The Genius Myth, with Helen Lewis and Armando Iannucci (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part two of our recent live event with Helen Lewis and Armando Annucci, who were in discussion live at Conway Hall in London to ask if the modern idea of genius is distorting our view of the world. Let's join Helen and Armando in conversation now. I think this is one of the most powerful bits in the book, really, because

What being called a genius does to someone, usually, mostly a male, is allow them to get away with anything else. To be badly misbehaved or to be appalling with their family.

I mean, I think Tolstoy is a really good example of this. He was, you know, he had that, he was an aristocrat anyway, so he had lots of money. And then he became, you know, so famous, he was sort of father of the nation. But he just, he put the whole family through his every little whim. At one point he was like, we're all vegetarian now. Yeah. And they had to be vegetarian. At one point he went, we're all going to Mongolia because I want to reconnect with nature in a yurt.

I mean, he was very much... And then he said, I'm now going to be a hermit. I'm going to be a hermit. I actually don't need any... I'm going to be celibate, he said, and then another child arrived the next year. I mean, he just... And because he was the family project, I mean, because he was a Russian aristocrat, that was attenuated. But anyway, as everyone around him became part of Project Tolstoy...

And then he was, when he kind of lost his religion and then went into more sort of spiritual stuff, he became a kind of enemy of the Orthodox Church. So he became very attacked. So then the whole family's project became keeping the works in print. That's right. Trying not to be heretic. The number of wives or widows of writers who then spend a lot of time trying to keep their legacy alive, make sure that everything's in print, catalogued and everything.

But also, and this, you know, I've come across in classical music a lot, and, you know, very post-Enlightenment, you'd think, but people like, you know, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was a fantastic pianist for someone that seemed very rare for a woman to be out actually as a professional pianist at the time. He fought very hard to marry her against Clara's father's wishes. It went to court. He won. They got married, and then he told her...

she had to not perform anymore, that she was his wife. And she only went back to performing when he died. And there are lots of... My favorite composer, Gustav Mahler, married Alma Mahler, who was a composer at the time, but...

was told no I'm boss now yeah there can't be two composers no actually that takes us back to Elon because he his ex-wife Justine wrote a piece in which she said that when they were having the first dance at their wedding he leaned over and whispered into her ear I'm the alpha and

You just think you haven't even cut the cake and you just go, oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no, what have we done here? This is the worst ever episode of Marriage at First Sight. But, you know, I think...

And I would say in the book that I don't think all of these are necessarily abusive or coercive or domineering relationships. Sometimes the other half gets a lot from it too. So there, sitting at the typewriter, you've got Vera Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov's wife. And they seem to have had a genuinely happy and affectionate marriage. He wrote her really beautiful love letters that are fantastic.

and delightful. And in return, you know, she turned the pages when he played the piano and she typed out all his manuscripts. When Lolita became incredibly scandalous, she sat at the edge of the stage with a pistol in her bag ready in case someone, some sort of like News of the World reader went, you love pedos and rushed the stage basically. It's great.

take on your critics, isn't it? That's very good. So, yeah, so I think that they aren't, I mean, Einstein, I have to say, is, I'm afraid, in the bad apple pile. That's Mileva Maric, who was his first wife. He's all presented her with a list of do's and don'ts. Yeah, don't talk to me when I'm working. Don't, you know, and they had initially quite a playful relationship. They had an illegitimate child together, Liesel, whom his biographers covered up for

60 years after his death airbrushed them out he his elder son was schizophrenic um and he just kind of abandoned them and maleva in europe um he married his second marriage was to um his cousin whose surname was already einstein which cheers me up but you know but essentially she she studied with him maleva studied maths with him um where he was a quite a mediocre student um

which is one of the things that you often find in these biographies of people who do make great technical discoveries, is that they weren't necessarily superstars at school. Yeah, they're not the obvious, the ones who are going to, you know, in the yearbook, the ones who will succeed. They're the ones who had no real impact at school, possibly because, I don't know, they're...

But it's that they were creative rather than academic, right? That's the thing that's interesting about Einstein. He didn't succeed by the kind of rules of the field of physics as it was. He broke the rules completely, and that's what was interesting about what he did. And then the other portrait there, that's a portrait of Fernand Olivier, who was the first kind of serious girlfriend of Picasso. And Picasso, I'm afraid, a very extremely talented painter, just...

one really seriously irredeemable personal life. One of the things that precipitated the decline of their relationship was they fostered a 12-year-old girl from a convent, and Fernand came home to find Picasso painting her in a suggestive way, and she was packed off back to the convent. But later in life, Marina Picasso, his granddaughter, wrote a memoir about

when she said he needed blood, you know, my mother's blood, my blood to paint. Everyone around him saw him as a kind of vampire on them. But that is sort of the cult of genius, isn't it? It's the fact that they are or designate themselves a genius that means that people are drawn into just changing the rules about them, that they're allowed to get away with unacceptable behaviour or just odd behaviour. Yeah.

anywhere else we would think oh is that right should we should we do something about that but oh no he's a genius or she's a we should my favorite one i don't even know is true but isaac newton who was apparently it was a bit of a bastard but he and he spent a lot of his time actually looking into alchemy when he should have been and biblical chronology he was obsessed with working out exactly when the bible i don't know this i hope this is a true story but he had a cat and he had

had built a cat flap. You remember when Theresa May told that true story about a cat and it turned out not to be true? What was that? Do you remember when she said the immigrant couldn't be deported because he had a cat and that's a true story? And it wasn't. So I'm just prefacing my scepticism. I didn't think Theresa May would come up in a conversation about genius, but there we go. So he had a cat, built a cat flap. The cat had six kittens, so he built six little cat flaps until someone said, they could all just go in and out of the one flap.

And I like to think that's true.

But that is a kind of very minor example of you're allowed, you know, which takes us back to the tech bros. You know, they're so brilliant, they're allowed to not pay tax. You know, they're allowed to blow up stuff because they're so brilliant. You derailed me by thinking about whether or not the cat flap was invented in the 1600s. I mean, it would have been great if he'd invented the cat flap. I mean, that's not something we talk about with Isaac Newton. No.

There's one of my chapter epigrams is Ken Dodd, which is that, you know, the guy invented the cat's eye because he watched a cat coming towards him. If the cat had been going the other way, he would have invented the pencil sharpener. We ought to... Thank you. Try the veal. Coming to your questions quite soon, we ought to get... Next slide, please. Oh, here we go. Yes. So, yes, your theory of either you've got to diet before you hit 30 or live to 90, and your theory...

The Beatles have somehow done both. How's that? Yes. My husband was like, you're going to have to word this quite carefully, otherwise you're going to end up saying, it's good that John Lennon got shot, which I think people might find offensive. But I have had a lot of conversations with people who have, who people have always asked me, what do you think if he'd lived now, John Lennon would have been like? And I said, I think he would have a show on GB News.

called like anti-woke John that's right you can't say this anymore you can't say that right yeah yeah yeah yes next caller hi John imagine stop saying imagine hate that song hate that song yeah

Yeah, right. Yeah, that. Yeah, that's what I think we've... But fortunately, he got shot. No! No, no, no. No, that's sad. No, you mustn't say that. You mustn't say that. No, I mustn't, and I haven't said that. No. But I think we're very lucky that Paul McCartney has had such a dignified later career and has worked with younger artists, worked to bring them on. He has been... Someone once tweeted this, which is that he's remained remarkably sane for somebody who... You know, people must go up to him every day, this person said, and say, you know, we played...

hey Jude at my dad's funeral thank you that meant so much to me constantly receiving that level of love and adulation to people this must be an incredibly heavy burden to bear and he's borne it incredibly gracefully so I think oh I can name drop here because I got a letter from him saying how much he liked Veep it was like couriered over there was no return address I couldn't reply back it was yeah anyway carry on

That's very cool. It's very cool, isn't it? Yeah. But that's what I mean. How gracious is that? I know. That you just go, I'm incredibly famous. Everyone will be delighted to hear from me. Why don't I just be nice to people who've done movies? I mean, I put it on eBay, so it's... All right. No, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. But...

But you know what I mean? So, and the other thing that Craig Brown, who wrote a brilliant Beatles book, said to me was that there's something that's kind of bittersweet and profound about the Beatles, which is that they ended, you know, unlike the Rolling Stones who are, you know, still going. Who have been permanently ending. Yeah, right, for some time. Yes. But the Beatles,

The Beatles will just, we never have any more of it. You know, it burst into flame and then it was over. You know, famously, George Harrison was only 27 when they broke up. He spent far more of his life not being a Beatle. And that, you know, that is kind of,

I think lots of the stories of genius are about that. There's a bittersweet quality to them. One of the reasons that they mean so much to us is that a person or an alchemy of a group is finite. Yeah, yeah. I do like your remark also that...

the Beatles ending did give us the benefit of Ringo Starr's other amazing success, which is Thomas the Tank Engine, which wouldn't have happened if the Beatles had carried on. But also that sense of, you know, four really talented, well, specifically two really, really talented, gifted musicians, songwriters, at the same time, in the same place, coming together, which brings us, I think, onto our next slide, please. Next slide, please.

Oh, look, it's you. Thank you. No. Oh, and Alan. That's Alan Yentob who passed away recently. But you talk about seniors, which is...

an environment where many talents are allowed to flourish rather than it being about one person. Yeah, so Brian Eno coined this phrase and I think it's rather wonderful because there are definitely times and places in history that were incredibly cool and exciting to be. So Vienna at the end of the 19th century, for example, Liverpool in the 1960s, Silicon Valley in the second half of the 20th century. These were places that you wanted to be. Renaissance Florence,

better than any of the other Italian cities to be in. Certainly, you know, just attracted talents from everywhere. And I just think we lack the way... We see Salford, Salford. Yeah. Since they've moved it up to, I think...

Well, but this is why. So the reason that I have a picture of you looking like a kind of little set of bookends with Arlen Gentoltz is I thought it was really interesting when they made the Imagine programme, which followed you around for, what, three years, five years? Well, it was seven years. Not constantly, but he was very persistent. But bless, I'm glad he did it, yeah. Because I was very reluctant. I don't like when cameras are present. I...

So he managed to do it in a very surreptitious manner. But what I really liked about that was instead of it being about the great genius of you, it was about the fact that you had built...

institutions and programs and ways of working that were collaborative, right? That to me was an example of seniors. - I don't, I mean, the geniuses are the writers. I mean, they're the ones, when people come up to me and say, "Oh, I love, think of it, thank you for writing." You know, I oversee it, but it's the writing team and it's the environment. I have it, my only rule is no assholes, really.

And I genuinely think that's really... There's good research about the fact that if you have one bad apple in a team...

is vastly more negative than adding three geniuses to a team. That's right. Yes, super groups. The Atlantic has the exact same rule, actually. On my first day, they said, here are things, it's spirit of generosity, blah, blah, blah, sense of belonging, and no arseholes. Yeah. No matter how good a writer you think you are, we don't tolerate anyone here who is just... Oh, and in casting as well, because if you're making something that is genuinely collaborative...

especially for comedy, because there has to be a light atmosphere on set. If there's one person who may be the most talented actor in the world, but it's just a nightmare, then it's not worth it as far as I'm concerned. But I was going to say, you know, supergroups are never quite there. It's never quite as good as the individual groups from which they emerged. Discuss. No, I've got stuff on. There will be questions in 10 minutes. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is the only one I'm thinking of. But are the Sugar Babes a supergroup? They had a lot of fun.

People cycled in and out, I guess. Have you listened to Yes? I mean, it's... Oh, it's interminable. But I know what you mean. The travelling Wilburys? Come on. But that question of ego, I think, is really fascinating because it's also tied up in it about... I mean, a lot of the undercurrent of this book is about how people deal with success. And do they... There's a phrase I really love, which is about do they kind of stick to the green growing edge, you know, or do they become somebody who gets...

calcified inside the thing that they're famous for and they just yes they can't grow anymore as an artist or a creator or an innovator and that's where the the concept of genius as one individual kind of loses its purchase just now because for example in science you talk about how you know scientific breakthroughs are not done by one person anymore really the if you do the whole business of cern or the finding the higgs boson yeah higgs

theorised about it, but the attempt to prove whether it existed... But that was a nice tribute to him, wasn't it, essentially, by lots of other people. It's a communal effort, isn't it, really? It's a real problem in the Nobels now, which is that the science ones are limited to a maximum of three people, and it's just not how labs... I mean, the whole...

The whole thing of the Nobels is completely wackadoodle in my view because it tries to work out who is responsible for something. And often that's the person who most loudly claimed the credit. We haven't had time to talk about William Shockley, who's one of the characters in the book. He basically freeloads onto the Nobel for the invention of the transistor. It was in his lab.

that it happened. But then he is such an asshole that he drives, he creates Silicon Valley with the strength of his arseholery because everybody leaves Shockley Transistor Limited because they can't bear him. And that's, all of those people are people who go on to create Intel and Hewlett-Packard and the other big early companies. But yeah, are there any other tips about how do you create seniors apart from not tolerating big swinging egos? Oh, heavens. I ask the questions.

How to create a scene. I think it's about that, making the environment conducive to, you know, it's not, it shouldn't feel... Do you make people be bored?

make people be bored. Yeah. Because one of the things I thought was really brave and interesting about that film, Peter Jackson film Get Back, is it shows the Beatles just sitting noodling around for hours and just tolerating that zone of this could be something, it might not be something, maybe we'll write something today, maybe we won't. Yeah, although my impression, memory from it, was just how...

spectacularly musical Paul McCartney was, but also how he was an engine driving the thing along. If he hadn't been there, people would have wandered away. I thought it was in a way they were a bit like ketchup is the most tasty thing because it's got a perfectly balanced flavour profile between sweet and salty and umami. That's kind of how I ended up thinking about the Beatles, in that you've got the slightly brooding presence of George, who is like,

in any other band, I would be the best songwriter. This is deeply unfair. How has this happened to me? And you've got Ringo, who's just like, my friend Janice was like, he's just like a lovely Labrador. He's just like, hello, hello, hello. But he also, he's obviously a great drummer and does things that other drummers wouldn't necessarily do. But he's also the kind of, people don't want to be mean in front of Ringo, which is actually a really important check on people's behaviour. And I think also, with Ringo,

with Lennon and McCartney, they sort of were friendly rivals in that they kind of wanted to outdo each other, but for the best of reasons, as in they were learning from each other.

and then wanted to notch it high, you know, try something new out and try something. And so they both needed each other to kind of push each other on, I think. And you find that with lots of research on creative pairs. It's almost like a binary star system, right? There's enough gravity between them that they neither drift out nor too much that they'd end up

collapsing together and exploding. There's a repulsion and attraction at the same time and it's just balanced, isn't it? Which is why it often just really doesn't last, particularly when you get successful and people start saying like, whose name goes first on the poster? Like, you know, whose dressing room is bigger? Blah, blah, blah. Have they got my font? I told them, I told them the font that I wanted my name in and also a font that I want up on stage. A literal font. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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I mean, have you changed your mind about genius, writing this, or have you gone in with a view about genius that's been affirmed or been affected by the research that you've done? I... Hmm, that's a good question, actually. I think I came to a slightly morbid conclusion, which is that it will never die, and the book is sort of pointless. LAUGHTER

That's not, don't put that on the back of the... This book is pointless. No, but I think, I just, I think we crave these heroic stories, whether or not it's, you know, the Greeks or the Romans having this pantheon of gods who are always shagging each other and falling out of Mount Olympus and whatever. And you're seeing it more and more, and actually AI is driving more, you know, just the,

that comes up online. You know, the 10 best comedies from the 90s about a cow. You know, a computer. But this ranking is just everywhere now. Yeah, that attempt to try and put people in order of who is bestest, I think I changed this. And actually, here's a really odd one for me. So my parents are Catholic. I'm an atheist. But actually, I began to appreciate, this is a slightly odd thing to say, actually,

the kind of Christian worldview of every human being having kind of innate worth and dignity, rather than it being about how special are you, how talented are you, how high is your IQ? Because all of those ways of ranking people, whether it's by how rich they are or how smart they are, always end up in nasty places where you don't just go, this person in front of me is a person who is... The Constitution says...

was it life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Yeah. Everyone has those rights. And if you want to look at more, the culture wars are the most extreme. It is those two positions, isn't it? It's all, it's either I am the me that I want to be and I don't want anyone telling me how not to be and what to say and what to, and the other extreme, we should all be lovely and to everyone. And I'm sat, you know, I'm exaggerating, but it's still that, that,

binary view, isn't it? It's the pool of the individual against the... Yeah, and again, I think it's about a good level of tension, right? We do need some space in society for tolerance for people who are weird in some way. Maybe we now would call it neurodivergent, right? People who don't really fit into...

normal working patterns and to still understand that they can achieve great things if they are allowed to flourish that then has to not go too far and come into people are allowed to act in ways that are coercive or demeaning whatever it might be but you always need that sense of like how much push and pull can you give to other people do you know we've got one more slide before we go to questions so i'm just going to show it to people because i want them to appreciate this horror um this is by salvador dali

And it's terrible. It's a painting that's about DNA. Didn't get that myself. No. Last year we went to, well actually at the beginning of this year we went to Sarasota in Florida, which is where the Dali Museum is. And you think, why is it in Florida? And then you go around it and you go, oh, he had no taste.

That's why it's in Florida. But anyway, we'll leave it as an... What benefit of clergy is an Easter egg for people so they have to buy the book? Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, it's a fantastic, fascinating read. Very informative and funny as well. And also, as you were articulating...

dilemma we have today in trying to balance the individual against the community I just thought well that's exactly why I enjoy my conversations with you every week on strong message here and why I'd recommend a good solid read of the

The myth genius. The genius myth. No, but I think that's... You're right. That's one of the things that from the start... Because we sorted it. Just when you described that, I thought, oh, good, we've sorted everything. We've solved all the problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was great. That's one of the things I love about the podcast, right, is that I come from a very different tradition to you. And that means that we always approach the same thing from different angles. And that's... Not to be rude about other podcasts, but some of them have people who are very similar. LAUGHTER

And you're thinking, why am I hearing two of the same man talking to himself? You're not talking about the rest is like this. You've been so nice all evening and then the two-footed tackle right at the end. Right. So, questions. I think we're going to come amongst you. Upstairs and downstairs there are roving mics. Put your hands up. We, if we, okay, there's someone there with, I'm going to go full Fiona Bruce voice.

Gentleman there with a yellowish thing on his chest. And then a lady over there with her hand up will come to you next. And I think there's people upstairs as well. Oh, there's one upstairs? Right. Someone who I can't see who's got their hand up because in the front row there. Right. So let's start down here. Yes.

Hi there. I really enjoyed the talk. It was interesting you talking about geniuses and how they're treated. I was wondering if there were any geniuses who weren't branded as a genius in their time and whether there's any difference between them and ones who are already raised like a genius, like a Picasso. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Good one. Yes. Do you want to answer that one? We will start piling up some questions, but we'll...

I mean, I think there's lots of stories like that. And I think that they're often... Often, again, there's been a really big political project. So...

Second wave feminism since the 1970s has had a huge project of what they kind of call her story, right? Just trying to retell stories about women that have been missed out the first time around. The New York Times has got a really great project which is writing obituaries for famous people from history that they forgot the first time around. But it's really, it is really kind of fascinating to just find out how people who are now seen as some of the most important people of the age that were not seen like that when they died. Going back to music, Bach was, as soon as, when

when Bach died, he was kind of forgotten about. He was seen as this kind of rather old-fashioned organ specialist, you know. And it was only Mendelssohn who revived Bach and brought out editions of

you know, the mass and the cantatas and the St. Matthew Passion and the Bach revival then took place. And similarly, you know, Gustav Mahler really went, he was really seen as a conductor and it was Leonard Bernstein in the 60s who popularized Mahler. So, you know, it's,

in terms of composers, it's quite a common thing for them to be forgotten. I mean, Mozart died, you know, forgotten and then rediscovered later on. That's interesting. I guess with composers, it's inherent to the form because you need a big orchestra to play the music, right? In the age before recorded music, you were literally only kept alive by people thinking you were important enough to spend a lot of money putting your music on. I don't know, maybe you're a lot more musical than me, but I couldn't sit there and read a music score and be like, oh, banger, banger. Yeah.

Number one, straight in. Yeah, exactly, G-Shop. But the other thing that I think also appeals to people is it flatters us sometimes to rehabilitate people as a kind of historical appeals court. So Van Gogh is the classic example of this. Only sold one painting during his lifetime. Was kind of unfashionable because of his mental illness. He didn't really participate in the Paris society that would have made him a kind of man about town. So he's out there painting his...

pictures writing these quite sad letters to his brother Theo and we have and I write about this in the book we have Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh Bonger great Dutch name to thank for for basically she had a boarding house that was full of basically all of the van Gogh canvases that you've ever seen including she had cherry blossom which is one of my favorite van Goghs hanging above the the bedroom in the baby's room because the baby was named after Vincent and

but it's only thanks to her and the fact that she actually created this legend by publishing the letters she created this legend of the torture genius and we heard the story about the ear and the time he spent in the mental hospital and that really appealed to people as a legend of the fact that this guy was so talented and no one knew and actually you can see how powerful that is because quite

Quite a recent Doctor Who episode in a couple of years ago. The conceit of that is that the Doctor takes Van Gogh to see an exhibition as well. It's very moving, actually, isn't it? It's really, really moving. If you have any biography of William Blake, if you read... I mean, because he had a circle of friends who thought he was really great and couldn't understand why nobody was buying his stuff. And he died...

kind of still thinking himself what I've done is good and his wife was very supportive and devoted and his friends and just you know he survived off the benefit of his friends really but through his lifetime you know he put an exhibition on nobody came nothing was sold

And I think in those cases, we often feel like we're delivering a sort of justice and we feel good about it. And I think particularly when there's a political act, so it's about reclaiming lost female artists, lost ethnic minority artists, lost working class artists, that we're seeing something, we're overlooking something that the people at their time were too blind to see. And I think that's a really powerful kind of impulse. And maybe genius, if we are going to use the phrase, is something that's assigned to someone, rather like the Catholic Church assigns

You know, they have to wait 400 years before they've established. They don't anymore. No, they're banging through them. Yeah, I know. Honestly, they wanted to find the first millennial saint. That's right. And it's happened. It's happening. He's done his three miracles. It's like Cadbury's chocolate eggs. They're coming out all the year round now, aren't they? So, yes. Yes. That's right. Yep. Hi. Thank you. Really fantastic evening.

On the point about geniuses being arseholes, I wondered if any of the geniuses in your reading have reflected on or regretted their arseholery and...

And perhaps just reflected on you win some, you lose some. You get to be a genius, but your children hate you. So I was just wondering if there's a trade-off between being, yes, an arsehole and a nice dad. I mean, recognition of your own arseholery is already quite a... Yeah, recursive. I think, unfortunately, one of the meta conditions of being an arsehole is an inability to see that you're doing it. Yeah. That's the thing. If you're a kind of, you know, driven by day... I mean, you'd have to be a real arsehole if you did it knowing you were one. Yeah. That's...

I mean, that's sadistic. Maybe in later life. One of the things that is interesting is the extent to which you need it. You need somebody who's kind of hard-driving and extremely hardcore. Because I'm sceptical of this, but not everybody is. So there's a quote in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography from Woz, Steve Wozniak, who was one of the people who developed Apple with him. And he said, you know, if I'd run Apple, it would have been a much nicer place to work, but we wouldn't have created the Macintosh. Hmm.

And so there is a bit, a bit about my kind of idea about the kind of perpetual push and pull. You don't, you know, you can't, anyone who's ever worked in a certain type of office when just no one's doing any work and it's all very nice, but no one's fundamentally willing to go, should we at any point make something or do something here? That doesn't work. And obviously you can go far to the other extreme and you can say everyone's got to sleep under their desk and it wins. But there are definitely, and the other thing that's really interesting is that people to some extent want that.

When you see lots of the kind of asshole constellations, then actually people think... Hang on. People read it as being... What? I'm so sorry. Sorry.

People think something more special is happening because it's unpleasant. A hub of arseholes. A hub of arseholes, if you will. A cluster of... A nebula. And actually, there's really good... This is a slight tangent. There's really good anthropological research on this about what they call dysphoric rituals. So most things that have an initiation ritual, your initiation ritual isn't like, if you're going to want to join adulthood in this tribe, then we'll give you a lovely warm bath and a cup of tea. No, it's like we're going to take you and give you ayahuasca and you're not going to eat for three days. I'm going to put a spike in you.

And there's really good research that shows that those dysphoric, so causing pain rituals, are much more bonding. At the end of it, the people... One of the things that's odd about my life is that quite a lot of people that I'm friends with, I'm friends with because the same people...

were mean to them on the internet, that's the most strange thing to say, during the 2010s. And I think that's one of the things, if you've ever been involved in a political cause, the idea that you're getting kind of attacked from outside actually really bonds you together. And there is something similar, I think, that happens with the genius arsehole, is that people in a company run by one of those hard-driving Silicon Valley guys, they're kind of like people who are in a cult, right?

And they kind of, everybody bonds. Because if we're having a bad time, then something amazing must be happening, I think. Yeah. I mean, I work for the Daily Mail, and it was very much like that. Everyone was having a bad time. Was something amazing happening, or...?

We were making the daily... Honestly, I did some pictures of orangutans wearing Harry Potter scarves. Okay. That were groundbreaking as a feature. Oh, actually, that's... We did one that was about people dogging in the grounds of a stately home. And I suggested to Paul Dacre, not a man with a great sense of humour, that the headline could be, this country's gone to the doggers. Did it get through? No, no.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Intelligence Squared. It was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, and edited by Mark Roberts.