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

Transcript

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 <a href="https://www.leonardodavin