Dean Simonton || The Science of Genius

and leadership and aesthetics. And I want to just personally say his book, Greatness, Who Makes History and Why is one of the major books that inspired me to go into the field that I'm in today. So Dean, it is just such an honor to chat with you today. Well, it's great finally be able to do this, Thanks Scott,

finally finally. Uh you know, I remember we were on a I was on a cruise ship with my dad, maybe over a decade ago, and the only thing I wanted to do was sit in the cabin read your book, Greatness. We'll in our room, sit in our room. My Dad's like, don't you want to like go to like the shows and the buffets, And I was just captivated by this book, and I still have my copy with all of my

underlings and circles. And I think I was still in college at the time, and it just, I mean, I knew that this is what I wanted to do in my life, you know, and you were such an inspiration to me. I wanted to study the science of greatness. And boy, it's just such a it really is such an hunter to chat with you today. I mean, you've done so much for our field. You really have done so much. I'll thank you much. So let's start. I

want to start back nineteen seventy five. That's when, or even earlier nineteen seventy two, you're in Harvard's PhD program in Social SEXCES in social psychology and you want to study genius. Now, tell me what your advisors said when you're like, oh, yeah, hey, I want to study genius. You know, it wasn't really it wasn't really a legitimate topic. I wanted to study creativity and leadership. And first of all,

they didn't see how they connected. And then it didn't help matters that I said, well, they're both connected because they both are related to genius, which made it sort of worse better because it's been a long time since, you know, genius or greatness or anything like that has

been used in psychology. I think Terman was the last person you know, back in the nineteen fifties, and it wasn't a good connotation really, yeah, yeah, right, And creativity at that time was already kind of seen as a dying field, you know, essentially the big thing with Gilford and divergent thinking tests and all that kind of stuff

kind of maxed out. And there I think the fundamental problem for me at that time, and why I thought this all fit with social psychology, is that I wanted to study people who actually exerted a big impact, people were influential. That's why for me, creativity and leadership were connected, because creators, really big creators you know, are sometimes called big C creators, are in fact leaders in their field. They're exerting just a different form of leadership, cultural leadership

instead of political or military leadership. So I had a really hard time find anybody who wanted to mentor me. But I was very very lucky that they just hired a brand new PhD, David Kinney, and even though he had no real interest in the substantive side, of what

I was interested in doing for my thesis. He was very curious about the methodology because I was going to be using econometrics, and nobody in psychology uses econometrics, right, And I was using econometrics because it was the ideal methods for the questions I want to address in my dissertation. And so and by the way, as you mentioned, David k just last year got the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award after many, many years of effort. So he got it

largely because of his mythological contributions. So that really helped because he was willing to supervise me. If you can't find something to supervise your thesis, you're dead in the water as a doctoral students. True, you know, well that approach turned into what you call the historiometric approach, the storiometric approach. At what point did you start to do that use the historiometric approach? And can you tell me more? Can you tell our listeners who probably have never heard

of it, what that entails. Well, it's kind of interesting because it turns out histeorometry it's been around for a long time. The term was actually coined in the early part of the twentieth century to describe any kind of method where you take historical and biographical data, you quantify it and then subject it to sophisticated statistical analysis like multi ard analyzes and structural equation models and things like that.

And when I did my dissertation, I hadn't heard of the term, so I just called what I did archival data analysis. But archival data analysis is too broad. It encompass a lot of things, and they're not necessarily historiometric. Just like going into the archives of a library to find out which books are checked out more often. That's

not really history metric, but it's archival. For archival data to be historometric, it has to be data that has actual historical value, like major achievement, major creative masterpieces, artworks, major battles that were fought, things like that, things that well, things that achieve greatness and will in a particular domain, and so much greatness that they literally go down in history in the animals in terms of major achievements. So I learned that this very obscure guy, Frederick Wood, no

one knows who he was. It was just a behavior geticist. He coined this term, and he pointed out that people had been doing histormetry historometry for a long time, but they never called it that. Like Francis Galton, he considered to be histometrician. And actually I found somebody who was doing histeometrics in eighteen thirty five, which makes his geometrics the oldest method used in the behavioral sciences before laboratory experiments.

But that's a good point. Yeah, this guy is Catla and he's more famous for inventing the BMI index and also introducing the normal distribution, which he described he said would describe individual differences. But he also did this classic study and it's still valid today. I mean, he introduced all these control and whatever to look at the relationship between age and achievement to see whether or not there

was a peak. And then I decline. He focused on the number one dramatists in the French and English dramatic traditions because they're very big and with lots of really outstanding examples like Moliere and Shakespeare. And that's the first and I was published in eighteen thirty five. And what I think is really amazing is there were studies that were published since his that didn't introduce other mythological controls

that he introduced. So we don't always progress. Sometimes we regress. Anyway, once I realized that there was a term for it, and I realized that because I mentioned Lewis Urman earlier where he did the Genetics Studies of Genius. A lot of times people forget that volume two of Genetic Studies of Gnientry, which was published by graduate students of his. Catherine Cox did not actually look at his intellectually gifted children. She looked at three hundred and one actual geniuses in

Western history. These were famous generals like Napoleon, famous musicians like Beethoven, famous artists like Nicolangelo, and studied not only their intelligence but also their personality characteristics. And she called what she was doing histrometry. Oh wow, someone I realized, and that was good for me because I was trying to validate what I was doing. And I said, well, this is old stuff, you know, it's already been around for now over one hundred years. So yeah, Cox did

some really good work. I think that she should get more credit than Sherman sometimes. Yeah, well, I have a paper that just came out in the Gifts Child Quarterly where I review entire history of that volume, both the anti Satans and also subsequent influences on the field, including its influences on me, and what's kind of said about that book in some respects is sometimes termining its credit for it because it was just the volume and genetic studies of Genius. So he is the author of the

entire series, but she is. That's the only volume that he is not co author on, only her. And sometimes you'll see on the Internet you'll see someone quote IQ estimates for various famous people. You can just go ahead and google like Mozart IQ and you'll get her i Q estimates, but on some sites are listed as uraments and not as hurts So and part of that is that he estimate is her estimate higher than Turman's estimate actually was one of the raiders I have checked out.

I don't know, well, I think it's interesting is that. Uh. One of the reasons why I've been kind of an advocate for her is because I think she is very, very neglected, and it was the sophistication of what she did did was his off and overlooked. She had three independent raiders to rate the IQ scores herself termin and then mod Merrill, who was responsible for a later revision of the Stanford Rene. So these weren't dumb people where it's just you know, undergraduates who were told here, here's

a scoring sheet. What always struck me about those ratings is Mozart didn't come out pretty. It didn't come out that high IQ. Yeah, I mean, he didn't come out as high as maybe you might think. But you got to remember that most of the information about Mozart where he would score high on has to do with musical precocity.

And what's interesting is that there was actually a study done of Mozart that was published in Transactions of Philosophical Transactions in seventeen seventy when Motes and this was a study done of start Mozart and his father Leopold were visiting London on a concert tour and this guy, this scientist, heard about this incredible child apology and decided to give him a bunch of a bunch of tests to see

how for coaches he actually was. And what was interesting is like one was a side reading thing, how good at your seg reading music? And Mozart when it came like anything musical, was better than his dad. So in that respect. He had a very high IQ, but when he wasn't seeing it at a keyboard, he was no

different than a typical eight year old. If if he was paying at the piano and a favorite key walked into the room, he needily dropped everything and mean to go and pet the cat, or he would he'd hop around the apartment on a hobby horse, you know, tending he was a calorie miner or something. I don't know, And so in terms of metal development, he wasn't really that precocious, except when the King too Music saw where I think I Q introduct kind of being lowered a

little bit. I like that explanation. You know, Well you see that a lot with prodigies, you know, yeah, you see it. It's like yeah, going. I mean, you have this kind of you know, the Savat syndrome where the disparity is huge, and then you have the prodigies that come somewhere in between where they're not, you know, totally slow in their development, but there's still nowhere near their

their talent happens to be. You know. Another famous example of that is William James Sidis, who you know, when he started Harvard at I think was thirteen he delivered a presentation in higher level of mathematics in front of the math club that just blew everybody away. But when he wasn't talking about math, he walked around like a little kid, like he didn't belong in Harvard Yard, you know. So and that was and that ruined him because he

couldn't adjust, you know, to his classes. They've already looked at him like he didn't belong in the classroom, even though he could, he could do the work, but he couldn't interact socially. I think that's so so interesting. Just there something so human about that. You know, we're all human, uh, you know. And there's multidimensionality and also it speaks to the multi dimensionality of us and and test scatter, all these things that you don't you don't get captured by

a global IQ score. Right. Well, you know your career, you've you've done so many different approaches to get at this question about genius, the science of genius, science of greatness. You've published laboratory experiments, mathematical models, computer simulations, meta analyses likeometric investigations, secondary data analysis, single case studies, and interviews. You know, what is it that compels you to do use a pluralistic approach, what is it within you? You know, like,

because not all researchers are so interested in that triangulation. Well, I think the main thing is from the very beginning, as a grand student I was trying to find I would start with the question, and then I'd say, what's the best way to answer that question? And most of the time I find that the questions I have that come up in my head are best answered using histometry.

So the majority of my empirical studies are histometric, but there's sometimes where I want to deal with an issue where that does not seem to be the best approach.

And this is a a petribute true for my theoretical work, where I've done computer simulations and mathematical modeling, because what you want to do is you set up, you start off with a set of assumptions, and then you want to work out the implications, and then later on you may collect data to test those predictions, but you got to first make the derivations from a set of assumptions. And so I've been doing mathematical modeling for ages. I started off as a chemistry major, and I took all

these math courses and things like that. And then when I became a site major at thein of my junior year, I realized that all that math I took wasn't going to be useful. When I took stats, even advanced stance, I didn't have to do differential equations or you know, linear algebra or anything like that. So in a way it was kind of a waste. But once I start doing mathematical models, all that math that I learned when I was a chemistry major then became very very useful.

So I, in a sense saved the first two years of college. That's wonderful. Well, just going back to be further, what were you like, you know, in middle school, in elementary in elementary school, high school, were you in gifted education? Were you really really good at math? What did teacher say about you about your promise? Did they say psychology?

I was considered to be a scientifically talented student, and my teachers nominated me for a special when I was in junior high school, they nominated me for a special metropolitan wide this is in Los Angeles Metropolitan wide program for the scientific gifted. Turned out not that the ex

fund as I thought it would be. You know, I had a commute across town and basically just do a bunch of laboratory experiments where you are already knew what the result was going to be, you know, like proving the gas law or something, and which I already knew I was going to turn out, but they wanted to see whether or not you could replicate it, you know, so you have you kept lab notes and whatever. So

it was nothing really creative about it. But the main point is, both in junior high school and high school, I did see the reward for being top of my class, not math though, in social science and in the natural

sciences and also English of all things. So I was acknowledged. Uh, I wouldn't consider myself gifted in a way that like, uh, some of the mathematical gifted people are, you know, and like the study of mathematic gifted it well, johns Hopkins and now Sad Vanderbilt, I mean those people, I mean, those guys are and Dallas are astonishing and and of course now some of them are now old enough that we they've become genius adults, you know, So it's uh,

those people are off the map. In fact, just just to put it in perspective, the way I like to put it is, I took a physics class in high school and I was able to get a's in physics just by doing the problem sets and attending electors. Okay, So I was pretty proud of myself. But there was another guy in that class who the teacher realized, whoa you you just study what you want to study, okay,

and turn in whatever you want to turn in. And he just gave him an automatic A without doing any of the tests and without doing any of the uh the sets. And that guy went on to cal Tech. So I mean he was he he was with brain. So that's the difference between being good in science and being, you know, a child prodigy. And so very fact that the physics prop would say, our instructor, you're on your own, do what you want. Do you need to be a child prodigy in order to be that good someday? Like

are you allowed to be a warmer? You know? That's That's the thing that a lot of people sometimes forget is a lot of child prodigies don't grow up to become genius adults. Uh. They will often go through various struggles, not just because of preps social issues, but sometimes they have problems actually eventually finding what they want to do.

David Filman did this interesting study of child prodigies and a lot of them were phenomenal, but they didn't stay in the same domain, and they went from one area to another area, to another area to another area. Some of them finally found their thing whatever they turned him on and then developed the necessary expertise. We still have

to develop the expertise. Being a child code, it just enables you to acquire the expertise faster, right, But you know they not everybody found their thing, And a good example of that is William James Cittis. He never really found his thing. The only reason why he went into mathematics is because he was pushed by his dad, or as Citists who was a famous psychiatrist. But he didn't really want to do it. As soon as he got a chance, he got out of math. You know, that

was dad's you know a thing. In fact, correctly, he didn't even go to his dad's funeral. He was so oppeeved. Wow, Well but what about the okay, so what about the reverse? Like can you not be a child prodigy and be it become a genius? Yeah? I mean that happens all the time. I mean, for example, Beethoven wasn't really a child prodigy. His dad tried to sell him as a child prodigy. He tried to make him into a Mozart.

And fact, his dad evidently actually lied about Beethoven's age and said that he was two years younger than he actually was, so that he would seem more like a prodigy. And the thing is, he Beethoven never found this out until there was a legal issue. He was he was fighting for a custody of his nephew and they had to get some records like his birth records and stuff back in uh Bond that's where it was where he's born.

And uh he said, be careful because it can cause confusion because there I have an older brother who was two years older than me, and he's he's passed away now, but he's also got the same name, so you got to get the right verse certificate. Well, they finally told them, we hate to tell you a little bit that you didn't have an older brother, so you're so. So the point is to get back to your original question, is

that Beethoven was wasn't really a child pody. I mean he was he was competent very early in but not not anymore. A lot of musicians are relatively early when they find their thing. I mean, there's this program on public radio called From the Top where they interview these kids, you know, and they and there some of them are like, you know, thirteen. I think the youngest I've ever heard is like seven. And you know, because of the Suzuki method or whatever, they can master of violin at a

very young age. But you know, you're not composing yet. They're not yet what we would consider to be adult virtuosi. So you do have a certain amount of precocity in music that's fairly common, but child pologies are relatively rare, even even in music, and Beethoven was definitely not a chipology. That's very interesting, you know, I just trying to understand, you know, where these things come from. Yeah, I know

you spent your career trying to stay this. I really liked your work kind of talking about how genes need to sync up sometimes, you know, it's like the late like late bloomers can can burst on the scene when when certain genes that take many years, like sometimes you might have genes that code for certain traits that make you appear awkward at a certain age, and then you get to a certain age where it all kind of gels together, and then it appears as those own burst

on the scene. I remember, you know, adopting some of your work along those lines in a in an article I wrote for psychology, my first ever article for a psychology for the for the public, general public. It was Confessions of a late Bloomer, where I drew it brought

in a lot of your work on that. But in addition to genes, you know, like it's it's it's obviously like its nature via nurture, right, So what you know, do you just after studying it for so many years, do you feel like you have a do you get it? Do you feel like you get where genius comes from?

I don't know about that, you know, yeah, yeah, I mean to me, it's it is a complex interaction between the environment and your generic genetic development, and it is rendered more complex for what you said is that we now have appreciated that a lot of teens don't fully manifest themselves until you're a lot older. So you may get a pretty good dove telling at one age, and then that dove tailing doesn't work later on, and sometimes

it just may be some capricious event. One of my favorite examples we actually did that TV show together on late Bloomers, And one of the examples that I like to give is a Austrian nineteenth century composer, Anton Bruckner, who was a real, real late bloomer. He wasn't a late bloomer in terms of learning music. He always wanted to be a musician. He studied music a lot, but he only wanted to be a religious composer. He posed a lot of masses and hymns, and he was very,

very religious, very it's about Ron mccathleen. Uh. He played Oregon in the Cathedral and all that kind of stuff. But he wasn't he didn't stand out he had he showed no talent. He couldn't find his thing. And then one time he went to see an opera by Richard Wagner, and all of a sudden he just had this epiphany that he wanted to write symphonies that sounded like Bogner operas, but without seeing you know, but the big orchestras and tubas and all this kind of stuff. And he actually

the first chance he got when he met Wagner. He just grabbed him around his knees and it says, master, I worship you. It was really kind of crazy, I should say. There were a lot of things that were nuts about Bruckner, not just the way he treated Wagner. I mean, he loved to go to funerals because they had this obsession with looking at dead bodies. And he would only propose to girls who are a lot too young for him. So he never married. Okay, so he had a lot of weird things about him. But this

fascination with Wagner changed his life. And so in his fifties, that's kind of a late start, he starts composing symphonies. And at first it took him a while, because you know, even though he's old, older and more mature, and he's composing it for a long time or too a while to finally get together into what it's sort of a typical sound of a book Mary and symphony. And later on he had a big influence and mother and so forth. But the point is if there had been no Wagner,

there would be no Brokener. If I would daft, you would He needed to encounter that sound, that specific sound, and I don't know what it rang in his you know, his genetic makeup, because you know, part of it is just you know, there's a certain genetic tendency for being able to hear certain sounds, or taste certain tastes, or you know, smell certain smells of what happens to be. You know, I one interview with this major chef who says she doesn't understand why people put silantro in anything

because she can't even smell it. And she's a chef, you know, but genetically she doesn't have whatever it is necessary for smelling that particular herb. So so get back to the the original question. There's something happening there where you have this dovetailing and a lot of times it doesn't come together. And so that's one reason why the mouth potential talent that becomes genius is a is a very small percentage. You know, the hit rate is very very low.

If you if you if you think of let's say the number of talents each generation they become a Michelangelo or a Newton or whatever, is maybe ten percent. The actual percent is much smaller than that. You know, he needs to make it one percent. The actual percentage is smaller than one percent. So I fact, Galton even estimated it. I forget what he came out to be, but he estimated what what the shrink age is basically, even though he felt that you would if you had any kind

of genius, you had inevitably become famous. But we know that's not true, well especially not true in the modern age of technology. With YouTube stars and Instagram stars. You know, would you say that they're all geniuses? Maybe they're they're beyond popular. There's there's a difference between popularity popularity is there is there a difference between popularity and genius, you know in this modern age? Well, that's an interesting question.

You know a lot of technology while all this technology is so very new that you know, it's harder to how it's going to pan out towards the end. Are we going to have TikTok geniuses that are going to go down the annals of history or are not? I read a very interesting article in the New York Times about TikTok artists and how they face a real big problem that once they get recognized, so they start getting the following, and of course you can see how big

your following is. Uh, two things can happen to you that undermine me. The first thing, you're in a tons of pressure to keep your audience interested. So you got to do another work and another work and another work and not repeat yourself. And it's as a tremendous amount of pressure to try to do that. And of course what the same kind of pressure happened, you know at a time of Beethoven, in a time of Nicolange, you just couldn't repeat yourself, but you were allowed a year

or two in between work. But now, I mean on the internet, you know, the next day people are saying, what do you have for me? Now? You know, what do you have for me today? The other problem that the TikTok genius's artistic genius is space is that it's they get imitators very fast. So when you catch on, then somebody says, oh that's hot, and so they will start their own imitation of you and pull away from your audience unless you can figure some way of pulling

them back. So the net result of this is that TikTok artists have a very short career. It's very hard for them to maintain themselves longer than I don't know if they've actually calculated their average, but your current to be over by the end of the year, you know. And one of the characteristics of genius is that they display a lifetime of creativity, a lifetime of productivity, and

TikTok artists can't do that right now. If there's something about the genre that makes it so, it's it's inherently transient form of thing, and so I think, you know, that's that's going to be the norm, but I don't know, you know, and this other thing that's happening with it anti Oh see, there's a three letters, it's an anagram. Well,

you get some some chips. It's a very common little thing, and you pay, like, you know, fifty dollars for it because it has some little part of it that says that this is the only copy and you own it. And yet it looks like anything else. You can't tell the difference except that one little part of the code that says that you paid for it. So what does that tell you? I mean, this is here, here's something that is deliberately not new, and yet you become an artist.

I don't think that's gonna last for a long either. So I don't know. Maybe even in a stage where things haven't really worked themselves through to find out what's enduring. Let's just give you example of where it has become enduring. I'm not a big gamer. My stepson is big gamer, so you can say more about this than I can. But one of the things that happened when gaming became really big is you started having composers composed music for

the games. And now these composers are recognizing their own right as being creative composent for creative musicians, and you can sometimes even hear their music on classical music stations.

So that's the case where a genre which you would think would be pretty transient, but you got to remember a lot of these games they go through, you know, several versions, and there's there's a big demand for them, and the music, just like cinema, music plays a very important role in building up the suspense or you know, I don't I can't really get more elaborate than that

because I'm not a gamer. But it is a genre that sort of compares to like opera or a musical theater, or you know, it's a form of background music or some other form of creativity. You know, I think of about one hundred years from now, the future Dean Keith Simonson in that generation is going to have to maybe use a different set of tools, or different set of analyzes, or a different set of definitions of genius than you have to look at genius in like the nineteenth century

and twentieth century. Well, yeah, or even like the eighteenth st you go all the way back, that's seventeen sixteenth century. I feel like there's there's on the horizon a different, a whole different conceptualization of greatness, shall we say. That'll be interlinked to with technology. Technology, Yeah, sometimes you get to the same place by different means. I mean. One of the things I think really impressive right now is

big data. And so there are these data projects where instead of what I used to do with oh, I'll take everybody who's in a biographical dictionary or in encyclopedia or whatever that's my criterion, they'll take everybody. You know, there's one study of scientific creativity that basically took everybody who had any kind of scientific career all and that includes nobel laureates in who's all noble laureates, but also a lot of people who never made it big. So

they can actually do something I couldn't do. Go all the way to start at the very bottom of the distribution and see what people had to do to get their Nobel prize, you know. And what's interesting though, is the end up with the same conclusion that I had. Using different sources. They found that the number one predictor of when you came up with your let's say, your Nobel Prize winning research is the total amount of publication as you've produced. So the more prolific you were, the

higher the probability. It's it's I call it. I call it the equods yeah, Ecoods rule. They call it the random impact rule. The same rule. It's the same rule. And in fact, they later on acknowledged it. They sign a paper that published and seche review and they had overlooked that and I I totally look back to that paper, talk about the equalods rule there, and that's your random impact rule. I don't want It's not a priority dispute

or anything. But the point is is that using an entirely different method, namely big data, which is not his geometric it's actually archive. You're taking basically, you know, the Web of Science or Google or whatever, and using that to supply your data, and and and that day is not collected for historical reasons, is collected first scholarship, you know, to find out who's doing work on what, whose side too,

and all that kind of stuff. So but at the same time they end up with the same conclusion that I end up. So they end up replicating. Well, they also came up some odeclusions that I didn't come up with, because they can do much more, you know, fine detail analysis. Given there are huge ends. I mean, they have ends

that just boggle the mind. Yeah, I just want to explain to our audience who who might be a little bit lost right now about what the what this rule actually means in everyday parlance the way I say it, and I give talks some times to say, here's the secret to creative genius. Are you ready to get out

your pen? Create? Create, create, create, create, create, create, create, create, create, create, create, create, create And basically the point there, you know, is that the more that you keep producing you know, trial and errors, whether if it's scientific creativity, you know, trial and error, you know, artistic creativity, keep expressing yourself over and over in many different ways, the higher the probability that someday one of them will be a masterpiece. Is that the

cooquial fair way of describing it. Yeah, But you got to remember, it's not like you're deliberately trying to produce trash, trying to trash. It's just that any given you work of art or work of science is a very very complex thing, very complex product, and a lot of different things have to come together, and sometimes it just just

doesn't quite work. You know. So a Beethoven Sports Symphony is a very nice symphony, but it's not playing anywhere near as often as his third or a s fifth because it's just doesn't I come together as a masterpiece. You know. You play it, orchestras play it largely because audiences are tired of hearing a third and the fifth, so you want to hear something in between, you know. But here's an interesting study that was done. I actually cite this in my Origins of Genius, which I think

it is fascinating. This guy wanted to study to find out what would what is the fact that enables someone to become really creative in ceramics. So he had two conditions, two independent conditions, you know, a random assignment to two groups. All that kind of stuff. In one group, his students were told, okay, you have all term or quarter or whatever it was to produce a single masterpiece, a single ceramic,

and so go to it. And so people will start working away, and a lot of times they just think. A lot of times, well, I got to come up with some idea first before I go to the potter wheel or whatever. In the other condition, he said, your grade is to be based on the total weight of the ceramics superdeers. And then at the end of the term he did something that he didn't tell him about.

In the second group, he took the He had raiders pick out the best stuff of the big pile of ceramics that was produced to the wine class, and they didn't know what condition it was in, and the raiders rated the things from the productivity group. It's more creative than the ones who were supposed to be perfectionists, you know, just focused on one single afterpe. So there's an example

of the equal odds rule working for you. Well, that's interesting, you know, how how to reconcile that with you know, the popularity of the concept of grit, you know, like one of the facets of grit is consistency of interest. That's on Angelo doctors grit scale. It seems like a lot of creators have a diversity of experiences. But you know, before you answer this question, I think that all because I know what you're gonna say, but because it's just

so I know, I know. But there's a I feel like there's a more general pattern with all this stuff, is that there's just when you talk about creativity, there's paradoxes inherent. You know, there's you know, there's always like, well this is true, but then this seemingly opposite is also true. You know. So now I'll let you give your answer, But I feel like that's, you know, just like there's an overall pattern here with all these kinds

of questions. I mean, as you know, one of the chapters and my Genius Checklist has to do with this paradox. I know. That's why I know the research. Yeah, you're a great, great blurb for that. By the way, of my favorite blurbs history anyway, one of the paradoxes is

that one of the number one predictators created genius. And by the way, it's also predictor of leadership as well, like in presidential leaders is openness to experience, having a lot of interest, a lot of hobbies, willing to try out new ideas, and and being well versed in uh

areas far removed from your actual domain. I mean a good example of that is the work that the ruth Ernstein's have done on Nobel laureates and found that the higher you are in the hierarchy of scientific achievement, they're more likely you are of having artistic hobbies. You know, maybe your painter or a photographer or whatever. And that's obviously going to be irrelevant to you know, working out

the equations for some theory and quantum theory. But on the other hand, you do have to have this persistence, you know, this drive. So you know, you look at how long you know, Einstein worked on relativity theory and the unified field theory. It takes a tremenus amount a persistence and stick to limit in this. But it also knows you have to know when to quit, because you can,

you know, you can become a drudge. It'd be very very persistent, and you've done yourself into a hole and you've got to get out of that hole to be able to find out if there's an alternative way. And you know, there's all sorts of research on this, you know, with a role of incubation, you know, and sol and

things like that, and so it's it's both. You know, there was a time when Eystein would be working away on its equations and he finally reached a dead end and he says, it's time for me to go sailing, or it's time for me to play Mozart Sonatas on

the violin, you know. And it's not that they gave him any ideas, but they but over the mind of I mean, who knows when he's on the sew boat if there was some kind of stimulus and environment or something you overheard conversation in the boat house, I don't know that could have you know, provided a seed for an idea. So and can I just say one thing

about the great research that's off and overlooked. Most of the domains in which that is applied focus on areas that are very well defined, and there's there's a pretty established path to how you get to where you want to go, you know. I mean I'm a good example of that is you know, a military academy. Uh, that's that's the thing where everything is over a century, it's been set up. This is what you need to do

if you want to get through the military academy. Right. Uh, spelling bees is another one that they've used in studies. Well that's another example, you know. Uh, here's a dictionary, you know. So yeah, I don't think they've actually done anything looking at GRIT with respect to creator geniuses. Do

you know of anything? So only the research that Angela Duckworth and I collected that we never published because we're interested in this question, and we did, yes, and we found that the the two facets of GRIT had completely opposite predictions. So perseverance was very strongly positively quartab with our Creative Achievement Questionnaire. However, the consistency of interest facet

was strongly negatively correlated. Yeah, we should probably publish that someday. Yeah, this is the c Q, the c a Q yep, yep, yeah yeah, Carson Peterson, yeah right, yeah, but you're going to publish that because it's interesting how that buy for cakes like that? I think we should. I'm going to reach out to Angela again. That's like, I mean, that's like, you know, I'm sure you have lots of data just

like sitting on your computer. That's like you just you're like someday I'll get around to it, you know, yeah, oh yeah, you know. In fact I had and I have I have a graduate student and has a lot of data like that too. We're going to co author that. Well, that's well, that's that's interesting you bring that up because ninety three percent of your publications are single authored, so that would be a huge outliar if you did publish that with your with her. But everyone while I do coleborate.

I mean, at the beginning, I couldn't find anybody who wanted to do histereometry. And and then once I started having graduate students, some of them would do histometric dissertations, but most of them not do a dictation topics or to get their dissertation and historometry. They would then get a post doc and pursue entirely different directions some of them. In fact, my two best graduate students, that's what they did. They got post docs. So you know, they did the

dissertations using historiometry. Their current research programs don't. He's htey ametry. Okay, And let this example I gave earlier, wone saying, we got some really good history metric data you collected. We got to publish this, but she's doing something else now. It's almost like, you know, forcing her to regress to when she was a graduate student. So it's hard to get people to want to do what I do. So a lot of the collaborations I end up working on

is where someone says a good example of this. I don't know if you've seen a study, but back in nineteen eighty five I published a article in Psychological Review which was a theory of the relationship between intelligence and influence in groups, and I show that under a certain set of circumstances having to do with a relationship between intelligence and problem solving and the relationship between intelligence and communication style, that there was a curve related relationship inverted

you relationship between intelligence and your influence in the group. And it actually made a very precise prediction. It predicted that the optimal IQ would be one point two standard deviations above the mean IQ for the group. If we don't have too many point predictions and psychological theory in any case, I had a guy at the University of lasan And in Switzerland who said, I caught this some very interesting data they find this current line a relationship.

And I was trying to find if there's any prior research on this topic, and I came across this paper that you published right back in nineteen eighty five, and it looks like my data supports your theory. And he says, do you want to kind of call author on this? And because he wanted somebody to want to want somebody responsible to the theory part in the introduction, and it's

an amazing study. It looks at middle managers in a lot of businesses and uses a standard intelligence test s he want us to use for football players and one point to standard nations. And we have all these robust tests and significance tests to prove that the slope becomes negative right after one point two uh at the confidence interval is beautiful. And so when he's when he asked me to collaborate on that, and just ended up being published as a lead article in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

So it's one of my best papers. I mean, I'm third author on it, Okay, because I didn't collect the data and I didn't do the analysis. I just provided the theory kind of retrospectively. You know. So that's an example where I'm I'm basically collaborating simply because I'm on somebody's study, I'm writing their works. Yeah, no, I got you. You're just you're very unusual in the field in in how many Well, first of all, how many publications you

have period? But then how many are single authored? It's uh, it's it's it's remarkable. I mean, I I've just I've had conversations with James Kaufman and I know you know him. But for our listeners, a very prominent creativity research and we we're so puzzled how you even like, like, how do you know the math? Like how does it just come intuitively to you? Like we look at some of your papers and we don't know what the hell you're the formulas mean? Like how do you even know what

those formulas mean? Like where's it come from? Where does it come from? With you? Well, well, I told you I took many when I was a chmicry major. Yeah, so I had the first two years of college. Man, I've had you know, your normal capitalists, which takes you to your first year, and then uh mecro geometry, linear algebra, and different differential equations. And of course I also have had advanced statistics as well, so that gave me a kind of a head start on it. I've always been

good at math. I wouldn't say I was talented man, but I was someone who'd always get a's as long as I did the problem sets. You know, ten a lecture, do the problem set, and get an AI exam. You know. So I had a certain ability for the mathematics. Sometimes sometimes I'm able to and this is something unique to histeorometry that I have to mention. One things unique about historiometry is that the subjects are historical figures, so you can use your subjects over again the same people if

somebody does a history of mythic study before you. We got back to Katherine Cox. Is an illustration. Catherine Cox published IQ scores for three hundred and one genius. WHOA, this is great. She did some analysis, but not very extensively. She was focused on natural estimates and whatever. She calculated a correlation between IQ eminence and found that it was positive significant, but no detail analysis. And so when I realized, wait a minute, she's got this data about these people.

We already know who they are. I can get further biographical information. So one year after my dissertation was published in nineteen seventy six, I published a reanalysis of her data where I took her IQ scores and then added more data of my own. I looked at formal education, I looked at socioepandemic class I looked at their versatility, and then built a structural model based on that. But think about it, it costs me nothing to use her IQ scores. Right, that was a free beat, and all

the data was already available. And I've done a number of histometric studies where I've taken on histometric study and then I've added more variables to it, so that it's sort of like a replication and extent thing. But you don't have to collect the data all over again. Well what did you find? Yeah, huh, Well, want to tell me more about what you found with your re analysis of Cox's data? Tell me like the nuances the nuances

first of all. Actually APUs a couple of studies using her data, most recently in psycholoical Science in two thousand and nine. A lot of interesting things there. Oh, I should add miscisspeck to history elementary again. A graduate student of mine found that she had started a data analysis that she never completed, and she left the data in the archives in Akron, the university, and she found these data where she rated her geniuses on physical and mental health.

And this data had never been used before. Wow. So I combine that data again, this is the same people, same subjects. Combine that data with her data and the data I collected to do some additional analyses, and it's a lot of fine. But one of the things very interesting I think is that you know, there's this thing about, you know, the mad genius controversy, and we know that

artistic geniuses have higher proclivities towards mental illness. And in fact, one study that was done by Arnold Ludwig showed that poets were way up there in mental illness. There were eighty five percent of poets had some kind of may not necessarily clinical, although it often isn't and you can a suicide has considered a clinical menalists. But what's interesting is that what Cox had done is estimated the childhood

evidence for a mental illness. And I should say she had an interest in this because she was actually a child psychologist. She became later and did clinical work with young kids and I was able to show that already in childhood and adolescents, poets start showing inferior mental health comparison to other future geniuses. So it's an early mindset phenomenon. Uh, you know, often depression and you know, feeling odd and

weird and that kind of thing. Uh. And nothing that I showed is that there's a dramatic differences in intelligence across different groups. So like philosophers tend to be the highest in IQ when you think about their professional thinkers, it kind of makes sense. On the other hand, the group of the lowest IQ are the military leaders. I mean with Napoleon. Napoleon didn't come out great writing. You know, he would have, he would have made mensa, but he's

he doesn't stand in the same rate me. You think about he's the greatest military leader in modern times, but he doesn't come close to Mozart and Beethoven or whatever. But that kind of makes sense because if you're a military leader, you're you're in fact, actually gets set back to the mathematical model military leaders league groups that have either average intelligence are below average intelligence. So yeah, data on that, and so that means that you want the

effective leader for that kind of population. You can't talk over their heads. If you're going to aspect them, charge up to that hill and sacrifice to their life. You know, with accountaball, you'd be better be very understandable in your you know, raw raw ross speech. Yes, but what about like some wouldn't, like a multiple intelligence person say like, well, they certainly have leadership intelligence. Yeah, but that was part

of it. That was part of it because one of the things that a lot of people overlook is that with Catherine Cox and mod Merrow and termin and I kind of meant touched upon this earlier simated IQ scores most of their development developmental information. I mean, they're supposed to measure intellectual development, but they're not lack measuring digit span, you know kind of thing. They're measuring intellectual development that's

pretty much domain specific. So what that means is that when they were seeing the IQ of the leaders they were looking at example, early examples of on demonstration of leadership ability. So, for example, you do see in Napoleon very early him assuming leadership roles even when he was just a corporal, and so that was part of the IQ estimate. My favorite illustration of that is if you

compare Pascal with Mozart. Not a single part of Pascal's IQ score was based on musical ability because he had none. Not a single part of Mozart's IQ score was based on mathematical ability because he had none. Yeah, he got a very high IQ score, and he got she got he got a very IQ score because they were primarily rated on things that were even musical. For mathematical Mozart, you said, Mozart, Yeah, well, sorry, so I thought I thought his estimated IQ was like one hundred though oh no,

oh no, no I thought it. No, I am his higher than that. His IQ was well, first of all, there there's four different IQ scores that they estimated, okay, up to age sixteen and then sixteen twenty six, and then uh corrected the debt relay and then not and then raw not correct. We did. Really he was roughly around one hundred and fifty. Really, yeah, as around one hundred and thirty. No, he was not. Oh no, that's an insult. Mozart was born the same day I was,

So you can't rag on mostart. I'm certainly not regging. I thought that when I had looked at there was so I thought there were some surprises. I remember when I looked at that data, there were some geniuses who had very average IQs, and maybe maybe I'm not it was but La Fontaine, the French fablist. I have an IQ which is barely above average. I think it was one hundred and five something around there. I remember it struck me. Yeah, okay, you stay there, Okay, I will,

I will. I'm I'm curious about the Mozart one because I'm pretty sure it was like not that high. Okay, this is this is my bible, Okay, I love that. I love I'm looking at Dean Keith SIB's version of that of the Cock Studies. Yeah, this is and this is actually the nineteen sixty nine printing. So I got it. It came out when I was still a graduate student. I actually lean up my senior year of high school and you can see it's it's really a bad shape,

terrible shape. But let me look up Mozart. Okay, so I can tell you actually what's interesting about her book. She has a whole section where she groups them according to their rating so that it's a little bit easier. Okayre IQs lois, she goes is, there's lots of IQs of one hundred and twenty and above. And that's kind of interesting because that's often used as you're in for intellectual giftedness. The lowest cases are there's one hundred and ten and oh man, she asked them from one hundred

and ten. Okay, and uh and I said, la fontaine u his IQ estimated between one hundred and one hundred and twenty five. Okay, one hundred twenty five is the later one, you know, in adolescence. But there's some pretty famous people with relatively well servantes one hundred and five to one hundred and ten. Yeah, and a lot of that is because most of his early life doesn't exist. You know, we have no record, very much like Shakespeare, who a lot of yeah, a lot of unreliable Oh,

a lot of unreliability there. But I'm just saying Shakespeare, that's a whole other can of worms with you, you know, who was the real Shakespeare. Shakespeare didn't take the sample because the data so it was so bad, I know. And you didn't. You didn't find Mozart, though you didn't find your your cheating Yeah about that, Yeah, okay, that's fine, Mozart. While you're while you're looking. Can you can you can you talk and chug him at the same time? Can you can you tell us about who was the real

who was the real Bard? Who was the real in your analysis? Did you ever figure it out? I'll get to that a second. Okay, I'm almost as almost there. Okay. Mozart Okay, one hundred and fifty really firs childhood, and I hired fifty five for when he was an adolescent. But there's such there was such a palsity of data on his intellectual prowess. Although I told you we have we have, well, we actually have a scientific observation of him when he was eight years old, really were describing

earlier transactions of philosophical society. So he was pretty well documented. And part of course, because Leopold, his father, was really really dedicated to documenting how precocious his young son was. I mean, he had a daughter, animal older sister who was also bread to coacious, but he realized Mozart was in another league. Altogether, very interesting. Let me answer your question. Okay, please do it. I haven't really found an answer to

the Shakespeare authorship problem. But what I have done is I've done the data analysis as a content analysis of his plays, basically a stylometric analysis, and comparing that with and also content analysis of the fanatic material to see what he talked about and how that relates to events that occurred externally, focusing on political events. And what I showed is that the current dating is traditionally given for the plays, it's probably correct the high probability of being correct.

So what that tells you is that whoever composed, whoever wrote the plays, was pretty much an exact contemporary of Shakespeare's and that does rule out a lot of people. Example rules out the current most popular candidate is the Earl of Oxford, who a lot of people believe composed of plays. But the problem is is that he died before a lot of the plays were yet to be written, so that kind of puts a kind of a monkey

mention now attribution. But there's still other candidates. I just got an email a couple of days ago from We still have people who argue for Francis Bacon No stop it really yeah, because he wasn't exact contemporary of Shakespeare, so time wise he could have I don't believe it. I don't believe it either. I don't believe my favorite candidate right now is Henry Nevill and he fits really

really welling. Yeah, I said, that's interesting. Certain things that happened in his personal life fit things that happen in the plays, so that, for example, there's a spot in the plays where they start becoming very very dark and and and you know, depressing and negative, and the tragedies you look at timing like Hamlet for example, Uh, he was tossed into the tire of London under a throat of having his head chopped off for his involvement and

the Earl of Sussex rebellion against Elizabeth the First and he was very lucky to get out alive. Uh. And so he started putting his affairs in order and he never completely recovered that. I mean, he didn't have his head shopped off, but he lost a lot of his privileges. He wouldn't he was no longer able to be uh. He used to be able to be the carrier of the canopy when she would go on public things like that. So anyway, that's my answer is we don't. I actually

don't think we'll ever have a complete answer. You know.

It's just there's so much information It's like another example, I did a study which I know so you've actually signed in one of your blogs of Biethoven symphonies and showed how the even numbered symphonies are very very different from the odd numbered symphonies, are not being more popular and were frequently performed and all that kind of stuff, but the melodies, and this is but determined by the computerized content analysis, the melodies are different in the in

the award symphonies than the even numbered symphonies. Wow. So the question is is that did he know that? And we'll never know that. We've never found any letter where he says, well, I just finished odd number of symphonies, so it's hapt for me to work on an even numbered symphony. What could be all the possible explanations that,

I mean, the whole full space of possible explanations. There could be things we haven't even thought of, you know that, I mean to me, the most likely one, most likely explanation is Beethoven's odd number of symphonies were breakthrough symphonies

where he went well beyond where he was before. And I think he had to step back, uh, after he did after he after he did this, well, he had his first symphony that was his first symphony hold and then his second symphony is regressive, it's actually more conservative than his first sympony. Then he does his third symphony, the Royka Symphony, and he really I mean, it was long and have a lot of innovations in it, and so he backs up into a sports symphony, which is

more conservative. Then he has a swifth Symphony, and he backs into the sixth Symphony, which is more conservative, and then he goes to the seventh Symphony, which is another bold statement, and of course he finally ends on the ninth.

So I mean, it's interesting to me, for example, that after he did the seventh Symphony, he composed an eighth symphony and it's full of jokes and a sense of humor, and it's also almost as short as the shortest symphony, the second Symphony, in so I think he needed kind of a break. And you see that for in the math MATERI for example, that the matic real is much less varied in melodic originality, and the differences in the

level of melodic originality. I mean, it's he's just he's uh with fresh and he's he was unbuttoned when he did his even numbered space, whereas that kind of image you have a Beethoven of you know, uh, Fate knocking at the door and finding me in state that's what he did, is odd? I see. Well, okay, well this was this is this is great ellucination rate elucidation rate here. I think that's probably the most parsimonious. Yeah, but we don't know. I know, we never know. But it's fun.

It's fun talking about probabilities of what probably haven't I'd like to double click on the madness genius link for a second, because you've done so much really cool work on that. In your book Genius. One on one you you point out a paradox, you say, here's some advice go stark raving mad, but also become the poster child for sanity. No. Now, but what is that about that paradox? Well, first of all, one of the things that I emphasize in that book, Genius Checklist, is that there's not one

kind of genius, one size. It's called genius. And in a particular, a theme going throughout the book is the stark difference between scientific genius and artistic genius. And I have to say there's there's divisions within e. So like if you look at artistic geniuses in a generic sense, the class composers are more like scientists, and then the poets are more like prototypical and so. And actually uh

Arnablithic has an interesting hypothesis on this. He says, and he cuts data to show this that the more logical and systematic and formal is the particular kind of creativity you're doing, the more likely you're going to be mentally healthy, because mental illness is going to get in the way.

But the more adjective, the more informal, the more chaotic the particular form of creativity is, the higher the rate of some kind of not in a mental illness, It could be some clinical symptoms right of depression or whatever. And that's born now in not only his own research, but in my own research. Scientists are less likely to show mental illness and our artists. But then there's divisions

within the scientists. So there's a nice study that was that was done by Cohen Kim are Kim and co one way or the other decree and researchers where they look at revolutionary scientists versus what they call paradigm conserving scientists. They didn't challenge the paradims they received, they just extended them, you know, and they found that the revolutionary showed much higher rates of male illness than did the paradigm conserving scientists.

And that gets back to the explanation of arn A Lutheric. When you're when you are shattering the paradigm, then you're really in a very vulnerable position. You know, it's not all health breaks loose, and you're under lots of stress because you don't know if you'll be able to pull this off. Even if you're able to pull them off, you don't know if your ideas are going to be accepted.

I have the poor Einstein, you know, he comes up with a beautiful theory of relativity and instead of being praised for it, that held him back from getting the Nobel Prize because the people on a particular one guy in particular, says that there's nets, that there's crazy, and so he had to wait to get his Nobel Prize because his theory went well. Was it challenged the classical physics, you know, and this person was a classical physicist. And

then the same thing with an artist. You know, classical musicians deal with a highly formal area with a lot of emphasis on order and structure. There's rules of harmony, rules of counterpoint, where in the case of poets, it's like anything goes I am particularly now, where you know there's no rhyme or reason before you know, it's whatever you feel like doing, as long as that is successful, expresses which you want to express, and it's often a

motion that you want to express us. So it's interesting,

you know, you mentioned James Kaufman earlier. This is an interesting study on those poets that are most likely to have mental illness issues and often commit suicide, like Solvia Plath and Ansect, and for example, are confessional poets where you're spending a lot of time dwelling on horrific experiences or feelings to have, and that rumination, you know, pessimists, rumination is not good for your mental health, and it's not therapeutic because you know, there's there's talk therapies where

it's therapeutic to talk about these things which you're supposed to work it through until you get at the end and see that there's another way of looking at all this, our more healthy way of looking at all this, And the confessional poets didn't do that. They just dwell on my daddy this and my daddy that. I can't take it anymore, you know it, It's time to you know, turn on stoke. Yeah. So, so the point is and that the paradox is that. Oh and here's one other

aspect of that. And I actually have a whole paper I study published on this. It's kindly call it the mad Genius paradox, where I show that's actually technically possible for creativity to be positively correlated with mental health at the lower end, that negatively correlated with mental health at the upper end of the distribution. Mh and and and the reason for that is because the vast majority of creative people we're at the bottom end of the tribution.

It's not a normal distribution, and the people are a percentage. So as a consequence, if you just kind of calculate to say, here's some creative people, here's some non creative people, who's the most mentally healthy, you'd find out that the creative people are more memorally healthy. But if you've catulate the correlation between the impact the creative achievement, you'd find a positive correlation with mental illness. So anyway to make a long story short, I can't really do that anymore.

I already talk too much. It's you have to be very very careful because it's a very very complex relationship. And and the one thing that obviously if you go over the edge, you know, like Hemingway or Ansecton or you know, Sylvia Plath, your creativity is not helped at all. You know, No, I think it was committed an institution that was the end of its creative career. Sure, and obviously once he commit suicide. I mean, I guess in some cases, like Kirkabbine, your work can actually be even

immortalized of all time. You know, the twenty seven year Old Club, I think a lot of them killed themselves so that they would forever be you know a myth right. Well, I mean the youngest interesting in the Cock Study, the youngest person who made it into it was eighteen years old. That's Thomas Chatterton. And he made a name for himself with that what are called a rally poems. They were

all four forgeries. He said he found the middle medieval poetry, and he made up a kind of you know, the medieval vocabulary and dialect and so forth, and totally faked and fool people for a long time. But unfortunately, when it started coming out, people started being suspicious because you could never show the actual manuscripts. Right, Yeah, when people started getting suspicious, he decided to There was also an unrequired a love part of it story too. He took

an overdose of arsenic. I guess a dose of arsenic is an overdose. So, but it's amazing at eighteen he was able to. Yeah, out of three hundred and one genius, he's in there because of his suicide, like your example. Well, yeah, that's right, that's right. I mean sometimes making that decision is what puts you in the history books. But I don't want to say that in a way that advocates for that choice. No, no, no, obviously, obviously I want to be clear. But you know, I look at the

Frank Barron studies. He found that they did score above average in markers of mental illness, but they also scored pretty high on markers of mental health. And that's the paradox. I wanted to really zoom in here a second, because ego strength, ego resiliency. Yeah, and also even on the clinical symptoms, this is on the n MPI, on the clinical symptoms. Even though they were above average, they were still below the normal level you see for people who

are actually clinically disabled by their mental illness. So they were right in between. It was like Dryden's saying that there was a thin border between madness, and he used with you know, madness and wit, and so that lower level in combination with ego strengths, or in the Cantel sixteen factor, it was self sufficiency. The same kind of thing would that Would that be great in today's world? Yeah,

I don't know. You know, that's the one thing that's really kind of unfortunate about I think the main frustration for me when I start studying personality theory and measurement is that you get these new tests and they don't completely map on each other. So some perfectly good dimension of like the sixteen factor Personality Scale or MNPI ends up vanishing because it doesn't map out onto the five

factor model. You know. Of course, later of people start adding more factories to the five factor model, and then especially I guess you'll get back to tell sixteen factors

or whatever. But a lot of dimensions kind of disappear, uh and and and sometimes of course the dimensions that replace them are are composites of things that used to be separate dimensions, you know, like extra version and the Big five that's partly social dominance and partly liking to be with people, and those are not really the same thing, which which treat extroversion. Oh extra version. Yeah no, that's a really good point. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's

a positive two major dimensions. Sometimes sorry, right yeah, sorry, sometimes what well, sometimes they split absolutely absolutely, there's actually general differences, and there's gender differences. But we don't we don't want to go there in the two facets. Yeah, you asked me, Like the stuff I've done on presidential leadership is kind of interesting. For example, that the president who had the lowest score on openness is uh Bush,

the second Bush. Very it wasn't it was he never people stood the plane like an account who was never curious. He never would ask a question, you know, me of something that happened to me the other day. But there's one facet of the open experience he's worked very highly on, and that is receptivity to openness to emotion. So he's very very open to emotions, but he wasn't open to values, wasn't open to interests, et cetera. Exactly how many facets

there are? So I can't. I can sometimes split was so was very He's one of the most open people ever in history. Uh, except for values. He knew what his values were and he were not He's not going to change him. Okay, Well, I got to ask you, because you've you've you've spent a career studying UH leadership. Where would you what's your take on President Trump? Don't ask, I mean you're a You're in a unique position to comment. First of all, can I say that I get a

lot of mail. Some of that is trolling asking for me to give Trump's i Q. Okay, because he boasted about his i Q. I know, well, you can estimate it, but I haven't estimate made it anybody since the second Bush. And part of the reason was because I got so much flat. I still get flat for that study because people think it's highly partisan, and particularly because Bush ended up having a relatively low IQ estimate in comparison to

his predetor Clinton. But I actually show in the study that there's no partisan bias that you live across all presidents. There's no difference in IQ scores. Obviously, there's going to be difference for particular presidents. I mean, Carter was really up there in IQ, but there's no parts of ad bias to it at all that people don't believe that people thought. I've actually been told that I had a job on the second Bush give him a low IQ score. And I didn't even give him a low IQ score.

He was above average. You know, it was about one hundred and twenty five. That's not a low IQ score, but it was ten points below Cultain. So it's a hatchet job. Now Trump Another reason why I think he's difficult to test, beside the that be heids all development data in my one of the years, like his grades and how he actually got into Japan, is that he has other things to kind of interfere with estimating intelligence. And I'll go ahead and say it. His narcissism, you know,

has been pretty well documented. It is sort of like what happened to the second Bush. He was actually brighter than he was given credit for, but because he was so close was minded, he ended up sounding less intelligent. He didn't want to process a lot of information. He just want he said, I am a decider. You know, they call it on a side or I don't need

any data, and Trump is very similar. I think that's a really good point that we could probably just leave that there because his as with anyone with profound narcissism, it can cloud and distort all sorts of other traits

and characteristics. So we'll leave that there. I want to end this interview with a with a topic that I think is really interesting and I've followed with your research on this topic, and that's the ten year rule for greatness or for expertise, world world class expertise as the elite. You know that that he passed Awake honders ericson recently. He was a I think, you know, he and I are about the same age. I consider him young. Yeah, sixty nine, that is well, that is young. That is young.

It was really tragic. I considered him a friend, you know, I considered it. I think he's a he was a terrific scientist. But I think that this research you did kind of re analyzing it and and and arguing there's different rates of of of you know, there's variability there and how long it takes people, and you know that's been followed up by people who've done much better jobs

on it than than I have. But the basic idea is that when he publishes original data like showing how many hours of practice pianists, you know, compiled for various categories you know, like novices, us virtuosi and that kind of thing, he didn't provide the range. Yeah, and the range is actually huge. And not only that, but that variation doesn't necessarily it depends on the field, but that

variation doesn't necessarily correlate the way you'd expect it. Yeah, So that, for example, what I found for class of composers is that there's a huge range, and those who have the narrower range, who took less time to master the field, end up being the greater composers. And that seems to be the opposite of what I do. Is that you think the more expertise required the more the greater your genius. And in fact, when you think about

that seems to support a talent interpretation. There's some people who just take less time to become masters of the material, and then because they're talented, they can do more what I call more bang for the buck. They could do more with it. So the talent means they get better, faster, and they get more bang for the buck. And you know, there's a lot of people who have done research on

this in other domains. I focused on fast composers, but people look at other domains and it turns out the variation doesn't explain very much variance in a lot of fields, and the fields explains the most experiencing in our fields. That kind of makes sense, like sports, where practice, practice, practice is extremely important. Those people who you know, when I watch basketball and when I see people who miss more than fifty percent of their free throws, I go,

you are not practicing. You know, there's gonna be variation to the talent. I have no doubt about that. But I think any professional basketball player should hit more than just another free throws. Yeah, people hit more than the

three pointers. Yes, it's such a good point. Yeah, it's such a good Well, this finding was so interesting that you just that you mentioned, and it does suggest that talent isn't irrelevant and at at at uh, you know, at uh in one sense or but another sense, it could we say the talent is even more important than we give it credit for in those in those earlier studies. Did you ever talk to Ericson about it? Did you ever did you ever talk to I did more than

talk or there. I don't know if you know that he and I had a public debate at Clarion. Is it online? Is it online? I don't know if they ever put this is This is a time when it wasn't automatic that they put things online. It was it was sponsored by the student government at Claremont, and they was quite a thing they put in the major, you know, auditorium.

I don't remember what it was. And it was basically him versus me, and they took us out to dinner before it was the evening address, and he and I got into it. I agree with you, he said. He's a nice guy, but he has taken a very very strong position on talent. Okay, And one of the things that I find very surprising is in order to make his argument against talent, he often has to take arguments,

make arguments that are just untenable. Like he and I at dinner had an argument about whether individual differences are real. He said, and he says, all individual differences that aren't physical differences like height are the measurement era you can't And I say, there are you got it? I gottaka, I said you've got admit their individual difference intelligence and the difference in personnel. He wouldn't. He wouldn't admit it.

And of course the reason why is that the second youmit those individual differences, then you go to the genetic vapor geneticis reserves and identical twins reared apart, and see what the credibility go efficients are for those individual differences. And you know, like a most fertionality traits, it's around fifty percent. For intelligence, it's more than fifty percent. As you age, it gets it gets higher. Yeah, it gets bigger. It can get up to point eight point eight. Yeah. Yeah.

So he and I really got on it, got at it, and it was I mean, fortunately it was moderated, so when either one of us got too we got cut off. Okay, that's good, that's good. Second between Trump and Biden, you know, they cost the microp what I would have given, given what I would have would given to have seen that, to have been there, or maybe I'm going to look to see if it's on YouTube, because you never know.

Check Two. I can't remember the date it was in the early part of this millennium, like two thousand and three or four or something like that. I actually haven't listed. I have a list of all my presentations and I haven't listed there, and the search to Claremont and and see and then see if it shows up on YouTube

or whatever. Yeah, I'm trying to look for Why have I have deep respect for for both of you obviously, and and and yeah, just to zoom in on you here and I'll kind of I'll end our episode today. Thank you so so much for being a real true legend in the field. And I think I think you're a genius of the science of genius. I me give me that that about me and said, I'm the first one since Goltham. Yeah, yeah, in a lot of ways. Well that's you know, I have a student who has

account to that. I had a student who took my genius criteria in leadership class, and she says, I'm gonna write my turn paper on how anybody who studies genius can't possibly be a genius. I don't. I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that, but I think, you know, uh, you know, it's interesting with Golden. I think you're you're more of a genius than Galton because you were You're more open minded. I think you bring

in more perspectives to the table. Well, I think you're even more nuanced in your consideration of the nature, nurture interactions and all the socio cultural factors. Like you know that you've studied and introduced into your models. I would make I could write a paper on why I think you're more of a genius than Galton. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if we get published, but I could write it. I could write. But thank you so much Dean for chatting me today and for being such an inspiration to

all of us scholars in the field. Great. I really I really appreciate it was really a fun thing to do. Do it me too. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, if you'd prefer a completely ad free experience, you can join us at

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