Is Anyone a Genius?

From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Love him or hate him, many consider Elon Musk to be a modern-day genius. He co-founded PayPal, which transformed how people purchase things. He became the CEO of Tesla, which revolutionized electric vehicles and made it cool to drive an EV. He founded SpaceX, which has accomplished only what superpower nation states have done in the past.

and is now working to make our species intergalactic. Maybe in a few years, I'll be doing this podcast on Mars. To many, these acts and more make Elon Musk a genius, perhaps the most important genius in the world today. But it's worth asking, what exactly makes him a genius? Is it a particular set of qualities? Or is Elon Musk just particularly adept at playing the role of genius?

or at least what we've come to expect of geniuses. And is his offensive behavior excused by his genius or the result of it? And what is it about us as human beings that values genius so much, even to the point of deifying it?

All of these questions are raised in Helen Lewis's brilliant new book, The Genius Myth, a curious history of a dangerous idea. And not just with regard to Elon Musk, but to so many of the figures that our culture venerates as geniuses, like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and more.

She asks, were these people actually geniuses or was their genius based on a myth? And if so, why was that myth so sticky? More importantly, How does our perception of genius confuse and distort our understanding of success and how we value or don't other human beings? Today on Honestly, I ask Helen Lewis if some people belong to a special and arguably superior class, what it means to be a genius, and if she believes in genius at all. Stay with us.

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Thank you very much for having me. Okay, well, I think it's clear to anyone listening that we live in a society, whether... You're calling in from London as you are or living in New York or anywhere in what we call flyover country in America. Any place you go, we as a people in the West. put the greatest value on the people that are driving technological change, on people that can make money, and on people who are famous, broadly speaking. And not on the people, for example, a teacher giving...

extra attention to a child with dyslexia or a home health aid that cares for your elderly parents. It's not that we as individuals might not appreciate those people, but we as a society. And your argument in your new book is this is not simply because we live in a capitalist economy, it is particularly because we venerate a category, a widely misunderstood category in your view, known as genius. So let's start there. What is our definition of genius in the West today?

Well, Samuel Johnson in his dictionary had a definition that was a man possessed of superior faculties. And I think that probably sums it up quite nicely. It's this idea that there are some people who are just in a kind of, you know, class by themselves, but they're different to others.

other people and you know that is a relatively recent innovation before that time you really more had an idea that you know genius was god acting through you or if you're from the Roman and Greeks, one of many gods, you know, a spirit acting through you. But this idea of people, special people...

You mentioned capitalism there, and I think it is part of it, the part of that story, because what happens during the 18th century, but the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, and the idea that people need to market themselves for the first time. If you're a great artist in 15...

you need to find a great prince or a duke and get them to pay for you. You need to find a Medici. Right, you need to paint flattering portraits of their wife and then you're golden. But when you get later on and you get the mass marketplace...

of the 1800s, then you need to be able to, you know, you need to be famous for the first time in this particular mass way, rather than just being celebrated by a kind of tiny elite court of tastemakers. And that's when I think you really begin to get that sort of modern idea. genius. And one of the things that I thought about a lot writing the book is you can tell a lot about a society by the category of people that we're fishing for geniuses in. So the romantics obviously loved a poet.

preferably bisexual, preferably slightly fae and tubercular, you know, preferably slightly kind of... you know, divorced, you know, someone who wasn't really kind of, you know, sort of small bean. I can't believe I'm saying this. Keats the small bean. But you know what I mean? There was this side of Adira being slightly otherworldly and detached. But that's unfortunately for poets today, that's not our big category.

of genius. Those are not the people that we're celebrating most in culture. It switched at some point, really. to becoming the technological innovator. I think maybe around the time, maybe Thomas Edison is the first, you know, that idea of, he was the American Prometheus. The idea that the most exciting thing in the world is technological innovation and the most exciting place that's happening is America.

America. And I would say that is still the dominant version of genius that we have today. What's the problem with this? Why is this a bad thing?

It distorts our understanding of history. I think it's bad for the people themselves. And it just, it's a set of stories and myths rather than being... which as a kind of journalist, I just find innately kind of slightly offensive. But, you know, I feel like we have these templates that we force people into. And a lot of times it becomes an excuse for bad behavior. I think that's a real problem.

And people kind of push down their qualms. You know, I have a story in the book that I think will really resonate with Honesty listeners, which is about a very left-wing queer theatre director who was making work that was essentially celebrating. paedophilia. And a lot of the people around him...

didn't say anything, didn't recognise it. They said in retrospect, if he'd been a male theatre director directing lots of young women, they might have felt, noticed the problem or felt empowered to speak up. But they didn't feel empowered to speak up, not just because of his politics.

and his sexuality, but also because everybody thought he was a genius and the rules didn't apply to geniuses. And I think that's one of the things, that exemption from the rules, George Orwell called it the benefit of clergy, is one of the most kind of... toxic things about geniusdom. In your view, Helen, is the problem that some people are being labeled incorrectly as geniuses, or is the problem that nobody is really a genius, or is it both?

I mean, I... saying that my last chapter is called An Idea That Won't Stay Dead. So I'm fully apprised of the fact that I'm on a doomed kamikaze mission to try and tell people, stop calling people geniuses because we really want to do it. But I think it's... healthier to talk about it more in that.

classical way that the idea of you have inspiration and it's a moment and maybe it happens because of collaboration maybe it happens because of the place you're in whether it's silicon valley or it's you know renaissance florence or whatever it might be but you know i think that the idea when people get high on their own supply, that actually is often the death of their most productive creative period. They then often move...

instead from their working life, the thing that made them famous, into actually being a celebrity. And genius is slightly overlaps, really, particularly modern culture with celebrity, I think, now. There are people that all of us think of when we hear the word genius. For some people, maybe it's Martin...

Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino. For some people, maybe it's, I don't know, Taylor Swift or Kendrick Lamar or maybe even still Kanye, maybe even Donald Trump, who certainly has a kind of political genius, regardless of what you think of his policies. If you are a person in possession of a kind of talent and then you're able to replicate that talent year after year, decade after decade, what else should we call that? Quality, if not...

Genius. Should we simply say, those are talented people? Would that solve the problem for us? Yeah, I don't see there's any problem with that. I think Taylor Swift is a really interesting example because she's obviously an incredibly talented songwriter, mythologizer of herself.

But she also has the same band come touring with her that have been there for a long time, right? She's worked with the same producers for years. She's somebody who's built an incredible tightness. She's had the same PR for a decade. She's built a real team around her and she seems to really respect them. She gave them all quite big bonuses.

on her tour and that to me is somebody who hasn't become eaten alive by their own mythology that it's all them yeah it all depends on her but there are loads of people around her who allow her to perform her absolute maximum and I think that's the bit that sometimes gets lost And yeah, I mean, obviously, people are not going to stop casually calling people geniuses. But I think the...

The bit that I find more troublesome is the attempt to kind of squash the story and not actually tell the reality of the story, the rounded story, because everything becomes about the protagonist.

Okay, well, let's get into some of the figures that you mention in your book. You write about figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Shakespeare, of course, Isaac Newton, Picasso, Einstein, Steve Jobs. What is the through line with all of these people? Is the thing that they have in common that all of their stories have been sort of flattened and squashed? Is the through line of these people that they behave badly and that we give them an excuse for behaving badly?

What do they all have in common? What do these people share? Well, most obvious things, they all have singular talent and they all have something that makes everybody around them stop and take notice.

And you know, the thing that was interesting looking at those Renaissance artists is that Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, this kind of incredible group biography of like all the people that you've heard of in the Renaissance essentially, creates so many of the ways that we talk about art today. So, for example, that idea of Leonardo da Vinci...

You know, what is the thing when you think about Leonardo da Vinci's career? You think about the Mona Lisa as the one singular achievement. And actually for centuries, that really wasn't his most famous work. It was only when it got stolen that people got very excited. And it became an argument between France and Italy about who... owned Leonardo da Vinci because he was born in Italy and worked a lot of the time in France but also about the fact that

The myth for him is the kind of scatterbrain, you know, the idea that he never settled to anything. One minute he was doing a helicopter and one minute he was painting the Virgin on the rocks and, you know, his attention was all over the place. And therefore... we never really kind of got enough of him. And that's actually quite hard to square with the fact that he left behind a huge amount of notebooks, a huge amount of drawings. You know, there are...

There aren't as many paintings extant of him as there are of some other people, but that's his myth, right? That's the box he's been put into. Whereas for Michelangelo, the myth that he's been put into is the idea of struggle. If I asked you what the one thing that you know about Michelangelo is, Probably that he spent years painting the Sistine Chapel lying on his back. Of course, and the paint dripping into his eyes. And yeah, of course.

Yeah, and there were loads of stories like that. I have no idea if that's true, by the way, about the paint trimming into his eyes. It's just the association I have with him. No, I spent ages trying to track down the rumor that he, this is horrible, he wore his dogskin leather boots for so long that they kind of melded into his flesh. And I'm...

I mean, it's in contemporary accounts, but who knows whether or not it's true. But it fits with the idea, doesn't it, right? That's the template he's in. Somebody who was so dedicated to this one piece of art that everything else was kind of pushed to the side. And so there are just these kind of...

these templates that feel very appealing to us. One of them is about the kind of cost of genius. There's a book out there called The Price of Greatness. And I think that's something that's really intuitively appealing to us too. The idea that you get this great gift, but it's also a... And that feels just incredibly mythological to me. And I think we find those stories really appealing because, you know, if someone's just had a nice...

well-adjusted life, and then they produce some nice paintings. There's nothing, it just, it doesn't feel narratively satisfying in some way, but some story about how this is very unlikely, or, you know, a story about Beethoven going deaf. John Milton going blind. You know, the feeling that these are kind of terrible, ironic things for somebody with these talents to suffer. Suddenly the tale is kind of bittersweet. And I think that intuitively makes it more appealing to us. Do you think that...

in order to be mythologized or sort of codified in our culture as a genius, you need to have this sort of twist or dark side. So for Steve Jobs, the like absolute... rageful anger, the neglect of his family. Like, is that necessary in your view and in sort of your study throughout history of the way that we mythologize geniuses? Is that an essential element of it? Because Taylor Swift would be the kind of the counter example. Like, what's the dark side there?

Well, just dumping a lot of people. No, I think that's one of the things that genuinely is the idea that she went through a lot of men and never found happiness. And I think it will be really interesting to see whether or not if her relationship with Travis Kelsey... laughs whether or not the fans still like that is is you know that's that's happy ever after and you don't write the story about happy ever after right you write about everything that that came before it um so I think yeah I think

I don't know if it's necessary to be a genius. I think it certainly helps to have people when they... calling you a genius. And I think you're right, like Kanye West is a very good example of, I think, somebody who for a long time, people really wrestled with this idea about his mental struggles, but his songwriting ability.

And you kind of have to have both of those for the myth to work. If someone's a mediocre songwriter and unfortunately just saying deranged things on the internet, that's not... a very exciting story and, you know, and vice versa. So I think the wrestle between these two impulses of wanting to like some aspects of someone and finding other aspects of them deplorable, I think is a real engine for arguments. And this is another thing I talk in the book, and I'm not sure I ever...

fully explained it to myself in the perfect way but so many times when someone gets called a genius it's a way of advancing a political argument And I think in the case of lots of these modern geniuses, it's about how much do you overlook? How much are you willing to forgive? Are you willing to say, let's give him a pass on the anti-Semitism because Heil Hitler is a really good song? And that might be the moment for most people where they go...

No, no, I'm not. But there were clearly lots of steps up to that. You know, lots of other crazy things that he said, and we still bought his trainers. So there's a kind of political argument there in calling Kanye West a genius or not about what will you tolerate? So this is really interesting. Draw that out a little bit more just in the case of Kanye. Are you saying that the people who defend his work as being genius and overlook the other things—

are sort of surreptitiously or subconsciously comfortable with those other things? I don't think it's that. Or maybe... Maybe it is. Maybe for some people there is just a hard line and the issue personally affects them, so they just will never listen to the music again. For some people, I think it proves to them that they've got a higher cultural sensibility. Other lesser people read the art through the...

artist that's very unsophisticated I don't I'm loftily able to do that you know you definitely see that in the case of somebody like Roman Polanski who for a long time people would say

you know, but the films are so good. And other people would say, but yes, but he confessed himself to sexually assaulting a minor. And it became this argument, particularly when he ended up living in France, about the kind of sophisticated consumer of art was able to overlook these minor personal... but no genuinely people were saying that uh there's a quote from a french actress saying you know it's philistines he's being pursued by philistines and you're not like

also known as the LAPD, right? What are we doing here? But that is exactly the argument that, you know, there's this... A crazy quote from George Elwell that I just found, and I couldn't get over it when I read it. It's from the essay Benefit of Clergy, which is his review of Salvador Dali's memoir, in which he says, Salvador Dali...

horrible. I hate the art. It's full of weird coprophilia and God knows what. And it's morally abhorrent. But you know, we shouldn't cancel him. I don't think he uses the word cancel because this was the 1940s. But then he has this great line, which has just stuck with me, which is... If Shakespeare came back to life and were found to be raping eight-year-old girls in railway carriages, would we let him carry on on the basis he might write another King Lear?

And that to me is that that's the fundamental question of all of this. What are you prepared to sign off? And I talk about Harvey Weinstein as another example of this in the book. And the really fascinating thing to me was that the people were prepared to overlook these rumours that were obviously very widespread. And that wasn't just kind of people doing it for commercial reasons. It was also sensitive.

left-wing artistes who thought, well, he will take a chance on my independent offbeat film that no one else will do. So I don't think there's, you know, there's no political side to our complicity. I think everybody has things there.

they're willing to overlook. But they should probably ask themselves questions about why. You know, I think that MJ, the Michael Jackson musical, I feel that the people involved in that, some of them maybe do think that Michael Jackson was genuinely wronged. Other ones want...

they think we've got this incredible back catalogue of songs, and wouldn't it be a shame if we didn't turn them into a musical? And I write in the book about the fact I walked out halfway through MJ, and I would put myself in the hardcore, separate the art from the artist. Because there was a scene at the end of the first act of that where he starts complaining about how the media are hounding him and they're terribly against him.

And I just, at that point, I was like, no, no one with the journalists here. Actually, Michael, I think it was okay to look into some of this stuff. And it just seemed to me that the art became propaganda. for the crime. And that to me, I just suddenly discovered that I did actually have a moral limit, actually, when it came to separating the art and the artist. Let's talk about Elon as an example of this. Yeah, okay.

Is your basic point that the people that make excuses for Elon, knowing that he is, you know, wildly inappropriate or at the very least. Perhaps having some kind of mental breakdown. We could postulate all day about what's going on with him. But let's suffice it to say, not living an ordinary life, leaving a lot of...

heartbroken women and other people in his wake. Okay, fine. Are you saying that the people that make excuses or just say, you know what, none of that shit matters, let's just focus on SpaceX, et cetera, et cetera. Explain what you mean when you say that's political. Do you mean, yeah, please go ahead. Yeah, I think essentially it boils down to you can't have an omelet without breaking some eggs.

That's the argument essentially in the case of Elon. If you want to have innovation, you have to tolerate... kind of Nietzschean supermen, you know, these people who are just beings of pure action, or actually Randian supermen, right? People who are just, they can't be constrained by regulations and bureaucrats and the slow march of the government. You know, that's...

argument that Elon embodies is that the private sector is dynamic and cool and individual inventors are what's need to drive forward the engine of American progress. And I think... There is a reasonable point to that. It became known as kind of great man theory in the Victorian age.

But you look at the picture and it's more complicated. You know, he was somebody who went to a really good university. He then moved to Silicon Valley, the kind of place you could get funding for your crazy little Zip2 startup project at the end of the, you know, 1990s and then sell it. spin it out and sell it for millions and use that to fund your next project. And then SpaceX was...

reliant on government contracts. And taxpayer funding gives you that stability of income to know that you can do something as gigantic as space exploration. So to me, his story really of his success is a story about synthesis between left and right, about between public money and private money. But that's not the argument, isn't it? The argument becomes either you have to let him do exactly what he wants or he's not going to go to Mars.

Or you have to, the left-wing version of that argument is, it's all a fraud, none of the businesses were ever any good. You know, he's just the Wizard of Oz and there's nothing behind the curtain. And this is what I mean about, you know, you get people, because people find it easier to debunk people than arguments. is Elon Musk a genius or not, becomes a left-right argument about a whole set of political ideas about taxation and businesses, basically. Totally. Totally. I mean...

Just to ask you, though, this idea of you need to break some eggs to make an omelet. Don't you think that's kind of true? Like, I don't think we get SpaceX and Mars colonization, if we ever will. without a person that is a little bit unhinged and crazy. I really wrestle with this because I talk to people who really strongly don't believe that, who think it is all just something that we tell ourselves. It's like a post hoc rationalization.

But I also do, you know, you go back and you read the literature, even like the romantic poets. I think it's either Keats or... Byron says, we of the craft are all crazy. You know, the idea is that creativity has this kind of real closeness to madness. There is this persistent feeling that lots of people who live these big, dramatic, world-changing lives are not... quote-unquote, it's normal. And I think that...

You know, I don't think that is entirely that we're just cherry picking the bits of the biography. I think that probably is true. I think probably people who are outsiders who think unusually, I think in the case of Silicon Valley, lots of people would talk about their, you know, autism or neurotypical behaviors as being something that...

allows them to do things that are different. You know, that puts them at slightly 90 degrees to quote-unquote normal people. So yeah, it's something I wrestled with all the way through. And I think that probably is... I think that's probably my own personal reluctance to say there is a level of people being arseholes that we should tolerate in order to have inventions because that feels bad.

to say that, doesn't it? Like, I don't want that to be true. But I don't, in my, unfortunately, many things that I don't want to be true are nonetheless true. So maybe this is one of them. I think the craziest aspect of it, but I also think the word that hasn't really come up yet would be something like...

just single-minded determination. Like, I am fully convinced that in the same way—this is— based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, of course. But in the same way that I sort of see that my wife has like a very high happiness set point and anything can happen and it's kind of not going to move. And I'm just much more like all over the map. And I just...

I think that so many of those qualities are inborn. Likewise, I really just see, you know, now that I'm managing 50 people, that there's certain people that just have this inborn. Whether it comes from personal hardship, you know, nurture of their parents, or was there the day they were screaming into the world, I have no idea. But some people come into the office here with an internal engine that is just unstoppable.

And some people just don't. And I don't know what to make of that, but it seems to me that when I think about the list of some of the people that we regard as geniuses, they have that. Like in Elon's case, the ability to just, you know, whether it's fueled by Coke or ketamine, I have no idea, but the ability to just work longer, harder, and more determined than other people. How important is that quality, that engine-like quality? to the people that we apply the label to Genius of.

It's such an interesting question because I think the mythology of extremely hardcore Elon has taken a little bit of a knock since he bought Twitter. And it's like, we can see, so we can see you posting.

You're not working 18 hours a day. You're spending 18 hours a day posting. We're here. You know what I mean? And I wonder if that's something that's changed. One of the really sad things that you see in lots of self-proclaimed geniuses is that they have an early career and they reach the high point.

And then they're kind of coasting on fumes. And the reputation doesn't fall. You know, people are still going out and seeking them and out and going to cancel and they're famous. But that engine that you talked about is somehow kind of broken or it's not connected. to anything that's achieving stuff. So that may be what's happening. But what psychologists would call what you're talking about there, intrinsic motivation.

So there's this quality of, you know, we're all motivated by external factors. You know, everyone wants to win prizes, earn a decent salary, find and attract a person to have sex with, all of that kind of stuff. But there's also lots of people who just are just obsessed with things. And you definitely...

see it in the biographies of great artists and scientists you know they've got some vision that they they can't quite access they know needs to happen and somehow they just keep driving away you know and i think that's the research suggests that actually when you tell

stories like that it's more motivating to young people they like the idea of somebody who grafts away at something because anybody could do that that's actually better than the idea that some people are just unique and special and a lightning strike hits them and they come up with an idea But you're right. And I think personality is a big part of this. It's kind of slightly fallen out of...

fashion in psychology, but the kind of idea of personality traits was a huge deal throughout the 20th century. And I'm like you, I think sometimes about which personality traits you need for kind of success, because I would say... You know, I'm very lucky to have had a really good education. I had an extremely boringly stable and happy upbringing. I credit to my parents for that one. But one of the things I do think I have is very high conscientiousness.

I really care about getting things right. I feel very guilty if I get things wrong. I live my life constantly worried, like as if there is some...

figure at the edge of my vision who is going to tap me on the shoulder and say, you've screwed up. We're going to take all this away from you. And I sometimes I will work with people who just turn up. They haven't prepared. They absolutely busk it. And they don't care. And to me, these people are like aliens. A lot of them are British men. I'll just say that. We won't name any names. But you know what I mean? You must have had this too, that you just think...

How have you succeeded? Like, I just think that most of the things I would attribute is just to me working harder rather than being better. Do you guys call them chancers? Chances, yeah. Chances, excuse me. No, that's my posh A, my long A. You can say chances. But like that is a category so fascinating to me because I've met... And by the way, a lot of these people are brilliant, but their comfort with just flying by the seat of their pants, completely adept at bullshitting in a way I am not.

Before I go on television, I still, like, I'm like, what is my opening line going to be? Like, the most type A, like, goodie girl whatever. And I've seen, like, it's embarrassing. People will watch it. You know, a lot of. they tend to be men and be like, this is like so cringe and pathetic. Like you've, you've, you've logged your 10,000 hours. Like, you know how to go on television and sound smart. Maybe it's just, there's a quality in me that kind of don't like.

can't let that go. And I do sometimes wonder a little bit like if this is like a typical female trait and whether or not a woman can be a chancer because I don't think I've ever met one. No. No, that's the last glass ceiling. Just the absolute, like, just taking pride, just turn up. Like, yeah, sorry, what are we talking about today? Oh, yeah, okay, we're going to talk about the Middle East. Yeah, I've got a few thoughts. I read a book a couple of years ago. Yeah, I'll wing it.

I know what you mean. I wonder though...

With all of these things, I wonder how much is innate and how much is conditioned. Because you must know, as I know, that if you or I screw up, there are a thousand people only too delighted to log this. And not just log the exact screw up, but... retrospectively say that you were actually you were a fraud all along.

Helen, what are you talking about? A bad tweet following you around for a decade? I have no idea what you're saying. Simply never happens. But you know what I mean? And I think that's probably true of minorities too. I think if you're a rare black person who gets to talk about a subject that is...

has traditionally been a white one, then you must know that people are waiting for you to slip up and go, oh, I see you were a diversity hire all along. And so I think that there is something about that. But I'm sure loads of men feel like this too. It's just that there are also that extra category.

of the... As we're talking, I'm just thinking about Boris Johnson, the former British Prime Minister, who was the absolute... This is a perfect example. Apogee of this. And people would call him a genius. He was incredibly charismatic. But he would just bluster. And actually, this is the thing that I find mind-blowing. He would sometimes, even about subjects which he knew about, pretend not to know about them because he knew that people would find it charming.

And I just think, where in my life have I ever gone on a show and gone, if I pretend I don't, oh, what cripes, what am I talking about here? People will find that charming. No, that has simply never happened. In addition to this question of... the internal engine. I also think there's a quality to some people, and I wonder if it applies to some of these geniuses. I'm not sure it does.

of like Nellie and I call it just like the glow. Like, and the glow can be on people that are very unexpected. You know, there's a guy I met the other day and I'm like, he just looks like, you know, a white guy that went to the University of Michigan and yet in a room. There's something like profoundly charismatic about this person. How important is the quality of charisma to the people that we come to regard as geniuses?

Charisma is a really interesting word because it's like genius, very hard to define. You know, in the same way, it is a bit like the porn thing of you know it when you see it. There was a phrase that really stood out to me. The anthropologist Manvir Singh used this phrase about...

shamans in traditional societies which was they had charismatic otherness and I think that's also a really good description of the people that we end up calling geniuses and you know you can talk about the fact that they were initially seen as being kind of

conduits for the divine but that sense that they're just a little bit different but in an incredibly compelling way I think is kind of fascinating and I also think there's probably quite a high correlation with a certain level of narcissism and self-promotion

have to want everybody to be looking at you and be okay with everybody looking at you um and and and to accept that role onto you and not sort of sort of shrug it off in the kind of well either in a kind of over i'm so ever so humble way or in a way or structuring your career in a way that you don't get pushed forward like that i think william goldman had this phrase about um film stars you know no one becomes a film star by accident you're an actor right the people who become film stars

They need it. There's some connection with the audience that just sort of swells them. And I think that's true of somebody like Picasso. Picasso clearly a great painter, but also enjoyed being Picasso. and inhabiting that role in a way that lots of his contemporaries didn't quite embrace in the same way. More with Helen Lewis after the break. Stay with us.

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Okay, well, one of the things that you do so brilliantly in this book, I won't say I won't use the word genius to describe you, is that you talk about sort of the mirror image, like what I think of as the mirror image people. So for every Elon Musk, and I was embarrassed that I didn't know this guy's name, there's like an unremembered person.

And in this case, you compare Elon Musk to Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. You argue that Tim was more of an original thinker and that his breakthroughs have arguably been more important, but people don't know his name.

Because he was kind of boring. Tell us about Tim Berners-Lee and this idea that you sort of like weave throughout the book. Yeah, the bit where it really crystallized it to me was when I was thinking about, I can't remember which Elon Musk child we were on. I think about... 11 or 12. And I thought nobody calls their kid X unless they want to make an argument about them being special and the belief that their child has a sort of special destiny too.

And then I thought, I wonder what Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called. And sure enough, Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called Alice and Ben. And I just thought that sort of tells you everything that you need to know, right? You have to separate out the objective assessment of the achievements from the who wants to be a public figure. And I just, you know, I thought...

Tim Berners-Lee has not had a shortage of recognition. He's well known within the field. He's got a knighthood. He's got honorary fellowships. He is credited with all of his achievements, but he hasn't broken through to become that. that public symbol of something in the way that other, you know, in the way that maybe Sam Altman has or Elon Musk has, you know, Steve Jobs has, these towering figures of Silicon Valley that come to represent some...

new technology or some idea or some argument. Do you think it's possible that we can perceive someone as normal, like the kind of person that has kids named Alice and Ben, and a genius?

I think it's really tough. I was trying to work out, you know, who's a sort of normal person. And my friend Ian Leslie wrote a brilliant piece about Paul McCartney, whom he loves, about the fact that Paul McCartney got disregarded as the Beatle. particularly in the post-Beatles period, because he sent his kids to state school, like in America, public school. He went, you know, he was very happily, boringly married to Linda. You know, he was just domestic.

in this particular way. He wasn't living a rock star life of smashing up guitars and swimming pools and groupies and all this sort of stuff. And Ian's argument was that people sort of held this against him. And they found the music kind of naff and twee.

as a result. And I think that really strikes me that John Lennon was rated more highly than him because he fitted the template more. And I've just been, there's a new book out about Tupac Shakur, which I've just been reading. And I think there's a similar thing with that.

kind of idea that, you know, there's like a long ongoing complaint that white stars, like pop stars, like Justin Timberlake, borrowed from black music and did collaborations with black artists because they wanted to associate themselves with something a bit more kind of edgy.

dangerous and cool and like gangster when they were, in fact, they were a very nice boy from the Midwest. And I think that's something, that is part of it too, right? That idea that you want people to be living exciting lives. Otherwise you find the work.

kind of twee as a result. Because you mentioned John Lennon, you talk in the book about sort of people performing the cultural role of genius. You use that phrase to describe Elon Musk. But could the same be said of John Lennon and of most, let's say, of the people that we remember as being geniuses? I think that's something that's definitely worth thinking about. Because John Lennon was kind of...

sarcastic. He was very funny. He was much more surreal. When he got into a relationship with Yoko Ono, they were living, you know, the kind of paradigmatic 60s hippie lifestyle, posing together in bed for peace. There's a film, whether it's just a film... of their buttocks walking away for the camera. You know, like, he was doing all of this stuff that people, you know, that some people hated.

absolutely hated and revolted against. And again, I think that made his fans like him more because they felt like, oh, the people who were criticizing him are the old fuddy-duddies who don't get it. And by praising John Lennon, I get it. I look young and cool and I'm okay with drugs. I'm okay with sex. And so there was a kind of cultural point to liking him.

And I think that just is a big part of how celebrity and genius works, is what does it say about me that I'm advocating for this person? Well...

One of the ideas that you talk about in your book is that some of these people who we think of as geniuses, some of these people who do exceptional things are largely or at least partially the result of timing. and location and luck. You put forward this question in the book. If Elon Musk was placed, you say, in 15th century Milan or present-day Mali, would he still be considered a genius? I'll put that question to you. Yes or no?

No, because I think the particular type of engineering aptitude that he has is perfectly suited for the time and place. And actually the time and place in which he found himself, right? I.e. Silicon Valley, not Pretoria in South Africa where he was born. Paul Graham, who I think is one of the most interesting Silicon Valley...

has this idea about the Milanese Leonardo. Why is there no Leonardo da Vinci but born in Milan? And he says, because you don't just need Leonardo, you need Florence. You need this incredibly fertile, creative city. And I think that's very true. Elon Musk in Pretoria.

would not be the richest man in the world. He needed America, you know, in order to become himself. But would Elon Musk, in other words, a person with an internal engine and, you know... incredible intellectual abilities and single-minded determination, might he have become like...

the chieftain of the tribe in Mali still maybe you wouldn't think of him as a genius but do you think that there's do you I'm basically pushing you on the question of like are there certain people just by their very nature

You know, we're all born different. Who will rise to the top regardless of the situation that they're in? I know. I honestly don't believe that. And I also think, and maybe this is the remnants of my... christian upbringing that you should be kind of humble about the fact that this might not happen to you that you are very lucky if it happens to you and there's probably a lot of other things involved or maybe my kind of left wing heritage because

For a start, if you run the numbers on an Elon Musk in, you know, any time really before the last century, he's got, what, a one in five chance of dying from a preventable childhood disease? That's... just something that's out there. You know, and I just, one of the things that shocked me still was looking through all the...

all the barriers. You know, look at George Washington Carver, an incredible chemist of the 19th century, but was born black. I think the child of a slave wasn't allowed to go to school. I think, you know, he could have been an Elon Musk level figure. But he just, you know, he had all the way through.

trouble accessing the places where knowledge would happen. I think about all the women who tried to join things like the Royal Society in Britain, where you would have heard about the latest developments in scientific theories from your peers, and they were cut out of that. All the women who couldn't attend... drawing classes. All the Jewish mathematicians in the Soviet Union.

There were just hard quotas on the number of Jews who were allowed to go to university in Soviet Russia. And so you see incredibly talented mathematicians forced either to study on their own or forced to kind of compete in the maths Olympiad because it's the only way they can get to university. And the same was true of the Ivy League in the 1920s. It ruthlessly excluded people, in the case of Jewish people, because they were too good.

And they felt it was kind of unfair to the wasps that they would have this unfair competition. But all the way through, there are so many people who've just been denied, who had the talent and they were just denied the opportunity to use it.

So no, I think he's, you know, I think he may have been quite a good Grand Vizier. There's lots of versions where it works out well and he's the king's kind of advisor working on the trebuchet problem. But there's also a lot of versions where, there's also a lot of versions I think where he gets killed. by the king for being annoying. Fair enough. Yeah.

Which is sort of happening right now. Which is kind of metaphorically happening now in America, yes. Helen, I'm not sure if you've seen the brilliant film Ratatouille, but we have a child that is two and a half years old, and this is the only movie in addition to Frozen that we have watched.

memorize the movie. And what I discovered a few months back is that Freddie DeBoer has written one of like, I think one of the best columns I've ever written about, it's like an analysis of this movie. And have you seen it?

No, I haven't. I haven't seen it and I haven't read this Freddie piece. So this is all delightfully new to me. Okay, so what you need to know- He's a chef, but also a rat? You got it. So there's a little chef. He is a rat. His name is Remy. And the whole idea and the whole like- sort of mythology of the movie is this idea that anyone can cook. And Remy the Rat starts watching...

These television shows by basically a French Julia Childs, his name is Gusteau, and Gusteau's whole idea is the idea that anyone can cook. Well, what happens when a rat proves that phrase to be true, and what is the result of the surrounding? French culinary society in this incredible Pixar film. Okay, that's my ad for the movie. And what Freddie writes about in this column is the meaning of the phrase anyone can cook is actually profound because the phrase isn't...

Everyone can cook. Everyone cannot cook. Everyone is not going to be a good cook, but it's that talent can come from anywhere. It can come from unexpected places. So anyone can be talented, but not everyone tragically is talented. And here's what he writes.

Everybody can do some things, but there are some things that some of us just can't do. And all of the rhetoric about believing in yourself and never giving up, all of the social justice platitudes about accessibility and equity can't change that. The world isn't fair, and one of the ways it's unfair is that some people are simply better than other people at certain skills and ability. They are born better, and obviously that's a provocative idea, the idea of being born better.

Do you think that, I don't know, I don't want to say progresses, but those of us who are just like liberal minded and want to believe that. Anyone can work hard enough and achieve, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that we have a hard time politically with the idea of genius.

Because it goes against that idea. We want to believe that everyone can cook when, in fact, anyone can cook, but not everyone can cook. That some people are just innately more talented than other people. And that that is a very... disagreeable and uncomfortable idea.

I think that's completely true. I mean, I write in the book that I think genius is a right-wing idea because it is about the individual and about the kind of idea of privileging them over the kind of collective. But I think there's a good reason. why liberals are really uncomfortable for that idea, because it has been so obviously misused in the past. You would have found...

Very, you know, intellectual men in 1870 arguing that women simply couldn't go to university. Their brains were demonstrably smaller.

Now, the problem that we have, if you want to think of it as a problem, is that women outnumber men as undergraduates and actually in taught postgraduate courses too. Women demonstrably can go to university. So that's the bit that I struggle with, is being so... certain that you know whatever the current political conditions are they're they're letting people flourish and so you can definitively say who's talented and who isn't

That's not to deny that clearly... I mean, I write in the book, you know, I couldn't paint like Monet in a thousand years. I tried to... I interviewed Brian Green, the string theorist, like about a decade ago, and I read his book, and it was beautifully written and accessible, and I just thought...

Way above my pay grade. Glad that I didn't go into theoretical physics. I'd have been terrible at that. You know, you just have to accept that. I think the word that you write to pick up as being the most provocative word, that it's better. Right. I don't think it's about better. And I think that that's such a loaded word. And I think this is where I, you know...

I was raised Catholic. My family's Catholic. I'm an atheist. But writing this book did bring me back more to that Christian idea of the idea that every human being is made in God's image and has an innate human dignity and worth. regardless of their achievements, money, success, whatever it might be, all the trappings of, you know, the world.

that I just think that's the bit about the way that we've talked about genius, particularly in the 19th century, particularly in the discourse around IQ that bothers me, is the idea that some people are worth more than others. I just think it... it's gone into some really dark places demonstrably in history, and it just carries that innate possibility with it. So yeah, I think liberals are overly hostile to that idea beyond the acceptable evidence. But I also think...

I understand it for historical reasons. Well, I think the reason that the law and social mores and frankly, religion are so important. and this is one of the things I've been thinking about because of your book, but just more generally, because we're living in an era where I think the mythology of genius is going to just get even more extreme with AI and everything else, is that...

We need a framework to mitigate against what is demonstrably true, which is that some people are innately born with enormous talents. abilities and some people are not and that is like to me that is obviously a truth and so then what do you do about it well you need a framework that mitigates against that by suggesting that

you know, we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, or we are all equal because we are all created in the image of God. And I guess I wonder, in writing and researching this book, how you've been thinking about, especially now that you've brought it up, but I'm thinking about this before the conversation, how you think about the decline of religion as being married to the rise in the mythology of genius, especially in Silicon Valley, especially in the 21st century.

And do you think, as a self-described atheist, that we sort of need, that even if you don't believe in God per se, that you kind of need religion or something like it for utilitarian? reasons in this in this moment yeah i this week in particular i've been feeling very well disposed towards religion because my atlantic colleague liz brunig who's catholic wrote a really beautiful cover story about witnessing um

executions in Alabama and elsewhere. And she writes really beautifully about these people, without denying that some of them are perpetrators of the absolute worst crimes that you could possibly imagine, that they nonetheless... how should America do right by these people? What rights does the state have to take a human life? And I don't think she would necessarily have come to that subject without her personal faith. And she's taking, you know...

To me, as a European, the idea that you'd be against the death penalty is completely unexceptionable, you know, completely unexceptionable. But still in America, you know, I don't know if you could become... president if you were a very overtly anti-death penalty but it seems to me that you know that she again was having these thoughts about the innate human worth of a life that I find

is one of the things I find very appealing about Catholicism and about that bit of religion that I grew up with. But you're right. I think you have to ask about something about the divine when you're talking about geniuses. I was thinking how weird it is that people kept asking... Albert Einstein, and kept asking Stephen Hawking whether or not they believed in God. And it was this sort of sense that they were, as physicists...

You know, they were thinking about these incredibly big existential questions and they were more interesting as scientists because they were almost on the borderline of philosophy. And it doesn't seem to me to be, you know, the Greeks and Romans had essentially a pantheon of gods. You know, they had this kind of soap opera of big figures to move among it. And they were kind of doing interesting things. That kind of, you know, that ebbed away. In the West, you end up with monotheism.

And then the idea of genius becomes you are doing stuff for the greater glory of God, you know, that you are building the cathedral, you're painting the Sistine Chapel, you know, whatever it might be. And then that begins to ebb away as we get into more secular societies in the 17th, 18th centuries.

And then I do think genius comes in to backfill some of that sense of an encounter. There's a Harold Bloom quote that I have as one of my epigraphs, which is it's very hard to go on without some sense of...

you know, encountering the transcendental or something like that. And I think that's true. We all, whether or not you are religious, you do want to be transported outside everyday life. And that's, you know, the sublime and the beautiful was this romantic idea that some things are merely beautiful, but something are kind of awe-inspiring, like, you know, really...

incredible piece of work or a waterfall or something like that. And there's a kind of slight note of terror. It's so much bigger than you, this thing that you're contemplating. And that's, again, I think something that we would more like to be associated with being the work of a genius. Something you just can't comprehend. how much it happened so that it is you know so sufficiently advanced it's indistinguishable from

God. And this is why I think people are particularly keen now. I'm not a kind of complete AI skeptic, but AI in its current form is a set of very useful business tools equivalent to kind of Google Docs, right? It's great. I'm not knocking it, but it's treated. in this mystic connection to God, connection to another consciousness way. And advocates are treated as the priests of this kind of new religion. And that strikes me. And Helen, there literally are new religions.

coming up around AI. There was an incredibly interesting column from, I think his name's Ted Gioia. I never know how to pronounce his last name, where like tens of thousands of AI users believe that ChatGPT is God. And they're, like, being kicked out of Reddit boards because they're, like, cultish about it. But I don't think it's crazy to imagine kind of new religions coming up around this idea of deifying.

AI and these tools. And I think that's one of the reasons that AI is currently considered to be the most interesting technology, even beyond what it's interesting and current capabilities. It's because people do feel there's something that is... you know, that it might be a kind of some kind of connection with something that is so much bigger than ourselves. You have this quote in the book that I pulled out.

The historian's name was Darren McMahon. Geniuses translated, decoded, and deciphered the mysteries of the universe. Wonders themselves, they made the world wondrous again. I think this is so brilliant. Geniuses reassured us that the universe...

was still a magical place. Talk to me a little bit about your thoughts about this human yearning for the divine. Yeah, I was talking to someone who said they were really disappointed by the kind of cancellation of Michael Jackson because they'd had Michael Jackson at their wedding. And, you know, and this was kind of forcing to reappraise that. I thought it was just really interesting.

Because obviously the cancellation of Michael Jackson doesn't make too much of a difference to me. Like I liked his music a normal amount. But it was this sense of you'd had somebody to believe in. Somebody whose music had soundtracked the most personal moments of your life. Someone who's...

you know, whose mythology you had woven into your own story. And so having that taken away was really, really painful. And, you know, that to me echoes a lot of the way that people talk about, you know, the scandals, say, in the Catholic Church, you know, something that was so much... you had such belief in, has now been revealed to have kind of feet of clay. I think it's got the same idea of disillusionment to it. There's a quote...

that I think Darren McMahon from his book Divine Fury also uses from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is once we saw phoenixes, now they're gone. The world is not thereby disenchanted. But I love that metaphor as the genius is a kind of phoenix. you know just something you know this kind of animal that bursts into flame that's you know this kind of something that can lift you out of your everyday life

You know, and Dirkheim talks about collective effervescence, these kind of heightened states you can appreciate in a crowd. And I think there's something... A bit like that, that when you have somebody that you think is a genius, it takes you into some slightly altered state that maybe in previous eras you would have got by...

if you're a Catholic, you know, doing the rosary or listening to the choir singing or whatever it might have been in medieval Europe, that they fulfill some slightly spiritual role for people. Because I think that's also part of the kind of cancellation discourse, right? Why does it hurt so much when someone's work, you're told suddenly that it's off limits to you? It's because it connected with you in some much deeper way than, yeah, it was quite a good novel or, yeah, I quite like that song.

It meant something to you and you'd woven it into yourself and into your life. One of the elements that has sort of stepped into the, I don't know what to call it, like the godless vacuum of our current age.

is the effort to play God. And we can see this in all kinds of both amazing and awesome and terror-inducing technologies like CRISPR and gene editing that both offer the promise of getting rid of horrific diseases like Tay-Sachs, but also are kind of... Modern eugenics. You write in the book about this idea that existed in the 1970s to create a genius sperm bank and to give sperm from high IQ men into married women.

I might argue that that genius sperm bank actually has just become our reality with a lot of the technology that's available to us right now. But tell us about this effort, because I think it's... I think most people would think about the kind of technology that many of us take for granted now and think, eugenics? Are you insane? What are you talking about? I think it's a really interesting ethical question, and I would love for you to tell us about this genius sperm bank.

Yeah, I had this argument with my friend Adam Rutherford, who wrote a really brilliant book on eugenics called Control. And I said, look, people now, even now, are practicing eugenics. People have chromosomal tests for Down syndrome and then they abort babies with Down syndrome. That is eugenics. And, you know, you don't want to call it that because you think that's perfectly legitimate and fine and you don't want to link it to the...

what was happening in the 20s and 30s. But it is absolutely, you know, and those are really complicated ethical questions. My colleague Sarah Zhang wrote a beautiful cover story for The Atlantic a couple of years ago about a world without Down syndrome and what that would look like. happen when everybody is quote-unquote perfect or quote-unquote normal.

But the Genius Sperm Bank, I just absolutely love this story. I mean, have you ever heard of anything that was more obviously doomed from the start? It's like an idea so stupid that only a smart person could come up with it. Robert K. Graham, who's this eccentric billionaire who makes all his money from...

shatterproof plastic lenses for glasses, decides he's going to collect the sperm of Nobel Prize winners and then distribute it to married women, who's very clear about this, in order to kind of make America great again. And it was essentially, I mean, yeah.

Long history, that phrase. But the idea was that America had got... This was interesting, because there wasn't such the discourse you have now about falling birth rates. So his problem was he felt that America was getting lazy and degenerate. And the same thing, which is that the wrong people were having babies, right? He felt...

that the trouble was that people who were poor or black Americans were having way more than college-educated white people. And he wanted to kind of reverse that trend. So he goes around and tries to collect Nobel sperm. We know that three people donated. David Plotz wrote a brilliant book about this. He found the fact three Nobel Prize winners donated. The only one we know about is William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize in the 50s for being involved in the invention of the transistor.

Unfortunately, much like James Watson, he had a sort of second career of enthusiastic, well... straightforward racism and advocacy for eugenics, really. And so as soon as the sperm bank became public, it became irredeemably associated with the political opinions of William Shockley, you know, who would sort of say... He wanted basically to voluntary sterilization for what he saw as the mentally unfit. And again, it's this classic example of somebody with a great scientific brain coming to an...

seeing a problem, coming to what they think is a reasonable scientific answer to that problem. And he didn't seem to think about the fact that maybe when normal people heard this, what they would think about was the Nazis, or what they would think about is Californian sterilization. of the quote-unquote feeble-minded and that therefore they probably instantly react against it even if what he saw himself doing was a very positive vision.

But it was also fascinating because they asked him in the Playboy, he did a famous Playboy interview with a black journalist called Syl Jones, and they asked him about his own kids. And he said, unfortunately, my children are an example of reversion to the mean.

Essentially, this idea that, you know, if you're a super smart person, you're essentially an outlier on genetics or environment. You know, you've just ended up kind of getting the winning hand and you will not pass that straight on to your children. And you know what? He was an asshole and none of his kids came to his funeral. And I thought that was kind of fascinating because, yeah, who else is running a one-man genius sperm bank as we speak? It's Elon Musk, right?

He's in text messages to Ashley Sinclair, the influencer, saying, we will need to use surrogates to reach legion level before the apocalypse. And... Again, what he's seen is a technical problem. He's provided a technical solution. But somebody as smart as him should know as well that parenting is really important. If you take the smartest child in the world and leave them to be raised by wolves, they are not going to found a...

billion dollar company, right? Like parenting really matters. And so it just, it's, I love those stories. Like I love the story of Mensa and the high IQ societies because their stories are incredibly smart people coming to worse. conclusions than somebody of absolutely average intelligence would have done. They are so smart that they have made themselves kind of profoundly stupid, which is very, very pleasing as a kind of narrative arc. One of the things that's true about...

us as human beings is that we've been obsessed not just with geniuses, but with trying to quantify, identify, define, like calculate genius specifically through often IQ. And the debate, of course, over whether or not intelligence is heritable or nurtured, and it's obviously one of the biggest third rail topics, and rightly so, because— The quest to understand and quantify intelligence has been profoundly racist. It has led to forced sterilization.

You could argue that it has led to mass murder of people that were not considered, I don't know, sufficiently intelligent is right, but sufficiently pure. So let's get, with that caveat, let's get into this subject, if we could, because I think it's essential to talking about genius. You know, part of this book is about the development of the IQ test.

as you were writing the book, you took an IQ test. And I wonder, without asking you your IQ, because I would never do that to a lady. Yeah, it's like asking a lady her age. Yeah, or my weight, or my weight. I'll tell you later. But what did that experience... teach you? Why are we obsessed with IQ? Why did you decide to take an IQ test for the book? Tell me about your thoughts about IQ.

Yeah, I would stand by everything that I wrote in the book, but I'm going to be very cautious in talking about this because it is an incredibly disputed topic. And I think for exactly the reasons you laid out, people are really nervous about it. And I think both sides made...

really big errors. You know, the hereditarians over-claimed, I think, about the heritability of IQ, but then, and they were associated with the kind of political rights, and they became tainted by the association with, for example, scientific racism. or sterilization programs.

The left, on the other hand, went too far in the other direction and really wanted to believe that everything was environmental. They really wanted to believe in the blank slate. And so sometimes they leveled criticisms of IQ testing that were... overwrought one of which is something you'll hear really frequently which is that IQ tests only measure how good you are at IQ tests and now that's just not

True. You can look at IQ tests and broadly, they will help you. They will correlate with things like educational achievement, like lifetime salary, like health, for example. The more intelligent people are, the healthier they are for a very simple reason, which is that you are more...

likely to get a good job and be able to kind of feed yourself and, you know, and you'll also be able to take care of yourself, follow nutritional advice, all of that kind of stuff. So there is definitely, there's a there there. I think that's the bit that the left has been very reluctant to engage with for very understandable political reasons. But on the other hand, you did get a lot of 20th century IQ researchers who were...

white European men who had a very set vision of the world, and they went out and they found the evidence that supported that vision. So one of the examples of that would be Francis Galton, who's...

a really brilliant 19th century kind of dilettante scholar, half-cousin of Charles Darwin. And he writes this slightly mad, but, you know, inspired book called Hereditary Genius, in which he tries to rank everybody in Britain by lettered classes. And he does this... how long your obituary was in the times, as if this is kind of, you know, just objective judgment rather than something that's deeply subjective.

But woven into that was his belief that the ancient Greeks were, I think, like he thought, full standard deviation in intelligence, and then Europeans, and then Africans at the bottom. And that's the kind of stuff that just makes the left... really really nervous and and where i've landed with it is is that i just don't think i don't think those conversations are particularly useful around race actually i don't know what you would change about the way you see the world if

you settle them one way or another. And I also think we should be incredibly tentative because we know that IQs, average IQs in America rose. A hundred is the average IQ, but they keep moving that baseline upwards because people...

have better schooling, people have better childhood nutrition, people learn better abstract thinking. All of that stuff happens. And so we just don't know whether or not countries that are currently poorer are maxing out their potential at the moment. But it is one of the most... I mean, you know me, Barry. You know I've participated in some fairly brisk topics over the years. This is one that is, I think people feel extremely strongly about it on both sides in a way that...

clearly suggests that other things are at play. But I think, one of the things I think is really fascinating is this weird fetishization at both ends, right? Both the belief that people of African descent are kind of inherently inferior and the belief that Ashkenazi Jews are inherently superior. And you think...

Why do you need, like, what is this doing for you? Well, like, why? I mean, you know, I'm... Well, it's a little bit, where does it go? Yeah. Like, let's say there are differences overall within groups. There clearly are. Where does that get us, actually? Well, one of the really obvious things that's interesting about this is in Britain, for example, there is a...

really big discrepancy between the GCSE, which is our kind of exams you take age 16, between boys who are of Black African descent and Black Caribbean descent. And Black African boys do a lot better. And that's because their parents... parents were by and large...

part of waves of migration that were from middle-class doctors. So the environmental conditions in which they're being brought up are different to those of Black Caribbean descent boys who are more likely to have come over in the Windrush migrations, for example, in working-class occupations. And you'd think that this would be a kind of slightly killer blow to some of those race realists.

But it's not, right? And that's the point at which you see the argument that's really been made here, which is that they want to stop immigration from non-white majority countries because they believe that is diluting the racial stock. And as soon as someone says that out loud... Fully, I think 90% of people go,

And it doesn't just become a kind of interesting intellectual debate. It becomes something that people see has real policy consequences. I think talking about IQ in the very explicit way that a lot of people do right now has become something.

quite normalized in Silicon Valley. I've seen job postings. on places like Twitter, from very legitimate people, where it's sort of cheeky, but it's sort of sincere, like looking for people with IQs of, you know, 140 and higher, who, you know, will work their ass off, sleep on the factory floor, blah, blah, blah. And sort of like in there is a throwaway thing, like as if you're going to like give your IQ measure. Talk to me about the way that.

The rise of Silicon Valley has led to the fetishization again of this thing called IQ, which I'll just say, like growing up. There was one moment, I think, where people in the public school system who wanted to get into the gifted and talented program took an IQ test. Otherwise, it's something that I— literally never heard about. It wasn't even on my radar. Now, all of a sudden, IQ seems to be everywhere. Specifically,

And specifically, like, very socially acceptable and talked about in a pretty bragging way in this one particular place in the culture. Why? I, yeah, I've noticed that too. And I think part of it is the kind of natural social media tendency to edgelordism, right? Which is that you know that this is a kind of spicy thing that people have arguments about and you're gesturing to the fact that, you know, you're in the club in the same way as...

people might, you know, use various slurs in a group chat, right? Just to say, or on 4chan, like the way that that is deliberately gratuitously offensive, as if to say, we're all in the club, right? Everybody here is based. So I think some of it's... Some of it's that. IQ tests were really popular all the way through the 20th century, and they were invented right at the start of the 20th century.

In a way that I think almost to some extent, they were sometimes used more like personality quizzes. They were kind of a cute thing you could find out about yourself. So there were lots of books that were like, test your IQ, brain teasers, train your brain. But now I think particularly... I think when they come with that racial overtone, that is something...

There is a feeling that all the way through IQ research that it's used to prop up the status quo. And I think that's some of the way that it is used currently in Silicon Valley, is you've got a group that is heavily dominated by people who are white and Asian. And there is a feeling that...

that, well, that's just natural and ordained and the correct people have risen to the top and IQ is the way that we prove it. And, you know, regardless of the actual arguments and the merits of them, I think that's... That's the kind of statement that's under the table that's being made there. The right people have prospered because they were destined from birth to do so. And it's kind of rarely said out loud, but I think that's probably what it is.

And the interesting thing about it is, you know, one of the chapters I most enjoyed writing was the one about high IQ societies, because they are filled with people who have on paper incredibly high IQs, but for whatever reason, couldn't translate it into... conventional worldly success and it becomes more and more obvious that you look at it that yeah if you want you know if you said to somebody do you want your kid to be smart or not

Almost everybody would pick smart because it's just much better the life choices of your children if they are able to graduate from college, right? They're just going to earn a better salary and have a much more comfortable life. But actually, realistically, the difference between... 120 and 140 or above that it at that point a it's very hard on the test to tell it's very hard to norm them and b also personality traits

And, you know, things like not being addicted to drugs or alcohol, things like having grown up in a kind of nurturing home become way more important. And you see these people who are, you know, there's a really beautiful essay by a guy called Grady.

Towers, who was involved in lots of these ultra high IQ societies, who worked as a security guard. And he talked about the fact that most people with ultra high IQ saw themselves as outsiders. You know, they just couldn't understand the rest of the world. They felt...

different to the people around them, and not in this kind of happy and fulfilled way, but in this way that they just didn't. And for some people, that curdles to resentment of not understanding why it hasn't worked out for them when they're magic, you know, when they're special.

There was a great quote in the book where you surface this Stephen Hawking interview from the New York Times in the early 2000s. And he's asked, I think by the Times, what's your IQ? And he says something like, I have no idea. People who. brag about their IQ, care about their IQ, are losers. Do you think that that is the statement of someone that has IQ privilege? Yeah, and I think that's a classic example. Stephen Hawking had, you know, he had the bestseller about...

physics which almost you know it's quite a rare thing to do he had all the worldly acclaim he didn't need to brag about his iq and i think that's the other bit there is a certain feeling that it has become the badge for people who don't have a lot of other badges to put on on the vest. And it's interesting you say that people kind of bragging about it online, because I think that's one of the...

One of the kind of great mistakes we all made about the internet was it was going to make identity much less important. You know, the early days of the internet, everyone thought, we'll just be brains in jars. You know, we'll all just be having this glorious discussion that's based entirely on, you know, the quality of our words. And actually what happened was that everybody started...

pinning labels to themselves. Well, we could obviously do a whole episode on IQ. We're not going to do that. I'd very much like to not be involved in that. We're never going to do that. We're going to do that with other people.

I want to talk just a little bit more, though, about the current mythology of the genius centered around a lot of these Silicon Valley types. Whether you're thinking about Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, a lot of these people broadly are... have reputations for being assholes you write a about Steve Wozniak telling Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs' biographer, that if he had run Apple, it would have been a nicer place to work, but Apple probably never would have made the Macintosh.

This goes back to what I was saying earlier about, you know, I guess I am a true believer in the great man asshole theory of history, which I do sort of believe in that to some extent. Do you think that Waz was accurate there? I think the counterpoint is that there are many, many extremely

highly valued Silicon Valley firms that make very boring products that we don't really hear about and have founders and people running them that we don't really hear about. You know, how much do you hear about Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, right? runs an incredibly successful company, but is not out there playing this role of the genius. So I think there is definitely a kind of selection bias there. But one thing I did think...

that made me think is a bit of the way that someone once said that lots of really great Silicon Valley startups are essentially cults. And therefore, you should look at their founders as do they have the qualities necessary to be a good cult leader? And therefore some, you know, certainly like, again, charismatic otherness, but also a desire for control, you know, that all of those things might kind of play into it too. So I think, yeah, I think we have to be very careful about kind of...

reverse engineering back, that we may be reverse engineering back from a certain type of person who is actually rare, or at least not the norm. But those are the people that we hear about. But yeah, I find Silicon Valley... Completely fascinating. I mean...

Not least because I find the gender dynamics of it being really interesting. We know from the labour market that men don't like working in pink-collar jobs. They find it kind of demeaning and devaluing. And also those jobs are usually much less... well paid. And it seems to me that it doesn't...

It's not a coincidence that Silicon Valley has become the site of genius as science, technology, engineering and maths have become the kind of male citadel as women have kind of stormed the humanities, basically. When poetry was a thing that men did... that straight men did, it was incredibly, you know, lionised. Now poetry's a bit girly.

it's not kind of so culturally valuable. Whereas engineering is still a male redoubt. And I think that affects the way that we value it too. What do you think is going on politically right now that we're exactly the same age? I'm also 41. There were other...

men and women, geniuses that were venerated when we were younger. But I cannot think of a moment where there's been more of a cult of personality around a handful of people in the culture. Certainly Donald Trump, certainly Elon Musk. But you could, you know, look beyond America and there's other examples we could point to. What is going on that we crave the veneration of these mostly men right now? Explain it.

diagnose our hunger for genius. Yeah, I mean, I really wish that I could, and I'm not sure that I can. But I think, you know, I think we go back to the fact that the Greeks and Romans had a pantheon of gods and they would... sleep with each other and turn into swans and do all that kind of stuff. And they were everybody's kind of giant soap opera. And, you know, now we have the Kardashians, who fulfill broadly the same role, albeit with slightly...

you know, fewer people turning into a bull. But I think there is a kind of desire for big personalities. I mean, you know, you mentioned that phrase, great man theory, and this is my unfortunate conclusion, is that the book is essentially useless, ultimately, because we can't quit it.

We can't quit it. You know, the fashion in history for the last 50 years, you know, it's a left-leaning discipline, like lots of academic disciplines, but has been about stressing society and social forces and bottom-up changes. But realistically... People want stories about people. You know, it would be much... Your bestseller is much more likely to be the...

Napoleon biography than it is, or the biopic about Napoleon, than it is a nuanced study of the social forces of 18th century France. You know, that's just the way that the human... brain works and this is something that you know my journalism i've been thinking about you know the politics is a contest of stories you know and i think that the

The left particularly has had this idea of facts and debunking and like, let's talk about misinformation. And if we can only just do all, you know, hold people accountable to the truth, then we'll win. And that's, unfortunately, I think that is a busted flush. What wins is the best and most compelling story. And that's been something that's run through lots of the work that I've done.

over the last couple of years. You know, these myths were really attached to them. And America is a story. You know, I think the book ends up being a lot about America because America is a country founded on a story and one that has consistently articulated. what it means and what it's in opposition to. You know, the leader of the free world, the only superpower, the new world, as opposed to Europe, you know, that's kind of boring and old and sclerotic. You know, and so I think...

I think there's just a kind of a human brain aspect to why we like this. And maybe when, you know, I mean, I think that probably actually the... Who gets to be called a genius now is tougher. We argue over a few names because culture has splintered so much. But it seemed really obvious to me that there was a big flowering of people who are now still in our canon of geniuses at the end of the 19th century, just as you get truly...

mass media in the sense that, you know, Thomas Edison was always having newspaper reporters down to his lab in Menlo Park. So that was a particularly fertile time for kind of creating geniuses. Maybe it's slightly harder now because things are so fragmented. So we only have one or two that have broken through to truly mass appeal. One of the things that I think is so well put in the book is this idea that we...

crave genius now because it's a way for us in America to comfort ourselves that we are still exceptional. This is what you write, and I just want to read a little piece of it. This is partly a debate about values, but also about geopolitics. The deification, you write, of Silicon Valley was a reflection of the power of America during the 20th century. This was the land of opportunity, the home of innovation, the owner of the future.

But the U.S. is no longer the world's undisputed superpower. With India and China rising, debates about the future-gazing tech geniuses of Silicon Valley are also debates about the importance of America itself. Just as Shakespeare became the argument—

For the preeminence of the English language, Elon Musk and Sam Alton and Peter Thiel and the rest are living arguments that America still leads the world. In other words, what I hear you saying is we are clinging to the idea of the tech genius because... It is a vestige of American dominance. It is a cope, really, for us to cling to the idea of a thing that has slipped through our fingers. Is that what you're saying?

I think that is probably one way of putting it. It's underrated the fact that among... younger people who are more likely to get their news and information from TikTok, one of the big strands that they will be seeing is big Chinese megacities that you and I have never heard of, you know, that have just been completely created in the last two or three years.

years you know because you can just build things there because it's essentially planned government and they don't bother about you know things like local planning boards who are allowed a democratic say in this process. So yeah, I think that the deification of Silicon Valley is the argument that America is still the white hot edge of the future. And I'm just not sure, you know, and that's probably become...

more important argument to make as it's become a more contested argument. And lots of people really feel like... China is the future um and you know I say very early on in the book that it's a very western book and I think genius is a very western idea and I'd be interested to know whether or not there will be people who will come to symbolize

China as an argument, and whether or not that will be allowed to happen, or whether or not we will retrench. And as I say, maybe so much of the intense love and feeling about AI is, God, I hope this one works. I hope this is...

the future. You know, I always think about that line in Watchmen, you know, the Superman is here and he's American, they say about Dr. Manhattan. And it's like, that is the kind of argument for Silicon Valley is that everybody still wants that to be the place, the most exciting place in the world for technological innovation.

It is still. I mean, to me, the argument would be about China, an authoritarian society can't produce—like, they won't allow for the creation of individual geniuses in the same way. There is something about— And maybe this is just, you know, my own delusions, but about liberal democracies, but certainly about America that allow for the creation of genius because it allows for.

the ability for individuals, for individual human flourishing. Like, who was the closest one to that? Probably Jack Ma, and they disappeared him. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think. I would like to think that. Because in the same way that I, but I do think about 10 years ago, we all quite confidently thought that.

well, maybe longer ago than that, that other countries would come round to liberal democracy because it was the way to make your country rich and developed. And China has since presented a huge challenge to that. So maybe you can have great technological... Maybe you can have great technological innovation without great men. Or, you know, Xi Jinping is the only great man and everyone is merely a reflection of that. I think the jury's kind of out on that one.

Which is funny that you say that because it makes me realize that maybe I am more attached to great man theory than perhaps I would like to concede. I think you are because I think it is true. Like, I just think that in the same way. You know, the idea of the blank slate, it's like the most comforting idea in the world, but it's obviously not true. The second you have, as we do, me and Nelly, two children, it's like...

The idea that we can do anything to shape them, I mean, we can kind of like create guardrails, make sure they don't like— fall off a roof, sure. But like, it's so inborn, it's profound. It has changed my idea of like nature and nurture and all of my delusions about that. And I sort of feel the same way about the... great men or I guess maybe great men and a few women theory of history only because it just seems

true, even though we might not want it to be true. I just use like a hundred words to say the same thing. No, I think that, but I think there's a sense, I think there is a reasonable synthesis. And I can't remember which critic of Thomas Carlyle it was said that, you know, before he can... remake society, society must make him.

And I think that's the useful counterpoint to remember, is again, like, that is the Milanese Leonardo. You need Leonardo da Vinci and his singular talent, but you also need Florence. And you know what? We can't really, unless you're...

a eugenicist do a lot about the kind of, you know, the tinkering at the gene level. What you can do is create the conditions, you know, and I write in the book about what it was that made Silicon Valley really attractive. It didn't have the same non-compete clauses.

tech workers that you had on the East Coast so people could move around freely between jobs. It had DARPA, the defense industry, and that was just putting piling money into research and innovation. It had Stanford University. It had these places. that were exciting and young people wanted to be in. And that's the takeaway. We can't alter human nature. Sure, I'm into that. But what we can absolutely do is change the soil in which the seeds are growing. So, yeah, I'm not...

I'm not a full, I'm not full bore great man, but I, and I'm not full bore blank slate. Just half, half. Yeah, great men, women, or non-binary people to be inclusive for 2025.

So, Helen, you close out this new book of yours by saying this. So after all this, you might be wondering, should anyone even be called a genius? I'll tell you what I think. It doesn't matter what I think. We need the idea of genius, the demigod, the superhero, the shaman. We need stories to make sense of the world.

But I wish that we would move back to the ancient idea of genius, something that is found in particular actions or specific works. To me, it makes more sense to call, say, a particular painting genius than to pin the label on the person that created it. In our age, as we've been discussing, that's all about fame and brand and marketing yourself and identity. The idea of the person being bigger than the art. Is there any universe in which you're...

wishful thinking will become more than that. No. No, I like to close out a book by telling people that they've wasted their time reading it. No, I thought it was important to be kind of... humble about that because the book is kind of in many ways a plea for humility more generally but just to say You have to keep pushing. You have to keep pushing, pushing, pushing on the door because the force that you're fighting against is so strong. And the snapback. We always want...

to airbrush out, you know, like when you're writing a kind of screenplay, we always want to just airbrush out so you just have the main character and everything just revolves around them. And it's so important to fight against that because it's not the truth. It's only half the truth. But, you know...

Thomas Carlyle was writing about great men in the 1850s. And that was a defensive, I didn't realize until I read this, that was a defensive essay saying like, everything's getting too egalitarian now. Like we just need a bit of hero worship back in our culture. So, you know, these are currents that constantly flow through human history. And the argument will never be over. I just hope that it's an argument that's productive and interesting to have.

What I appreciated writing this book was just spending so much time with so many interesting thoughts and people. And really... having a kind of mental workout for myself. And this is what our conversation now has just been, is really challenging yourself in...

You know, not in a way that the internet often does, which is about kind of defending your incredibly fixed and entrenched positions with maximum vigour, but really asking yourself these profound questions about human worth and how you think a society should be structured and what price your... willing to pay for the things that you want politically? And those are really good, deep questions that underlie almost every other argument that we have.

Yeah, I haven't fixed the problem of bad people becoming famous. And I don't think anyone ever will do, unfortunately. We'll look forward to that, you tackling that in your next work. I'll get on it. Helen Lewis. The book is The Genius Myth, A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Thank you so much for coming on Honestly. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening.

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