built on the work of millions. Right. Those LLMs, the large language models would not exist and they had not been trained on the corpus of huge amounts of writing by loads and loads of people. But as it stands at the moment, lots of those people are not going to get any compensation for their involvement in it. And the genius myth really helps. Is a kind of ideological underpinning for that to be justified, which is we need to. These guys, they have to have enormous compensation. They have to be able to own these billion dollar companies because without that you won't get innovation. And actually also you won't get innovation without the work of thousands and thousands of people. But it's just we've chosen to emphasize these great men, as you say, this was Thomas Carlyle's theory about history. The history of the world is, but the history of great men. And we still find that really appealing because we want stories to have protagonists. Yeah. And often those shows actually not to quibble.
- [38:29]
Mike Pesca
I think that the LLM example, and building on the work of all these other people, I don't know how strong an argument that is. To me, that almost that is a little reminiscent of the Henrietta Lacks argument that it was her strand of genetic material that caused these breakthroughs. Yes, but I don't know, maybe they didn't give her a full disclosure about what they were doing with it. Was anyone really using the LLM? It was just a bunch of stuff moldering in the archives before someone. A man. A man we ascribe too much genius to a man we probably give too much money to. But until some actual genius came along and recognized what can be done with it.
- [39:10]
Helen Lewis
I can't believe you've described my articles and my book, which is on the meta analysis of something moldering away in a basement. No, I think that's a. That's a reasonable point. And this is why. This is where the pushback comes, where people say, think that you're essentially a kind of communist, that you don't think that people should get, you know, rewards for their risk taking or that we should ever recognize individual achievement. And I think that's not, that's not true. I think my attempt is to kind of bring a synthesis to it, which is that you, you know, you need people with great ideas, but you also need to recognize the huge support. Funny enough, one of the people who I think recognizes this best is Sam Altman's mentor, Paul Graham, involved in founding Y Combinator. He has a brilliant essay in which he talks about the kind of. He calls it the Milanese, Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci. And he talks about the fact that during the Renaissance, Florence had this incredible flowering of artistic talent. Just, you know, almost everyone you've ever heard of and Milan didn't. And why on earth was that? And, you know, they were both Italian city states, both with similar governance structures, similarly educated populations, all of that kind of stuff. And the conclusion comes about the fact that Florence just had these incredible network effects. It was the place where you went, if you wanted to be a great artist, you learned from the schools of the great artists. You engaged in productive rivalries with other artists. You know, people who wanted patronage came to, like, look at the stuff in Florence. And I think that's the bit that again, because it doesn't have a kind of single protagonist, becomes harder to tell. Brian Eno calls it seniors. You know, these idea that there are places that are exciting and collectives that are exciting and they spur on individual achievement. And I think that's that's a, that's a much healthier way to look at it, really.
- [40:47]
Mike Pesca
Do you think the idea of genius, which is motivated by the intellectual. Did it supplanted it replace the idea of warriors or the idea of physically heroic figures in our mythos?
- [40:58]
Helen Lewis
That makes a lot of sense to me because the kind of. If you read the Iliad or the Odyssey, you know, they are written to tell the stories of great conquests and individually heroic warriors. And that's a celebration of what was happening in that culture. But the Greeks and Romans were pretty, pretty keen on poets too. So I'm not sure that, you know, it was a sad time to be a nerd rather than a jock. If you lived in, if you lived in classical Greece, I think they had room for both of those models of achievement. I think the better argument is the One that Darren McMahon, the historian makes, which is that in some way they are secular saints, you know, and I would like. Superheroes is the one word you used before, which I think is also true. You know, they are the kind of real life Marvel superheroes. We want these. We want interesting things to have been done by big people with big lives. You know, we want them to be our version of Thor or whatever it might be.
- [41:50]
Mike Pesca
One thing I just wanted to get to because I have so many thoughts and can't let you go until I tell you most of them. Okay, so when I asked you what is the cost of the genius myth? You gave a great answer. But as I read the book, I thought of a different cost. And it's not even by implication, I didn't infer it. It's right in there. We have this tendency, the way our society is structured. You get a couple of big wins. And for Elon, I'm not even going to think about the stuff that he did before Tesla, Tesla and Space X. And then that gives him unbelievably wide latitude to get called a genius and maybe to squander away and to add nothing valuable to society afterwards. I think a similar thing, and this is very disturbing, goes on in the academy and with the hard sciences, which I don't really even understand that well, but there are bona fide accomplishments and maybe acts of geniuses that often include collaboration and one person taking credit. But after one or two of these, and usually it's after you get a Nobel Prize and you're Watson and your Crick or you're anyone else who's a Nobel laureate, you can only squander that. And at that point, once anointed a genius. And once given a tenured faculty position, it allows for. And you document a lot of this, really the potential for really bad science, the potential for crowding others out of the field. And this is. None of this is to the good in our consecration of the genius.
- [43:21]
Helen Lewis
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Kind of early reactions to the book, I've had a lot of people push back on that. And the way that it often comes is they think that because I'm on the left and because I'm a feminist, that I'm just sort of denying obvious truths in pursuit of my kind of woke ideology. And the thing about it is, it's not true. Like, this is something that the people in the social sciences have been studying for a really long time. There's a paper from the 60s from Robert Merton in which he identifies this thing, what he calls the Matthew effect, which is from a biblical verse, which is something like, to him that has more, more shall be given. Right. It's the idea that kind of, once you've. Once you've had your Nobel Prize, you get a better lab, you get written up. When you do something, you are always the first name on every paper that you kind of, you know, once you've had one level of success, it becomes a kind of rolling boulder and you pick up more and more success. And that's just, you know, that's a pretty well established and understood thing. And it's also a site of lively discussion among the kind of Nobel community that you can only get three people on the citation for a Nobel in the sciences. And you will talk to working scientists at the absolute top of their field who say, well, this is kind of mad, right? Something like the Higgs boson, you know, is the product of cern, which is a collaboration across, you know, dozen countries, scientists speaking, you know, dozens of languages. That's how science works now. You know, the vaccines for Covid relied on one group of people sequencing the genes, another group of people doing that, and you get simultaneous discoveries in different places. So we have this award structure that is entirely unreflective of what achievement really looks like in the science is now. But, yeah, but people just. People think you're. I think people just hear that you're tearing down people that they admire, and that's the resistance to it, I think, and which I completely understand. I was talking to somebody who, you know, I wrote in the book about how I walked out of the Michael Jackson musical, and she said, I was so devastated about Michael Jackson. You know, I had his music at my wedding. And I thought, yeah, I get it. I completely get it. If you are invested in someone to that extent, then it must be horrible to hear that they've got feet of clay. I completely understand why people find that so threatening.
- [45:26]
Mike Pesca
The name of the book, and I have to say, the description of the book is the Genius. But then it goes on to say myth A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea was written by Helen Lewis. Helen Lewis is also the author of Difficult Women, a History of feminism in 11 fights, and the BBC podcasts the New Gurus. Helen Lewis has left the chat. I was in that a little bit strong and strong message here, which is still going on with Armando Iannucci. Helen, thank you so much.
- [45:58]
Helen Lewis
Thank you for having me.
- [46:05]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the Gist. Astrid Green does our socials. Kathleen Sykes, she's the editor of the Gist List. Ashley Khan is the production coordinator for the gist. Michelle Pesca does all that she sees. She sits over that and calls the shots and moves the chess pieces. Leo Baums, our intern, he's very good with coming up with databases. Data's base improve. Thanks for listening.
- [46:33]
Helen Lewis
Foreign.
- [46:39]
Mike Pesca
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