The Genius Myth, with Helen Lewis and Armando Iannucci (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti, and I'm joined today by Connor Boyle, head of programming. Connor, what can we expect on today's episode?

Well Mia, today we have two returning guests who, if you've been a long-time listener of Intelligence Squared, you'll have heard many times. Helen Lewis, who hosted lots of episodes on Intelligence Squared before. We're recording this now in Soho Sonic Studios in London and Helen used to host a lot of episodes here in studio and

She's written some brilliant books, obviously Difficult Women, which was a history of feminism in 12 fights, which was a brilliant bestseller. And now she's got her latest book, which is The Genius Myth, which is asking whether the whole concept of genius is warping our perception of society. So, you know, right now there's a bit of a cult following, you might say, around people like Elon Musk. People say he's a genius. But if we go back to Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci,

The Beatles, were these people geniuses? Or is there more to the story that we're leaving out? So really interesting conversation. And she's with Armando Iannucci, who obviously writer of The Thick of It, most recently created the Doctor Strangelove theatre adaption with Steve Coogan, which was brilliant. So a lot to get into today. And I think our audience will enjoy it. Absolutely. Such a fascinating conversation as well. The idea of genius, whether IQ is really a...

a valid metric and all of this really interesting stuff. So, um, and the two are really fantastic in conversation with each other. There'll be a lot of laughs, I'm sure. So let's join the conversation now live at Conway Hall in London. Hello. Uh, first of all, can I apologize for looking like, uh, um, someone who went backpacking 40 years ago and is now returned. Um, I thought either I can, uh, be a bit more formal, but boiled or, uh,

Much sharper, but in the raw. So I've gone for the latter. Given the nature of what we're talking about, you can decide as the evening goes on whether this is just a delightful eccentricity on my part or just plain rude. I'm very excited to... I think we properly met on stage at something like this when you were interviewing me about a year ago. And you managed to... We talked about...

satire and where it's going, you managed to knock some sense out of me to such an extent that we thought we should carry on on the radio. So we do our Strong Message Here podcast on Radio 4 every Thursday morning. A much spicier 30-minute version then goes up on all pod outlets. And I have the pleasure of switching roles, really, and interrogating you. I don't think I'm going to be able to tell an anecdote as brilliant as that one you told about

alan partridge interviewing tony blair and peter mandelson not realizing that alan partridge was a fictional character which still haunts my dreams i think will manderson helps out in the trade deal that's going on i think he thinks that trump is a fictional character and um so those of you i mean you must know who helen you must she's one of the finest funniest most uh

Insightful. Not ubiquitous. Deservedly ubiquitous writers around. I think I first started reading you when you were a contributing editor at the New Statesman. You've moved on to Atlantic. So writing about American as well as British politics. Many documentaries I'm ready for. I

This is her second book. The first is the... For its title alone, deserved the success it got, which was... This is what we do in the podcast, which is I fumble about with bits of paper, which then gets cut out. But I want to get the title absolutely right, because it was called Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. And now we're talking about, not so much a follow-up, but the second book, The Genius Myth, which, spoiler alert...

raises some question marks about the concept of genius. Do you think that genius is an artificial construct, or do you believe in genius, or do you question genius? Well, I'm going to answer that question by... I've been given control of the clicker, which is very exciting to me. I'm going to answer that question by showing you the first slide. OK. Oh, I see. Now...

Where do we begin? For those of you who haven't listened to the podcast, Amanda has made a point of mispronouncing Elon Musk's name in about, I would say, maybe five different ways at this point. He was Ellen. He was Eileen. Eileen. Eileen. Elon Musk. Elon Musk, which I liked a lot. I actually thought of one the other day, which is Elephant Tusk, I thought, which we'll do next week. If I were not.

But I think he's a really good example. I started writing this book in about 2021, in earnest, when he wasn't quite the beautiful flower of masculinity that you see there in front of you. But he was already showing worrying signs of heading in the direction of today's society.

which is that he had gone from thinking, or maybe he did already think, that he was a kind of special, insightful kind of person, a one in a million talent, and that this was a talent that was transferable online.

across many different industries. Because I think this is the thing that people know him for Tesla and they know him from SpaceX, but he's also got the Boring Company, in which he's determined to waste a lot of money trying to drill tunnels under California instead of just people accepting in America that you could build a train. Imagine these things called trains. The trouble is in America, they find it very hard to build trains. Almost impossible to build a train. But nonetheless, probably still a better idea than the Hyperloop, which the plan is that you fire people in pods under the desert. Yeah.

Like receipts in 1930s department stores, basically. It's basically that, but we're in it. What could possibly go wrong? And he's got various kind of other solar technology. But he was an interesting guy because he was trying to do things that were quite left-coded back then. So, for example, electric cars, solar panels. I interviewed a guy actually at a Trump rally who said he didn't believe in climate change, but he worked for Tesla. Which

which is a sort of standard conversation. He was wearing a giant foam hat that he'd bought on eBay that you had to put in the dryer and it swelled to 15 times its original size. I had some great conversations there last autumn, let me tell you. Anyway, the point about Elon Musk was that he always used to, back in the 2000s, argue with all the gossip blogs who wrote about him, which of course made him delicious to them and they wrote about him more. So from the start, he was somebody who had this slightly spiky but generative relationship with publicity.

And one thing you'll know from reading the book is that this is not an unknown trajectory that someone has great early career success and then the career begins to sputter a bit.

And then they looked at other ways to get people to talk and write about them. And he, for a lot of people, at the start of... Well, not at the start, but at the era when he was more popular as well as being successful, he was regarded as the modern genius, the one who could come up with rockets to Mars and electric cars and tunnels that spat you towards San Francisco at 101 miles an hour.

And that is a kind of a construct because as you mapped out, he doesn't do that, does he? He lives off the publicity that's been generated by his kind of following.

In real time, I mean, one of his rockets blew up this morning. Yeah, and there's a reasonable failure rate you would expect if you're doing that kind of level of aeronautical innovation. And look, he did do some really incredible things with SpaceX. Fundamentally, his insight was we need to drive down, aggressively drive down the price of space parts if we want, for example, the reusable rockets, the chopsticks, catching them and stuff, if we really want to go to Mars. This is the only way we can really do space exploration effectively.

And you're right. The reason I compare him in the book to Thomas Edison, who was known as the American Prometheus after the guy who stole fire from the gods. And it's a similar idea with him is that he is the idea, you know, there was a time when the American space program was deeply humbled. They, after the various disasters, couldn't get their own rocket into space anymore. They had to hitch a ride with the Russians. And overnight, anyone who was over 5'11 was no longer going to space because the Russian capsule was only Diddy.

But it was a really, truly humbling thing for America. And so he, in some sense, helped restore American pride. But the lesson I think he took from that was that the state is always slow and cumbersome and wasteful because that actually was true of space manufacture. However, some might say...

actually it needs to have some of that in for safety. When you're going to start talking about manned missions, maybe some of that redundancy was useful. And I think there's a new documentary about the Titan submersible, which makes the case that this one self-styled genius thought, I don't need to do safety inspections, what's the worst that can happen? And it turned out the worst that could happen was imploding under the sea. We'll probably look at this in greater depth. There is that...

that comes with, yeah, pun, greater depth, yeah. I didn't spot that. That was subconsciously a pun. But thank you for the little titter. It was just someone that went at greater depth. That's someone who's listened to Radio 4 before and they spotted it. Thank you.

I've lost my train of thought now. No, that they convince themselves that if they can get... If they've come up with one good idea, they have a transferable skill set that can mean...

I'm very good at getting rockets mostly off the ground. Therefore, I shall look at waste in various government departments because I'll be good at that too. Right. But you can see that he misapplied the political lesson that he learned from spaceflight, which was the idea that the public sector was innately slow and wasteful.

and he thought that's what kind of doge was going to be but you're right what I mean a lot of the other side of this book is about humility and about people continuing to learn throughout their lives and trying to stay in that mindset that you were when you were young and successful when you were open-minded about stuff and people losing that because he was out on stage pledging to cut two trillion from the federal budget and I think the federal budget is six

trillion. So it was ambitious. But you wouldn't be able to do that amount of money unless you cut basically all social security for veterans. Someone said to me, maybe he's not a kind of monster on the level of some of the people that you talk about in the book. And I said, actually, unfortunately, I think...

I think he is, because Bill Gates said of him only a couple of weeks ago, this is the richest man on the planet has killed some of the poorest children on the planet. By defunding those malaria programmes, by defunding PEPFAR, which was the anti-AIDS programme, there are probably hundreds of thousands of children in Africa who are going to die of preventable diseases. Are dying, are already dying. And we will probably never hear about them, because they will be in places that don't have very many reporters in them. And it's a kind of flip, because...

One of the things he did when he was launching SpaceX was he would admit up front, this is trial and error.

you know, it will probably blow up, but we'll learn something from it. So the next time we'll hopefully we'll apply the lessons learned into that. And so that's, I think when he was perceived as some kind of genius. Now we're seeing the flip side of it, which is he's believing his own publicity, which means he's then thinks he's omnipotent and can apply it to everything else and then gets annoyed when it doesn't work. So he's left Doge, the wastage, the,

administration he was running yeah i think he managed to save something like 140 million from the from the uh from the government's budget uh and nowhere near the two trillion that he and and he's done that by things like he probably won't be able to go to the loo in a national park by this time next year you know there will just be lots of things that he's he's broken and walked away from and that will only become apparent later is the musk experience a a product of the

The overuse of that word genius that we apply now to everything. I mean, you go Apple, we go, it's the genius bar. No, it's not. It's people you give your broken phones to.

They're not geniuses. They're employees, and they'll take it around the back, and they'll give it to an engineer, or they'll swap it for something. That's not genius. But this over... And, you know, we come across it all the time in critical... The number of films I've been to see because the poster said, genius. You know, they... And it's just... You look at the listings, and, you know, that episode of Mrs. Brown's Boys was genius. LAUGHTER

It's a man. I can't believe it. You know, that sort of... That...

Whoever came up with that hair salon, calling it curl up and dye is genius. No, it's quite good, but we're overusing this word. Does that mean it's lost its uniqueness? Because if genius does exist, surely, almost by definition, it should be a market outlier from most other people then, shouldn't it? It's such a comedown. If you look at the fact that you're getting people like Leonardo da Vinci described as a genius, and now it's essentially...

a branding term, right? It's used by the kind of person who might talk about KPIs. LAUGHTER

And, you know, I'm sure there's a, even now someone is getting an AI to write them a LinkedIn post about marketing genius. You know, it's just, it has been cheap and overused. And these people become kind of cultural symbols of something, an argument. So I think, you know, obviously Elon Musk is the cultural argument that the private sector is dynamic and swift and generative and creative and the state is slow and cumbersome and, you know, doesn't believe in letting people die. Yeah, we break things. Right, but is that move fast and break things, which was the

for Facebook motto? It's move fast and break things. Yeah. And it's no flip really. A lot of these people, which is just break things and then just move fast, which is like, just get the hell out. Just, ah, that didn't work. But that's because of everyone. Yeah. It's that. Laden down only by your piles of money holding you back from moving fast. Yeah. And I think, I think this is an interesting time to be having this conversation because I think people have really soured on the tech side

as the model of modern genius, which has been an incredibly durable one, really from, I guess, the 60s onwards? Yeah, I'd say that. I think most of the sheen has worn off apart from in government because people in government are still thoroughly...

by these idiots with money who come to them and say, Luke, I've got this great data thing here that if you gave me 60 billion, I know that sounds like a lot of money, but it would mean we could entirely make sense of all your health, national health data. We could solve cancer and everything. It's always a bit like for these magic beans. And I've just come from a...

a thing that was on in Georgia where a lot of AI people would say, we actually don't know where AI is going. We say it's going to be revolutionary, but it may be that where we've got it now is probably the best it's going to be. So, you know, it can do your undergraduate essay. You know, I had, this is a very classy name drop, I had this argument with Tony Blair. Okay. Okay.

No, because he's a huge advocate for AI. He thinks it could dramatically increase productivity in the public sector. And it also, like you say, everyone in government desperately wants it to be true because the fundamental state of the British economy is our productivity is terrible, we're massively in debt, and no one can really see an obvious way out of that without dramatically cutting back the state in ways that people will find incredibly painful. So it would be lovely if you went, have you considered turning the Department of Work and Pensions into ChatGPT? Yeah.

And I said to him, how do you, not to be rude, Mr Blair, I don't think I said Mr Blair, I think I may have said Tony in a slightly oleaginous way, not to be rude, but I saw a photo of you and Bill Clinton sitting next to Sam Bankman Freed.

last year and for those of you who don't know he was an enormous Sam Bankman Freed totally played up to the stereotype of the tech genius you know he was always doing zoom interviews in a t-shirt that was covered with bits of cheeto and he never brushed his hair and this was kind of like such a genius such a mass wunderkind you know so incredible and it turned out it was an all an enormous pyramid scheme

And he collapsed and he's now gone to prison for an extremely long time. And basically that was, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried is almost kind of, because he went to prison, he sort of moved out of our consciousness slightly, but he was treated as exactly that template of the genius. And it was a bit like the Boris Johnson thing where people somehow, I don't understand how this happens. People think that if men don't brush their hair, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's so Boris. Yeah. It really doesn't work for women. Great sadness. And I have this, you know, let's talk about the other genius in Washington, the stable genius that is Donald Trump. And I always feel if somebody has to actually say that they're stable, it kind of implies that they're not really. Because, you know, I wasn't thinking until you brought it up. I know I'm really worried.

Donald Trump is regarded, I think, by those who have supped the Kool-Aid as some kind of genius. That he is, the way he does deals, the way he deals with people, that he's got this instinct, this gut. And therefore, all the things we see are the crazy types of behavior you get from a genius. You know, the fact that he changes his mind, the fact that he doesn't quite know what he's talking about and

speaks in confused sentences and says one thing and then the opposite. That's just all part of the joke. That's really the stuff that we'll accept for the actual thing, which, oh no, there is no actual thing. It's just that.

So he's a kind of... But the actual thing is vote. Vote, yeah. Now, that's when people say he's a genius at salesmanship, he's a genius at the messaging. And I think there's something to that. So I went to a Trump rally last year in Reading in Pennsylvania, and what you watched before the warm-up acts were lots of people doing an impression of Donald Trump badly. And you just... It helped me really understand the fact that the Trump package... Oh, I wish I hadn't said that. The Trump package...

Oh, my God. Is a coherent whole. Sorry. It's just got worse. But, you know, for example, the fact that he's just intensely camp is absolutely key to it. Because people just... And the fact that he's very funny. He went and talked to a load of soldiers. Oh, no, he went today or yesterday. He went to talk to a load of workers in the grounds of the White House and said, hands up any of you who are illegal immigrants. And they didn't.

put their hands up and he said, these journalists, they'll tear your lives apart to see whether or not you are, you know. He said, I'll be right behind you, far behind you. And it's like, oh, you're just saying it. And that's the thing that people just, they try and replicate it. And J.D. Vance being a very good example of this, just the nastiness is too obvious. You don't have the light and shade, the kind of toddlerishness that I think a Trump or a Boris Johnson kind of had that let them get away with it. But do you still regard it as a,

as genius his ability to know which buttons to push to get the right voters to think the right way. But I think of him a bit like a stand-up comedian. I think he is happiest doing rallies. I wish there was some way that he could just...

That would just be too rally forever. He is permanently on campaign mode because campaign mode is him selling himself. That's what he enjoys doing, just selling the concept of himself. And his day is mostly, how can I make the day about me all around the world? So he's now, you know, this stable genius. Yesterday he said he doesn't know what he's going to do over Iran. Today he said he's going to make a decision within the next two weeks.

And that doesn't strike me as someone who's on top of events. See, I think... But he loves to... He treats everything, doesn't he? Like he's a game show host. Yes. Like he's in charge of spinning the wheel and he's going like, the wheel's got nuclear apocalypse, do nothing. And then it's just, oh, what's it going to be today? And his little television... I've got the president of Nicaragua here and...

Let's give him a hard time. You know, it's that, it's, it's that, he's opera. I was like, no, Jerry Springer. It's like, he's a walking Jerry Springer in the body of an 80 year old that thinks that everything that's going on inside his head is all that there is. Yeah. And that everything else outside is just stimulus. And in fairness to him, that is how everyone around him treats him. So I can see where he's ended up getting that idea. So when, when,

Was it Muskin, the culture of genius in Silicon Valley, was that what prompted you to home in on this word? I knew I wanted to write about it because I wanted there to be a spine to the book. And the spine essentially was saying that you can tell something about an age by what it values, by what it lionises. And it does say something about now that we are all about the future and we're all about smashing things up.

These are kind of new things to value. And it's not the same as... The Romantics, obviously, that's when you get Rousseau, that's when you get the Romantic poets. They are enthralled to a very different model of genius. And more's the pity, you don't get a lot of epic poetry lauded. These days. These days. Yes. I'm speaking as someone who spent three years trying to analyse Paradise Lost. Do you mind telling me the thing about the Flintstones? Oh, OK. LAUGHTER

I stopped analysing Paradise Lost when I realised the opening lines of Paradise Lost, of Man's First Disobedience and The Fruit of That Forbidden Tree, are the exact same rhythm scheme to the theme tune to The Flintstones. Love it. Man's First Disobedience and The Fruit of That Forbidden Tree. So, that's when I stopped. That's when I stopped. Come on, meet the angels. Yes. Satan! It's a good poem, though.

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Click on to the next slide. Next slide, please. To take us back to the COVID days. Next slide, please. Now, who's this? This is Francis Galton, who is a great Victorian polymath, half-cousin of Charles Darwin.

He came up with a beauty map of the British Isles. He invented a method of cutting cake so that it didn't go dry, which is essentially to treat it like a folding table and take two slices out the middle and then put the other side back together. Is that genius? I mean, it's not for me to say. LAUGHTER

Well, it kind of is, really. That's why we're here. This is the kind of stuff you used to be able to write into a scientific journal with when there was less on. The thing I thought... So he was, shall we say, an enthusiastic racist. I think you really put the... He was one of the funny ones. Yeah.

It was a sort of amateur racist. No, he goes on a sort of gap year after flunking out of medical school. And it's honestly the most colonial thing ever. He eats hippo and he says, oh, I didn't like it very much. And you think, really? I mean, it doesn't look like an edible animal, does it? No. I can't imagine it's great. And then he says one of the chieftains brings him somebody as, I presume, a temporary wife. But he turns her down because she's covered in ochre and he's wearing a white linen suit.

Strange man. But in light of the racism, very entertaining, he invented the dog whistle. The actual dog whistle? The actual whistle for dogs. The actual dog whistle. Is it on a plinth somewhere in Reform HQ? So why did you bring him up? Well, I brought him up because in the 1860s, he wrote a book called Hereditary Genius, in which he tried to rank all of everyone in Britain by how smart they were.

Yes, you can see where this is going. And he assigned them all to a letter, and then he sort of worked out what the standard deviation was. And this was before IQ tests had been invented, so he had to kind of freestyle jazz it a bit. But he looked at things like the length of people's obituaries in the Times, or whether or not they had a state funeral, etc.

Just, you know, those objective markers of achievement. He had a number of odd theories. He thought that women could... You could descend... Geniuses could descend through women, but women couldn't be geniuses. Oh, yes. God, I mean, yes. Obviously. Obviously, that was the case. But it was just...

it was a fascinating book because it was an attempt to try and bring that kind of very Victorian idea of classification and science and taxonomy to this idea that fundamentally completely resists being kind of codified and pinned down. And so, you know, and it's...

It's obviously, given Enlightenment is Racism, a deeply racist book, a sexist book. But it is also, I think, a kind of sign that people wanted to make this a scientific concept. Yes. And you can't do that. It's a pseudoscience because, I mean, what is genius anyway? Is it meant to be a kind of intellectual brilliance or is it the ability... I've always regarded it as someone who has this...

innate instinctive ability to see something that no one else can see. It's not the product of

what your education was. I suppose the archetypal genius is Einstein, and the theory of relativity was just something so outside the box of how physics was thought about then, that's why genius was applied to it. If I may say that, that's very post-enlightenment of you, Armando.

I take that as a compliment. No, but it's true. You're right. I don't understand, but yes. Our modern idea of genius is very much about originality. Yes. And that really... This is one of the things that I always find fascinating about history is you just realise that people in the past thought in profoundly different ways to you. But originality, before really the creation of the market, is not...

has such a high premium on it. The idea of the Renaissance, it's right there, is the rebirth, right? It's the rebirth of the classical tradition. You're bringing that back. The idea of mimesis, of copying, was much more widely accepted as the highest pinnacle of art. You were in the vein of Plutarch or whoever it might have been. And now that's not the case. If you say something's derivative, that is by definition not genius. That's right. And yes, it's not...

It's not being inspired by what's gone before. It's you saying, I've come up with something that no one else has ever come close to. Which can leave you feeling quite cheated. I remember going to one of the Greek islands a couple of years ago and seeing, I think it was a Cycladic mask, and it looked so like a Picasso deconstructed face that you just go, oh, he nicked it. He just nicked it from there. And of course, he didn't. He remixed it in his own way. Yeah, and he probably said, you know, I mean, composers do this, but they, you know, like Benjamin Britten,

in a trip to Indonesia hearing the Gamelan Orchestra, it just suddenly, a whole different set of sounds. Or Indian sitar music.

composition was suddenly affected by the whole new concept of musicality that it hadn't come up with but which had existed for hundreds of years elsewhere and they just hadn't encountered it's really beautiful when you find out about things like that so one of the other examples would be vanishing point perspective in art yes until what do we about the 1300s everything was just flat yeah and then someone some genius as close to genius went hang a minute what if we made it so that things in the foreground were bigger yeah

And that's not because, yes, it's because they're nearer, not because they're actually bigger. Right, exactly. And then everyone went, that's a brilliant idea, and it just swept through. There's another thing, which is that zero is an idea. You can watch it kind of follow the Silk Roads. And it's an Arabic concept, and it comes to Europe. And thank God we ended up with Arabic numerals rather than Roman numerals. We dodged a bullet on that one. For anyone who's ever watched a BBC programme at the end, and you just go, no, no, no.

I think Farage wants to get rid of Arabic numerals, I think. That would be such an amazing reform policy. Bring back proper European numbers. He wants to go to fag packets, back of fag packets for our number system. I don't know why I keep mentioning him. So Mr... Mr. Galton. Mr. Whiskersface here was the first of an attempt to try and give a sort of...

reset the idea of genius as a scientific measurable thing, which I suppose the thing we then think of as that is the IQ test, I suppose. Yeah, which gets invented in the 1900s by a guy called Theodore Binet in France. And what's really sad about that is that he, the first versions of IQ tests were essentially given to kids...

And it normed them against what you'd expect like a seven-year-old or a six-year-old to be. And his idea was you'd be able to give it to a whole class. This is, you know, when universal schooling is coming in. And you'd be able to find the kids who were falling behind their peers. And you'd be able to maybe, you know, keep them back if they needed it, give them more tuition, whatever it was. So the whole idea behind it was a kind of progressive one about helping people.

But unfortunately, as often the case is this kind of thing, people just go, what about the top end? How can we rank people in order of how amazing they are? And it very quickly, it goes across to America, it becomes the Stanford BNA test, and it becomes...

kind of obsession with the idea that you can now find geniuses. So there's a very great social scientist called Lewis Terman who's operating in California from the 20s onwards and he runs a huge longitudinal study which is originally called Genetic Studies of Genius. It later becomes called Genetic Studies of the Gifted because he doesn't find any geniuses. It's quite...

Sad and humbling moment for Lewis Terman. But the thing that's about that study is that he just goes, oh, we haven't found a Tolstoy. And then he goes, oh, maybe you can't, you know, maybe you need, maybe there's once in a generation talents are just really hard to predict. And it's sort of, I don't know whether you've looked into the history of the IQ test. Does the IQ test change over the years to be looking for slightly different talents?

areas of excellence that are more the product of the time in which the tests are conducted. Yeah, I mean, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a very good book called The Mismeasure of Man, which I think, for me, is too far into the environmentalist side. He's too into sort of blank slate ideas, but he made some really useful criticisms of the early IQ tests, which were what they ended up calling culture-bound. So what they ended up doing is relying on knowledge, essentially, and a particular type of white Anglo-Saxon American middle-class knowledge, right? Essentially, it was kind of like...

you know, which spoon do you use for the soup? Right? And then, oh, look, guess what? These middle-class kids have done better in it. And so ever since then, there have been all these attempts to try and find what they call non-culture-bound IQ tests, which are mostly about rotating shapes or logic puzzles that don't rely. But, you know, ones of them relied on you knowing that, you know, horse riding, you could ride a horse instead of a bicycle or something like that. Just stuff that now children wouldn't answer anymore. Yes. Yeah.

We ought to move on to the next slide, but before we do, I just wanted to read out. Someone tried to do... I don't know whether it's tongue-in-cheek. This is...

Hans Eysenck, the psychologist. When he died, he was the third most cited social scientist after Marx and Freud. Unfortunately, a lot of it is bollocks. Yes, well, here's his rough portrait of the genius. Clearly, he should be male, of middle or upper middle parentage, and preferably come from a Jewish background. He should receive intellectual stimulation at home, but ought to lose one parent before the age of ten. LAUGHTER

He should be born in February and die at 30 or 90, but on no account at 60.

And you should also have gout is the next bit that he says, which I think is really great. So it just, yeah. And I think what I enjoy about that Hans Eisen quote in a book called Genius is it's a total reverse engineer from the kind of people who have been called geniuses. The one bit I do think he's right about is the bit about either dying before 30 or powering on until 90.

It does really help. Either you're a kind of River Phoenix, Amy Winehouse, James Dean, Rudolf Nureyev, all the lost talent, you're only ever young, or you live long enough to become the father or mother of the nation, you inspire the next generation. But if you die in crabby middle age, it's all over. Thanks for listening to this episode of Intelligence Squared. It was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, and edited by Mark Roberts.

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