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Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic who writes about politics and culture. Her latest book, The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, is out now.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Helen Lewis explore what our ideas of genius mean, whether you need to die young to be considered one—and why no one cares about geniuses with boring lives.
This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You've written a great new book called The Genius Myth and I learned a lot from it. I enjoyed reading it and I also wanted to argue with the book. So I'm going to argue with you. What is the modern idea of the genius and how is it different from how people might have thought about that term?
Helen Lewis: One of things I wanted to do with the book is look at what you can tell about a society by who it puts on a pedestal. The original meaning of genius iin the classical tradition is that it's a visiting spirit. If you are a poet, you are visited by a poetic spirit. It suffuses through you and speaks through you. That's not our idea of genius since the Middle Ages. It's sort of a special type of person. Through Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, you get the idea that these Renaissance artists, the romantics, and poets are these special people. Then, the Victorians come along and say that maybe there's a quality called IQ that we can talk about. Some people just have these better operating systems. I would say our modern idea of the genius—maybe this is the bit you disagree with—is the tech innovator. The highest ideal is the young-ish guy who is not great at small talk or eye contact, but is one with the computer. That is our modern idea of genius.
Mounk: I'll build suspense about the piece that I disagree with. I can put it out early on. I think a lot of the myths that you take down in the book are myths and are harmful and I agree with taking them down. I'm not sure that I'm willing to let go of the idea that some people just have very special talents that lead to works of art or sometimes to technological inventions that really are beyond the grasp of most other very talented people. That's sort of what I was grappling with throughout the book. But I want to go back to this idea of divine inspiration that I think is very helpful. I thought of the novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk, where the narrator is shown as this poet who has these moments when a spirit seizes him and he sits down. He jots down this thing that came in his mind fully formed. It really feels like he's just a medium for some outside inspiration. But that, of course, also has kind of limits. I went to university in your fair country and in the library of my college—Trinity College, Cambridge—there's a poem by Wordsworth. Somebody went to see that poem by Wordsworth and was very disturbed by the fact that it had edits on it and that the poem could possibly have been different: what do you mean it could have been different? It's perfect as it is. So even if you think that it's this moment of inspiration that comes to you fully formed and you just jot it down, that's a kind of myth of its own, right?
Lewis: Yeah, I love that idea of the canonical version of something. I did English at university, and one of the modules was all about that in relation to Shakespeare. The fact is, for most Shakespeare plays, we have the First Folio version—but that might not be definitive. It was reconstructed from memory. There would have been one version of the script nailed up next to the stage at the Globe, or wherever it was, and everyone would have learned their parts from that. It was a much more oral culture, so people were used to carrying around a huge amount of material in their memory. So all the Shakespeare plays we have are, to some degree, reconstructions. In some cases—like Hamlet—there are multiple versions that are still hotly disputed, and scholars continue to patch together a version. That really challenges the idea that there is a single Hamlet that stands as the supreme achievement of this guy called William Shakespeare.
I think you're exactly right to pick up on the idea that what I’m not arguing is some kind of deluded egalitarianism. There is a version of that—particularly associated with the left—that suggests we’re all blank slates, that no one is more adept at anything than anyone else, and that it’s all environmental. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. As I say in the book, you could give me a thousand years and I still couldn’t paint Water Lilies or understand string theory. It’s just not in my brain to do those things. But what you said is exactly right about those moments. You must have had it when writing articles—some days, it’s just not happening. I think you did a tweet about this once, where you said some days you just have to accept that nothing is coming out, that you can’t marshal your thoughts in any interesting order. And then other days, it’s as if you’re a lightning rod at the top of a building—it’s just flowing through you. It’s the best feeling in the world.
And every other time you write, you’re chasing the high of that one perfect time when everything was just flowing. I think that’s probably what it feels like to creative people when they’re on a hot streak—what they call “flow,” that experience of being right at the edge of your abilities. That’s why I say in the book that genius does exist—in the sense of moments of genius. But it’s very bad for people when they begin to think that everything they do is good, that they are a genius. That, to me, is the crucial distinction. There’s a great Harold Bloom quote at the start: “It’s hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.” And I think that’s very true. We hunger for those moments of extraordinariness, and for the idea that there are extraordinary people—halfway between gods and gurus, or whatever it might be. But the trouble is, that belief often has a very bad effect on those people themselves.
Mounk: I think that is an interesting distinction. One way of thinking about it—which may have pitfalls of its own—is that you have a special talent. There’s something that makes you a possible receptacle of this. This isn’t the idea of God just choosing someone at random and letting divine inspiration flow through them. What is inspired, what has that special character, is the work you create. And that moment of inspiration is really circumstances coming together in a particular way. It’s perfectly fine to call Hamlet a genius play. But that doesn’t mean we should think that if Shakespeare were somehow reincarnated and gave us his opinion on how to lose weight or what to think about Donald Trump’s tariffs, he would have some special insight into those things. I think there’s a lot in that. Now, of course, there is—as you’re alluding to—a kind of counter-myth. If the genius myth is on one end, then, with apologies to Malcolm Gladwell—who I actually think is often not taken seriously enough as a writer and who makes very interesting contributions—there’s the Gladwell myth of the 10,000 hours. That’s the idea that anyone who puts in the necessary work, who works hard, who perhaps is born into the right family with access and socioeconomic support, can become a great scientist, a great athlete, a great whatever.
I don’t actually think that’s exactly what Gladwell meant by 10,000 hours, or what those studies say. I think it makes sense to interpret them as saying: you’ll be at your best after 10,000 hours of serious practice in a particular field. That’s what it takes to reach the frontier of how good you can be at something. But I could do 10,000 hours of painting and I’m never going to be any good. Maybe I’d be competent after 10,000 hours—certainly better than I am now—but I’m never going to be great. It’s not something I have a natural talent for. Meanwhile, someone else might put in just a hundred hours and already be better than I would be after 10,000, because they do have that special talent. And they’ll be even better after their 10,000 hours. They might advance very quickly. So if the genius myth is on one side, then something like the blank slate myth—or the 10,000 hour myth—is on the other.
Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting distinction. If you read Outliers, and if you listen to Malcolm Gladwell talk about it now, he seems slightly surprised that the 10,000 hours idea is the bit everyone remembers. But that’s what happens when you write a book—people find something in it that speaks to the moment. And I think, at the time it came out, people wanted to believe that what he was arguing was that practice means everything. And I think you’re right: the version of that idea that holds up is that you need raw talent, and then you need to channel that talent. What I’d say, from everything I’ve read for this book, is that very few people are savants in the sense of just emerging from the womb able to paint or compose or whatever. And I think Gladwell was very good about pointing that out.
The Beatles might have been incredibly good, incredibly young, but they’d been working at being a band for a really long time, and very intensively. Picasso was an extraordinary painter by the time he was 20, but he’d also done an enormous amount of painting by then. So that’s the version of the idea that’s exportable. The other bit Gladwell talks about in Outliers, which I think is true, is the generation of computer geniuses—Steve Jobs, Bill Gates—and how they were lucky to have been born with the talents they had at the exact moment when home computing became possible. That’s the idea Stephen Johnson picks up with the “adjacent possible.” You can have all the tools in your mental kit to invent YouTube, but if you’re trying to do it at a time when internet connections can’t support streaming video, it’s wasted. Ideas have to arrive at the right time. But we don’t really want to think that. We want to believe that special things are done by special people. We want there to be great men—and they are usually men. We want there to be agents, because that’s what stories demand. Stories need a protagonist. We don’t want mushy explanations.
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You’ll know better than me that historians are always desperate to insist on the incredibly complicated social forces at play. But people still want to buy biographies of Napoleon. We just want stories about people and about human-sized decisions. Our brains crave them.
Mounk: I studied history at university, and I’m not sure I learned much at the time—but some of the lessons are slowly trickling back into my brain as I witness historical changes myself. One of them is about technological change. I’m really struck by some of the texts I read as an undergrad about how the way people wrote about politics in the 18th century changed because of certain refinements to the printing press. Those changes made certain kinds of pamphlets possible, which led to the rise of a public sphere and, really, to a shift in the “modes of literary production”, as it might have been put at the time. That all seemed quite abstract to me then. I kind of thought, “Well, surely if people want to say something, they say it—and they do it in whatever way they can”.
But now, living through technological changes myself—not just the rise of social media, but now the arrival of Substack—I can feel that shift. I write very differently for an audience on Substack than I do for more traditional magazines, in part because of the immediate relationship with the reader. You don’t have to worry about an editor cutting it down to a particular length or removing the stylistic little twists you might put in an essay. You can do things like share a series of observations about the world. I go to China for a week—I don’t feel like I have a definitive essay about China to publish in Foreign Policy or something, but I can share the 21 observations I might tell my friends upon returning, and share them in that format. All of that is possible in this new medium in a way that wouldn’t have been earlier.
So I think this idea of the “adjacent possible" is clearly right. Someone with amazing talent for coding or imagining new technologies, born into an Italian village in the 13th century, might have just ended up being a really bad farmer.
Lewis: I think that’s exactly right. One of the things I’ve really been enjoying from Persuasion lately are those little vignettes from different countries—was Kyrgyzstan the most recent one? Tokyo? What I love is that they’re not coherent essays with a big thesis or a “take.” They’re much more impressionistic. And because the readership has already said, okay, show me whatever you’ve got—I’m interested, there’s a freedom in that. Also, I bet one of the nice things about doing that kind of writing is that you don’t have to do the explanatory commas—you don’t have to write, “Germany’s far-right party, the AfD,” every time. You can just assume the reader knows who the AfD are, or the names of politicians. When you’re writing for mainstream outlets, you’re constantly having to explain everything. The other example I think about a lot—my last book was on feminism—is this question: what did more for women in the 20th century? Was it the second wave of feminism, or was it the widespread invention and adoption of the contraceptive pill? Can you have one without the other?
For all that we might want to say feminism changed women’s lives, reliable contraception was absolutely part of that story. It gave women power over the shaping of their lives that no women in history had ever had before. And I think you can really argue that without that, you don’t get the feminist gains of that period. So again, a lot of this is about balance. It’s about acknowledging that, yes, there are people who are interesting, special, talented—whatever it might be. But let’s also talk about the moment that made them. And let’s retain a level of humility. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to anyone who’s interviewed Nobel laureates, but people often say, I was really amazed—they weren’t that impressive when I met them. Or they’ll say quite a lot of them go a bit mad afterwards. And I think that’s because having this label on you—“extra special person”—can distort your sense of self. You begin to think that everything you do is special. One of the high-IQ societies, Mensa, when it was founded in the 1940s, had this idea that they would run opinion polls of their members on the great issues of the day. The idea was that policymakers could hear what the smartest people thought. But most of the research we have shows that if you ask a lot of smart people about subjects they know nothing about, their intuitions aren’t any better than anyone else’s. People have domain-specific expertise. But the temptation—and all the incentives—are to present yourself as a big brain.
Mounk: I think there’s a very interesting distinction here. One question is: are there geniuses in the sense of people who have a very, very rare talent at a particular human activity? Is Nikola Jokić just a better basketball player than 99.9999% of other people who had the same opportunities, who practiced just as hard, who trained just as intensely? There’s just something that comes together in this individual that makes him superior to that competition and allows him to do things others simply can’t. Take someone like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One of the amazing facts about Mozart is that people who are professionally trained to copy music—whose job it is to hand-copy scores—can’t match the sheer volume of music he composed in his short lifetime. There’s something about Mozart’s ability to imagine music that is just incomparable.
And if that’s the case, then perhaps there is a useful concept of genius that we should apply to people like that. There’s something that makes them special relative to others. But that’s different from saying, for example, that Jokić has particular insight into social science, or that Mozart would be good at giving advice on your romantic life. I assume not. I mean, I could probably listen to Jokić talk on a podcast—I have no idea what his political opinions are or what he thinks about anything else. And we don’t have much insight into what Mozart thought about most things, either. I assume he believed a lot of pretty stupid things, like most people of his time. So maybe we just have to disentangle those two things. Yes, there are people who have a special brilliance at particular human activities. But that doesn’t mean they’re all-purpose oracles whose opinions we should revere whenever they speak on any topic.
Lewis: I think that's exactly the distinction that I want to make. Have you ever watched the film Amadeus based on Peter Shaffer's play? I think it's really brilliant.
Mounk: I have as a teenager or something, but yeah, it's very good.
Lewis: It’s actually the same structure as Hamilton, the musical, which is all told through Aaron Burr, who is just jealous of this guy who seems to have words pouring out of him. And the same thing is true of Salieri in Amadeus. He looks at this little squit who’s obsessed with scatological jokes and thinks, I worked so hard—why did God give you this gift? I think there’s so much in that about the mythology of how we talk about people who are special or talented. We want them to be weird, interesting and different. Part of that is about dealing with the fact that we’re not special. There’s a kind of emotional logic to it: if you’re Salieri, you want Mozart to be a superior type of human, because then it’s fair that he got the gift and you didn’t. And I think that’s really powerful.
When I was showing this book to a friend of mine, he said, you need to make sure you talk about envy in there. We live in a kind of giant-killing age, and people want to tear down geniuses. That wasn’t always the case. Although even in Thomas Carlyle’s The Uses of Great Men—which is where that phrase comes from—he was already writing defensively, arguing that hero-worship was a good thing, and that it had gone out of fashion. There’s always this push and pull. When we raise someone to that level, there’s often an argument smuggled in with it. And I agree with you—I’m totally fine with the idea that Mozart had music pouring out of him, and that’s wonderful. But what’s the argument within that? Is it about specialist education for certain types of kids? Is it about Austrian nationalism? Is it about something else entirely? Often, when someone is put on a pedestal, some idea they represent is being elevated too.
Mounk: Yeah, that's very interesting—what you're trying to accomplish by elevating particular people. Of course, some of that is, for example, that certain kinds of geniuses were simply involved in the construction of a nation, for better or for worse. Part of building a kind of imagined community in the 19th century was to select particular writers—certainly very talented, who had made great contributions—and say, they are now our Shakespeare. So Goethe became that figure in Germany. In France, it might be someone like Boileau or Racine.
Lewis: Yeah, or Van Gogh becomes the national painter. I think it’s happening now, even—someone like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is kind of the Nigerian writer. She’s the writer who symbolizes this new Nigeria that’s building itself and feels ready to take its place on the world stage. I have this line in the book about Shakespeare, which is: he started off writing for the groundlings and ended up working for the Warwickshire Tourist Board. That’s what it becomes—a kind of brand. Nowhere do you see that more obviously, I think, than with Einstein and Picasso. They’re just, at this point, huge brands. All of the Einstein money goes to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which is why you get these weird things where Verizon or gas meter companies are using claymation Einsteins to stand in for “a really smart person.” There are a lot of people making money off the idea of genius as a brand.
Mounk: So how do we think about extraordinary achievement? What’s interesting to me is that some people can make extraordinary contributions and yet seem relatively ordinary. But then there are others who make extraordinary contributions in a way that really does suggest they have some strange, unique talent—something difficult to put into words, difficult to quantify, but that does seem to set them apart. I think about one area I know well—political theory, which is what I did my PhD in. When I read John Locke, who made very important contributions to the history of political thought, the way the prose flows, the way he thinks about the world—I sort of think, I know 50 people today who could do that. They didn’t come up with those insights at his time, of course, and Locke clearly had a way of seeing the world that was special. But there’s nothing in his prose that makes me think, this was a unique mind. He may really have been someone who simply seized the adjacent possible more effectively than his contemporaries. So I don’t want to sound oddly blasé about Locke, but in a certain way, he feels to me like someone who, within the ranks of very talented people, was comparatively ordinary—he just worked on the right questions, thought about them in the right way, seized the opportunity, and was able to produce lasting, important work.
Then I read someone like Thomas Hobbes. The way his prose flows, the way he thinks about the world—he clearly has a strange mind. Today, we might say he was neuro-atypical or something like that. But I don’t know anyone who sees the world the way Hobbes does. I don’t know anyone who writes like that. Hobbes, to me, comes closer to having that kind of unique talent that sets him apart. Now, that doesn’t mean Hobbes was more correct about politics than Locke. It doesn’t mean he made a greater contribution to the world. But it does suggest that you can make a great contribution without having whatever we call genius. And also, that there are some people who do seem to have something like genius—which doesn’t mean their opinions are always right, or that I’d want to take advice from them on every subject. But there’s something there—some quiddity, some quality—that is unusual in a way that’s not true of others. I struggle to find a better word for it than genius, even if I, too, have some skepticism about the term.
Lewis: Yeah, I agree with you. I think part of it is that some biographies are simply more compelling than others—they lend themselves to mythology. One of the examples I use in the book is Jane Austen. She lived an incredibly quiet life and was excluded from some of the early 20th-century surveys of genius because the compilers went through the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography with a kind of ruler and said, anyone whose entry is more than eight centimetres long is in. And there just isn’t that much to say about her life. She turned down a couple of marriage proposals, which people have tried to spin into a kind of feminist legend. But really, she was a quiet observer of things she hadn’t necessarily experienced firsthand. There’s no way to render that into a tidy storybook narrative. And yet people want it—they want the myth.
Another example I talk about, to illustrate that yearning for mythology, is Artemisia Gentileschi. Of all the artists of the Renaissance, she’s the one we’ve rediscovered. And that’s because there’s this incredibly compelling story: her father’s apprentice tried to rape her, she testified against him, submitted herself to the thumbscrews—threatening the very hands with which she painted—and then, in her Judith and Holofernes, she painted her rapist’s face onto the man being beheaded. It’s a perfect feminist legend. And so she’s been rediscovered, in part, because it comes in this package—this branding package—that every art museum now wants to showcase. Now, as it happens, I think the paintings are good enough. That’s not what I’m sad about. But the fact is, there are other artists from that era—like Sofonisba Anguissola, for example—who don’t have that kind of mythology attached to them. And so they struggle to survive or break through in the Darwinian marketplace of biographies. Artemisia, the feminist saint, is a compelling commercial package. And I think that’s a natural process—we’ll probably never get around it.
But you’re right: what we shouldn’t do is grade people according to how satisfying their mythology is. Not least because, having read a lot of these biographies of so-called geniuses, I just think a lot of the stuff in them is probably bollocks. The one I talk about in the book is Galileo. He’s held up as the guy who stood up to the Inquisition. Yes—and no. He died in his bed. He wasn’t burned at the stake as a heretic. He was political about how he presented his ideas about the Earth going around the sun. But what we crave is the story of the one man who knew he was right, and the whole Church was against him, and he stood alone. Because that’s the compelling story. So I think we need to be very aware of the fact that the stories we tell about achievement mutate—they grow toward the sun in particular ways. And yeah, you can’t adjudicate between Locke and Hobbes based on who was weirder, or who has the more compelling biography, or who fits more neatly into a mythology. That doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of their insights. It tells you, maybe, why a particular person might feel more connected to one than the other. And that’s what so much of this is about—what are the bridges across time that connect us to these people? And those change.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the case of military leaders, who were championed for a long time. But now, particularly on the left, there’s a lot of discomfort with that. Winston Churchill is a good example—someone who was straightforwardly hailed as a hero, but who also played a role in the Bengal famine. So the question of whether Churchill was a genius in standing up to Hitler becomes an argument about your politics. Do you forgive him for one thing? Do you not care about colonialism if you champion him? Do you not care about nationalism if you don’t? This is what I mean about the arguments we’re really having when we argue about the value of these people. I’m always interested in that—what are the arguments underneath the arguments?
Mounk: You know, that is very interesting. And I think one of the fascinating things you bring out in the book is how elevating someone for a specific talent to the general-purpose status of “genius” doesn’t just risk encouraging us to overlook bad behavior—which is a debate we’ve had a lot in recent years, and which perhaps isn’t all that novel or interesting anymore—but actually encourages that bad behavior in the first place. If it’s true that Jane Austen was excluded from some of the early pseudo-scientific attempts to catalogue genius in the Victorian era because her life was too quiet—because she didn’t have enough pages devoted to her in Who’s Who or whatever the 19th-century equivalent was—then the person who wants to be recognized as a genius has to make sure they live a larger-than-life existence. That’s what we’ve come to associate with genius: not just talent, but spectacle.
I’m thinking here of a distant acquaintance of mine, a visual artist who, in my estimation, clearly leads a very unhealthy life—appears to be addicted to alcohol and other substances, and probably needs a mental health intervention to be less unhappy and, frankly, to have a better chance of living the years she should enjoy. But she’s celebrated in the New York art scene, in part because she’s such a character—so outlandish, so erratic. And particularly in a world where there are few objective measures of achievement, and where subjective taste is so influential—as it is in the slightly strange world of contemporary art—it’s not just that she’s a brilliant artist and we look past her behavior. It’s that the behavior and the persona are part of what makes her art sell. So the art world, in effect, is encouraging her to rush toward a premature death. And that’s the darker side of the mythology of genius—not just that it excuses harm, but that it incentivizes self-destruction.
Lewis: I think that’s exactly it. When you go around art galleries now, it’s really interesting to look at what they tell you about the artist’s biography, and how often that’s used as a kind of measure of authenticity—that the art comes from some sort of pain. And sometimes that’s really cheap. There was a very interesting essay in Harper’s a while ago about the uses of identity, particularly racial identity—perhaps even that of long-forgotten ancestors—as a kind of proof that the artist is in touch with something deeper, something that gives their work a kind of spiritual weight it wouldn’t otherwise have if it were just a pretty painting. I think alcoholism is a really good example. There are people who think that being creative is incredibly tough—because sometimes it comes, and sometimes it doesn’t. And when people have had success creatively, they’re often perpetually worried that it’s going to dry up, that the gift is going to vanish. That kind of fear can encourage people to spiral in terms of their behavior.
At the same time, if you’re even slightly successful, you’ll always have enablers around you. What you said reminded me of something I read—Carol Blue, Christopher Hitchens’ second wife, once said that people would come to D.C. and want their big night out with Hitchens. They wanted to wake up in a gutter at 4 a.m. because they’d heard all the stories about the hard-drinking, wild-living Hitchens. And for them, that was great—they got their one night of chaos. But he was living that life every single day. And I think that’s the point. We want these people to live outrageous lives so we can just touch them for a moment, bask in the glow of that myth—but without any real thought for the cost of living that way every day.
It also comes back to something I was reading while preparing for the book—a book called The Price of Greatness. I think that’s part of the storytelling we crave. We want great talent to come at a cost. That feels like the universe is balanced. If you’re Mozart, you get the gift, but you’re also a child prodigy who dies young. That’s a compelling story. If you’re Beethoven, you have the musical genius, but you go deaf. Or you neglect your wife. Or you never speak to your children. Or you’re Isaac Newton and you spend your life alone in a Cambridge college. Or you’re Yayoi Kusama and you check yourself into a mental institution and stay there for fifty years. We want to believe you don’t get the juice without paying for it. I think that’s the problem with boring geniuses—because they don’t seem to be suffering, we downgrade their achievements.
Mounk: Well, it speaks to the question, doesn’t it, of why every great musician seems to die at the age of 27? Presumably, part of the answer may be that this myth, as you call it, of the tortured genius is somewhat true—that people who are particularly creative might also have a tendency toward mental illness or toward excess or whatever it is. Part of it is that if you achieve great fame at a very young age, it probably encourages you to live in very, very unhealthy ways. Part of it is the other way around. Perhaps the musician who dies tragically and romantically at 27 doesn’t go on to produce seven more albums that are increasingly mediocre and out of step with the times. Slowly, people might decide, perhaps he wasn’t so great after all. Whereas if they leave the scene at the young age of 27, at the height of their fame, we’re always going to remember them as standing at the center of that culture, as being these innovative forces. They don’t grow into old, resentful farts who keep repeating the same song from 40 years ago and mouth off about stupid topics on the news.
Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s very true. I have a chapter about the Beatles in which I explore this, because—I can’t remember if it’s David Galenson or Hans Eysenck—someone has a theory that if you want to be hailed as a genius, you need to die before 30. So it’s all about the terrible promise lost. You’re Keats, the poet. You’re Amy Winehouse, or whoever it might be—River Phoenix, James Dean. You’re someone who was only ever beautiful and young, and then you were gone. Or—and I want you to pay attention to this, Yascha, because this is the zone you and I are in, if we ever want to do this—you have to keep marching on until you’re over 80. And at that point, hopefully, you become the inspiration for a younger generation who read your work and really like it. You become—well, I don’t think either of us is going to become father of the nation—but you know what I mean. So in the Beatles, you have one of each. You have John Lennon, who gets shot at 40. Let’s be honest—given his political tendencies, he probably would have grown into a reactionary old fart. He’d now be airing some slightly wince-making views about the small boats crisis.
Mounk: I do not know enough about John Lennon to have predicted that. What makes you say that?
Lewis: Well, because he was very spiky, and they had a whole song about how they didn’t like paying taxes—I mean, they were paying ridiculous rates of tax—but still, they had a whole song complaining about their tax bill. That’s the kind of arc where you can see the direction it was going. You know, the kind of Eric Clapton trajectory—I think Lennon would have followed that. But on the other hand, you have Paul McCartney, who has lived long enough to become this sort of site of pilgrimage. Younger artists want to work with him, and then he goes and performs at Glastonbury with an isolated audio track of John Lennon—still young, captured in time. So you’ve got one of each in The Beatles. You’ve got one who became a kind of father-of-the-nation figure, an inspiration for the next generation who idolize him, and one who was taken from us too soon. That’s one of my answers to how The Beatles became the huge juggernaut band that they did. And the other thing, of course, is that they broke up. The wildest statistic is that George Harrison was 27 when The Beatles ended. The vast majority of his life, he wasn’t in The Beatles. They pumped out a lot of albums in that time, but what you’re left with is something perfect and beautiful. And, as you say, you don’t get the disappointing, we just cashed in because one of us has been through a bad divorce and needs to pay the bills tour that tarnishes your cherished memories of them. There are all these other factors that affect how we feel about things that aren’t purely about the level of achievement. The Beatles are a really good example of that.
Mounk: One of the things that makes sure you don't cheapen your brand by appearing in diaper ads is that you're dead by the time you might have a financial need or desire to do so.
Lewis: I say this as somebody who feels pretty middle-aged most of the time. Middle-aged is just kind of sad, isn't it? Like, it's just a sad decline. It's got lots of constellations. I'd rather be alive than not. But there is something about those people who will only ever have been young and beautiful that I think we just find really compelling.
Mounk: Another thing you talk about is the attempt to look at genius as a scientific endeavor—to measure genius, to predict who will turn into a genius. And that gives rise to everything from studies that try to give people IQ tests early in life to predict who’s going to become a genius and who isn’t, to, of course, a favorite subject of fun in the book and in broader popular culture: all of these societies like Mensa that claim they can identify geniuses. The idea is, we’ll administer an IQ test, and then there’ll be this club where the geniuses hang out. And of course, it turns out that a lot of the people who hang out in the club—and certainly the ones who are vocal about being members of Mensa—often don’t appear to be geniuses in the sense of having any particular achievements to their name in the real world.
Lewis: Yeah, I find high IQ societies really compelling for that reason. At one level, I think in their original form, particularly, there was something lovely about them. The two people I know in real life who took the Mensa test as teenagers both grew up in working-class households where no one had been to university. They were brighter than the people around them, and they felt slightly like they didn’t quite fit in. So they just wanted to talk to people who were a bit more like them. It’s one of the least sympathetic things in the world, isn’t it—people complaining that they want to talk about French 18th-century literature and no one they know does. But I think genuinely, for people like that, it does feel like they’re outsiders in that way. And “outsiders” is actually the group noun that some people in high IQ societies suggested should apply to them. But the point where you’re absolutely right—where it tips over into being poisonous—is this idea that, although I’ve got nothing to show for my life—maybe I didn’t finish university, maybe I’ve never held a particularly good job or had a relationship—I know I’m a special person inside because there’s this number that says I’m better than you. You do find a bit of that tendency. I write not just about high IQ societies, but about ultra-high IQ societies. That’s where you get people who are really obsessed with the idea that they’re super smart, even though they don’t have anything to show for it. I think that’s where it becomes quite corrosive. Grady Towers, who was a member of one of these societies, wrote about that. He said, if you get a smart person who grew up in a middle-class family with a stable background—a home where there was enough food and people weren’t violent—they become an architect. They don’t need a high IQ society.
Mounk: Right—they acquire the highest status in the world through their achievements, through using their intelligence to design buildings or become engineers or whatever it is they go on to do. And they don’t need to go around saying, do you know I’m a member of Mensa? or do you know I’m in a genius IQ society? I was really struck by this in the book—it’s the people who don’t have those achievements, who’ve flailed out of life for any number of reasons, who make that membership central to their identity.
Lewis: Yeah, there's a line I really love in Pride and Prejudice—sorry, I’m obsessed with Austen today—by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, where she sees Elizabeth Bennet playing the piano. Elizabeth isn’t very good, but she’s trying. And Lady Catherine says, I don’t play the piano, and then adds, had I ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And I just think, quite often, I’ll read a comment on the internet and think, Had I ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. Because it’s this eternal human impulse, isn’t it? I know I could do that better than you. I haven’t tried, but I’m pretty sure I could. And I think that’s just a really human impulse—to believe there’s something within you that makes you better than other people who’ve actually tried and been mediocre. And it’s also a fear of failure—you don’t want to try. I think it’s Maslow who writes about this: people don’t just have a fear of failure, they have a fear of success. So in both senses, it’s really awkward. If you try and fail, that’s bad, because now you know you definitely can’t do it, rather than leaving it open. And if you succeed, that’s also scary, because it might make you different from other people, and they might resent you. And again, for geniuses, it’s hard to be the object of everybody’s attention. That level of status and acclaim warps people. If you’re a rock star, for example, you’ve got managers giving you amphetamines, people invested in “brand you,” who want to keep the show on the road.
I thought about this really strongly in a different context when I was writing my Atlantic piece about Jordan Peterson—the psychologist who became physically dependent on benzodiazepines. And yet he carried on with the world tour. You think, why did you do that? Why did the people around you let you do that? There’s this feeling sometimes with people who are phenomenally successful that this whole juggernaut, this machine, depends on one frail human being at the center of it. And the person gets forgotten. That happens to a lot of geniuses, which is why—even the ones who become slightly monstrous—I do feel sorry for them. Being special is also hard. For all that most people would love to have more acclaim, more status, whatever it might be, it’s not an uncomplicatedly happy experience for most people.
Mounk: It’s no coincidence that so many child actors, for example, grow up to have very, very troubled lives. The documentary about Amy Winehouse—which I think is very good—really brings out that need everyone around her had for her to keep functioning, to keep the machine going, and the way in which that obviously encouraged her most self-destructive impulses. I always thought about that in another context—not a genius, I think—which is Joe Biden. What really struck me in the months when he was clinging to the idea of running for reelection was the fact that his own family members, in particular his wife, seemed very keen for him to run again. I just thought: what a disregard for your loved one, who is clearly struggling, clearly mentally impaired, and clearly just exhausted. For whatever reason, you feel such a need for them to stay in political power, but you don’t seem to have their best interests as a person at heart.
Lewis: I'm really interested in the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which I haven’t read yet. It seems to portray the situation as more malignant than anything I’ve seen in the reporting so far. Most of the coverage I’ve read has described it as essentially a kind of group delusion—that acknowledging he wasn’t fit to run again would have been so psychologically difficult for all the staffers involved. Someone would have had to tell him, his wife would have had to accept it—you know. My colleague Franklin Foer, who wrote a brilliant book about Biden, compared it to having an elderly parent who needs to be told they can’t drive anymore. They’re never going to drive again. It’s not like they’re sick and might recover—it’s that this part of their life is over. They have to accept they’re no longer the person they once were. It’s incredibly hard to do that to someone you love. And you’re right. Like someone else—who I think some people would call a genius—I think this is also true of Donald Trump. There are thousands of people in the Republican Party who don’t think he’s fit to be president. Some have even said so publicly. But now they say he is, because their fortunes are so tied to him and the cost of speaking out is so high. You have to understand the kind of beehives that get built around these figures. And that’s true whether or not it’s about politics. What I’m writing about in the book is often about fame, celebrity, commerce—and genius as a kind of branch of that. Everybody wants to keep the show on the road, whether it’s Amy Winehouse or Joe Biden. Everyone is invested in that person as a project.
Mounk: One of the things I found striking is that there’s this attempt to identify early on who’s going to be a genius—and that attempt mostly fails. People go out and administer all these IQ tests, and some of the individuals who do end up winning Nobel Prizes and becoming very influential actually fall just below the cutoff, even though they still show particularly high IQs. Of course, many people who are shown to have very high IQs don’t end up doing anything particularly distinguished in their lives—whether because of circumstances, like the timing of World War II, or simply due to personal challenges. I’ve wondered how to interpret that as evidence. I think it shows that whatever genius is—whatever the qualities are that allow someone to achieve remarkable things in specific fields—it’s not just about IQ. First of all, you need other kinds of circumstances. You need opportunity. If you were an African American in 18th-century America, your talents would have been wasted, no matter how intelligent you were. If you were a woman in a society that didn’t offer opportunities to women, it’s very unlikely you’d be able to make productive use of your talents—certainly not to the same degree as a man with the same abilities.
Lewis: if you were Jewish in early 20th-century America and there were hard quotas on how many Jews could attend Ivy League schools—that’s a huge barrier. I was surprised, when I looked into it, by just how many different groups of people were systematically excluded from opportunities. One that really gets me is the Soviet Union. The question of who was allowed to prosper within that system was extremely rigidly controlled. How many great mathematicians did we lose simply because their parents weren’t party members, and so they weren’t allowed to advance through the ranks?
Mounk: There were the national quotas the Soviets imposed—including quotas on Jews, who were categorized as a nationality in the Soviet Union. Where I’m trying to go with this is that I really do believe it takes all of these different factors. Clearly, any algorithm that says, if you have a particularly high IQ, you’re going to rise to the level of genius, is just wrong. The many dysfunctional members of those super high-IQ societies are proof of that. But I think there are two important points on the other side. First, studies do show that people who achieve extraordinary things in most fields—including sports, by the way—tend to have very high IQs. So it does seem very difficult to reach that level of achievement without some kind of exceptional mental talent. Second, you could actually read all of this as supporting the idea of a “genius myth.” That is, the notion that extraordinary achievement requires something special—some unique spark that isn’t reducible to a number on an IQ test or to the sum of various influences. Take Nikola Jokić, for example. He obviously has physical gifts that make him well-suited to basketball—he’s tall, strong, fast. But the extent of his excellence seems to go beyond just those ingredients. Or think about William Shakespeare. If we had access to him and could test his IQ, I’m sure it wouldn’t be 75. He likely had a high IQ and other talents. But it’s not as though, at age 16 or 20, you could have administered the right tests and predicted he would become more creatively impactful than virtually all of his contemporaries. So you could take the same studies that fail to identify geniuses early on and say: that’s not proof that genius doesn’t exist. It’s actually proof that it does. There’s something that comes together in certain people—something we haven’t figured out how to measure or predict. There’s no formula that explains it, and it’s not reducible to simple traits or metrics.
Lewis: That’s the version of genius I like—the idea that genius is like a lightning strike. You put yourself in the right place, because fortune favors the prepared mind. You go to Silicon Valley in the ’60s because that’s where exciting things are happening and you’re interested in technology. You do the work, prepare yourself as much as possible, meet as many interesting people as you can—and then, at some point, it’s in the lap of the gods. I think that’s a fundamentally healthy way to think about genius. But you’re right—the problem lies in how IQ tests developed. As you probably know, they were originally designed to identify children who were falling behind, to help those at the lower end of the spectrum. They weren’t meant to sort people into a race of super-beings at the upper end. But when that idea merged with the late 19th-century interest in eugenics—Francis Galton being a key figure, brilliant in some ways but seemingly devoid of human empathy—it led to this notion of stratifying people by how “special” they were. That collided with the IQ test to create this idea of fixed human strata.
I spoke with Stuart Ritchie, who wrote a very good short introduction to IQ, about this. I mentioned Darwin, who was often described as a methodical plotter. Ritchie said, okay, but don’t overstate it—he would have been very clever. Maybe not an IQ of 180, but certainly not 70 or 60. At those higher bands, the tests become very hard to norm—they’re kind of made up at that point. So yes, these people were relatively smart, but then there were also circumstances in their lives, and other personality traits, that shaped their achievements. And again, I think that’s a healthier way to look at it: to ask, what have I been given, and where can I best exercise those talents? Where can I go to do the most interesting work?
Of all the people currently thinking in Silicon Valley, I don’t have time for many of them—but one I do is Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator. He said that when you’re 20, you should look around and ask yourself where the most exciting place in the world is—and then move there. He talks about Leonardo da Vinci and the incredible flowering of talent in Florence during the Renaissance. Florence and Milan shared many characteristics—same religion, similar governance, similar levels of violence—but something special was happening in Florence. It was a kind of network effect. You want to be where those people are. Again, I think that’s a healthier way to think about achievement: go and be around really smart people. You’ve spent a lot of time working with universities, so you’ll know this. The idea of the university was that interesting conversations would happen—within departments, between departments. It was meant to be a kind of force multiplier.
Of course, what it often leads to, at least from what I’ve seen in university management, is people having intense arguments about minor administrative issues and long-standing beefs with colleagues. But the ideal was that being around other smart people, especially those who are smart in slightly different ways, would be incredibly energizing. That’s why I wanted to go back to the office after the pandemic. One of the things I love about journalism is that it feels like a little project—it’s us against the world. I like institutions for that reason. A lot of them are dysfunctional—Persuasion has written about this very well—but at their best, they’re much greater than the sum of their parts. That’s what I love in this book: it’s a kind of plea for humility. You might be incredibly smart, but there are all these other factors that helped you reach your full potential. We should recognize those, consider them, and try to maximize them for everyone else too.
Mounk: Yeah, and that’s something I really like about the book. It’s called The Genius Myth, and it aims to dismantle certain myths about what genius is. But it’s not dismissive of the idea that some people have special talents. It’s not a book that rests on the idea of a blank slate. It doesn’t claim that you can take anyone at random and train them to be brilliant at whatever they choose.
Lewis: Yeah, I think there’s a version of this book that could have been much worse—a more politically correct version. I’d be really interested to see how people react to it, because I suspect some will want it to be that book, just so they can argue against it. But I don’t think that’s entirely fair. If you look at the history of IQ, for example, there was a strong movement of ultra-environmentalists. Some of them made very valid criticisms—like pointing out the culture-bound nature of IQ tests and how they assumed everyone was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American from the late 19th century. But they also held the belief that everything was environmental, which unfortunately was more of a wish than something supported by evidence. Now, you see people on the left—like Kathryn Paige Harden—writing about IQ and being very open about the fact that intelligence, in the raw IQ sense, exists on a spectrum. That says absolutely nothing about human dignity or worth. For some reason, we’ve decided to yoke those two things together, but we don’t have to. Just acknowledging that IQ varies across the population doesn’t imply anything about whether people deserve to live good, dignified lives. But that’s the legacy we’ve inherited, and it’s part of what makes people so nervous about discussing IQ at all.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Helen explore whether it’s harder to idolize people now, what cooking shows reveal about the human condition, and the impact of support systems. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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