Today’s guest is Helen Lewis, a British journalist and podcaster who is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and it explores how the definition of what it means to be a genius has changed radically over the centuries, how it became linked to all sorts of weird biological theories, and how Elon Musk has come to personify genius in our time (and whether his failure at the Department of Government Efficiency spells the end of his genius moment). Lewis and Reason‘s Nick Gillespie also talk about The Beatles; William Shockley, who turned to racial science after winning a Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor; and her notorious 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson for British GQ, which has racked up over 70 million views.
0:00— Introduction
1:36— The Genius Myth
7:20— How dead geniuses fueled national myths
11:30— Thomas Carlyle and the Great Man theory
18:18— Are inventions inevitable?
23:22— Francis Galton and eugenics
33:35— Pro-natalism and declining fertility rates
37:14— William Shockley
48:00— Shakespeare and The Beatles
57:22— Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the gender dimensions of genius
1:03:50— Lewis’ Jordan Peterson interview
1:07:18— Germaine Greer and second wave feminism
1:11:05— The gender debate in the UK vs US
1:14:14— Elon Musk’s rise and fall?
1:20:57— Do geniuses have second acts?
Upcoming events:
- Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24
- Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the MAHA Movement, June 25
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Helen Lewis, thanks so much for talking to Reason.
Helen Lewis: Thank you for having me.
Let’s start with the obvious question. The book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, which is a great subtitle. But why did you write The Genius Myth?
Do you know what, it’s one of those things where it’s evolved over time, so I may be now lying to myself about why I wrote it. But I did have a conversation with a friend a couple of years ago about the idea that—he has always said that genius is a right-wing concept, which I thought was a really interesting idea because it’s about the individual over the collective. It’s about people with sublime achievement who are not part of the common throng.
And I thought that was interesting. I thought, well, I hear loads and loads of left-wing people use it very casually, and I don’t think they’re accepting this kind of idea behind it. And then that made me think, well, hang on a minute, what other ideas are kind of being smuggled in in that little word? And that’s where the book kind of came from.
That’s fascinating. And it puts me in mind—the book is fantastic. I mean, it is a great read. It’s better than 99 percent of novels I read. And I love—it’s a series of stories about kind of crazy people and the people, including all of us, who enable them.
But part of what you talk about in The Genius Myth is that being a genius meant radically different things in different eras. Explain in ancient Greece—and I don’t know why we care about what ancient Greece thought about anything—but the Greeks talked about having genius, or being a genius meant that you were possessed with a visiting spirit. Can you explain what that means?
Yeah, you have a genius—that’s the original sense of it. You’re visited by this spirit, and you know, it might be the muse of poetry speaks through you, or the muse of history. And they called it furor poeticus, furor divinus—divine fury.
And I think that captures something really well. I don’t know if you would describe yourself as a genius, Nick, but most of us wouldn’t. But you must have had moments when you’ve sat down—
No, very few people have defined me as a genius, so thank you.
But you might have had times when you sit down to write a piece or do some piece of work, and it just clicks. Something just feels really good. And I think most writers probably spend most of their life kind of chasing that dragon for the rest of the time. You go, ‘when will it come back?’ And that’s what writing should feel like, and most of the time it’s just a kind of grind. So I think they did a very good thing then in capturing something that we’ve all felt to some extent. There are moments that work.
You talk about how, particularly in the context of things like pop music and whatnot—and this is certainly true for writers and novelists in particular—you go on a streak where you are just performing at a higher level.
I want to get into an argument about the Beatles for any number of reasons. It’s independent of you—I have this argument every morning. But when you look at somebody like Paul McCartney, who you talk about in an interesting way, he’s got to understand that whatever he’s been doing for the past 40 years is not what he did for that 5- to 10-year period. He was on.
So you go from that classical understanding of genius as a visiting spirit or something is speaking through you—which now is almost always the province of serial killers, right?
I guess I had the dog talk to me, and it told me to kill me.
They’re the last classical geniuses in this tattered world. But then in the Renaissance things shift—the Renaissance and the early modern period. How does being a genius change in that period?
Maybe even a little bit later than that, because the thing about the Renaissance is always that the word comes from rinascita—rebirth. So the idea was that they were, as they saw it, bringing back the classical tradition. And it was kind of quite imitative—you were trying to learn these things about proportion and form.
Well, I don’t want to get sidetracked. I’m just going to say yes—they were smuggling what they wanted to do by saying, “What we’re really doing is merely bringing back these eras of former greatness.” There’s the American Renaissance in American literature, which was created in the 1940s about the pre–Civil War period. And I believe there’s a racial journal now called American Renaissance, which—they want to rebirth things.
So in this early modern period redefinition of genius, what’s going on?
Then you get this very, very important book that I had to say I didn’t really know about, which is Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. And it is a group biography of—I have to say, all the artists that I would have known growing up because they were also Ninja Turtles, like Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo.
But there is a sense that that was a period of a kind of burst of creativity, and he puts them together in this kind of pantheon. And it’s one of the first times that you begin to see, in a really systematic way—this is what I mean by the genius myth. These are stories that we tell about people who are innovators or scientists or artists.
So you have, for example, the story of Leonardo da Vinci. And the myth that’s imposed on him is that he couldn’t settle on anything. He had a kind of—an uber level of ADHD. He was designing the helicopter, then he wanted to learn how to paint directly onto a wall using tempura, then he was doing something else. He was kind of a scatterbrain.
We have all met that person in our first semester in college as well—who’s just so brilliant. Obviously Leonardo accomplished a few things, as well.
It’s true—not all of the people that you meet in the first semester at college go on to paint the Mona Lisa, or anything like it, sadly.
But what I was getting at is that the Mona Lisa wasn’t really the Mona Lisa until centuries after it.
Until it got stolen. This is one of my favorite things in all of it. It’s the same way that Shakespeare died a respectable playwright, but he didn’t die the guy that we should enthrone forever as the crowning jewel of English literature. That really a century later.
And exactly the same thing with the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was—and I’m going to be really rude here and say—quite a sludgy gray and green painting, and not seen as the crowning achievement of the Renaissance by any means.
It gets stolen in the 1920s and ends up in Italy. And it becomes—actually, as lots of these things do—about national myths, because Leonardo was Italian or proto-Italian, but he was working for most of his life in France. So it becomes a kind of ‘Who owns this great genius?’ and ‘Therefore, who should have the Mona Lisa?’ And then it becomes a kind of inter-country fight.
It’s also great because, in the United States in particular, Italians have always claimed Christopher Columbus. But now many of us Italian Americans are like, “Oh, maybe he was working for Spain, and maybe he is a Jew, so forget it. We don’t need Columbus anymore.”
He’s not The Sopranos…
But da Vinci is one model of a Renaissance genius. Talk about Michelangelo or some of the others. The person categorizing them said, “OK, well, there are different gradations.” He seemed very much like a boy with a bunch of Pokémon dolls or something where he’s rank ordering them things like that.
Yeah, well, he definitely had a bias. He had a pro-Florentine bias. So he’s quite rude about Titian, who was born—I think— Venice or the Alps. But he kind of gets relegated to second status because he’s not from the right place.
But Michelangelo, he uses as a different example, which is something you find all the time in genius myths: which is someone who had to struggle. So that’s turned into a story about how hard it was to paint the Sistine Chapel, and how he had to design all the stuff you’ll hear if you go on the tour of the Sistine Chapel.
The other thing that you will know from visiting the Sistine Chapel is that it’s a lot. It’s quite—it is a statement, is it not? Yeah. And I think that’s kind of fascinating too—that you have to have a level of ambition. The film critic called it white elephant art. Which he didn’t intend as a compliment—these films that kind of announce themselves as a masterpiece.
And I think that actually is also quite pertinent to this. The fact that Ulysses by James Joyce is very hard to read—not an enjoyable novel in the conventional sense—is actually taken as being a sign of its genius. The fact that the Sistine Chapel is big…if he’d done that much individual painting and separated it out by canvases, we wouldn’t find it quite so impressive as this one—you know, what’s that German word? Kunstkammerwerk—you know, the kind of the whole thing is it.
You have that word written on your computer, and you use it in every conversation that you ever have.
That’s true. I do, actually. Yeah, you’ve rumbled me.
But you know what I mean—like that idea of the kind of… You still see it now when you have like, oh, Birdman, it’s filmed like it was in a single shot, or The Revenant, oh it only filmed in natural light, or Tom Hanks really lost all the weight for Cast Away, or Charlize Theron made herself ugly for Monster. These are kind of—there’s a price to greatness.
I like the movies where people gain weight, because anybody can lose weight, right?
If we may jump forward a little bit—and I want to skip over him a little bit, both because he deserves to be forgotten, but I want to get to a later figure in Victorian England—but Thomas Carlyle pops up a couple of times in your work. And he is kind of the modern conceptualizer, right, of Great Man Theory, which is related to genius but it’s not quite the same thing.
Life writing takes form, and then you get the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. And what you then get is genius really as a marketing tool. So, if you’re an artist in the 14th century, what you need is a rich aristocratic patron.
If you’re an artist in the 18th century, 19th century—well, actually, at this point there’d be things like, you know, gallerists start arriving, things like newspapers arrive, mass media arrives, and you might therefore be able to brand, basically.
But what’s interesting is that most of the time, or at least at that point, it seems to be less the person selling themselves as a genius, and they have a Boswell—or they have somebody around them who is writing them up as, like, “Oh, this is the real guy,” like a hype man. A Flavor Flav.
Yeah, everybody needs an 18th century Flavor Flav. Yes, it’s true.
But then you have somebody like Thomas Carlyle, who, you know, very much of a… in the context of his time, it’s not like he was a right-winger. And he hated capitalism, certainly. And he hated all of the liberal economists who actually thought that Irish people and Blacks in Jamaica were human in the same way he was.
But how does he talk about Great Man Theory, and how does that kind of add to the genius lore before it gets kind of quantified and mathematized later in that century?
Yeah, he has this line, which I’m going to mangle, but it’s something like, “The history of the world is, at root, only the history of great men.”
And that was very in keeping with a certain type of patrician Victorian thinking—that you just needed these once-in-a-generation personalities. One of their references would have been someone like Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French general. And I think there’s a lot to that argument—that actually, the military decisions that Napoleon made at the times that he made them changed the history of Europe. He was a consequential figure.
In the same way that now The Atlantic just ran a cover story on Donald Trump that said he’s the most consequential president of the 21st century. I do think it’s a reasonable point to say that some people are kind of hinge points in history.
I was gonna make a joke about like, what’s his competition so far though? You know, it’s—zombie Abe or whatever.
And you thought—”No, I love Obama and I would never say anything mean about him.”
Well, I know. I said, unfortunately, from my stupid libertarian point of view, I see an immense continuity between George W. Bush, Obama, Trump I, [Joe] Biden, Trump II. And it’s not a good continuity.
But, you know, this is part of what you’re talking about when you talk about The Genius Myth—you’re not saying everybody is exactly the same, and it’s just a social construction that Leonardo gets called a great artist, but actually anybody around him was as good. But it is this storytelling and kind of creating this sense that these people are the limit of everything that we’re doing.
But with Carlyle—so Carlyle—I guess in a way systematic thinking— this is what the Enlightenment was about. And to some degree, the Renaissance—it hadn’t quite got there. And you certainly get there with somebody like [Karl] Marx and [Freidrich] Engels, where they kind of say, actually it’s the system. It’s the base—typically the economic base—that actually determines everything else.
So we might forgive Carlyle this one thing of not really understanding.
Oh, I totally forgive him because, you know, what’s the easiest thing to do is to go, “Actually, it’s both,” because it obviously is both, right? Some people do make decisions, but also they are products of fundamental forces that are in society.
And I guess—now let me, because I outed myself on my libertarian podcast show as a libertarian—maybe it’s people like Adam Smith who started to talk about how things don’t just happen. There are a lot of kind of occult forces, invisible hands and whatnot, that create order among seeming chaos. And you could extend that to individuals.
I feel like this is a big part of your life’s work—the meta story that you tell now—which is just that it’s a mix of both. It’s circumstance and it’s individual effort. And that should in no way ever be controversial, but it seems like it constantly needs to be relearned.
Absolutely. Because you bring up Carlyle, and he was writing defensively. That’s what I didn’t really realize until I looked more at that stuff. I sort of assumed everybody in the Victorian era was swanning around going, “Of course the thing is that just a couple of men changed the world.”
But no—he was writing to defend that idea against what he saw as the kind of forces of egalitarianism.
There’s a fantastic book called How the Dismal Science Got Its Name by David Levy, which is a study mostly of how Carlyle and other people like him treated the Irish in popular culture and academic discourse basically in the long 19th century.
And they were mad that people were saying, “No, actually the Irish are pretty much like the rest of us. They follow incentives. They’re not all gorillas or chimpanzees.” And that’s why Carlyle named the dismal science “the dismal science,” because he said that was its main truth—that all humans respond similarly to incentives.
What a dismal science that we’re not somehow more elevated than the lower order.
That’s great—to accidentally coin a really great phrase like that when you’re trying to be rude.
Yes, right.
But the point I try to make in the book is that we always end up coming back to Great Man Theory—even people on the left—because we want stories. And stories demand protagonists.
Frankly, your biography of Napoleon is going to sell a lot better than your book about agrarian upheaval in France in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s just more interesting to have… You know, when you write a screenplay, the first thing anyone will ever tell you is you have to have a protagonist and they have to be active—they have to make decisions. That’s how our minds want history to kind of work.
But there’s a brilliant paper that I reference in the book from 1922, about “Are Inventions Inevitable?” And the list that they have of the number of things that got invented simultaneously—the most obvious one is the telephone, right? Two people came up with the telephone, and only one of them gets the credit.
I write about Edison—Thomas Edison—later in the book. And everybody had the idea for the light bulb. Every man and his dog had that idea because it’s quite a simple conceptual idea. What they couldn’t do for 100 years was manufacture it and reliably make it work.
And the real genius of Edison, if he had it, was, I think, the New York City power grid. But again, that’s just not as compelling a story as “Man invents light bulb” that you can see and hold in your hand.
And Edison, then—and you point out that he ended up in a fight that he lost. I mean, he lost a lot of his invention battles overall. He was a proponent of direct current, and alternating current won out and ultimately kind of swallowed a lot of his activity.
And with Edison, I mean, there’s always the fascinating concept of Edison versus Tesla. So you have Edison as one kind of genius, and then Tesla as another—crazy, more romantic genius, because he ended in failure.
Do you know, my favorite anecdote is the fact that Tesla walked out of Edison’s lab—where he worked for a while—because they had a bet, which Tesla won, and then Edison got really grumpy about him.
And I just think this is fascinating because—I don’t know if you know this—a couple of months ago, the podcaster Sam Harris told the story. He had a bet about deaths during the coronavirus pandemic with Elon Musk, and Sam Harris won. And then he said, “So, where’s my—pay up, son?” And then Elon Musk kind of just got weird—kind of grumpy—and ended their friendship.
I like that. That is a great way for Sam Harris to call himself a genius.
—is to call himself Tesla. But it is also interesting that, in the book, I had already made this comparison between Edison and Elon Musk—both in the sense of the style of invention they do, their talent for publicity, but also the ego, frankly, that has made them want to play the public role of an inventor.
And I think that’s where the bet story really comes from. Neither of them likes to be beaten or humiliated. They were both schemers—not ivory tower scientists happy to do their own thing and let the chips fall where they may. They both want to be out there in the world selling themselves. And so that echo was very pleasing.
Yeah. And we’ll talk more about Musk at the end, I think—or toward the end of this conversation.
But Edison also was—he really did work long hours, but he also did what Benjamin Franklin called “visible industry.” Like, he made sure you knew. How did you know Edison worked 24 hours a day? Because he told you every time he saw you, or he had people in the press who were either sycophants or on his payroll or whatever, who were telling people.
It’s not clear that he ever said that creativity or genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, but that captured the image that he was pushing.
Oh yeah. I mean, I’ve got actually—I think more respect for Edison as a businessman and as a marketer than I had when I came in. But you’re right, because everyone wanted the myth to be that they were kind of—you know, the easiest mark is somebody who wants to believe what you’re selling them.
And everybody wanted to believe that he was this American Prometheus. You know, he was stealing fire from the gods. And this is what I mean—to come back to nationalism again. This was a time in which America was the future. Europe was kind of classy, but it was old and hidebound and dying. And America was the new continent of steel and electricity and the railroad and these big barons. And Edison fit that image that America had of itself at that time. So he slotted himself in very neatly. There was a pre-made genius myth for him as an American genius.
Right. And if I’m remembering, there was a fantastic series of kids books called Childhood of Famous Americans.
All right.
And it was the same story told over and over again, but they would change the names and places. And there was one of Edison, and part of his myth is that at some point he was working as a baggage boy on a railroad or something, and he was missing his train, and he gets pulled in by his ears—which caused hearing loss. So he became a great telegraph operator, and his kids were nicknamed Dot and Dash.
But a lot of it came from: he was a small kid from nowhere who had bad hearing because of this industrial accident, and then he becomes the greatest inventor of all time.
And he gets rewritten as well as “Tom” Edison—young Tom Edison, like Tom Sawyer—rather than his actual first name, which was Alva. And that again just speaks to the kind of—
The country hasn’t been invented yet that’s going to promote an “Alva” as their great inventor. Yeah. And there’s a famous movie called Young Tom Edison with, like, Jimmy Stewart or somebody playing him. So this gets done again and again.
But now let’s bring it back to the evil effects of the British on public discourse, and let’s talk about Francis Galton. Because what is interesting—you have the geniuses themselves who become public either because somebody writes about them or they’re creating their own myth.
But then you have somebody like Francis Galton, who helped kind of quantify—or tried to quantify—what genius meant, and also why it’s hereditary and why it persists in certain types of people but not others.
Explain who Francis Galton is.
He was a really brilliant dilettante—from the time when you could just skip around and come up with lots of different things. He tried to create a beauty map of the British Isles and work out where the women were hottest. I mean, very much actually the precursor of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook in that respect.
But was he a lifelong bachelor? He definitely was childless, right?
He married, yes, but I can’t detect any real enthusiasm for women—or, indeed, any other people at all.
Did he marry—did he fight? Like, he was like, “The Orkney Islands have the hottest babes, so I’m going there,” or something?
No, I think it was—I think it was an arranged marriage. There’s a bit in his memoir of his essentially like gap year, where he goes to Africa. One of the chieftains offers him a woman as a “temporary wife,” and he declines because she’s covered in— that orange pigment, and he doesn’t want to get it on his white linen suit.
And it’s just the sort of most Englishman-abroad kind of colonial power.
That’s pretty amazing.You have a lot to be ashamed of.
OK, thank you. I’ll take that one actually.
He was also the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He came from this very storied family in the 19th century, and he therefore was familiar with the idea of evolution by natural selection. You know, this was the idea that survival of the fittest—that people passed down something that now we think of in terms of genes. They didn’t have that kind of biological basis to it initially.
But he was very interested to think, well, hang on a minute—you can breed dogs in all these different ways. You can breed cattle. Maybe we could breed humans.
And this is what I mean about him not showing really any kind of…
It just doesn’t make sense…
Right. Him not showing any kind of fellow feeling for other humans. It was like, “Where could this possibly go wrong? I’m sure this won’t have any bad consequences whatsoever.”
And of course, it did, right? Because he coined the term eugenics, which is from “good birth,” essentially, and then dysgenics—which you hear a bit about today.
He wrote this book called Hereditary Genius, in which he tried to work out how frequently genius and high achievement occurred in the population and how it was passed down. And people were kind of slagging it off from the very beginning.
There’s a great dunk of it from a Victorian writer at the time—because he works out that there’s a whole family of judges, and he essentially posits the existence of a kind of hereditary judginess. And someone else calls them a “snug little galaxy of jobbers,” which I think is right. Just the idea that actually, if you’re a judge and your nephew wants to be a judge, then there may be other ways by which that happens rather than pure genetic inheritance.
But that’s a very influential book among a whole generation of statisticians, because he was a brilliant statistician. And they were also heavily influenced by eugenics.
Can I ask was he actually a brilliant statistician, or was he just really novel in what he applied statistics to? Like, he measured a lot of stuff and then said, “OK, well, it means this,” but. I mean, the question is—
—have concepts like standard deviation, correlation, things like that—they come from his thinking and his work. So he’s there right at the birth of this discipline as an academic one. So I think you can say that he was brilliant.
And to go back to the idea of, like, do individuals create inventions or do larger forces produce them—is he, as England is moving out—or as the modern world, certainly Europe, is moving out—of kind of inherited aristocracy, he provides a rationale for why the ruling class deserves to be.
And this is more of a Marxist kind of interpretation, but it’s that Victorian England had to produce Francis Galton, because otherwise people would be like, “Why am I listening to these people simply because they, when I was born, had more money than me?”
Yeah, I think that’s very true. And also, he provides an excellent justification for imperialism, which was also a great enthusiasm of England at the end of the 19th—
He didn’t create it. But then provides a justification for what’s happening anyway. Which, yeah, in a lot of social theory—that probably, well, now that I’m thinking about it, might be a better interpretation of a lot of social theory—that it’s not leading where society goes, but it’s rather kind of explaining why we’re doing what we’re already doing.
Yeah, I think you can say there was a kind of Francis Galton–shaped hole in the discourse, and he popped into it quite neatly to say, “Europeans are of better racial stock than Africans,” right? And that was obviously something that white Europeans were very keen to hear at the end of the 19th century.
Well, some of them, right? Because it really took a couple more generations to figure out, “OK, well, which…who are the Europeans who are actually European, as opposed to Africa due north?”
I mean, by the end of the 19th century, you had people who were like, “Well, the Nordics and the Alpines are OK, but these Mediterraneans, like, nah—they’re not really…”
Well, that’s where we have to flick it over to the Americans really taking up the mantle on that. Because they just went, “Hang on a minute. Polish people aren’t quite European. Italian people aren’t quite European. Irish people aren’t quite European. We mean the Nordics, right?”
And that’s how our racial laws are going to say that the true descendants of the ancient Greeks, bizarrely. I don’t know why the ancient Greeks got away scot-free, despite being from Southern Europe, as being very intelligent.
If they were so good, they wouldn’t have gone away. I mean, this is what I just—I don’t understand.
But yeah, you’re right. He just becomes a very influential figure in what then develops into eugenics and race science. His name has recently been taken off a lot of buildings at University College London. And it’s one of those ones where I think I’m ok with it. You know, I think there are lots of cases for whether—- went too far…
Am I remembering correctly—part of his research method was measuring the column inches or the number of mentions in encyclopedias of famous people to kind of—
He did obituaries, yeah. And then Havelock Ellis, who was a sexologist, does another book in which he basically gets out a ruler.
And this is the problem that always happens with these people—they get completely stuffed by Shakespeare, about whom we know very little, and Jane Austen, who lived a very quiet, boring, blameless life in a parsonage. So the biographical idea that you just—you have a lot of biographical detail and you get written about a lot—completely falters. And then they just end up fudging these supposedly scientific lists.
Which is the methodology that Charles Murray used in his book Human Accomplishment, where he looked at reference works and measured column inches. Which I think probably calls more for a Freudian interpretation rather than a mathematical interpretation of what’s going on.
Right. I think you can say it’s all interesting data, but it’s not objective scientific data. Because you can measure how someone’s reputation has changed over time, but you can’t say there’s a kind of version of just desserts where the most intelligent people get the most column inches.
I think our own media at the moment would heavily debunk that idea.
Talk about eugenics briefly, because we’re also—and this is in the Muskosphere and Peter Thielosphere and stuff like that—where people are talking about eugenics. It’s one thing if you’re saying the state is running things and saying, “You can mate with these people but not those people,” and things like that.
You know, when you are going to Burning Man or you’re at the Bohemian Grove and it’s a voluntary association, we all are eugenicists. We all practice some form of “good birth,” where we choose these people rather than those people.
Is there a way to disentangle eugenics from its kind of history? Is there a eugenics which does not immediately—or quickly—devolve into racial sorting and some kind of horrific cataclysm of human suffering?
In practice, I think, no.
I think in theory, you’re right—it doesn’t have to go in those directions. And I think actually—again, I think you’re kind of alluding to this—most people, when you drill down to it, are softly eugenicists themselves.
Most people: A, they choose their partner because they think their partner is attractive and smart and would be a good father or mother—which is itself kind of eugenics. The second thing is that most people are broadly supportive of women having abortions of babies with severe and life-limiting illnesses—even those like Down syndrome that aren’t necessarily fatal.
So, lots of people think that looking after a disabled kid would be really hard, and people should have the choice to opt out of that.
I have this argument with one of my friends, who has written brilliant books about eugenics. And I said, “But that is eugenic.” And you just don’t want to call it eugenics because, to you, eugenicism is bad. But you support this.
And I think that’s what I mean about in practice, I think there are things that people do agree with that you could describe as eugenic. But in any kind of organized movement, it is so unbelievably tainted by what happened in California in the ’30s—huge amounts of sterilizations of the quote-unquote “feeble-minded”— by what had happened under the Nazis, that no reputable scientist would touch it with a 10-foot bargepole.
And I don’t really see the need to rehabilitate it in these individual cases.
Do you see any—I realize it’s a little bit off topic—but we are now, because there is a demographic collapse happening. It’s women’s fault. Women are having fewer children now that they have more job opportunities.
Right, because they’re grasshoppers, and they reproduce by themselves. Yeah, it’s women’s fault, yeah.
But throughout the West—certainly in the U.S., but then especially in those old parts of Europe that maybe really aren’t European, places like Hungary—there’s a big push for natalism. The state needs to pump up the volume of kids being born. And countries like Singapore spend millions—or billions—of dollars a year trying to do that.
Is that a form of eugenics as well? Should we be concerned, from a history-of-eugenics point of view, about what happens when the state starts to say, “You need to be having more kids”?
I think the main contradiction to that is that we don’t have any evidence that it works. Stalin had a medal that was like—if you had 10 kids, you got a medal.
Yeah, I think it was six or something, but yeah.
I mean, to me, what I consider to be a lot of children. And there have been regimes through history that have tried to—currently, Viktor Orbán in Hungary said very explicitly, “I don’t want more immigrants. I want more Hungarians.” And he has put in tax breaks for people who have more than three children, reductions on the people carrier, you know.
But with negligible effects, from what I can see. Unless you’re running a really brutally directive society like China, where you can dictate to people how many kids they have—
And that it was more about having fewer.
But now it’s like, “Please, please, can you—people—start having children again? We’ve realized this is a demographic problem.” And I think that will be harder to reverse than the previous one-child policy.
That’s the thing that’s interesting. And I think actually—oh, I’ve forgotten her name, the brilliant researcher Alice—and I’ve just talked to Ross Douthat about this at The New York Times—that actually it’s not even just the West. Quite conservative societies in North Africa are also seeing this reduction in birth rates.
No, it tracks perfectly with the proxy that I’ve seen brooded about a lot is the number of years of education women have on average. As that increases, fertility rates decline—always and everywhere.
And it’s that the world has become more modern, meaning that women have more opportunity and more equality and more education. I know Mexican women in Mexico have more kids than they do in America. They cross the border, and they have fewer kids. And that’s not even that big a difference.
But everywhere, yeah—it’s a global phenomenon. And I think it contributes as a sign of progress, actually. Because it means more people, I think, are making more choices.
I think it’s a sign of progress. I think it’s very hard to square with our current gerontocracies in terms of our political systems. I mean, that’s the problem. In Britain having fewer working-age people to support more older people is a problem, when those older people are on unsustainably high pensions and earlier retirement…
You know, I have a political ideology of limited government and a basic social safety welfare net that I would love to sell to you right now. The problem isn’t that people are getting older; it’s that we have unsustainable entitlement programs that we can thank Bismarck for.
Oh, right. OK. Yeah, OK—so we’ve put, so far, the villains of today’s podcast as the English and Otto von Bismarck. OK, good to have the enemies list updated.
Come on, surely let’s argue about the Beatles now, Nick. You’ve been holding out on me.
Yeah, well, before we get to them, I want to talk about William Shockley, who is somebody that I think a fair number of my audience will remember. He encapsulates something perfect—partly because he is related, he’s a kind of semi-direct descendant intellectually of Galton. But he is also fantastic because he brings us closer to Silicon Valley.
William Shockley won a Nobel Prize for his role—contested as it may be—in developing the transistor. And then he became a—you know, he took that—
He was a massive prick. And everybody left his firm, and they went on to found Silicon Valley. That’s the short way.
That’s right. On the business end, he had this great creation, or he was part of a great invention, and then he was such a terrible manager that everybody who worked for him—who were incredibly talented—were like, “Fuck it, we’re going to start our own company.” And that became modern Silicon Valley.
And then he spent the rest of his life, “electronics, who cares, I want to talk about racial differences that are quantifiable.” And he is the genius, in a way, who precedes many other figures that we’ll talk about, but where he was great at one thing, and then spent most of his time talking about stuff—that is just crazy pants—and it takes away from his luster as a great inventor.
Yeah, I was just rereading the interview that he did with Playboy. It was one of those kind of great heyday-of-Playboy, nine-billion-page interviews. And it’s just—it’s really sad to see somebody who obviously had a great scientific brain, but they’ve just picked up a load of goo, basically.
Like, for example, he didn’t—you know, the interviewer talks to him about his decision to donate to the so-called Genius Sperm Bank, which is a kind of cursed idea from the start. But he has no idea that men’s sperm degrades with age and that at 70, the old swimmers might not be in the best condition. And he just completely hasn’t looked into that.
And it’s a kind of sad version of someone who obviously had a great and flexible intellect in their youth, and they’ve just kind of hardened. And I don’t know about you, but when I was reading that, it felt like one of those kind of internet–social media–era midlife crises ahead of its time.
I’m sure the obvious example is Naomi Klein’s book about Naomi Wolf, a great feminist scholar, gets caught out and then drifts into the kind of QAnon sphere
Wolf found out on—was it the BBC?
Live on radio. She basically had a book that was about gay men. And she said that there were a number of them who were executed for sodomy. And it turned out that the phrase that had been written was “death recorded.” And that didn’t mean they’d been executed. That meant that they’d had a death sentence and actually most of them had ended up commuted or whatever.
But it was just this very embarrassing thing that dented her credibility in the liberal sphere. So she went over to the other side.
And here is—I’m going to make—this is an act of genius that I almost certainly won’t pull off, because I’m not a genius. But that moment where she is live talking to the interviewer who points that out to her, and she’s like, “Oh… oh.”
I mean, you just see something change. It’s almost like having a stroke. It’s very similar to the moment—and I believe you mention this in the book—the Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles, Get Back, when the song “Get Back” comes into recognizable form. Where the Fab Four are noodling around, and then suddenly you hear this classic song come into being.
Yeah, it’s a live-action shot of somebody who basically—and I think this is exactly what happened to Shockley. Shockley won his Nobel Prize, the career stalled, he couldn’t understand what happened to it. He made, I think, one idle comment about IQ and everyone screamed at him.
And he did exactly what happens to lots of people now in that situation, where he felt like that was unfair and unjust, and so he kind of did it harder. And he became a provocateur, and he got into this mindset of, “The more that I’m owning the libs, the righter I must be.”
And I think you just—you see that. I still think you see that now, and I understand it psychologically.
Yeah, like you say, “I’m this thing that you know is horrible, and it’s like I’m going to be your worst nightmare version.”
And in the point about Shockley—and this is, I mean, a credit to the book and to your work—is that Shockley was not— here was an ongoing study of IQ and super-smart kids in California that he did not make the cut for.
So you have a guy who becomes obsessed with IQ as this thing that is free-floating and independent from all sorts of influences. And you have to—I mean, anybody reading that in the contemporary world would say, “Oh, he became obsessed with IQ because he was a genius, but he was not ratified as a genius in this grammar school or high school study going on in California.”
I found that very telling. Yeah, that’s Lewis Terman’s Genetic Studies of the Gifted, and the cutoff point was either 140 or 135 on this particular IQ score. And he claims that his mother got an IQ score of 150, but he was below it.
And actually, there was one other Nobel Prize winner, Luis Alvarez, who also didn’t make the cut. And the really sad thing is, in that Playboy interview, he says, “Well, you know, I think probably my IQ has gone up a bit since then,” which isn’t really how it works between being a school kid and being 70, right?
But obviously—you can—yeah, I think you’re exactly right. When I read that, I thought, oh, there’s the chip on the shoulder. That actually, he’s had all the success—what more success could you want than having a Nobel Prize if you’re in the sciences? But somehow, there’s some little bit of him that still feels he’s not enough.
And actually, if he clings to this idea of superiority through IQ—racial superiority through IQ—that rubs a little bit of salve on that chip.
What goes into people who—and I want to get to the Beatles, because I can talk about The Beatles endlessly. And I met Paul McCartney once—
Oh, wow!
Yeah, as a college kid. So it was quite exciting, and it led to one of the reasons that I no longer like The Beatles so much.
Oh, ok?
So that’s a good tease, right?
But to focus on Shockley a little bit—what goes on where you are a genius in this field or this set of fields—manufacturing, science, invention, electricity—and then you say, “Well, fuck it. What I really want to talk about is race and IQ”?
You mentioned, like, his career seemed to stall because nobody—literally nobody—wanted to work with him. They were like, “I’m leaving. You cannot lock me in this factory anymore. I’m just going.”
But how does that happen? Because this is part of what the book is about. We’re in a golden age now where if you are really good at making money on Wall Street, or if you are really good at inventing an electric car, if you are really good at making pop music, we really want to hear your thoughts about all of these other fields that you know absolutely nothing fucking about.
I know. It’s strange, isn’t it?
I think, yeah, that does seem to me the Shockley story. There is a heavy suggestion that he kind of piggybacked on the precise version of the transistor that won the Nobel Prize—it was really other people’s work—and that people in the lab got tired of him being a kind of credit hog.
And then he started getting into applying psychometric testing to his employees, which is always a red flag, I would say.
If I may—I’ve never had to take a psychometric job test, or one that presented itself as such, but my father worked for a shipping company and he used to tell this story that I found very funny.
It was called Sea-Land, and it kind of popularized containerized shipping in the postwar era. But it was founded by a guy named Malcolm McLean, who was an illiterate son of sharecroppers in North Carolina.
And then, at a certain point, when the company got big enough, they were like, “OK, you’ve got to start taking business seriously.” And they had all of the employees take kind of basic IQ tests to see if they were Sea-Land–worthy people.
And Malcolm McLean failed it—because he was basically illiterate, and he was not functioning at the higher level. But, you know—so you had this moment in the heyday of scientific management, where a guy who revolutionized shipping would not be hired at his own company because he was kind of retarded.
Wow, that’s wild.
Yeah, so I always—
It doesn’t surprise me, because I think that, you know, you would always want to have a higher IQ than not. But I think people overrate that—when you’re getting way above the average—how important it is versus personality traits like conscientiousness, openness to experience, whatever it might be.
So I think I’m entirely unsurprised by that, but your question kind of speaks to one of the things I talk about in the book, which is this idea of galaxy brainlessness. Which is the idea that, “I’m a smart person, all my opinions are smart.” And I think it’s just demonstrably not true.
And the other thing is—I think it’s really sad for the geniuses themselves. Because you look at someone like Shockley, and he has his success because his type of intelligence and his breakthroughs interact with a particularly fertile moment in the history of Silicon Valley, right? He had the right brain for the right time. And what often happens to people is that that lasts for a while, and then it goes away.
And that is a really traumatic process for them—particularly if they’ve become kind of high on their own supply, and they believe that they’re a superior sort of person. You know, “Why—I’m pressing the gas pedal and the car’s not moving forward anymore,” and they can’t understand it. And that does often, I think, lead people to kind of bitterness and resentment rather than a kind of appreciation of, “Most people don’t get one hot streak. Maybe I won’t get two, but the one I had was pretty good.”
So this is a good segue to talk about The Beatles and the music or creativity streaks where either you’re hot, and then suddenly you’re not.
And I guess part of—we have been, I don’t know, and I’m assuming broad social trends in Britain are similar to America—but certainly over the past 30 or 40 years, we have been pushing galaxy brain ideas on schoolchildren and things like that. You know, the idea that you have a domain-specific genius or intelligence doesn’t seem to be in favor.
We talk about general intelligence, and it’s kind of like if you’re good at one thing, you’re going to be good at everything. So—I mean, we’re kind of reaping that whirlwind. I’m not even sure I’m using that term properly, but—because people like Elon Musk are told when they’re a kid, “Well, you are really smart. You do great on standardized tests, so everything you say—you get an A in every subject.” So like, why wouldn’t you start talking about fertility or something like that?
So let’s talk about the Beatles a bit. How did The Beatles—I mean, it’s fascinating, you know, Shakespeare and The Beatles are like the two great British exports, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And I really appreciate your focus on the way that all of this stuff plays into national myth-making and things like that. When you talk to French or German people, they’re like, “Yeah, Shakespeare’s pretty good, but he’s not great.”
English-speaking people—and Americans, I think, probably love Shakespeare more than English people—because we have spent, you know, a couple hundred years trying to be like, “No, Melville—he’s as good, and Walt Whitman.”
During graduate school, I studied American literature, and it was fascinating—right around the time that the Berlin Wall came down and then the Soviet Union collapsed. And suddenly, Americanists who had been spending 50 years searching for the American Shakespeare were finally like, “Hey, you know what? We don’t actually have to worry. Britain is now a minor literature because America is—our literature matters because we’re the world power. We don’t have anything to apologize for on some level.”
But roundabout way of getting to the Beatles—like, you particularly talk about how, within the Beatles mythology, John is seen as the kind of genius, and Paul is—you know, he’s like the job, right? He’s just a hard worker. What goes into that, and why do you pick Paul over John?
Well, for a start, I say this slightly incendiary line, which is: I think in terms of their long-term reputation, we’re very lucky that it’s Paul who’s made it to 80, and John is now a hallowed memory.
Because I think if John were still around, he’d be an extremely grumpy reactionary—probably doing quite bad tweets.
That would be glorious, though.
Whereas Paul McCartney has grown into that kind of father-of-the-nation role, and the younger musicians can make pilgrimage to him.
Oh, and it’s interesting—I’m sorry to interrupt—but I know George Harrison, who’s also important in this kind of holy trinity. And you realize, as age goes on, that Ringo is the only Beatle really worth caring about in the long run. But—
Ringo is lovely in Get Back, right? One of my friends described him as being like this sort of lovely Labrador. He’s actually like a sort of emotional support animal—because he’s there, just exuding Ringo energy. He calms everything down because people don’t want to have a row in front of Ringo. And they don’t want to upset Ringo.
And actually, that is an underrated skill in the high crucible of tempestuous creative motion.
Well, but George—towards the end of his life, by the ’90s—he was grumpy. When Oasis openly paid a compliment to him by talking about “Wonderwall,” which is a reference to his first—or near first—solo album, he was like, “Oasis sucks.” He hated everybody younger than him. He was grouchy and grumpy.
I mean, Oasis’s reputation has not stood the test of time, has it, as a…
No, I don’t think so. They were—
They had a lot of concerts. I think that might be an interesting one to see when people have their own music.
Well, and they have their own—that’s a variation, right, on the genius theme. The brother who writes everything is really the genius. I mean, they’re doing the version of The Kinks with Ray Davies and Dave—
Right. And two people who hate each other because they’ve both got something the other hasn’t, right? Liam hates Noel for being able to write songs. And Noel hates Liam for being the charismatic frontman.
Anyway, but there’s a similar version of that with John and Paul, where John is cast in the role of being the rock bad boy. And that’s what people kind of want at the time from their singers. Whereas Paul is seen as kind of domestic and managerial and a bit of a boring admin guy.
And his songs focus on mundane stuff, whereas John is writing much more surreal and whimsical stuff—and that’s seen as more creative.
So you see by the end of the breakup that they’ve been put into those two categories, and that John has got the much more flattering one. But I don’t think it would necessarily—
—from a kind of romantic demonic—you know, like the Romantics loving Satan. John is that kind of rock creative genius.
Yeah, exactly. Untamable, weird, odd. You know, him and Yoko were kind of wandering around filming their bottoms and all that kind of stuff. He’s performing a much more obvious genius role.
Whereas Paul McCartney has gone to live on a Scottish island, and send his kids to a public school, and wanting to be, quote, “as normal,” right? Trying to live as normal a life as a rock star could live.
And therefore—one of the things—I was just talking to a playwright last week about the book. And I said, the thing is, people would rate you as more talented if you were just weirder. You’re too normal. You should try and cultivate an aura of eccentricity, because people would misread it as brilliance.
I want to get to two other points before we stop talking. And I guess the first is: it’s called The Genius Myth. Part of it—I can hear people being like, “Oh, you’re just putting down anybody who accomplishes things. You are cutting down the tall poppy or whatever.”
The Canadian band Rush has a great song called “The Trees,” which is about how all the maple trees are trying to keep this oak from growing taller than them. And, you know, they were in an Ayn Rand phase when they produced that.
The maple leaf must be the regular Canadian, and they just don’t want, you know, Rush to become too big.
But it’s about the myth, you know. How did you become interested in not the things that people do that are interesting, but in the way that it ends up being talked about?
I think people in groups are completely fascinating. Because—I don’t know about you—but I find it hard enough to understand individual people. The fact that they think in completely different ways to me. And just—things that to me are completely obvious, they just disagree with me on.
And it’s kind of life’s project to be like, “Oh—other people’s brains are different.”
But then you add in the complexity of them being in crowds, and it becomes completely impossible to understand why people do the things that they do.
So lots and lots of my writing—about political movements, about social change—focuses on exactly those kinds of weird emergent properties of people in groups. And that’s what interested me about this: you don’t get to declare yourself a genius. You can try, right? Lots of people have. And quite a lot of them have been cruelly rebuffed.
But genius is created by a crowd looking at you and adoring you and hailing you. And therefore, the interesting question is not just to talk about the properties of the people who are being adored, but the properties of the crowd.
So I’m always really interested in celebrity—-
Yeah, you talk about Elon Musk in the beginning of the book as an argument about what society values, but also what we’re willing to tolerate because it’s this whole pact. How did we get to a point where we’re going to say—and this is an older example—but it’s like, “Well, Roman Polanski deserves to fuck any child that he wants because he made Chinatown.”
I mean, generally, that is the way that people used to talk about it. They used to say that it was—
That’s how Bernard-Henri Lévy, the great human rights advocate, said it when Polanski was arrested in Switzerland and was going to be deported to the U.S.
Yeah, or like, “It’s not rape rape,” or, you know, all these kind of weaselly things. Or, “It was Philistines”—that’s what one French actress said: “You’re Philistine,” and then this campaign of smearing against him.
And you’re like, I’m going to stay at this wild position that I don’t think it’s good to drug and sexually assault teenagers. Just call me a prude, if you will.
And to confess to that. He pled guilty and then he fled because he was worried that the plea bargain that was in place might not come through on the terms that he wanted.
To talk about the kind of people who helped create the myth—you have a great chapter, and I’m misreading the title because I don’t have it, but it’s about the widow of the genius. You talk about people like Orwell’s wife, but I’m especially interested in talking about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, who was an artist—plausibly of equal talent, potentially—but she kind of consciously, ultimately played a role of saying, “OK, I’m going to take a break, and I’m going to kind of build up his myth.”
Can you talk a little bit about that? And also, one of the things that I find fascinating—this is about your work in general—but it’s particularly strong in this book— the gender dimension to all of this. Because geniuses—when you think of a genius, you think of a boy genius. You don’t think of a girl genius.
Oh, the Romantics were quite explicit about this. They thought genius was a male property, but it was a man who had a kind of feminine spirit within him. You know, this was the idea of a poet.
But they’re not girls.
No. It was fae, sort of feminine men—but never butch ladies. No, that was not the same at all. So those roots of the gendering of genius are really, really deep. And I think there’s pretty good research that says we’re more likely to describe boys as brilliant. That is just an adjective that we apply more readily to men than to women.
But is that something relatively recent? And then it becomes hard because in terms of, if we’re talking about harder-core patriarchal structures…I had a conversation with Richard Dawkins once where he was talking about various things, and I was just like, “Yeah, it’s really weird to me that, like, girls—you look back in human history and girls just couldn’t pole vault until about 1985. Is that because of biology?”
I grew up in a world, in high school, where girls were not allowed to participate in the pole vault because they couldn’t do it. Evolution did not allow them to have the upper body strength to pole vault.
How many times do you recognize things that are treated as facts of nature are obviously social constructions and change? And I’m not denying differences between men and women—
Oh sure. No, I’m sure women are worse at pole vaulting, right?
They do not do as well.
It’s definitely sex-linked.
What I’m getting at is the question of girl and boy geniuses—because we now live in an age where, you know, the equality of sex is certainly under the law. And even in places where testing is used, you know, girls do better in high school, girls get into college more often, they graduate college more often.
Are we going to look forward to a future of girl geniuses that are as insufferable as the boy ones?
Well, that’s the final dream of feminism, isn’t it? To be as insufferable as men.
Yeah, I don’t know—because I think that’s a really interesting question. There are undoubtedly women who have really high achievement in ways that they were previously blocked out of. But there’s still an open question about whether or not there are sex differences in the kind of selfishness and ambition that’s required to be like a William Shockley.
Actually—are these traits that we really want to encourage in our children? The kinds of things that make you the Nobel-winning scientist?
Or—that’s also an interesting question about the fact that science has changed so much. There’s very little low-hanging fruit that one person can now do. Most great science projects now are deeply collaborative—often across countries.
But it’s also about who the crowd wants to hold up as the genius. And I still think that both men and women are more reluctant to idolize women.
So I don’t think it necessarily will level out, actually. Because again, it’s not an objective awarding of a quality—it’s not something awarded on merit. It’s about why you are celebrating someone—because of what it says about you, or what it says about the qualities you want to stress.
So, you know, we definitely do have more women who are celebrated now.
And also—the other thing I would say about, to go back to Lee Krasner—my editor made a very good note in that chapter which I incorporated. She has been the benefit of a explicitly feminist genius myth. Which is that feminist historians love the idea of finding overlooked women and lifting them up and celebrating them.
You see that with Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance painter. You see it with Krasner. And so there are a new set of genius myths, which are sometimes in themselves quite reductive—the poor, downtrodden woman who never got her flowers during her life, and now we’re here, as the historical court of appeal, to make that right.
So yeah, there will be some women who benefit from that. But I would doubt that it will level out anytime soon.
What kind of pushback do you face when you bring up the social context of the creation of things like genius?
Part of what your book is that there’s a line or chapter like, “There really is no lightbulb moment.” That Edison, tried a million different things, and all these people, etc.
But you—for you—you certainly burst into a bigger view when, it was in 2018, when you had that great interview with Jordan Peterson.
Yeah, what I like to do is confuse people by getting attacked from a completely different political tendency every couple of years and just switching it up.
So, you know, there are people who’ve spent the last couple of years thinking that I’m this anti-woke conservative. And now I’m going to go through a phase where they think—I think you’re right. The people who don’t read the book will think this is some misguided egalitarian feminist nonsense that says, “Everybody can be Monet. Everybody can be Einstein. Everybody can be Picasso,” or whatever it might be.
So yeah, I think that there will be misreadings like that. You can only write the book. You can’t force people to read it, tragically.
It’s a better world where authors cannot force people to read—
I was going to say I couldn’t read his book, but yeah.
Well, he could get you to hold it up, right? And I guess Gaddafi did that too, right? He had his little Green Book—that’s all over. I’m sure it’s still in the basements of the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi or whatever.
But, you know, with that Jordan Peterson interview—what is amazing, like, when it came out, I watched it, and I was like, “OK, this is really—it’s just great journalism.”
I mean, to your credit—what was funny to me, and more clear on a second viewing—is just that you’re asking basic questions. And he is a male genius, and he uses ratiocination, he is incredibly learned—but it’s like he’s about to cry half the time. He is so emotional.
Do you think we’ve entered into a period where men—the kind of male recourse to anger—is now being recognized less as, you know, genius and more as a failure to cope with what’s going on in the circumstance?
I hope that’s true, because I know what you mean—particularly the kind of plethora of those very cruel videos of people having public meltdowns. I think you often see men melting down in public in a way that suggests they’ve just never learned to process and manage feelings of humiliation or denial, in a way that’s quite unhealthy. And I think everybody would probably benefit from working a bit harder on that.
But I’m pleased that you picked that up, because I do think it was very funny—because, you know, that was explicitly set up, that interview with Peterson—
This was like—if I may make an analogy—this is like when Playboy sent a Black interviewer to General William Shockley. Sending GQ—sending a woman—to interview Jordan Peterson.
For their Men of the Year issue. And that’s the thing that’s very funny, because everybody wanted it to be me—this kind of emotional little lady—and him to be the Great Man of Science loftily delivering his insights.
But as you say, I’m there being quite sarcastic, because that’s how I brawl. And he’s the one who’s kind of tearing up. It was actually very gender-nonconforming in that sense. So credit to everyone involved there.
He fits into this category. He obviously toiled in the groves in the academy for a long time and had developed a certain kind of expertise and a certain level of reputation. And then when he broke big, now he’s giving people tips on how to tie their tie and things like that.
Yeah. I was talking to someone who knew him, actually, in Toronto earlier this week. And they said, you know, he was—he was this really great. Like, the research was really good, and the teaching was really good, and his students really liked him.
Everybody who knows him from that period in his life is like, “Oh, you were a really great psychology professor, but you are probably not psychologically suited to be an internet commentator.”
Some people just have hides of inch-thick leather and that sort of thing bounces off of them. But clearly he’s somebody who really takes criticism to heart, and it affects him quite deeply. And he’s really not cut out for sprawling with people on the internet.
Can I ask before—and I promise we’ll get to Musk and then I’ll let you get on with your day, or tea, or whatever you people are doing in England now—curtsying—
—my crumpets
—as you drive by…
In your previous book Difficult Women, which is excellent—I’m a big fan of kind of second-wave feminism, which now gets read out of context. You read women like Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, and they’re read out of context.
Obviously, she shouldn’t have shot Andy Warhol. She should have shot Norman Mailer if she understood her own theory. That would’ve been great.
But what I’m saying is, second-wave feminism from the late ’60s and early ’70s often gets read in a void. So it just seems like these shrieking harpies who are talking about castrating men, etc., and it’s always taken out of context. Like, yeah, they were denied entry into universities or jobs, etc.
One of the figures you’ve talked about a fair amount is Germaine Greer.
Talking about Norman Mailer—I mean, if you ever watch the live debate, she just rocks. She throws her fox fur stole over her shoulder and starts talking about building cathedrals in this über-academic way. I mean, it’s… oh, I love it.
Yeah. No—I mean, you could power all the energy needs of the developing world with the sexual tension…
It is really quite something.
Germaine Greer, does she fall into a problem of—she was hot, she had a moment. Do you think her thought isn’t on a hot streak anymore? It’s kind of a amazing because she helped define, certainly in England, second-wave feminism, and now she seems to be hated by most feminists.
How does genius age?
Oh, I don’t think that’s true in Britain, where she lived most of all—I mean, she’s originally Australian. I think because of the transgender revolt of the last 10 years, she became very unfashionable with the people who came of age at that time. She was seen as being insufficiently inclusive of transgender women.
But I think in Britain, the scales have tipped back toward—whatever you want to call it—sex realism, gender-critical feminism. People are now also rediscovering their love of Germaine Greer’s brutal, radical honesty, I think we might call it.
Personally, my favorite Germaine is not “Why I think naked boys are attractive” Germaine—that was a strange Germaine—nor even the Germaine of The Whole Woman or The Female Eunuch. But her writing on art criticism—she wrote a book about female painters called The Obstacle Race, which I read when I was revising this.
As a scholar I think she’s got another one called something like Kissing the Rod, which is about Restoration poetry. It’s a very Germaine Greer title.
She was an exceptional close reader of texts and paintings. And I wonder, actually, when the outrage about her comparing trans women to spaniels has all died down—we will remember the quality of her thoughts.
In the same way that people now appreciate—you mentioned Valerie Solanas, but I’m thinking more of Andrea Dworkin. Penguin has just reissued all of Andrea Dworkin’s work. Because it’s now been long enough that people have kind of gotten over themselves about her controversies and remembered the interesting contributions that she made.
But this comes exactly to what the whole book is about, which is: all of that depends on a generation of women—my age or below—who want to remember her, who want to keep enshrining her.
This idea of history as a process—you know, we want to keep her memory and what she wrote alive. That’s ultimately where the historical judgment comes from. It’s whether or not the next generation thinks you’re important.
It seems to me that Britain has more—you know, and I use this term with air quotes—”TERFs” than American feminism.
I think America maybe has a lot of… If you want to define it like this—80 percent of America thinks that sex matters and that there is a difference between trans women and women. Right? But those are none of—
Yeah—none of that implies a different legal standing or anything like that.
I have struggled. There’s a tradition of French feminism, which is its own thing, and then Anglo-American feminism. I found it interesting, I guess, that there are very few American feminists who are on a Germaine Greer level—who exist and are talking publicly about this.
Do you have a quick gloss on why it seems like second-wave feminism stuck around longer in England than it did in America?
I think it’s probably because of the trade union movement and the left feminist movement. Whereas in America, things became much more polarized.
And also I think that in America, because abortion dominated the conversation for so long—and continues to dominate it—everybody gets sucked into that. There isn’t a lot of space for other stuff.
Plus, stuff like employment law being so much more federal in America—what are the kind of big…? And again, in America, race has been such a big part of the conversation for so much longer.
I mean, Britain is now a much more diverse country than it was. But in the ’90s, it was still 95 percent white. These are just much more recent questions about whether or not feminism is, quote, “white.”
In 1920, that wasn’t a question in British feminism because everybody was white. Whereas it was a huge deal in America. So I think all of those social factors might account for it.
I was just thinking as you were talking about England being blessedly white even into the 1990s.
Whoa, whoa, whoa—I didn’t say that!
I was going to say—if you’re looking for supplementary material for the eventual paperback edition of this, it would be great to look at Eric Clapton as a genius who then went on to a bit of racial…
Very Shockley. A very Shockley trajectory. Like, “Oh, so you loved ‘Layla’? Would you also like to hear my thoughts on race?” No—just play “Layla” again. That was really great.
And he also has a few thoughts on COVID.
I’m sure John Lennon would have had his few thoughts on COVID, I’m just saying.
Well, yeah. This is where I think John Lydon—or Johnny Rotten—is kind of… he’s a very stable genius, because whatever is dominant thinking, he will be on the other side of it at any given moment in time.
But let’s talk about Musk quickly. He’s not the controlling metaphor of your book, but he is the controlling genius of our moment. Do you think his recent foray into politics—does that tarnish him?
Because I was thinking: there’s a science writer based in Canada named Dan Gardner. He has a fabulous Substack called Past, Present, Future, or something like that. He wrote a lot about Henry Ford. And he was like, “Hey, I want to tell you a story about a carmaker who really kind of blew his reputation by talking about stuff he didn’t really know anything about.”
And it’s about Henry Ford, who was a great genius at mass production and all of this kind of stuff. And then he got bored running a car company, and he’s like, “OK, I’m going to solve World War I.”
And didn’t he become a massive antisemite?
Oh, he was. He is the Bob Dylan of antisemites. I don’t know who’s the ultimate Jew.
He went electric.
Yes, absolutely. And then he also ended up suing people who libeled him for describing him accurately, and then losing status in public court hearings. Because he’s an idiot about all of this kind of stuff.
Where does that story go? Because he is the epitome of galaxy brain. It’s like: he’s good at these things, so every thought he has is good, and we have to put up with him.
You know, he was working for an administration where people want to have more kids and be Christian. We don’t know how many children he has—virtually none of them in a marriage setting. He’s divorced, and increasingly it’s not even clear how many there are or under what circumstances they were born.
That’s one thing people tolerate—because he’s good at making money and making cars. But then this political foray, where he’s going back to Texas—is that the type of thing that destroys his geniusness, or does it remain to be seen?
I mean, I think it does. How I’ve always felt about it is: SpaceX, which is the truly innovative business—if it manages to make reusable rockets work in that way that drives down the cost of space travel, that allows us to become an interplanetary species—I would have thought, in 400 years’ time, we’re not going to be talking about his bad tweets.
But at the current rate, I think he deeply risks falling into that Shockley pattern—of somebody whose juice kind of runs out. Because look at the DOGE as we’re talking, he’s just been giving this round of kind of exit interviews complaining it was a lot harder than he thought it would be.
And you know how he could have found out how hard it would have been? He could have asked me—an idiot—to tell him that. The fact is, governments are harder to run than private businesses, because you can’t have creative destruction. You can’t just let a government fail and someone else move in—people die, people don’t get their Social Security checks.
These are important things. But instead, he trampled through that undergrowth like a huge rhino, insistent that he knew best. And—shock horror—if he’d gone into that with his undoubted skills, but had learned more first, he would have been more successful at it.
Well, from a Reason angle, it was frustrating, because there are people who work at Reason—but also there’s a whole Gulag Archipelago of think tanks—of people who have said, “This is how you cut government spending and waste,” etc.
And, like, there are almost off-the-shelf plans you can bring in as opposed to going in and not succeeding.
Ones that are increasingly picking up traction on the left, right? If you look at the whole abundance agenda—a lot of that is really saying, places like California don’t work because they overregulate.
What’s that phrase of Ezra Klein’s? “Everything bagel liberalism”—where it’s like, “Why don’t we make this housing project also solve racism and wild birds?” So there’s definitely a libertarian critique that people feel government is slow and sclerotic. And a more humble man might have read those things first.
The point with Musk is that—I guess this is part of where geniuses go to destroy themselves—they really don’t think that, as your book argues—and I think it’s completely persuasive—that breakthrough technologies are never the result of one person.
But when you get exalted like that, then you stop looking around for the expertise or the team that will actually help you produce results. Then you’re looking for yes men, or people who will… Your circle becomes—you become Kanye West or something, where nobody around you is going to say no.
Yeah. And I think the really interesting examples of that—Picasso and Einstein are probably our most obvious examples. Most people’s go-to ideas of artistic and scientific genius.
But Einstein never really accepts quantum mechanics. So when he dies, he’s more a celebrity than the kind of person in the field that young physicists look to. And Picasso similarly doesn’t go to pure abstraction—he doesn’t end up in the place of Rothko.
That’s because they had their paradigm shift. They had the moment where they were the perfect brain to meet the moment. And I think you probably see something very similar with Musk.
He had a playbook—which, if you read Character Limit, the book about his takeover of Twitter—you know, he brings in his lieutenants, they lock everybody out of the systems, they fire everyone and rehire that they need. He just had this way that had worked for him in the past.
And he went, “Bring on big balls, I’m going to do that to the government too.” And he didn’t realize that it was not the same environment, and that his one thing that had worked before would now not serve him anymore.
And that, to me, exactly is what you’re saying. It’s a classic genius myth: you think, “I’ve got the answer,” not realizing that different questions have different answers.
Right. Yeah—and to go back to that idea of domain-specific intelligence or expertise: not everything is like everything else.
That was one of the great myths in American capitalism in the mid-20th century that was destroyed—the idea that all businesses, regardless of what you produce, can be managed by a set of professional managers who are trained in management.
And it turns out shipbuilding is very different from oil production, which is different from newspapers, and all of that.
If I may—are there good examples of geniuses who run into the wall that Musk has driven his Tesla into with Dogecoin and everything—who then come back?
Are there Paul McCartneys, whose second truth or last two-thirds of a career are actually as good or as interesting as the first third?
That’s a really good question. And I’ll probably have to give it more thought than I’m able to on the hoof, because—
I’ll tell you what—I can’t think of any examples offhand, but as you’re saying that, I can totally see what a great story that is. And how much people would love that story.
So there probably are examples of it.
I’m thinking of the kid who was the actor in Indiana Jones who then didn’t really do anything for ages and then won the Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once. People love that idea that this is the ultimate comeback story.
So I can see that happening, where someone had been piddling away for a while and then came back with something.
But I don’t know. The best versions, I think, of people are your McCartneys or your Springsteens—or, you know, I went to see the Pixies last week. People who just carry on doing something because they clearly love it, the fans love it, and they enjoy it.
And the Pixies gig was very interesting, because clearly people were there to hear the songs primarily from Surfer Rosa, their 1980s album. And they play those quite happily. Then they play some of their new stuff too.
And I just thought: this is quite a good acknowledgment of: this was the moment we were hottest. We’re not in that moment now. But we don’t hate those people or resent that. We love that it happened. We’re not sad that it didn’t go on forever.
That is fascinating. Yeah, I started my career as a teen magazine and rock music journalist. And there’s nothing worse than bands or artists who hate the work that made them famous. It’s an awful life.
It’s sad, isn’t it? It’s really sad.
It is. And there are people—I’m thinking of someone like Nick Cave or Bob Dylan. They’re very different, but Dylan refused to go away. He goes through cycles where stuff starts to make sense, even if it seems horrible the first time.
And Cave has certainly been growing as an artist. And someone like Madonna—I think she stopped, in a way, but had a fantastic run.
Can I just real quickly do a bit of biography? Because you mention at one point—and I thought this was fascinating in the book—that your father, in the ’50s, took one of these inscrutable-to-Americans O-levels or A-levels, or whatever. I’ve read a ton of Beatles biographies, and they’re always talking about how “I ruined my A-levels,” and I have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s not easy to understand—like SATs.
Yeah, no, of course—which is its own kind of bullshit. But your father did well on a test, and that meant that he got to go to university. What is your background, and how did you get to be where you’re at?
So the test you’re talking about is the Eleven-Plus, which kids took at the age of 11. At the time—this is after… so my parents were both born in 1945—so this is in the aftermath of the Second World War. The idea was, if you came from a working-class family—and any other kind of family—that they were going to try and make higher-level education more accessible to a greater number of people.
But the way to do that was by selecting viability. So you took this test at 11, and if you passed it, you went to a grammar school. If you didn’t, you went to what was called a secondary modern or a technical school. The idea was that you either had an academic education or a vocational one based around going into trades.
Because at 11—come on—the bread is baked, right?
Well, that’s a big… I mean, we mentioned Lewis Terman a long time ago. He also, earlier than that, thought that you could kind of pick future winners very early. And that’s not always possible.
The other thing it did was create—you know, you’ll hear people today will say, “the Eleven-Plus was amazing because I got chances that I wouldn’t otherwise got.” But that’s a kind of survivorship bias, because you don’t hear as much from the people whose lives were ruined by being told at 11 they were not good enough.
But in his case, it meant he was the first in his family to go to university. He went to Aston University in Birmingham to study chemistry. He worked first for Worcester Porcelain—where I grew up, which has its own delightful porcelain—and then for a place that made things you melt steel in—crucibles.
Sorry, I know you’re loving how much of an English stereotype I am, aren’t you?
Yeah.
“It has a delightful bone china—from the Potteries.” But you know, he benefited—definitely—he got lifted up like that.
And on my mum’s side, my granddad, who was Scottish, he was a coal miner. He moved south and took civil service exams as an adult. So he was the engine, he moved from working class to middle class, at that point. My mum then went to the same school I ended up going to, which was a convent school, a Catholic school.
So I came from a really nice, normal middle-class high school. This was in the Midlands in England. I didn’t know anybody who was a journalist. I didn’t know anybody who lived in London. Even Birmingham was quite exciting to me.
So I do have to remind myself every so often: if I could go back and talk to 16-year-old me about what I do and who I know, she would be pretty impressed.
It is kind of fascinating, isn’t it? There’s a version of this in the U.S.—and I think throughout the West, and even much of the developing world—where tests, whether they’re IQ tests or aptitude tests, they’re used in many ways to reinforce the status quo or to naturalize it.
But oftentimes, the goal—even when they were implemented—was not necessarily to do that, but to be more egalitarian and more meritocratic. Intelligence needs to be contextualized, and things like that. You know…
Well, it’s not necessarily a bad impulse, is it?
Because actually, the signature event in my academic career was that I went to Oxford University, and that was determined—
I said…
A little place, yeah, in the Cotswolds.
But that wasn’t determined by a test for English—that was determined by an interview. And you know what? That obviously privileges eloquent bullshitters. The die was cast in my future in podcasting, because that’s exactly what that selects for.
Tests are bad in some ways, but they’re also sort of… they’re the worst thing apart from all the other things. We haven’t yet invented a way of designing education that weeds out bias.
The Eleven-Plus was notoriously problematic because it was easier for middle-class kids to pass it. They had more knowledge. Often just flat-out their parents hired tutors to get them through it.
Now what happens is that there are very few grammar schools left, and the house prices around them are exceptionally high. So you end up with class sorting by who can afford to buy a house in that area.
I mean, that’s… to talk about the abundance agenda. And I always think when I hear about Ezra Klein, I’m like: If you want to read what Ezra Klein is going to write tomorrow, read what Reason was publishing 20 years ago.
But part of it is—when it comes to educational opportunity and whatnot—the idea that, well, there are only 10 universities. So we have to sort to get the right people into that.
It’s like, maybe you create a world where there are many, many different universities—or more schooling opportunities—rather than funneling people through.
In America, there was starting to retreat—not necessarily for good reasons—but there was this birth of gifted and talented programs. And most of the time, it wasn’t just like, “If you hit this level of testing, you’ll be in the gifted and talented program.”
It’s like, “We only have a certain number of slots.” And, well—if the test says you’re gifted and talented, why don’t you expand the program?
But oftentimes, the function of schooling is not to increase opportunity, but to maintain the existing power structure. That’s my idea.
No, I know. And there’s loads of stuff that happens like that.
The Ivy Leagues, which excluded or limited Jewish students in the first half of the 20th century, they did that by saying, “We want to look at well-rounded students.” Or they moved their recruitment pools out of New York City and into the outer boroughs—or whatever it might be.
That’s the only way I think T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound got into Ivy League schools—because they were from Missouri and Idaho. So they benefited from the geographical quota.
But this is one of the big themes of the book: a level of humility about the systems we have and whether or not they are free from bias.
And when the things that look natural and inevitable to us are actually the result of things we can’t see—because, yeah, there are a lot of invisible hands. And actually, sometimes, extremely visible hands, if you care to look for them.
Yeah, the Ivy Leagues now have a different way of keeping Jews off campus, right? So they—you know, it’s more visible.
This is not the first time that America’s had debates about affirmative action. It just used to be that the affirmative action was in favor of WASPs in the 1920s.
Yes, and I’m glad to live in a post-WASP America, for the most part.
Just a final question about your method. Have you ever been called a genius?
Hm. Why?
One of the things that I find remarkable in your work—both the podcasting but then the writing work. I always take this as a sign of an excellent journalist—and I don’t really care about “geniuses” is that you find a topic and then report out on it.
And that way, you don’t have to worry about a hot streak or a cold streak, because the onus isn’t on you to be a genius all the time or to come up with new and novel things to say.
You go out into the world and see what’s happening. That seems to me that’s a very rare model for journalism—but it obviously seems like the best way to do it.
It’s a great relief to just be like, “I am not actually that interesting. What I do is, I go and put myself in interesting places and meet interesting people—and I will tell you about them.”
And like you say, I’m surprised more people don’t do it, because it’s a huge burden off you. If you’re not trying to be the main character in your drama—if you’re content to be the amanuensis at the side—then yeah, it’s a huge weight off your shoulders.
And I think this is what drives a lot of modern journalists kind of mad: if you’re only telling a story in which you’re the protagonist, then you need to keep doing stuff. And actually, just go and talk to other people.
Other people are mad. They say crazy things.
That’s Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his collection The New Journalism, which was about stuff from the ’60s and early ’70s, published in the early ’70s. He said that, “it was amazing. So many weird things were happening in America, and all you had to do was go out and hang out with people.”
He’s seen as someone who’s a genius—he has genius insights and is a stylist—but he says in plain sight:” just go and talk to people who are doing things you think are interesting.” And you are interesting.
It’s also just the most fun. I mean, there’s nothing that makes me happier than being in some random bit of backstreet America, just talking to people whose life experiences are completely different from mine.
And I wish more people got the opportunity to do it, to be honest.
The color that you add to, you know, talking about going to—or witnessing—one of the SpaceX launches or recoveries is brilliant. You know, because it’s out in the world. It’s wonderful.
I have kept you overlong—I apologize for that. Where are the best places people should look for your work?
You can find most of it through my Substack, which is helenlewis.substack.com. And also my longer, more considered work is at The Atlantic, who are very kind in giving me—the thing that I really like about working for them is that they invest in you as a person.
And like you say, reporting is the best and most fun thing to do. And it’s not the easiest thing to do in journalism at the moment. So I give them huge credit for letting me—letting me be my best self.
God, that sounded like therapy.
Sorry—what a hateful note to end on. I’m going to go and have, like, a muffin and a crumpet and be overly British.
Yeah, maybe talk about Princess Diana and how sad it is. Are you up on the royals? Do you like the royals?
Oh, yeah. I know. There was a time during the Prince Harry saga where I was threatening to become The Atlantic‘s royal correspondent, just because I enjoy writing about them. And by God, do Americans love reading about them.
I don’t understand that. And I think Harry was best when he was following in—was it Edward VII or VIII?—when he was doing the Nazi costumes.
I was going to say, “being a Nazi.”
It’s all been downhill for him since then.
Helen Lewis, thank you so much. It was a real delight talking to you. The Genius Myth is a spectacular book. It’s the best thing you’ve written recently—until the next one. So thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
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