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A
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B
It's just this really human impulse to sort of think that there is something within you that makes you sort of better than other people who've just tried and been mediocre. And actually a fear of failure that you don't want to try. I think it's Maslow writes about this. You know, people don't just have a fear of failure. They have a fear of success.
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C
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. There's a topic I'm really torn about. When I look at the plays of William Shakespeare, when I listen to the music of Wolfgang Amdeus Mozart and realize how incredibly prolific he was in his short life, it's tempting to think of him as different, superior breed of human, as a genius that stands apart from the rest. At the same time, when I think of many of the supremely talented people I've had a chance to meet in my life, it turns out that there's lots of things that they're quite bad at, and that the more you know them, the more they seem to be cooking with water. And then, of course, there is the quote, unquote genius that turns out to have unhinged opinions about all kinds of things in the world. So how should we think about this phenomenon of special talent, this concept of the quote, unquote genius? Well, to help me answer this question, I have back on the podcast, Helen Lewis, she's a staff writer at the Atlantic, has been on the podcast in the past to write about her book Difficult Women, and she has now written a lovely book called the Genius A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Helen tells us about how the idea of genius has changed from something that is a predicate of a particular work of art, something you do in the world, to a person. She tells us why she's worried about the genius myth, and I push her a little bit about whether we don't need some concept of genius, whether there isn't something also fundamentally beautiful and positive about being able to recognize when people make that special contribution. In the last part of a conversation, we also wonder about who the right heroes for this age might be, whether there are any true geniuses walking the surface of the earth today, and how we should feel about one person who there's been a lot of mythologizing about, but who also seems to fall into some of the pitfalls of that role. Elon Musk. To listen to that part of the conversation, please become a paying subscriber, please go to Yashamonk Substack and support this podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. To listen to the rest of this conversation, in which we wonder who the true heroes, the true geniuses of 2025 might be, and discuss the complicated, illustrious career of one Elon Musk, please become a paying subscriber, Please go to jasiamunk.substack.com and support our. Helen Lewis. Welcome back to the podcast.
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B
Oh, yeah, thank you very much.
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C
You've written a great new book called the Genius Myth, and I learned a lot from it. I enjoyed reading it, and I also wanted to argue with the book, and so I'm going to argue with you. Okay, what is the modern idea of genius and how is it actually different from how people might have thought about that term in the past?
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B
So one of the things I wanted to do with the book is look at what you can tell about a society by who it puts on a pedestal. And so the original meaning of genius and the kind of classical tradition is that it's a visiting spirit. You know, if you are a poet, you're visited by poetic spirit. It suffuses through you and speaks through you. And that's not our idea of the genius since really the Middle Ages. It's of a sort of special type of person. And so through Vasari's, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, you get the idea that kind of these Renaissance artists are special people, that the Romantics, you get the idea that kind of poets are these special people. And then the Victorians come along and say, maybe there's a kind of quality called IQ that we can talk about. Some people just have these kind of better operating systems. And then I would say our modern idea of the genius. And is this the bit you disagree with? I would say it's a kind of the tech innovator. And the highest ideal is kind of the youngish guy who is not great at small talk or eye contact, but is, you know, in one sort of One with the computer. That is our kind of modern idea of the genius.
- [05:19]
C
I'll build suspense about the piece that I disagree with. No, I think a lot of the myths that you take down in the book are myths and are harmful. And I agree with taking them down. And I'm not sure that I'm willing to let go of the idea that some people just have very special talents that lead to works of art or lead sometimes to technological inventions or whatever it is that really are beyond the grasp of most other very talented people. And that's sort of what I was grappling with throughout the book. But I want to go back to this idea that I think is very helpful of this kind of divine inspiration. I thought of the novel, I think it was Snow by Orhan Pamuk, where the narrator is shown as this poet who just has these moments when a spirit seizes him and he. He sits down and he jots down this thing that came in his mind fully formed. And it really feels like he's just a medium of some outside inspiration. But that, of course, also has kind of limits. Right. I remember I went to university in your fair country. And in the library of my college, Trinity College, Cambridge, there's a poem by Wordsworth. And somebody went to see that poem by Wordsworth and was very disturbed by the fact that it had edits on it and that, you know, the poems could possibly have been different. What do you mean they could have been different? They're perfect as they are. So even if you think that it's this moment of inspiration that it comes to you fully formed and you just jut it down, that's a kind of myth of its own, right?
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B
Yeah. I love that idea of the kind of the canonical version of something. I did English at university, and one of the modules was all about that in relation to Shakespeare. And the fact is that we, you know, for most Shakespeare plays, we have the First Folio version, but that might not be, you know, that was really reconstructed from memory. There would have been one version of the script nailed up next to the kind of, you know, the stage at the Globe or wherever it was, and everybody would have learned their parts. It was a much more oral culture, so people just were used to carrying around a huge amount of stuff in their memory. So all the Shakespeare plays that we have are essentially, to some extent or another, reconstructions. Now, some of them that's, you know, hugely like Hamlet. There are various versions of it that are incredibly disputed. And people will still, you know, patchwork together a version and That's a big challenge to the idea that there is a. A Hamlet that is the kind of the supreme achievement of this guy called William Shakespeare. And I think you're exactly right to pick up the idea that what I'm not arguing in the myth is for this sort of deluded idea of egalitarianism. I think there is a version of that, and you see it particularly, it's associated with the left is this idea that actually we're all kind of blank slates and no one is kind of more adept at anything else. And it's all environmental. And unfortunately, that's just not true. You know, I say in the book, you could give me a thousand years, and I could never paint water lilies or understand string theory. It's just not in my brain to be able to do these things. But I think the thing. What you said is exactly right about those moments. And you must have had it when writing articles where some days it's just. I think you did a tweet about this once where you were like, some days you just have to accept it's just not happening. It's just nothing is coming out. I can't marshal my thoughts in any interesting order. And some days it's as if you're a kind of lightning rod at the top of a building. And it's just. And it's the best feeling in the world. And it's like the kind of chasing the high of that every other time you write is that one perfect time that everything was just flowing through you. And I think that's probably what it feels like to creative people when they are on that hot streak in them, what they call flow, this kind of experience of being right at the edge of your abilities. But I think the reason I say it's, you know, I say in the book that genius does exist in the sense of moments of genius. It's very bad for people when they begin to think that everything they do is good. They are a genius. And that, to me, is the crucial distinction. There's a great Harold Bloom quote at the start, which is, it's hard to go on living without some hope of experiencing the transcendental. And I think that's very true. We do hunger for these moments of kind of extraordinariness and the idea that there are extraordinary people who are, as you say, halfway between gods and gurus or whatever it might be. But the trouble is, it often has a very bad effect on those people themselves.
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C
Yeah. So that is, I think, an interesting distinction that one way of thinking about it, which may have pitfalls of its own, is you have a special talent. There's something that makes you a possible receptacle of this. Right? This is not the idea of God just choosing somebody at random and letting divine inspiration flow through them. But what is inspired, what has that special character, is the work you create. And that is a moment of inspiration. That is circumstances coming together in a particular way. And it's perfectly fine to call Hamlet a genius play, but that doesn't mean that we should think that if Shakespeare was somehow reincarnated and gave us his opinion about how to lose weight or what to think about Donald Trump's tariffs, he would have some special insight into those kind of things. I mean, I think there's a lot in that. Now, of course, there is, as you're alluding to, a kind of counter myth. Right? So if we're saying the genius misses on one end, then with apologies to Malcolm Gladwell, who I actually think is often not taken seriously enough as a writer, who I think makes very interesting contributions. That's the gladwell myth. Over 10,000 hours, anybody who just puts in the necessary work, who works hard, perhaps anybody who is born into the right family, that has the access and the socioeconomic status, anybody who is given support in the right way can become, you know, a great scientist, a great athlete, a great whatever. I don't actually think that's exactly what gladwell meant by 10,000 hours and exactly what the studies say. I think it makes sense to think about those in terms of you're going to be at your best after 10,000 hours of serious practice of a particular subject, or that is what it takes to get to the sort of frontier of how good you can be at that. But I can do 10,000 hours of painting, and I'm never gonna be any damn good. Or perhaps I'll be competent after 10,000 hours.
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B
I mean, you'd be better than you are now, right? Yeah, I'm better than I am now,
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C
But I'm certainly never gonna, you know, it's just not something I have natural talent for. It's never gonna be something when we could. And somebody who puts in a hundred hours might be better than I would be after 10,000 hours because they do have that special talent. And, you know, they're gonna be better than they are today after 10,000 hours, but they might very quickly advance. Right. So the genius myth on one side, something like the sort of blank slate Myth or the 10,000 hour myth, might be on the other side.
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B
I think if you read Outliers, I think when you hear Malcolm Laward talk about it now, he's slightly surprised that that's the bit that everybody remembers for it, and that's what happens when you write a book, is that people find something in it that speaks to something of the moment. And I think that was the moment that it came out of, was people wanted to believe that what he was arguing was practice means everything. And I think you're right. The version of that that is true is you need raw talent and then you need to channel that talent. What I would say from having read everything I've read for this book is that very few people are savants in the sense of they just come out of the womb being able to paint. And I think he was very good about saying the Beatles might have been incredibly good, incredibly young, but they'd been working at being a band for a really long time, really intensively. Picasso was an incredible painter by the time that he was 20, but he'd also done an enormous amount of painting by that time. So that's a version of it's portable. The other bit that he says in Outliers, which I think is true, is that he talks about this generation of computer geniuses, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and he says they were very lucky to have been born with the talents that they had at the exact moment that home computing became possible. And that's the. Steven Johnson has picked this up about the kind of idea of the adjacent possible. You can have all the tools in your mental Kit to invent YouTube, but if you're trying to do it at a time when Internet connections won't support streaming video, it's wasted. Ideas have to kind of come at a particular time, but we don't really want to think that, right? We want to think that special things have been done by special people. We want there to be great men. They are usually men. We want there to be people who are agents because that's what stories demand. Stories need a protagonist. We don't want mushy, you know, you'll know better than me that historians are always desperate to insist on the fact that there are incredibly complicated social forces. But people still want to buy biographies of Napoleon. That's, you know, that we just want stories about people and about human sized decisions. Our brains crave them in a way.
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C
I studied history at university and I'm not sure that I learned much at the time. But some of the lessons are slowly trickling back into my brain as I see some historical changes myself and One of them is about technological change. I'm just really struck by some of the texts I read in undergrad about how the way that people wrote about politics in the 18th century changed because of certain refinements of a printing press which made certain kinds of pamphlets possible. And that led to the rise of the public sphere. And it really led to a change in the modes of literary production as it might have been put at the time. And that all seemed quite abstract to me. I kind of thought, well, surely if people want to say something, they say it and they do it in the way that they do. Living through technological changes, like not just the rise of social media, but now the arrival of substack, I can feel that I write very, very differently when for an audience on substack than I did in or than I do in more traditional magazines. In part because you have that immediate relationship to the reader. You don't have to worry about an editor sort of cutting it down to a particular length, taking out the sort of stylistic little twists that you might put in an essay. You can do things like having series of observations about the world. I go to China for a week. I don't feel like I have a definitive essay about China to publish and, you know, foreign policy or something, but I can share the kind of 23 observations that I might tell my friends upon my return and share them in that form. And all of that is possible in that new medium in a way that it wouldn't have been earlier. So I think this idea of the adjacent possible is clearly right. Right. Somebody who has this amazing talent at something like coding, at imagining some kind of new technology born into an Italian village in the 13th century, may just have ended up being a really bad farmer. Right. And that's clearly right.
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B
Yeah, No, I think that's. I think you're exactly right. And I've been. One of the things that persuasion's been doing, I've been really enjoying are those, like little vignettes of a country with. It's Kyrgyzstan. Was that the most recent one in Tokyo, where it is just someone. It's not a coherent essay with what I reckon about such and such. It's not a take even. It's much more impressionistic than that. And because you've got a readership that have already that have said, okay, show me whatever you've got, I'm interested also. I bet the nice thing about doing that is that you don't have to do the commas. You don't have to do comma. Germany's Far right party, comma, you can just assume that people know who the AfD are or whatever it might be, or the names of politicians, which when you're writing for mainstream, you have to try and constantly be explaining everything. So, yeah, I think that the other example that I think of a lot, my last book was on feminism is what did more for women in the 20th century. Was it the second wave or was it the widespread invention and adoption of the contraceptive pillar? Can you have one without the other? And I think for all that we might want to say that, you know, feminism changed women's lives in the 20th century. Reliable contraception was absolutely part of that story. It gave women power over the shaping of their lives that no woman in history had ever had before. And I think you can really argue that without that, you can't have all the feminist gains that you have during that time period. So again, like a lot of this is about, it's about trying to find the balance, isn't it? It's trying to find the balance between genuinely, there are people who are interesting, special, talented, whatever it might be. But let's also talk about the moment that made them and let's also retain a level of humility. I don't know if you've ever talked to anybody who's ever interviewed Nobel laureates, but people will go, I was just really amazed. They weren't that impressive when I met them, or quite a lot of them go a bit mad afterwards. And I just think that having this label on you that says extra special person, you begin to think that everything you do is special. One of the high IQ societies, Mensa, one of the things it wanted to do, and it was founded in the 1940s, was they planned to have opinion polls of their members on all sort of great subjects of the day. And then they thought, well, this would be brilliant for policymakers. I'd be able to hear what the smartest people think. And actually, most research that we have shows if you ask a lot of smart people about subjects they know nothing about, their intuitions aren't any better than anybody else's. People just do have domain specific expertise and that, you know, but they don't. It's the temptation is always. And all the incentives are to present yourself as a big brain.
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C
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B
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D
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B
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C
So I think there's a very interesting distinction here, right? One question is, are there geniuses in the sense of somebody who has a very, very rare talent at a particular human activity? Is Nico Jokic just a better basketball player than 99.9999% of other people who had the same opportunities, who practiced as hard, who trained as hard? There's just something that comes together in this individual that makes him superior to that competition and allows him to do things that others were not able to do. You know, Wolfgang Amademus Mozart, somebody who just, you know, I mean, one of the amazing facts about Mozart, for example, is that apparently people who are very proficient at copying music, whose job it is perhaps to hand copy music, cannot gather this speed to copy as much music as he wrote and composed over the course of his lifetime because he died at a young age. There's just something about Mozart's ability to imagine music that is just incomparable to others. And if that is the case, then perhaps there is a useful concept of genius that we should apply to them. There's something that makes them special relative to other people. Now, that's different from, you know, do I think that Jokic has particular insight about social science, or do I think that, you know, Mozart would be good at telling you how to live your romantic life? I assume not. I mean, I guess I could probably listen to Djokovic talk on some podcast. I have no idea what his political opinions are or his opinions about anything else. We don't have much insight into what Moltz had thought about all kinds of things. I assume he believed a lot of pretty stupid things, right? But don't we just have to disentangle those two things? Isn't it just a matter of saying, yes, there are some people who just have some special talent, some special brilliance at particular human activities. That doesn't mean Medvee's all Purpose oracles who we should think of whenever they mouth off about whatever it is.
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B
I think that's exactly the distinction that I want to make. And have you ever watched the film Amadeus based on Peter Schaeffer's play?
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C
I think it's really brilliant as a teenager or something. But yeah, it's very good, I think.
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B
But it's brilliant because it's entirely. And it's actually the same structure as Hamilton the Musical, which is all told through Aaron Burr, who is just jealous of this guy who seems to be just, you know, words pour out of him. And the same thing is true of Salieri and Amadeus. He just looks at this little squit who's obsessed with, you know, scatological jokes and he thinks, I worked so hard. You know, why did God give you this gift? And I think that there's so much about the kind of the mythology about how we talk about people who are special and talented. We want to believe that they are weird people, interesting people, different people. Part of that is about to deal with the fact that we're not special. And I think there is a feeling that you want somebody like if you're Salieri, you want Mozart to be a special, superior type of human because then it's fair that he got this great gift and you didn't. And I think that's, you know, when I was showing this, spoke to a friend of mine, he said, I think you need to make sure that you talk about envy in there because we live in a kind of giant killing age and people want to tear down geniuses. That wasn't the case in different ages. Although Thomas Carlyle's the Uses of Great Men, which is, you know, the kind of where that phrase comes from. He was already writing defensively about the fact that he thought hagiography about hero worship was a really good thing and it had kind of gone out of fashion. But there's always this push and pull because when we raise somebody to this level, often there's a kind of argument smuggled within it. And I agree with you. I'm totally okay with a bit where, you know, Mozart is, you know, just music is pouring out of him. And that's kind of, that's wonderful. But what is the argument within it? Is the argument within it, you know, about specialist education for certain types of kids is the argument about Austrian nationalism, is the argument about whatever it might be. And I think that there's often a second thing going on when somebody is put on a pedestal. Some idea that they represent is also being put there, too.
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C
Yeah, that's very interesting, what you're sort of trying to accomplish by lording particular people. And of course, some of that is, you know, for example, certain kind of geniuses were simply involved in the construction of a nation for better or for ill. Right. Part of a kind of imagined community of the 19th century was to pick particular writers that certainly very talented, that certainly had made great contributions and say they are now our Shakespeare. And so Goethe becomes better in Germany and whoever else, you know, Boliere perhaps, or Racine.
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B
Yeah. Or Van Gogh becomes the national painter. Yeah, I think it's happening now. Even like. I think someone like Cheremana de Gozi Adichie is kind of the Nigerian writer. You know, she's the writer that symbolizes this new Nigeria that's kind of building itself and feels like it's ready to take its place on the world stage. And I have this line in the book about Shakespeare, which is, you know, he started off writing for the Groundlings, and he ended up working for the Warwickshire Tourist Board because that's what it becomes. It becomes a kind of brand. And like, nowhere do you see that more obviously, I think, than with Einstein and Picasso. They are just, at this point, huge brands. All of the Einstein money goes to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which is why you have these weird things where, like, Verizon and, like, gas meters are using claymation Einsteins to stand in for, like, a really smart person. There are a lot of people who are making money out of the idea of having these brands of genius basically at this point.
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C
So how do we think about extraordinary achievement? Because what's interesting to me is that some people can make extraordinary contribution, and they seem to me relatively ordinary. But when other people make extraordinary contributions in a way that I think does seem to show that they have some strange, unique talent that is difficult to put in words, it's difficult to quantify, but it does seem to set them apart. I mean, to think about one area that I know very well, because that's what I did my PhD in political theory. When I read John Locke, who has made very important contributions to the history of political thought, the way that is prose flows, the way he thinks about the world, I sort of think I know 50 people today who could do that. They didn't come up with those insights at his time. You know, Locke, I think, clearly had a way of having an insight into the world that was special. But there's nothing when you read his prose that makes you think this is a unique mind, Right? This may really have been somebody who just seized the adjacent possible to a greater extent than his contemporaries. And so, again, I don't want to sound kind of oddly blase about John Mark, but I think in a certain kind of way, he feels to me like somebody who within the ranks of very talented people, was comparatively ordinary and just worked on the right questions, thought about them the right way, seized the opportunity, was able to create really lastingly important work. I read someone like Thomas Hobbes, and just the way his prose flows, the way he thinks about the world. He's clearly also quite a strange mind. I mean, nowadays we probably say that he was somehow neuro atypical or something like that, but it's just I don't know anybody like that. I don't know anybody who sees the world in that way. I don't know anybody who writes in that way. I think Hobbes, to me, comes closer to having that kind of unique talent that. That sets him apart. Now, that doesn't mean that Hobbes is more correct about politics than Locke is. It doesn't mean that Hobbes made a greater contribution to the world than Locke has. But it does seem to me to suggest that you can make a great contribution to the world without having whatever we call genius. But also, there are some people who do seem to have something like genius. Which doesn't mean that Hobbes opinions were all correct or that I would want to take advice on him on any other subject. But there was sort of some quit something there that is unusual in a way that's not true of others and that I struggle to find a better word for genius, even if I too, have some skepticism about the use of that term.
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B
Yeah, I agree with you. I think that there are. I mean, part of it is about the fact that some biographies are more compelling than others and lend themselves to mythology. One of the examples I have in the book is Jane Austen, you know, who lived an incredibly quiet life and was excluded from some of these early surveys of genius in the 1900s because they kind of went through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography with a kind of ruler and said, anyone who's got kind of more than 8 centimeters, they're in. And there isn't really anything particularly interesting to say about her life. She turned in a couple of marriage proposals herself, which people kind of try and spin up into a sort of feminist legend. But she was, you know, she was a quiet observer of things that she hadn't seen. And there's no way you can kind of render that into a little storybook. And I think people want it, you know, want it to be mythological. The one I also talk about and the same, you know, to illustrate the kind of yearning for that is. Of all the female artists of the Renaissance, who is the one that we've rediscovered? It's Artemisia Gentileschi. And that's because there is this incredibly compelling story about the fact that her father's apprentice tried to rape her. She testified against, submitted herself to the thumbscrews, you know, threatening her hands, with which she painted herself. And then in the portrait of Judith and Holofernes, she put her rapist face in the man who's having his head cut off by Judith. And this is a kind of feminist legend, is just absolutely perfect. And so she's been rediscovered because it comes in this package, this branding package that every art museum wants to do now. Now, as it happens, I think the paintings are good enough. This is not what I'm sad about. But, you know, but the fact is there are other people from that era, and just so Phineas Aguissola, for example, who don't have this kind of mythology attached to them, and therefore they kind of struggle to survive or break through in the kind of Darwinian marketplace of biographies of people that you want to kind of champion. Whereas Artemisia, the feminist saint is a kind of compelling commercial package. And I think, you know, I think that's a natural process. I don't think we'll ever get around it. But I think you're right. What you don't want to do is grade people according to how satisfying the mythology is. Not least, I have to say, because having looked and tried to read some of these biographies of geniuses, I just think that. How will I put this? I just think a lot of the stuff in them is probably bollocks. Like, I just think, you know, the one I talk about in the book is Galileo. And, like, Galileo is held up as this guy who stood up to the Inquisition. Yes and no. He died in his bed. He didn't die on a stake being burned alive as a heretic. He was political about the fact that he was going to talk about the Earth going around the sun. But what we crave is that story of the one guy who knew he was right and the whole church was against him and he stood alone because that's the compelling story. So I just think we should be very aware about the fact that the stories we tell about achievement mutate. They kind of grow towards the sun in these particular ways. And, yeah, you can't adjudicate between Locke and Hobbes based on who is weirdest, who has the most compelling biography, who has the most compelling mythology. That doesn't tell you anything about the quality of their insights. It tells you maybe about why a particular person might feel more of a connection with one of those people than the other. And that's what so much of this is about, is about what the kind of bridges across time are that connect us with some of these people. And, you know, those, those change, you know, nowhere more than, I think, in, you know, in the idea of kind of military leaders who obviously had been championed for a long time. And I think lots of people, particularly on the left, would now feel very, very uptight about the idea that you would, you know, like Winston Churchill being a very good example of somebody who's been straightforwardly hailed as a hero. And that makes a lot of people in Britain now very uncomfortable because he's also the guy who was involved in the Bengal famine. And so the argument about was Winston Churchill a genius in standing up to Hitler and getting, you know, in his actions in the Second World War becomes an argument about your politics, really, and about whether or not you would forgive people for one thing, or do you not care about colonialism, you champion him. Do you not care about nationalism if you don't, whatever it might be? This is what I mean about the arguments that are being. I'm just always interested and you must be too. What are the arguments we're really having when we're having arguments about these people's value?
- [31:58]
C
That is very interesting. And I think one of the fascinating things that you bring out in the book is about how elevating somebody because of a talent, a specific domain to this general purpose status of genius, doesn't just potentially allow us looking past bad behavior, which is one kind of debate that we've had a lot in the last years, but perhaps is not actually that novel or interesting at this point, but encourages them to behave poorly in all kinds of ways. That, you know, if it's true that Jane Austen was excluded originally from some of the kind of pseudo scientific attempts at listing and cataloging genius in the Victorian era because her life was so boring and so she didn't have, you know, sufficiently many characters devoted to her sufficiently many pages devoted to her in the who's who or whatever the books were in the 19th century, then the person who wants to be recognized as a genius has to make sure that they live life in a larger than life way, because that is what we associate with genius in a certain kind of way. And I'm thinking here of a sort of distant acquaintance of mine who is a visual artist who, you know, I think clearly, in my estimation, leads a very unhealthy life. You know, appears to be addicted to alcohol and other substances, you know, probably needs a mental health intervention in order to be less unhappy and to frankly have a higher chance of living for the years that she should enjoy. But who is celebrated in the New York art scene in part for being such a character, for being so outlandish, for behaving in such erratic ways. And, you know, particularly in a world in which there are few objective measures of achievement and in which subjective taste is as influential as it is in the kind of slightly weird world of contemporary art. You know, you're right that it's not just that she is a brilliant artistically talented, but it's not just that she's a brilliant artist. And therefore we look past her strange behavior. It is that the strange behavior and the Persona is what makes her sell her art. And so actually this art world is encouraging her to rush towards a premature death in that kind of way.
- [34:25]
B
Yeah, I think there's, you know, and I think that's. When you go around art galleries now, it is really interesting to look at what they tell you about people's biography and how often that is used as a kind of measure of authenticity, that the art comes from some sort of pain. And that is, you know, sometimes that's really cheap. There was a very interesting essay in Harper's a while ago about the kind of uses of people, particularly invoking their racial identity, perhaps, or that of their long forgotten ancestors as being a kind of measure that they were in touch with something that then gives their art some kind of deeper spiritual meaning than if, you know, than if it's just a pretty painting or whatever it might be. I think alcoholism is a really good example because I think there are people who think that being creative is really tough because sometimes it comes and sometimes it doesn't. And I think when people have had success creatively, they are often perpetually worried that it's going to just dry up and the gift is going to go at some point. And that's the kind of thing that encourages people to spiral in terms of their behavior. At the same time, if you are in any way successful, you will always have enablers around you. The one that, when you were saying that, what it made me think of is, I remember, I think it was Chris Pitchens second wife, Carol Blue, said about him and his drinking that people would come and see him in D.C. and they wanted their big night out with Christopher Hitchens. You know, they wanted to wake up in a gutter at 4am because they'd heard all these stories about the kind of hard drinking guy that he was. And that was kind of great for them. They got their one day where they, you know, got to kind of experience this wild life, but he was living it every single day. And I think that's the point, isn't it? We want these people to live these outrageous lives so we can kind of just sort of just touch them a little bit, but with no real thought about the kind of cost of living that life every day. But it also comes back to something that I've got a book behind me somewhere here that I was reading when I prepared for it, which is called the Price of Greatness. And we also, you know, in terms of like the storytelling that we crave, we want some great talent to have to exert a particular cost. You know, that feels like the universe is balanced. We want it to be. If your Mozart, you get the talent, but you're also a sort of child and you die young, you know, that's kind of an incredibly compelling story. You know, if you're Beethoven, you have this musical talent, but you go deaf, whatever it might be, or you neglect your wife, or you never speak to your children, or, you know, you just. You're Isaac Newton and you spend your whole life living in a Cambridge college, or you're Yayo Kazama and you check yourself into a mental institution and you have been there for 50 years, we want to believe that you don't get the juice without some kind of payment for it. And I think that's the other thing about. That's the problem with boring geniuses is that because they don't seem to be suffering, we also downgrade their achievements for that reason.
- [37:01]
C
Well, it speaks to a question, doesn't it, of why every great musician seems to die at the age of. Is it 26?
- [37:08]
B
27?
- [37:08]
C
Yeah, 27. Right. And presumably part of the answer may be that this myth, as you call it, of the tortured genius is somewhat true, that people who are particularly creative might also have a tendency towards mental illness or towards success or whatever. Part of it is that if you achieve great fame at a very young age, it probably encourages you to live. Live in very, very unhealthy ways. And part of it is the other way around. Part of it is that perhaps the musician who dies tragically and romantically at 27 can't go on to produce seven more albums that are increasingly mediocre and out of keeping with the times. And slowly people decide that perhaps he wasn't so great after all. Whereas if they leave the scene at the young age of 27, at the height of their fame, you know, we're always gonna remember them as standing at the center of our culture, as being these innovative forces, you know, you can't grow into an old resentful fart who, you know, keeps repeating that Same song from 40 years ago and mouths off about stupid topics on the news.
- [38:14]
B
Yeah, I think that's very true. I have a chapter about the Beatles in which I explore this because I can't remember. It's David Ganzson or Hans Eisenhower has a theory that if you want to be hailed as genius, you need to die before 30. So it's all the terrible promise lost. So you're Keats, the poet. You know, you're like, you know, oh, yeah, you're Amy Winehouse, you know, whoever it might be. River Phoenix, James Dean, you know, you're these kind of. You only ever were beautiful and young and then you were gone. Or. And I want you to pay attention to this, Yasha, because this is the zone that you and I are in. If we ever want to do this, we have to keep marching on until you're over 80. And which point you hopefully become the inspiration for a younger generation who read your work and really like it. And you become. I mean, I don't think either of us are gonna become father of the nation, but you know what I mean? So the idea is like, so in the Beatles, you have one of each. You have John Lennon, who gets shot at 40. So I think he, let's be honest, given his political tendencies, he would have grown into a reactionary old fart. He would now be airing some sort of slightly wince making views about the small boats crisis. And you have Paul McCarthy.
- [39:21]
C
I do not know enough about John Lennon to have predicted that. What makes you say that?
- [39:26]
B
Well, because he was very spiky. And they had a whole song about how they didn't like paying. I mean, they were paying ridiculous rates of tax, but they had a whole song complaining about their tax bill. That's the kind of Political arc that kind of. You can see the direction that it's going in. The kind of Eric Clapton. I think he would have followed the Eric Clapton trajectory. But on the other hand, you have Paul McCartney, who has lived long enough to have become this sort of site of pilgrimage. Right. You know, he's gone. Younger artists want to go and work with him. And then he goes and performs at Glastonbury and has an audio track, an isolated audio track of John Lennon, still young, captured. And so you've got one of each in the Beatles. You know, you've got one father of the nation, the inspiration for all the next generation who idolize him. And you've got one taken from us too soon. And that's one of my answers about how the Beatles became the kind of huge, juggernaut band that they did. And again, the other thing being that they broke up, you know. And the wildest statistic is, I think George Harrison was 27 when the Beatles ended. The vast majority of his life, he was not in the Beatles. And so you've got this. You know, they pumped out a lot of albums in this time, but you've got this thing that's perfect and beautiful. And as you say that you don't have the disappointing, weakest cashed in because one of us has been through a bad divorce and we need to pay the bill that tarnishes your cherished memories of them. There are all these other factors that affect how we feel about stuff that isn't purely about the level of achievement. And the Beatles are a really good example of that.
- [41:00]
C
One of the things that makes sure that you don't cheapen your brand by appearing in diaper ads is that you're dead by the time that you might have a financial need or desire to do so.
- [41:10]
B
Yeah. Also, I say this as somebody who feels pretty middle aged most of the time. Middle age is just kind of sad, isn't it? Like, it's just a sad decline. And it's got lots of consolations. I'd rather be alive than not. But there is something about those people who will only ever have been young and beautiful that I think we just find really compelling.
- [41:29]
C
Another thing you talk about is the attempt to look at genius as a scientific endeavor. To measure genius, to predict who would turn into a genius. And that gives rise to everything from a study where you try and give people IQ tests early in the youth in order to predict who's going to turn into a genius and who doesn't. To, of course, a favorite subject of fun in the book and in the broader popular culture, all of these societies like Mensa that try to say, we're going to administer an IQ test to you and then this is going to be the club where the geniuses hang out. And of course, it turns out that a lot of the people who hang out in the club, and certainly the ones who are vocal about being members of mensa, often don't appear to be geniuses in the sense of having any particular achievements to their name in the real world.
- [42:24]
B
Yeah, I find high IQ societies really compelling for that reason. On one level, I think they're both, in their original form particularly. There was something lovely about them in the sense that the two people in real life I know who took mentor test as teenagers, both grew up in working class households where no one had been to university. And they were brighter than the people around them and they felt slightly, you know, like they didn't quite fit in. And so they just wanted to talk to people who were a bit more like them. I think it's like the least sympathetic thing in the world, isn't it, for people to complain about the fact that they want to talk about French 18th century literature and no one they know does. But I think genuinely for people like that, it does feel like they are outsiders in that way. And that's the group noun that some of the people who were in high IQ society suggested should apply to outsiders. But the bit where you're absolutely right about where it tips over into being poisonous is this idea that although I've got nothing to show for my life in the sense of like, maybe I didn't finish university, maybe I haven't ever held a particularly good job or had a relationship. I know I'm a special person inside because there's this number that says that I'm better than you. And you do find a little bit of that tendency. I write just not about the high IQ societies, but the ultra high IQ societies. And that's where you get people who are really obsessed with the idea that they are super smart, even though they don't have anything to show for it. And I think that's where it becomes quite corrosive. And so Grady Towers, who was a member of one of these societies, writes about that. He said, you know, if you get a smart person, you grew up in a middle class family that was a stable background, you know, home where there was enough food and people weren't violent. They, you know, they become an architect. They don't need a high IQ society,
- [44:03]
C
you know, they acquire the high status in the world through their achievements for using their intelligence in order to, you know, design buildings or do, you know, become engineers or whatever it is that they're going to do. And they don't need to go around say, do you know I'm a member of Mensa or do you know I'm a member of whatever other genius IQ society. Right. Yeah, I remember.
- [44:22]
B
Mega. Yeah. Yeah.
- [44:24]
C
I was really struck by this in the book. It's the people who don't have those achievements, who fled out of life for any number of other reasons, who make that central to their identity.
- [44:33]
B
Yeah. There's a line I really love in Pride and Prejudice. Sorry. I'm obsessed with Austen today by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, where she sees Elizabeth Bennet playing the piano. And Elizabeth Bennet's not very good, but she's trying. And she says. She said, I don't play the piano. She said, had I ever learned, I should have been a great proficient. And I just think quite often I will read a comment on the Internet and I will think, had I ever learned, I should have been a great proficient. Because it's this eternal human impulse, isn't it? Like, I know I could do that better than you. I haven't tried, but I'm pretty sure that I could. And I think that that's a. Again, it's just this really human impulse to sort of think that there is something within you that makes you sort of better than other people who've just tried and been mediocre and actually a fear of failure that you don't want to try. I think it's. Maslow writes about this. People don't just have a fear of failure. They have a fear of success. So in both senses, it's really awkward. So either you fail, and if you tried, that's bad because, you know, you definitely can't do it, rather than leaving it an unanswered question. Or people have a fear of success when they succeed, and they know that will make them different to other people and other people will resent them. And again, like, for geniuses, it's hard to be the object of everybody's attention. I think, again, that level of status and acclamation warps people, basically. You know, if you are, you know, also to go back to our kind of our rock stars people, their managers sort of giving them the amphetamines. You know, all these people who are invested in brand you, they want you to keep that show on the road. I thought of this really strongly in a different context when I was writing my Atlanta piece about Jordan Peterson, you know, the psychologist who had this terrible situation where he became physically dependent on benzodiazepines, but he carried on the world tour. And you kind of think, you know, why did you do that? And why did the people around you let you do that? And I think that there's a feeling sometimes with these people who are phenomenally successful that they are, you know, this whole juggernaut, this machine, depends on the one human frail person at the center of it. And them as a human gets kind of forgotten. And that happens to a lot of geniuses, which is why, you know, even the ones of them who I think become slightly monstrous, I do feel sorry for them. Being special is also hard for all that most people would love to have more acclimation, more status, whatever it might be. It's not an uncomplicatedly happy experience for most people.
- [46:53]
C
And of course, it's not a coincidence that so many child actors, for example, grew up to have very, very troubled lives. You know, the documentary about Amy Winehouse, which I think is very good, brings out that need of everybody around her for her to keep functioning, to keep the machine going, and the way in which that obviously encouraged her most self destructing impulses. I also thought about that in another context, not a genius, I think, which is Joe Biden. I mean, what I was really struck by in the months when he was clinging to running for reelection was the fact that his own family members, in particular his wife, seemed very keen for him to run again. And I just thought, you know, what a disregard for your loved one, who clearly is struggling, clearly is mentally impaired and clearly just is exhausted, that for whatever reason, you know, you feel such a need for them to stay in political power, but you don't seem to have their best interest as a person at heart.
- [48:08]
B
I'm really interested when the new book, the Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book comes out, which I haven't read yet, which seems to portray it as more malignant than I think I've seen in any of the reporting so far. All the reporting I've seen of that so far has painted it as essentially a kind of group delusion, which is that acknowledging that he wasn't fit to run again would have been so psychologically difficult for all the staffers who would have to, you know, someone who'd have to tell him for his wife, who'd have to accept it. You know, my colleague Frank Foer, who wrote a brilliant book about Biden, compared it to when, you know, You've got a parent who's really elderly, and you have to tell them they can't drive anymore and they're never gonna drive again. So it's not like you're ill and you're gonna get better. It's like this part of your life is over now. You have to accept that you're not the person you were and how hard to do that. Someone you love. And you're right. Like someone else who I think some people would call a genius. I think it's true of Donald Trump. There are millions of people. Well, there are thousands of people in the Republican Party who don't think he's fit to be president. They've never thought that. Some of them are on record as having said that, but now they will say that he is because their fortunes are so tied to him and the cost of speaking out is so high. You know, I think you have to understand the kind of. Yeah. The kind of beehives that get built around these people. And that's true whether or not it's any kind of. I mean, what I'm writing about in the book often is about fame and celebrity and commerce and genius being a sort of branch of that in that everybody wants to keep the show on the road, whether it's Amy Winehouse or Joe Biden, everybody's invested in that person as a project.
- [49:39]
C
One of the things I found striking is that there's this attempt to identify early on who's going to be a genius. And that attempt mostly fails. So people go out and administer all of these IQ tests, and some of the people who do end up winning Nobel Prizes and being very influential end up being just below the cutoff, though they still actually are shown to have particularly high iq. Obviously, many people who are shown to have very high IQ don't end up doing anything particularly distinguished in their lives, whether because of circumstances, the time of World War II, et cetera, or just because of personal failings. I wondered about which way to read that as evidence. Right. I mean, I think it shows that whatever genius is, whatever the qualities that allow us to have particular achievements in specific fields, is not just iq. Right. First of all, you have to have other kinds of circumstances where you have to have opportunity. If you're an African American in 18th century America, your talents are gonna be wasted. No matter how intelligent you are. If you're a woman in a society, if it doesn't give women opportunities, it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to make productive uses of your talents. Certainly not to the same degree that a man with the same talent might
- [51:03]
B
be able to do. If you're Jewish in early 20th century America and they have hard quotas on how many Jews can go to the Ivy League. Right. I think there's some of the. I was surprised when I looked into it quite how many different groups of people had been ruled out of opportunities. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the other ones that gets me is the, you know, the Soviets, the kind of like who was allowed to prosper within that system was extremely rigidly controlled. Like how many great mathematicians did we lose to the, you know, to the fact that if their parents weren't party members, they weren't allowed to progress on through the ranks, I think. Yeah, go on, sorry.
- [51:38]
C
And by the way, the national quotas that the Soviets had, including the quotas on Jews, which counted as a national category in the Soviet Union. Right. Where I'm trying to go with this is that I buy it takes all of these different factors, right? And clearly an algorithm that says if you have particularly high iq, you're going to go up to the genius is clearly wrong. And all of these dysfunctional members of these super high IQ societies show that. I guess there's two things on the other side, right. One is that it does appear to be the case from other studies that people who have extraordinary achievements in most fields, including sports, by the way, tend to have very high IQs. So I think it is very hard to have extraordinary achievement if you don't have some special mental talents. But the other thing to say is that you could read all of this as a support of a kind of genius myth, which is to say, look, what it takes to make this extraordinary achievement is something special. There's some special source that isn't reducible to a number measured by an IQ test, or that isn't reducible to the sum of different influences. You look at Niko Jokic and he obviously has physical talents, but predestined him to be a good basketball player. He's, he's tall, he's strong, he's fast. But the extent to which he's good seems to go beyond just those individual ingredients. If we had access to William Shakespeare and we could test his IQ, I'm sure it wouldn't be 75. I'm sure he had high IQ and I'm sure he had other talents, but it's not the case that if you looked at him at the age of 16 or at the age of 20, you would have been able to administer the right tests and predict that he was going to go on to just be more creatively impactful than all of his or virtually all of his contemporaries. And so you could take that same study that fails to identify those geniuses and say, that's not proof that genius doesn't exist. Actually, it is proof that genius exists. There's something that comes together in people that we can't express, but we haven't figured out. There's no formula that just makes him have these extraordinary achievements and is not reducible to these simple things.
- [53:58]
B
That's the version of genius that I like, which I think of as, like the genius. As lightning strike. You know, you put yourself in that. Fortune favors the prepared mind. You put yourself in the place where all of these things could happen. You know, you go to the, you know, you go to Silicon valley in the 60s because it's where exciting things are happening and you're interested in technology. You know, you do it, you get yourself as prepared as possible, you meet them, as many interesting people you have, and then it's kind of in the lap of the gods. I think that's a fundamentally healthy way to look at genius. But you're right, the problem with the way that the IQ test developed, they were originally developed, as I'm sure you know, to test kids who were falling behind. This was an idea that they were going to help people at the lower end. They were not supposed to sort of, you know, show you this race of super beings at the upper end. But you marry that with the kind of late 19th century interest in eugenics and Francis Galton, who was a brilliant man in many ways, but completely without kind of any human empathy, as far as I can see, classing humans into these different gradations by how special they were that collided with the IQ test to kind of get this idea about the idea that there was sort of strata of people. And I think you're right. You know, I talked to Stuart Ritchie, who wrote a very good book, Short Introduction to IQ about this. When I said someone like Darwin, you know, was a kind of a plodder, a methodical plodder, and he said, okay, but don't overstate it. He will have been very clever. You know, he will not have had an IQ of whatever you would say now, like 70 or 60. He will have been a smart guy. Maybe he wasn't, you know, 180, I think at the higher bounds anyway, it's very hard to normally the tests, right, they're just really kind of made up at that point. But, you know, you will have had people who are relatively smart, and then they will have been circumstances, end their lives or other personality traits. And again, I think that's a more healthy way of looking at it, is to kind of think about what have I been given and what can I. What is the best place to exercise those talents? Where can I go and do the most interesting work? And of all the people currently thinking in Silicon Valley, a lot of them I don't really have a lot of time for. One of them that I do is Paul Graham, who's one of the founders of Y Combinator. And he says, when you're 20, go and look and think what you think the most exciting place in the world is and try to move there. And I think, you know, because he talks about the, you know, Milanese Leonardo, he said there was this incredible flowering of people in Florence during the Renaissance, and there's just the list of them, but there was just not that happening in Milan, which shared many of the same characteristics, you know, same essential system of governance, same levels of violence, whatever it might be, same religion, all of this kind of stuff. And so there was something special happening in Florence particularly, that was a kind of network effect of all the people that were there. And you want to be in the same place as all of those people. And I think, again, that's a healthier way of thinking about achievement. Go and be around really smart people. I mean, you've spent a lot of time working with universities, you'll know this. The idea of the university was that there would be interesting conversations that would happen within departments, between departments, but this was that the ideal was that it was this kind of force multiplier of smart. Obviously, what it mostly leads to, as far as I can see from university management, is lots of people having very intense arguments about minor admin issues and beefs with their colleagues. But the idea was that people being around other people who were smart in slightly different ways was incredibly energizing. It's why I wanted to go back and work in the office after the pandemic, because one of the things I love about journalism is that there's like a little project. It's like it's us against the world. And, you know, and I like institutions for that reason. Like, a lot of them are very dysfunctional. You know, persuasion has talked about this very, very well. But in their best form, they are much greater than the sum of the individuals within them. And again, I think that's like a level of, I guess what love in this book is a kind of plea for humility. It might be saying you might be incredibly smart, but there are all these other factors that have helped you exercise your maximum potential. And we should look at those and consider those and try and maximize them for everybody else as well, basically.
- [57:48]
C
Yeah. And that's something that I really like about the book that it's called the Genius myth and it is trying to take certain myths about what a genius is down. But it's not dismissive of the idea that some people are special talents. It's not about that rests on the idea of a blank slate. It doesn't say that you can take anybody at random and train them up to be brilliant at whatever they might want to do.
- [58:12]
B
Yeah, there's a bad, more politically correct version of this book, I think, and I wonder, I'd be really interested to see the reaction to it because I think some people will want it to be that book so they can argue against it. And you know, and I don't think that's entirely legitimate. If you look at the history of iq, for example, there was a big movement of people who were ultra environmentalist. You know, some of them made very good criticisms of the culture bound nature of IQ tests. You know, the way that they presumed everybody was a white Anglo Saxon Protestant American from the late 19th century. But they also had this belief that everything was environmental and that was unfortunately a kind of a wish rather than anything that was supported in the evidence. And you've seen people who are definitely on the left who write about IQ now, like Catherine Page Harden, and just be very open about the fact that we know that there is a spectrum of intelligence in the raw IQ sense and that says absolutely nothing at all about human dignity and worth. And for some reason we've decided that these two things are kind of yoked together. But we don't have to. Just saying that people's IQs follow a spectrum across the population says nothing else about whether those people deserve to live good and dignified lives. And that's the bit, that's the inheritance that we, we've ended up with that makes people very nervous about iq.
- [59:34]
C
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. To listen to the rest of this conversation in which we wonder who the true heroes, the true geniuses of 2025 might be and discuss the complicated, illustrious career of one Elon Musk. Please become a paying subscriber. Please go to jaschamonk.substack.com and support our work. Thank you so much for listening to the good fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.