← The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk
657: Helen Lewis - Why Genius Is a Myth, Edison Needed Teams, Self-Promoters Are Overrated, Conspiracy Theories, Shakespeare Needed Luck, and How To Build an Excellent Career
00:57:54
Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people or transform your business through talent or technical services. Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.com learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com learningleader welcome to the learningleader show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com now on to tonight's featured leader. Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic based in London who writes about politics and culture. She's the author of a new bestselling book called the Genius Myth, A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. During our conversation, we discussed the secret to the Beatles success and a good story and useful takeaways for us there. Then why Stephen Hawking thinks IQ tests are for losers, the amount of luck involved in Shakespeare's work becoming iconic. And then Helen goes deep on why Thomas Edison was considered a genius. Her answer might surprise you a bit. We talk about that and so much more. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Helen Lewis. I want to start with Shakespeare. He died in 1616. He's 52 years old. He was kind of popular then, kind of, but not like an icon at the time. What happened after his death that has made all of us call him an icon and a genius.
- [02:20]
B
Yeah, I love the story of Shakespeare because I think there's somebody that I think almost all of us would agree is exceptionally talented. I mean, if you look at him in relation to the other dramatists of his era, I think he's head and shoulders above them, even though there were other brilliant people writing at the time in terms of the number of words and phrases that he coined, the psychological complexity of those plays, the way he wrote a story of England through the history plays. So, you know, I say in the book, if anyone deserves to be called a genius, it's him. But it is interesting to me that he dies as a relatively celebrated. He certainly didn't die in obscurity or forgotten, but he died as a successful man of his age. There was, I think, less idea that this was a kind of passing of one of the immortals in the way that you get sometimes later, when people die and people already think, well, this is somebody who's gonna impact all of history, it's not really a way that people are thinking about him. You get a couple of his friends put together a very expensive edition of his plays, the First Folio. And we're very lucky that they did because that's the only that a couple of the real bangers end up surviving. But he potters along and then what happens is in the next, let me think when this would have been. Yeah, about 50 years later, England has a revolution. The king is deposed, Charles I. Then the Puritans are in charge for a decade and the theatres are all closed because Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans do not think that it's good for people to be going to the theatre. They should only instead be going to church. And then this is one of the very oddest bits of English history, which almost never happens in revolutions, which is that people get bored of the kind of slightly joyless puritans and their insistence on plain clothing and not going to the theatre. And the heir of the original king, whom they all hated enough to have executed 10 years earlier, is in France and they go, would you like to come home and be king again? We sort of think that whole thing was a bit of a mistake. So Charles II arrives, a great pleasure seeking king, perpetually kind of broke and borrowing from the king of France. But one of the things that he does is he loves the theater. I mean, specifically he loves actresses. A couple of his mistresses, including now Gwynne, are actresses. And so the theater is sud revived in London. But they have this big problem, which is that they don't have enough plays to meet demand because no one's been writing them. And so they, in the way that I think people would now complain about the Marvel films, they turn to existing ip and that's the canon of Shakespeare plays. And so there's this immediate swelling of people wanting to put on Shakespeare plays who's, you know, a writer from 50 years ago that people still kind of vaguely remember and they get rediscovered at that point, but they're not at all. And I think this is really important, treated with any kind of reverence. You know, they put people on wires, they put an orchestra in them later on. And in the next century they change the tragedies to have happy endings. You know, they make them very thoroughly at the time. And Shakespeare gets renewed in this sense. And that's something that happens with playwrights, is they only live in a performance tradition. So Shakespeare gets you Know, kind of acclaimed more into now, this. This genius, basically.
- [05:14]
A
It's wild how that works. But part of it is that somebody needed to gather his work. Right. And then present it and share it. So it's like, there's luck. There's like a good bit of luck involved in somebody becoming, quote, a genius.
- [05:30]
B
Yeah, I think that's the thing that's really important to note, I'm pretty sure. Let me get this right. It's King Lear, I think, is one of the ones that we wouldn't have without the First Folio. The fact that that only exists because a couple of people knew him personally and cared about him enough to save that stuff, it slightly tugs at your heartstrings, right, to think that these plays are so important to our culture that so many school children will have learned, kind of almost didn't survive. And one of the ways you can tell that people in the past, at that time, thought rather differently about playwrights is the fact we have very little biography of Shakespeare. You know, we know a little bit. We know that he married. We know that he had a child, Hamnet, who died. We know that he seems to have lived some of his life in London and some of it in Stratford, Von Avon. But there's just. There's whole big chunks of it that are just. And to this day, you know, we have a couple of his signatures that survive, and that's really it in terms of manuscript. So it is fascinating to see that people had to fill in all of those blanks. As soon as Shakespeare became that post restoration in demand playwright, people were really hungry to hear about him, too. And this kind of comes back to my idea of a myth around somebody. So instantly you get this kind of like, who is Shakespeare? Who is this guy whose plays we really love? People really, really want to know.
- [06:41]
A
I always maybe this to a fault. Your book is so cool when it comes to the storytelling. And I think there's also practical application elements throughout. And I want to focus on that for a minute. So we learn about Shakespeare, we learn about. There's a little bit of luck involved. He was still exceptionally talented and produced some amazing work that has stood the test of time. But if I'm today working to build a career, and I don't know if I need them to say I'm a genius, but I want to do well. I want to put a positive dent in the world. What can I take from that story and apply to my life to make it useful?
- [07:21]
B
I think one of the most obvious things that comes up throughout the book is this Brian Eno's conception of seniors, which he sees as a counterpart to genius. It's the idea of places that are unusually productive, creative, you know, hot places to be. And it's very telling to me that Shakespeare was a grammar school boy from Warwickshire, from the middle of England. And what he did as soon as he could was he moved to London because London was where the theaters were, London was where the other playwrights were. And one of the early verdicts that we have on Shakespeare is this damning verdict by one of his other rivals, which is he called him an upstart crow beautified with our feathers. Right? Which is a kind of one those great writer on writer violence bits, where it's just like, oh, you're getting a bit popular. But the point about that is that having rivals is really good for you. I remember Serena Williams once saying this, that she wanted to play tennis against really good people because that was the only way that she could really achieve her full potential. And all the way through the book, I just kept finding these examples. So medieval universities are another one of them. There's a guy called Meursault who's a monk. He didn't make it into the book in the end, but he just sits in a monastery somewhere and writes to all the most interesting people in Europe at the time that all this stuff was going on. He was the kind of center of a web. There's an art dealer who connected lots of the impressionist paintings, Duran Rule. You know, there are these collaborative circles that are really interesting. There are these times and these places. Paul Graham, the tech investor, writes about this in an essay about why did Milan not produce a genius as great as Leonardo da Vinci? You know, why are all the people really, you've heard of in the Renaissance? Are they working in Florence during that time? And he says, well, you don't just have to be Leonardo, you also need Florence. And I think that's a really good way, a lesson for people to take away, which is, if you are a really ambitious person who has a particular field in mind, where do you find the coolest, most interesting bleeding edge of that happening? And can you find a way to put yourself there?
- [09:11]
A
It really speaks to me about. I think of this when it comes to. I certainly geography plays a role. I would view it too, about the people that you surround yourself with. You got to put yourself in rooms where you feel like the dumbest person in there. I mean, that's actually what this podcast kind of is. Part of the reason I do it is to push my edges and try to hang for an hour with Helen Lewis. Like, I don't know if I can do that, but I like the challenge. I like the idea of regularly putting yourself in rooms with people who are going to force you to rise up. They're going to force you to think a little bit differently, you're going to force you to work a little bit harder. I think that's what I take from this, Helen, is how are you or what are you doing to put yourself in those rooms to be surrounded by people that just force you to up your game?
- [10:04]
B
Yeah, I think that's something that is. You know, even when I would say our politics is quite anti establishment and anti institution at times, some of the most interesting people are actually creating institutions, creating connections. I'm thinking about somebody like the tech investor Peter Thiel, not somebody I'm politically sympathetic with, but his idea of creating fellowships for college dropouts is a really interesting idea. Answer to the question of what does the kind of right training ground for people look like now? How can I create something that encourages what I want to see in the world? And just to take a completely opposite end example, last year I was in Austin in Texas, and now Joe Rogan is known to most people as one of the most successful podcasters in the world. He's also loved standup comedy. And about two to three nights a week he goes and performs stand up comedy in Austin to a room of about 300 people. So he has his own venue there that he's invested in the comedy mothership. And not only does that is that interesting to me that he is somebody who pursues something for the love of it. You know, he still wants to get up in front of people and risk failing, which I think is always a really good instinct to embrace, but also that he created an institution because as he saw it. And you'll hear people like Shane Gillis, who's very successful comedian now, talk about for a while, if you were a standup, your options were LA or New York, and both of them had a particular type of progressive politics which not everybody shares. And so for those, those more right wing or heterodox or whatever you want to call it, comedians, we love to have this idea that people are just simply so talented that talent will out and they will succeed on their own. Actually, if you look at something like Austin and the comedy mothership, you begin to see the importance of an ecosystem because there's a whole load of comedians who've come out of that. So Shane Gillisping one of them, Tony Hinchcliffe and his incredibly successful podcast, Kill Tony with another. And the fact that they can go and you can live and work and make a success out of yourself in this scene has been really important to Joe Rogan, advancing the type of comedy he likes to do and he likes to see. And I really do respect that. I respect people who go out and create an institution that creates more of what they want to see in the world.
- [12:07]
A
I do too. I've heard Joe talk about not only going on stage, but being physically in the back rooms with guys like Tony and Shane Gillis. Like, I'm a huge stand up comedy fan, so I love studying. I think it's some of those people are, I had Nikki Glaser on recently and, and some of them are like the modern day philosophers. The way that comedians view life and are able to put a twist on it to make you go huh and laugh at the same time, it's brilliant. It is cool to see what he's built down there in Austin. So I am curious. Another guy who spent some time in Texas that you've written about in your recent book quite a bit is Elon Musk. What's the difference? I'm going to start though with this. What's the difference between a guy that I'd never heard of before reading your work, named Tim Berners Lee and Elon Musk?
- [12:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, Tim Berners Lee built, he developed the World Wide Web, the protocol in which the whole of the Internet is built. So you can argue that without him we're not here. Just the, the fundamentals of architecture, of how things work online really owes a great deal to him. But I find him funny because, you know, he's had great deal of recognition. He has a knighthood here in Britain. I'm sure he has many honorary doctorates. You know, he succeeded by absolutely any metric. But he is just a kind of regular guy in the sense he's, I mean, obviously incredibly smart on the top few percentiles of smartness. But he's, you know, he just, he lives a very ordinary life and seems to be very happy with that. And I just draw a parallel between him and somebody like Elon Musk who I think is very invested in the idea of living a big public life, of making public statements, of having political opinions about how he thinks the world should be constructed, of thinking that there is a kind of race of special people. I mean, the way that Musk talks about his natalism, you know, he's on what is it like 14 children and counting? Is that his genes need to live on. Smart people like him need to have children. There is a kind of sense of that he is of a special nature that I don't think you find in some of the more humbler, unassuming kind of people who have equally impressive levels of achievements. And one of the things that I do worry about is that we overrate, you know, the. I'm gonna say narcissists is a bit harsh, but the self promoters, I guess, and the way that I kind of usually sum it up is the fact that, you know, Elon's kids are called things like Romulus Sykirgus and Xae Ash, 12. And then Tim Berners Lee's kids are called like Alice and Ben. Right. He's just somebody who has not decided to paint himself as a kind of world historical figure. And as you say, if you hadn't heard of him, that's really interesting to me because he definitely deserves a huge amount of credit and inspiration. He just is relatively, personally quite modest about it. And I think the thing is, we don't really tend to call those people geniuses because they're just a bit too normal. And we sort of demand a level of oddness and specialness in who we attach that label to.
- [14:58]
A
I noticed that as a theme in your book. Why is that? You're so right, though. Like, we don't want the genius to be normal. We actually want them to be really weird. Why? Why does that need to be part of the narrative?
- [15:10]
B
Well, maybe you've got alternative theories, but the couple I'm wrestling with is that I think there's a simple fact that lots of people of high achievement have got kind of slightly quixotic personalities or whatever it might be. You know, the Romantics were very attached to the idea of, I guess what we now call bipolar disorder that was linked to creativity. And there was a theory in the 20th century in psychology that creativity was a kind of a mild form of psychoticism. And, you know, these are contested theories, but I think the reason that they took hold is they kind of intuitively appealed to something in us. I think it feels right that people who achieve something special, we want them themselves to be special. We want to hear that they were child prodigies or that they only sleep four hours a night or whatever it might be. The problem is that obviously we have this kind of cult baggage to the extent that unscrupulous people now try and exploit it. And I think you see a very obvious example, like in Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, the blood testing startup who sort of essentially styled herself as a mini Steve Jobs because she knew that was a template for what people considered a startup invested to look like, you know, the polar neck, the deep voice, the kind of showmanship. And the thing is that it worked in the case of Steve Jobs because the back of that was the iPad and everyone loved it. And the iPhone, these incredibly beautifully designed products backed up by an incredibly impressive supply chain. And what she had unfortunately was a machine that entirely failed to work. But she in her pomp got the most incredible list of investors in that company, including people like Rupert Murdoch who you think would be quite difficult to. What's the phrase my mother used to say? Didn't come up the Mersey on a bike. You know, like not easy to kind of seduce with sort of sweet stories, hard headed business people, but they all believed in her. They kind of essentially fell for it. And the same thing with someone like a Sam Bankman Fried of ftx. He looked like what we thought a maths prodigy should look like with the messy hair and the slightly strange lifestyle. And he was going to go and live in the Caribbean on an island. And the thing was that some of that people from that template were organically successful. He unfortunately was standing on top of a huge financial house of cards. But I think he for a while fooled people because again, it was what the boy wonder looked like. That was what he looked like.
- [17:16]
A
I was also thinking back to the difference between Tim Berners Lee and Elon Musk. I would still want to study their upbringings a little bit because I have to believe that part of this yearning to be famous and to be in the news every day has to stem from some potentially troubled upbringing which has been written about in Isaacson's biography and you've written about that as well. And maybe Tim Berners Lee didn't have that again, I don't know. But then to also grow up and believe I am so otherworldly special that I need to spread my seed to the four corners of the earth, but I don't need to be a dad, right? Which to me is being a dad. I am a dad and being a dad is the greatest thing in the world. The actual act of being fully present with your own children, there's nothing better in the world. I can't fathom the idea of being like, I am so brilliant. We're just going to have a bunch of kids that are my DNA, but I don't need to be involved. I think that's that's wild. You know, that is a wild way to think. It takes another level of I'm special to live that way, you know, And I don't know, I'm fascinated by it though.
- [18:28]
B
I'm really fascinated by it because a lot of the way that that kind of cohort of the kind of very pronatalist, very obsessed with iq, but of the tech world present it about the inheritance of intelligence, for example, is these are uncomfortable scientific truths that liberals don't want you to hear. And actually there's a best guess that nobody THINKS Intelligence is 100% heritable. Almost everybody credible thinks that some part of it is right. If you have smart parents, yes, they pass on a load of other advantages like growing up in a house with books, if they've got good jobs and their kids are likely to be fed well, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But also almost everybody credible in that field thinks that some percentage of intelligence is inherited. But almost everybody credible will also tell you that based on twin studies of twins raised apart, that actually upbringing really does matter too. And so that's the bit that I kind of agree with you on. There is a kind of, as ever, picking and choosing which bits of the science actually fit your ideology. And I would say if you want to breed a race of super intelligent beings, also pay a lot of attention to how like where you sent them to school. This is, you know, this kind of being like involved and present in their upbringings. I think what you're alluding to is also quite interesting though, because you're right. Matthew Paris, who's a broadcaster here, presents a series for the BBC called Great Lives. And that involves somebody nominating. He's just a celebrity nominating historical figure that they think has had a great life. And he wrote a book called Fracture because he noticed quite how many of the people that were being nominated had some traumatic event in their childhood. And historians of genius have written about this often in earlier ages when this was more common, the loss of a parent, for example. But I don't think that's necessarily genius in the way we would say objective achievement. It's more like a hunger for recognition or fame or attention. I think if somebody feels like they were an unloved kid growing up or they were bullied at school, there is more of an engine to a kind of I'll show all of you kind of idea. And that again comes down to that difference. Like, is genius a label that we award based on objective achievements or is it a kind of Social category that has all these other influences too.
- [20:31]
A
You talk about another person named Francis Galton.
- [20:35]
B
Yeah.
- [20:35]
A
What can we learn from studying Francis Galton?
- [20:38]
B
The Victorians were often very weird indeed, I think would be my main takeaway from his story. He is just like one of those eccentrics that you find in the history of science, I think a really fascinating guy. He's a half cousin of Charles Darwin. So he's working around the same time as the theory of evolution by natural selection is kind of really affecting how people think about the world. So one of the things that's really interesting about Darwin's work is it's a real challenge to the kind of Victorian religious worldview. Right. That class is set out by God and people have kind of, you know, ordered in creation. And rich people are destined to be rich and poor people are destined to be poor. So there's lots of ways in which Darwin's ideas were profoundly challenging to Victorian society. That's not where Galton comes. Galton is a traditionalist and a conservative, and he is an incredibly brilliant man. He develop several concepts that modern statisticians still use. This incredibly brilliant brain. But I would say from having read the biographies of him, some of his letters and journals, almost completely without empathy for other people. So Darwin goes and travels and sees a slave market and comes home and becomes an abolitionist. Francis Galton sees a slave market in Constantinople, now Istanbul, and says, well, everybody seemed very happy. They were dancing and singing. So it doesn't really think there's a problem with slavery. That kind of gives you that idea of his mindset. He's obsessed with kind of categorization. And he writes this book called Hereditary Genius, which is an attempt to find out if genius is inherited and how common it is in the population. And he classifies all of history into these lettered groups, essentially. And what comes out of that is the idea that genius is pretty rare. It's concentrated in families. He thinks that means it's very heavily influenced by inheritance. And there's an immediate backlash to the book from sociologists. This field is just kind of really being born at this time who say, well, hang on a minute. There's quite a good reason why if you're the son of a judge, you might also become a judge other than positing the existence of some kind of special. You know, I guess they wouldn't really have thought about it in terms of genes at this point, positing some kind of genetic inheritance of judgeness. It might be also that your father encourages you to a career in the law and asks his friends if they could get you a job. And so it starts up, this push pull, which I think we still have with us today, about how much are they kind of Nepo babies? Essentially, like, how much? Is that a useful frame to look at the world and look at genius versus how much do we just think that this is a kind of random lightning strike in the population? And then the other outcome of Galton's work, of course, is that he's the coiner of the word eugenics, which is the idea that the human race needed to be kind of selectively bred, both for high intelligence at the top end, but also to stamp out what they would have seen as the bottom end. The American classification was morons, idiots and imbeciles. And that had a direct influence in American policy. The very famous Supreme Court case of Buck vs Bell about sterilizing somebody with a low IQ, because it was seen at the time that that was a reasonable thing that would actually, you know, that was going to improve the American breeding stock, essentially.
- [23:37]
A
There's so much.
- [23:38]
B
I know it's such a fascinating question because, you know, I think IQ is a really interesting subject and it makes people really nervous because it invokes incredibly big ideas of kind of innate human worth. I think is where people feel that it's going. And it's so bound up with an American context, specifically with a kind of feeling of racism and racist history, that people are nervous of it. But again, it is something that is really worth studying. One of the things I think I found mind blowing to find out about IQ when I studied this book is the Flynn Effect, which is, over the course of the 20th century, the average IQ benchmark had to be moved because people got smarter, which I think is lovely. Like, it's one of those really great stories about, you know, if you have proper childhood nutrition and universal schooling, you can make your population smarter. And everything that we now know says higher IQs are correlated both with better jobs, educational achievement, but also more healthy years. A smarter population is one that's making better decisions about themselves. So these aren't, you know, these don't have to be topics that we kind of shy away from. There are interesting ways to discuss them that don't lapse into being deeply reactionary.
- [24:42]
A
Why does Stephen Hawking think IQ tests were for losers?
- [24:46]
B
I really like that quote. Yeah. Someone. People are kind of obsessed with sort of finding out, like, you see it on the time. I don't know how much time you spend on X. Formerly Twitter. A lot Right, Okay. Well, I mean, I see it all the time. Maybe this is just my feed. So it definitely helps to be smarter. Right. You are not going to complete a college degree if you have an IQ of 60. Like, there are some things that are true, but actually at the top end, it is not a kind of. For every one IQ point equals one success in life. And that was one of the stuff that I found quite humbling to study, was actually about the really super high IQ societies and actually how often they become a home for people who really feel quite broken and outsiderish, really. But Stephen Hawking's point essentially was what does it matter what my IQ is? What matters is what I've done with my life and what I've come up with. And I think he was trying to address that idea that you see in some of the IQ obsessives, which is, I've got an IQ of 180. Everybody should listen to me while saying things that are completely bats, as one example. So Christopher Langan for a while was known as the guy with the highest iq. He features in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. So he has got a cognitive theoretical model of the universe that he thinks could overturn Einsteinian physics. He writes about this on Facebook and on his substack. And he also thinks that George Bush did 9, 11 to stop people finding out about his cognitive theoretical model of the universe. And you just go, okay. I mean, Occam's Razor says probably not, but I'll bear that in mind. But what you won't see in his career is like a history of overt achievement. And Malcolm Gladwell writes quite sympathetically about why this might be. But it's a very good and sobering reminder of the fact that smart people don't always prosper. You know, it's not enough to have a really high performing engine. You need the kind of gears and stuff that connects that to the wheels on the road is the way that I tend to think about it.
- [26:39]
A
Helen, I gotta do a small departure because you brought up that thing about the George Bush conspiracy thing.
- [26:45]
B
Yeah.
- [26:46]
A
And maybe you can play along with me and educate me, because you've probably thought about this or maybe if you haven't, then you'll think in real time. So the conspiracy theory thing is rampant, especially over here where I live in the States. It's just everywhere to me. It's exhausting. And when I've sat in rooms with some of those, the feeling I get is it usually stems from some sort of insecurity. And they want to prove to me that they are so superior and smarter than me that they know all of this crazy stuff. Even something as stupid as somebody saying the. The moon landing isn't real, even though we went six times. Right. 12 guys, all this stuff, whatever. And how dumb I am for actually thinking like that stuff happened or whatever the other. There's a million of them, right. You know, lizard people, all this stuff. I found that it usually come from somebody that seems to have some deep, deep insecurities and need to show me that they are smarter than me. That statement I just made is very judgmental. I don't like being a judgmental person. I'd rather approach you with curiosity than judgment. So I'm just putting all that out there because I want to hear from you, like you study geniuses, quote, you've probably think about this a little bit when I say all of that. What do you think?
- [28:11]
B
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot. I've just been reading Julie Brand's very good book about the Jeffrey Epstein case. So she's the Miami Herald reporter who really broke open the story again after that very first plea deal that Epstein received in the 2000s, which was, I think, now undeniably corrupt.
- [28:27]
A
Yes.
- [28:28]
B
You know, just something to have the charges reduced in that way is. Would not have happened to somebody who wasn't as rich and as powerful and connected as he was. So in some ways that is a conspiracy. That is true, right. That rich, powerful people do get what they want and they don't get treated the same as a poor person who, you know, is caught shoplifting or whatever.
- [28:46]
A
Real quick. That is one of the reasons why conspiracy theories are a thing and they're alive is because every once in a while they're true. Every once in a while they are correct. If they weren't, then they wouldn't be a thing. Because they're like, no, that's dumb, that's dumb, that's dumb. I still think most of them are, but yeah, yeah, every once in a while, yeah, one of them is correct.
- [29:08]
B
Yeah. And Naomi Klein writes this about this in Doppelganger, which is a very good book about Naomi Wolf's descent into conspiracies, saying that the line between investigative journalism and conspiracism is often not as. As stable as you would like to think it is. But there's a difference between Epstein and QAnon, which was also essentially another kind of child abuse themed conspiracy. But that one just does not have the factual support behind it. But I Think you're right. There is something about that. So some of it is definitely a kind of I'll prove more than you pencil neck, kind of pointy headed, whatever you like. Other insults, elite kind of people, right? Like that you would look down on me for believing this. Well, you know, you're not so smart. The other thing I think when they did a study about which personality traits are most correlated with conspiracy thinking, the one that came out top was narcissism. I think that's really important too because it's a bit like oh, the sheeple, the NPCs, the other people think this, but I alone have seen the truth. It positions you as the protagonist of reality. Like you're the one who's seen, seen through this kind of stuff. So I think that's very seductive to people. Definitely. And you know that.
- [30:15]
A
Wait, why is that seductive? I mean, I hate that so much, but you're 1000% right. Why is that seductive? To be a narcissist and to, to feel like I have to prove that I'm smarter than you because I believe this crazy thing that is obviously not true when they're just wrong.
- [30:33]
B
But the point about that is that everybody else is just been taken in and that you think has taken at face value the official story and you're therefore, you know, I understand this impulse as somebody who does a bit of borderline adjacent investigative journalism. There's something like exciting about that detective story aspect of it.
- [30:49]
A
Yeah.
- [30:50]
B
And I think that the way that the Internet works, I think my colleague Derek Thompson wrote about this once, was that it is a confirmation bias engine. If you believe something already, you can go online and find support for it. And it also induces this kind of, this way that kind of paranoid schizophrenics think about stuff where they just see far too many connections between stuff. I think that's how I, I don't know how about you? But when I see conspiracy stuff online, it's just like putting overactive pattern matching essentially. And the Internet is very good. You know, you can watch a three minute TikTok in which someone presents to you five out of context facts and suddenly links them together in this kind of red string in the corkboard way that is superficially incredibly appealing. And you don't really know whether those facts are true or they relate to each other. You've just been kind of sold a, a story. It's a prestige. So I think the interaction between conspiracies and the Internet is kind of fascinating. The thing that's A problem. This is a detour. Sorry. I interviewed a really great scholar of authoritarianism called Karen Stener a couple of years ago and she was researching conspiracism and she had this theory. Essentially I render it as. Wouldn't it be good if we could get people back to good old fashioned 1990s style conspiracy, depoliticized conspiracy theories. Right. The problem with something like QAnon is you say it's the Democrats who are drinking blood. Right. It's your political opponents. What was great about the Chupacabra? Or do you have crop circles in America or is that just a British one?
- [32:14]
A
Yeah, I think so.
- [32:15]
B
I mean, like Iowa, I imagine probably had some great crop circles, but stuff like that, or like ley lines or like Area 51, Roswell. There was obviously an ambient conspiracism of that kind of X File style in the 1990s, but it wasn't. And that's why you should go and shoot up a pizza restaurant. Right. Like, there wasn't any action that you had to take as a result of it. And I did think that was quite. I just sort of thought, yeah, maybe we should try and like, let's encourage people to get back into UFOs again. Right?
- [32:41]
A
The good old days of conspiracy theory.
- [32:43]
B
Yeah, just like bring back Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. It just, it was really harmless. Just looked like cryptids were just, you know, it was a lot of, a lot of time you could spend in your local woods looking for Bigfoot and you're getting out in the fresh air. It was very healthy.
- [32:58]
A
Yes. I'm with you. I'm with you. Sorry. I know I led us down that path, but it's just, you could probably tell it's a little bit of a sore subject in my private life with some of my friends, but I, I actually though do think one of the things I am proud of and I think, hope all of us can do this is just because somebody is that way. I don't think you should remove them from your life. I mean, I guess there are some cases, maybe you should. But I like the fact that I have a real wide variety of friend groups and people I regularly will talk to and hang out with that I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? And we can say this to each other's face. You're insane. You know, I still can have love for them and try to again, even though I just was judgmental there. I try to approach them with some levels of curiosity because I still am curious about. I wonder how you got that way where I wonder how you view the world that way. That is still fascinating to me, even if I am like on the other end of the spectrum of where they're at.
- [33:58]
B
Oh, no, totally. And you put your finger exactly on the reason why I became a journalist. Because that realization that other people are different from you, just even the way that their brains work, that they just have instinctive, visceral responses to things in a different way to you. Like I was thinking about the fact that. So there's an autistic trait which is called justice sensitivity, which is where you just can't bear injustice. You're very highly alert and attuned to it. And I thought that's really interesting. If you think about that being unequally spread throughout the population, it does explain why people react to stories of corruption very differently. Right. For some people, it clearly doesn't bother them. They think, well, everybody's kind of corrupt. But other people, the idea that the world isn't fair is really politically motivating to them. You know, that comes across in stories about. You might get about migrants, for example, like, why are migrants entitled to Social Security? What about Americans? You know, fundamentally, people are just feeling things at different levels. They're affected by them. And when you start to realize that not everybody has the same responses to external stimuli as you, that's kind of always fascinating. I mean, I imagine it's part of the reason why you do what you do is just finding out that other people just don't start, you know, they're not even looking at the same map you are, basically. I love that. I don't find it frightening. I find it kind of mind blowing in a good way.
- [35:12]
A
Yeah, I agree. I am genuinely fascinated by just the stories of people and what makes them the way they are. I. I like learning about upbringings and parents maybe because, like, I am one and I want to like set my children up to do well and to do good and. And. But I am fascinated by all of that stuff. One of the things that I'm a huge fan of is this is. Again, we're going on another direction here. But you've written about them, is the Beatles, right? And I have studied a lot, listened a lot, watched all the documentaries, all that stuff. You've uncovered the secret of their success. What is it?
- [35:49]
B
I mean. Well, there's quite a lot of secrets of their success. And number one is definitely be very good at songwriting. I think that's. Well, one of the things I was found when I was reading there's a strange old book by a guy called Hans Isaac. He was a psychologist in the 20th century. A lot of his research is now questioned. You know, he did a lot of psychology IQ genius research. He also did a lot of research into smoking and heart disease. And because that's medical research that's been looked at again and some of it's been found to be unsafe. I suspect the same would be true as other research. But he wrote this very quirky book called Genius in which he said he had a portrait of the genius and all these things. He had to be male, obviously, but one of the things he said was you should either die before 30 or live, you know, past 80. And I thought that's really interesting. Why is that? And so many of our templates of Genius are essentially, you know, taken too soon. So that's like an Amy Winehouse, a Kurt Cobain, a James Dean, a Rudolf Nureyev because, you know, or to go back to the Romantics, you know, a Keats or a Byron. Because then the idea is it sort of tortures you about what you could have had. You know, there's not enough left.
- [36:51]
A
Steve Jobs left.
- [36:52]
B
Yeah, exactly. What would he be doing now? Like what have we been robbed of basically by their early death versus his other model, which is the kind of you live long enough to inspire the next generation who kind of make a pilgrimage to you. You become the father or mother of the nation. You know, I think you see that maybe in somebody like Chinura Chebe or Vaclav Havel or. I'm sure they're like great old American writers. Yeah, just. Or Tom Lehrer as an example of somebody who died recently. You know, somebody who. The next generation just. You would hear them talking about him all the time. And today's successful artists would kind of talk about the tradition he created. But the bit in the middle is just a bit kind of like, eh. It's not, you know, it's just sort of normal and regular and expected. You know, you're neither tragically gone too soon nor venerable. And so the interesting thing about the Beatles to me is they had that very, very short performing career and slightly longer but still very short recording career. And then it was over. And then in 1980, John Lennon is shot, you know, and he's only in his 40s at that point. And then there will be no more Beatles. But at the same time what you have is Paul McCartney and to a lesser extent George and Ringo living on and becoming the kind of, you know, McCartney has recorded with much younger artists he's done more experimental things. And then he did this incredible performance at the Glastonbury Festival with a vocal of John's, and it was really haunting because there's, you know, John is frozen in time. He's never gonna get any older. But you have, you know, McCartney on stage with, I think, Springsteen, you know, like, people like, he's still living on. And so I thought there was something intriguing about the Beatles success. They were finite. And Craig Brown, the novelist, says this to me. Sorry, the author says this to me about, you know, the Rolling Stones just kind of go on and on and on, playing the hits, but there's never as much of the Beatles as you want. And emotionally, that's. Yeah, that makes it. That kind of gives it that bittersweetness that I think so many genius stories have in them.
- [38:48]
A
So let's get practical with this one. Yeah, so you're building a business, you're building a career, you're working to sustain excellence over time. Right. Again, you want to do well, you want to do good, you want to put a positive dent in the world. What do you take from that finiteness of the Beatles that you could implement into your life?
- [39:09]
B
Well, one of the things I've been thinking about in my career is about the relationship, sort of toxic productivity, if you see what I mean. I think if you work in any number of creative fields, the incentive now is to be producing, producing, producing broadcast, broadcast, broadcast. And that has got often quite big, immediate commercial rewards. You know, if you run, you know this from running a podcast, right? You have to hit the schedule. We absolutely have to hit the schedule. But I'm sure that, you know, there'd be pressure to be like, well, why not put them out more regularly, more content? You know, you've got kind of constantly going to be. You'll do better in the YouTube algorithm if you publish more regularly. Right?
- [39:44]
A
Definitely a thing.
- [39:45]
B
Yeah, right. Completely a thing. And then just to be pumping out constantly like a fire hose of content. Now, the two things about that is that's neither very fun to do as a creator, nor do I think it provides you with your. Like, you're not making your best work at that point, by definition, because you have no time to stop, to think, to be reflective, to choose your guests with care, choose your topics with care. And so when you're in the beginning of your career and starting out, you will want to say yes a lot because you want to try things out, you want to be open to opportunities. And then there comes a point, hopefully, if you've had a bit of success where the most important thing you can say is no. And I think that's something that I'm a kind of natural people pleaser. I'm a bit of a workaholic. So my instinct is always just to say yes to things. But the way my husband always puts it to me is like the idea of the kind of opportunity cost. Well, if you say yes to this, then you will have to have less time for that and you have to be more jealous of guarding your space. And the way I kind of think about it is like, I don't want to put out anything under my name that I'm not really proud of. You know, whether people like it or not, I can't control. But can I say honestly, that was the best I could do? I didn't cut corners. I thought it needed doing and I thought it needed saying. And I've done it as honestly and best as I can. That's the metric by which I should judge myself. And at that point you sort of let go of the success aspect of it and you say, well, I can only make this good. And everything else is just, you know, in the hands of the gods, basically. I mean, have you. Do you struggle with productivity, like in either direction?
- [41:13]
A
So one of the things that I've been advised by all the people now who are in the podcasting world and podcasting space, so I release every Sunday at 7pm and I have for 10 and a half years I've been advised and others have taken this advice is do two or three a week. That will increase your rankings in the algorithms on Apple and Spotify. And I've actually, some of the shows I like have done that or even gone daily, which seems insane to me. And I ended up actually stopped listening in a weird way, even though I really like the show and they give me more of it and then I don't even listen anymore. Isn't that bizarre? It's like so backward.
- [41:50]
B
No, I think that's exactly right. Cause we went from a period of scarcity, right? Like, one of the things I have in the book is that Leonardo da Vinci owned like a hundred books and that made him one of the best read people of the Renaissance. And like now we just live in this glut of content. So actually somebody who promises you everything that I put out you will enjoy, like there is all killer, no filler is actually now a much more powerful thing, I think.
- [42:11]
A
Well, it's just, it's harder to. To keep the quality bar as high as it is if you're going to increase the quantity so much. So to me, I'm like, my desire is to have the Helen Lewis's and the Tim Ferrisses and. And the. I want to increase the quality bar of my podcast, not the quantity. And that means I got to be very curious and careful about the guests. The selection process is really narrowed down. I mean, I'm pitched, you know, 100 a day. And so it's just choosing the people that I'm deeply curious about can have these types of conversations where they're a little bit messy, you know, but that's where we're learning. That's what I'm trying to do. But Robert Greene said this in the 48 laws of power, and on this podcast, do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence.
- [43:01]
B
That's great. Yeah.
- [43:02]
A
But this is advice I give to people in their leadership careers if they work in corporate America. So many people get in meetings and they're like, oh, I gotta talk. I gotta show how smart I am. I'm gonna. And so they just like, vomit all over the meeting room with a bunch of random garbage instead of saying, wait a second, wait until you actually have something of value and use that will improve upon the silence, that will make the room better, that will help out your colleagues, so that when you speak, people are like, oh, Helen spoke up. We got to listen to her. Because she's just not just like, throwing all this garbage out all the time. Because we've all been in those meeting rooms, at least those of who worked in, like, the corporate world, where it's just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah the whole time. And then you have that person or two who. They wait to speak until they have something to add, and then everyone just stops, listens to them, and you end up doing what they say. And I think, like, that's hard. That's not easy, but I think it's something to strive for. I actually learned that from my dad. My dad's still that way to this day. Like, he's definitely not the loudest guy. He definitely will have not the most words said at the family gathering. We're about to have one in a couple days. So I'm like, already thinking about it. But when he talks, we'll all go like this. Oh, yeah, huh? Yeah. And you're like, oh, I need to be like that. You know, like, I want to be that guy. So anyway, I think that's similar to what you're talking about, this finiteness of. We're taking all the Way back to the Beatles. That you can be that way in your career, you can be that way in your life with your family and with people in general is like, how can we add value to this space? We don't just need to just be yapping the whole time.
- [44:38]
B
It's a level of discipline is. Yes, that's the thing. Like, I think about that, about, you know, every time you commit to a big project, you've said no implicitly to a load of other things. So it's really scary to make that decision. But ultimately, if you try and just scatter shot around, you know, it may be superficially successful, but in the long term, I don't think it. I don't think it's sustainable. Because I think what you see with those podcasts as you go very, very intense schedules is that they often burn out. They just can't do it and they don't. And you also get the sense of not enjoying it anymore. It's a real grind. And so, like, is that really, at that point, like a lifelong or sustainable career? I was having a conversation with my friend about most novelists you've heard of or film directors. Go and look at their Wikipedia page and see how often they produced something, and you will often find out that someone's reputation is founded on three films that they made over 20 years. I think that's maybe harder than it was now, but I think we can sometimes overestimate just the amount of content that you need to pump out in order to be successful. All of the superficial incentives in our culture are towards just maximizing yield. And actually, you are the only person, really, who cares about maximizing your quality. You have to be your own quality controller.
- [45:51]
A
The other part to that, though, is I know there's some studies on the fact of the people with the best ideas usually stem from the people with the most ideas. Now, they might have to publish all of those, or that might not have to be for others to see all of them. But even Edison, who you write about, right? Lots of ideas. A lot of the inventors, a lot of the writers, a lot of the artists have tons of ideas, and then a few of them break through and we don't really remember all of the other ones. So how do you balance out this quantity in order to get to the quality? Because most of us, that's what we need to do.
- [46:31]
B
Yeah. When I was reading the story of Thomas Edison, I think it's one that's worth studying for anybody who's interested in creativity, because there's a Couple of different lessons that come from it. One is that the light bulb is not a kind of conceptual innovation of Edison's. Right. Everybody had had the idea of the light bulb, the idea of burning a filament in a vacuum, back to Humphry Davy in the previous century. What was incredible about what Edison managed to do was he managed to make it work. So first of all, he managed to get a really tight vacuum seal and find a really good material for the filament. And that sounds kind of boring compared to the idea of coming up with something, but it's really not. You know, Leonardo da Vinci had a hell of a lot of incredibly good ideas, including one for a kind of helicopter. But he wasn't able to put most of them into practice. They weren't achievable by the technology of the time. So there's that aspect to it which is that we underrate kind of the logistics, the quartermaster kind of side of things, just making things work. You see it all the time in kind of unsuccessful screenwriters or writers. You know, I had the idea for Ant man, and you go, oh, was it that a man should be an ant? Okay, lots of people can have that idea, but not everybody can write to that screenplay and have it put, produced. So the idea of actually having to put rubber on the road, I think, is a really big part of the Edison story. You could say the same about his role in the creation of the New York power grid. Electricity is a kind of interesting quirk unless you can find a way to make people pay for it and reliably deliver it so that comes out of it. And the second thing is that he was one of those inventors who had a really hot streak, which lasted for an unusually long time. But he also had a pretty unsuccessful middle age. And one of the things that might be, that may be about just the timing of his life and about what he was interested in and the conditions. It might also be about that laboratory in Menlo park that he had because he was working with other people who were really brilliant on problems that they all cared about, you know, and if you look at the logbook, you can see that some of his assistants names are on some of their biggest breakthroughs. So they were a collaborative effort. So, yeah, he had lots and lots of ideas, but the important thing is that he was able to put as many of them into practice as he could because of the way that he surrounded himself with people with complimentary skills.
- [48:37]
A
Again, we get back to the importance of being surrounded by others who have high Quality bars. Excellence. Ambitious. Interesting that his name comes through. And I like that you write about the fact we talk about these light bulb moments, like these. Oh, these ahas. But in reality, the light bulb, that's not how it happened. It was a slow, incremental, highly contested creation. It wasn't just, oh, the light bulb. And it just.
- [49:07]
B
Yeah.
- [49:07]
A
What it tells me is life is just so much more messier, and then somebody gets a hold of the story and they clean up the mess. But in general, when you meet people or when you see them, there's usually a bit of mess to them. And I think that's good. I think that's inspiring. Because what it shows me is that's possible, right? It's possible for me and you to go and do whatever that thing is because we're like, oh, my God, I'm a mess. I have this and I'm dealing with this. It's like, yeah, so were all the other people who created the big things, you know?
- [49:41]
B
Yeah. I think it's a much more empowering version of the story. Right. Because you can't ultimately affect the hands you were dealt in terms of your innate strengths and aptitudes and weaknesses and the upbringing that you had. What you can do as an adult is make choices that maximize your ability to do good. You know, people sometimes ask me, why are you not on substat? Why are you not writing a newsletter? Why haven't you gone independent? And the fact is that working at the Atlantic allows me to be the best possible writer. You know, they have got the resources not only to send me interesting places, but also to provide me with the legal support I need to write about very powerful people who might sue us. The editorial integrity, to have a second pair of eyes on something saying, have you really nailed down that fact? Is that definitely not just hand waving, things that are true, sharpening everything up. And also, the other thing I really like about working, and it's been true, the places I've worked, is a feeling that there are people who I don't want to let down, colleagues that I want their good opinion. I work for the Atlantic in the U.S. and Jeff, who's our ultimate editor there, has made a series of really brave calls. And fundamentally, I would like him to respect me. And that sounds kind of creepy and crawly when I say it like that, but you know what I mean? Like, you must have people in your life who you just think, I want to do work. Maybe it's your kids, you know, I want to do work. Like, I will Feel proud of explaining it to them. You know, just finding those people who make you your best version of yourself.
- [51:04]
A
It's the power of being a part of a great team. My background's in athletics, Helen, and this is where I've learned it and try to do the same now in my business is being surrounded by people that I think are better than me, that I think are wiser than me, that are at least better in certain areas, and it forces me to raise my game. Again. This is a theme of our entire conversation. So I completely get why you would choose even. It could be more lucrative, and you could potentially make more money going independent. But the fact that you choose to be around the best of the best, and it forces you to raise your game. You want to impress people. I think that's good. I think that's healthy. That's why we want to be a part of a great team. Selling. Before we run, one more question. Based on everything, like in the genius myth, somebody who's a little bit earlier in their career, let's say, you know, recent college grad or someone like that, and they don't really know what they want to do, but they want to leave a positive dent in the world, like some of the people you've written about in the genius myth. What are some general pieces of life, slash, career advice you'd give to them?
- [52:03]
B
I say one of the really good things that comes across in more recent research is that lots of people who have high achievement, they have a hot streak later in their career, but earlier on, they do quite a bit of sampling, they try different things. And you're a very good example of somebody who you learned a lot of things from something in a very different discipline that are completely transferable skills. I always say to young journalists, take the first job at a publication that you think you could learn something from. If it's just a content mill, a slot factory, and they're just, you're just gonna be pumping out stuff, don't do it. But even if it's in an area you're not wildly interested in, if you think it's a good publication and they'll hold you to high standards, do it. Because your second job is infinitely easier to get than your first. You know, just breaking in in journalism is the absolute hardest thing. Moving sideways is less hard. And so don't stress out too much about, is it your dream job? Sample it. See how you go on that. Again, I think that idea of, like, work out when in your career, you need to move from your default yes to your default. No is really important. And just to go back to what we were saying before, be around people who really care about the work. I think that's the thing, is if you work somewhere where no one really cares, you can't care on your own, you'll become infected by the apathy of people around you. And then nothing is more boring than a job that you don't care about. You know, I have periods in my life where I've worked really, really hard, and I couldn't do that indefinitely. But it was worth it because I felt like it was an important bit of my career and I really wanted to do it. Well, having to devote long hours to something just for the money, maybe for some people it's worth it, but, you know, you only got one life. Really. Yeah. I just. I sometimes think, you know, how would you feel if you just spent all that time just chasing something with the promise that eventually it would pay off and you'd retire at 30 and then you'd start to. To live your life and you get hit by a truck. Don't do it. Don't wait for it. Just try and enjoy what you're. You're doing right now.
- [53:57]
A
Love it. The book is called the Genius Myth. A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. At least that's what it's called in America. I know it has different subtitles elsewhere. It is so well done. I. As I told you before, I'm on the elliptical rereading it this morning, and I end up just being on there forever because I can't stop. And that's not common when it comes to.
- [54:19]
B
Lots of, you know, that is. That. That is a great endorsement. Like, so good you'll forget you're on the elliptical. That. For me, as someone who doesn't really love cardio, but which. That does it for me.
- [54:28]
A
Yeah, it is, because it's entertaining and it's like I'm learning and I'm thinking of practical ways to use it. It hits all the marks. And I think that's. As someone who's written books and. And is in process of doing that, it is so, so hard. And the good ones, like, you make it look so easy. That makes me so bad as a writer because it's like, oh, Helen makes it look so easy. But I'm guessing it was a messy process and you struggled and you questioned yourself and it was hard, but eventually, you know, you get there. And I think that's also inspiring for people to learn about.
- [54:59]
B
If anyone who has fun writing a book is either a freak or is lying to you. Like it's, you know, it should feel like it's effortless, but it is a grind. So if you want to write a book, don't give up. Don't think you're doing it wrong. If it's like, if it's making you go crazy.
- [55:14]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I love it. Well, anyway, thank you so much, Helen. I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.
- [55:20]
B
Thank you.
- [55:24]
A
It is the end of the Podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the Podcast club. If you are, send me a note. Ryan learningleader.com Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Helen Lewis. A few takeaways from my notes. It's funny that we have come to use the phrase quote, light bulb moment to describe a momentary flash of inspiration. That aha moment. Because in actuality, the birth of the light bulb was slow, incremental and highly contested. The world is far more messier than we think, or at least than we like to think we want to think. We have these aha, light bulb moments all the time, but in reality, it's usually a slower process. You just gotta stick to it. And then I enjoyed her life slash career advice to be around people who care about their work. That's why she continues working at the Atlantic. Even if she can make more money being independent, there's something powerful about being around others who force you to up your game. That attitude is so contagious, you become the type of people you hang out with. So it's on us to choose wisely. And then what can we learn from the Beatles and the, quote, finiteness of their work? As Robert Greene told me, do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence. Yes, we need quantity to get to the quality, but some of that quantity should be done in private. Set a high quality bar and then push to continually exceed it. High standards. So important. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader show with Helen Lewis. I think she'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify and Apple podcasts and you subscribe to the show, you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show, hopefully five stars. By doing all that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.