Intelligence is Not Enough: The Genius Zone - Dean Simonton : 576

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Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that MRI scans show that your brain region connectivity correlates to your intelligence. There's a new and relatively simple technique for mapping the wiring of your brain, and they've basically shown that how the individual regions of your brain talk to each other can correlate very well with intelligence. This comes from University of Cambridge and the NIH in the US, and they're using fMRI, or actually, I apologize, they're using conventional MRI, which is much more affordable than fMRI, in order to look at what your brain's doing. Normally an MRI gives you a single image of your brain, and then they can use that to calculate multiple structural features. And that means that every region of the brain can be described with 10 different characteristics. And what these people figured out, which is kind of cool because it's simple tech, is that if two regions of the brain have similar profiles, then they're in a connected network. And they invented an idea of something called morphometric similarity networks and can say how well connected are the hubs, looking at the very basic physiology of the brain. And they said if there's connectivity in the MSNs and brain regions linked to higher-order functions like problem solving or language, that your intelligence would be higher. And this is particularly interesting because it's a very easy test to do, and it correlates very well with some of the stuff that we're doing at 40 Years of Zen, where we're mapping connectivity of different areas in the brain across different wavelengths of EEG in order to make the brain work better or faster or have neurons fire at different signal amplitudes or different parts of the brain. What's going on here is the brain is way more hackable and way more visualizable than we thought, but there's still a heck of a lot we don't know about what intelligence actually is or what you can do about it. And intelligence is really interesting because if you look at Game Changers, which is my statistical analysis and book about the last almost 500 episodes of Bulletproof Radio, what I found is that the people who are game changers, that is they've done something noteworthy enough to get on the show, Nobel Prize winners, Navy SEALs, and all sorts of cool people, One of the big 3 buckets was smarter. These are people who are doing things to be smarter, they're doing things to be faster, and most importantly, they're doing things to be happier. So happier people tend to be more successful and do big things, but they are also conscious of doing things just more intelligently, which is why on today's episode we are going to talk about intelligence. And that's because in today's episode, I'm going to interview Dean Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at UC Davis. Who has had a career of almost half a century as a social psychologist focusing on genius, creativity, aesthetics, and leadership. And he's looking at eminence, giftedness, and talents in science, philosophy, literature, art, cinema, politics, even in war. He's received 3 Mensa Awards for excellence in research and has authored more than 500 publications, including a dozen books. And his newest book, which is what we're going to talk about on the show today, It's called The Genius Checklist: 9 Paradoxical Tips on How You Can Become a Creative Genius. This is from a guy who's studied it probably more than anyone else alive, at least according to what my trolling of the internet and just looking around and saying, who could I interview about this? This is the man himself.

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So, Dr. Dean, welcome to the show.

Oh, I'm glad to be here.

Why did you spend 50 years looking at intelligence?

Well, I mean, to me, it's a fascinating group of people. Here you have all these individuals who have made lasting, enduring contributions to human civilization. In some area or another— arts, science, philosophy, politics, war, whatever. So these are people who are intrinsically valued by our culture, by our history. And they also stand out. Not everybody can do this. Not everybody is Napoleon. Not everybody is a Beethoven or a Michelangelo. So what makes these people able to do what they were able to achieve in the same lifespan that we have too, but they achieved so much more. So, and it was actually a group I first encountered when I looked at an encyclopedia when I was a little kid and wondered, how do you get into encyclopedia in the first place? And I found all these strange people had to do something to get there, and they had to make a name for themselves, they had to make history. So to me, it's an intrinsically interesting thing, and I was just fortunate to find out that I could make a career studying these folks.

How do you study someone who's dead like Napoleon?

That's a good question. Fortunately, by the very fact that they attained distinction in their own life, there's huge amount of records that are— well, that's what we call the historical record. And this has information about their biography, context in which they lived, various kinds of psychological characteristics. You can actually make inferences about their intelligence based on biographical records of how quickly they developed. You have someone like John Stuart Mill, for example, who's writing a history of Rome at 6 and a half. And you ask, okay, what's the normal age in which people would write their first history of Rome? And it's a lot older than 6 and a half. So these people attract very early because they usually tend to be very precocious. They track very early, early a lot of biographical information. People save their first notes that they wrote, the first letters, their first projects. Of course, nowadays we'll have photographs of them. And so basically you use the historical record, the biographical record And then from that, you try to abstract various kinds of psychological variables like intelligence or personality or motivation or whatever. It's not easy. It's much easier to do it in a laboratory. But on the other hand, it's very hard to get Napoleon into the laboratory.

They say that history is written by the victors. So, I mean, if you were to look at Napoleon from, say, Admiral Nelson's perspective, Napoleon was this evil man who needed to be defeated. And if you looked at it from the Napoleonic perspective, it would've been very different. Are you sure when you're going back hundreds of years and looking at these figures that we're not getting the equivalent of Instagram posts for today where people make themselves look all pretty?

Well, I mean, you have to focus on what are verifiable facts and also remove value judgments, whether or not Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo is not dependent on your perspective. So there are facts that are questionable, things you have to, you know, take with a grain of salt. And then there are other facts that— so, like, for example, when I looked at military genius, I focused on whether or not you won or lost a battle. And there's very few battles where it's controversial about who won it or lost it, because usually the army that lost ends up retreating. And that tells you something.

Okay, so part of what you're using to define genius, at least genius in The Art of War, as we're talking about right now, although, as I mentioned, you look at genius across almost every discipline.

In fact, that's actually a minor area. I tend to focus on scientific and artistic genius.

Okay, those are the areas I wanted to talk about more, but it's just easier because everyone's heard of Napoleon. Um, what, uh, when you're looking at this stuff, you can say, okay, somebody won and therefore they were probably better. And you look at statistically over time, how do you boil that down into something like genius, which seems very ephemeral and hard? And I love studying the history of genius, but what's even the core definition of that?

Okay. First of all, um, there's two main definitions of genius that you see in a standard dictionary. And I've used both of them. One is one that's very, very popular, and that is the IQ definition. So in one dictionary, for example, the American Heritage Dictionary, it says that if you have an IQ of 140 or above, you're a genius, which rules out a lot of Mensa folks, by the way, because they only have to have IQs of 130. Uh, but that's one definition. Uh, IQ of 140 puts you in the top 1% of the population.

You're probably also way more likely to be, uh, crazy, right?

Uh, not necessarily.

Okay, I've heard some interesting statistics. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be crazy.

Um, high intelligence people tend to be fairly sane, tend to be— okay, there's a positive correlation between IQ and both physical and mental health. Okay, it's not a huge correlation, but there's a positive correlation. But anyway, that's one definition. The other definition, which I use in most of my research, uh, is outstanding and unique achievement. You've gone down in history for doing something where you really, really stand out. You're not just doing something in there. I mean, this is what separates, for example, a creative genius from someone who is like, um, A champion weightlifter, okay? It doesn't take genius to be a champion weightlifter. You just have to lift more weight than anybody else lifts, and that means lots of training, and it may take some talent, but it doesn't take genius to lift weights. It's not a unique achievement. But in the case of like Beethoven, his Fifth Symphony is a unique achievement. No one else did something like that. No one else besides Michelangelo did the Sistine Chapel. No one besides Newton developed his celestial mechanics, and so on down the list. It's unique. It requires a great deal of intelligence to do it, and so it links into the other definition of genius, and it has some staying power. We're still talking about these people centuries later. And there's actually been studies showing that if you look at, for example, Renaissance artists, like in Renaissance Italy, the people who were most acclaimed in their own time are the same people we're still acclaiming today. Michelangelo was considered to be the greatest artist of his time, and he's considered to be the greatest artist of Italian Renaissance today.

You've actually said though that very intelligent people do not necessarily accomplish great things.

Right.

Looking at people who've accomplished great things, saying they're intelligent, but that the— but, but that— I guess I'm not sure what the logic loop there looks like.

Well, the thing is, um, when we're talking about intelligence, we're talking about general intelligence as measured by an IQ test. Okay. And those people who are high achievers tend to have higher general intelligence than the average person on the street.

But they had something else besides intelligence.

They had something else. And for example, this one classic study that looked at 3— it wasn't done by me, it was done by someone at Stanford— looked at 301 geniuses, and they found that motivation, determination, you know, stick-to-itiveness, or what now researchers will often call grit, is far more important than intelligence per se. In other words, the intelligence provides sort of a minimum. You have to have a certain intelligence in order to master your domain, in order to learn how to do equations or how to do painting or how to compose music or whatever. You have to have a certain minimum intelligence to do that, and that's higher than the average. But beyond that, you have to come up with something that you're going to devote your whole life to it too, and stick to it. No matter what kind of frustrations you experience, what kind of obstacles you may face. You even— Beethoven would have concerts where they did. They were, they were failures. They were not successful. Michelangelo was working on a Pieta towards the end and he realized it was a piece of crap and smashed it with a sledgehammer. So there's going to be a lot of frustrations and a lot of failures. And so you have to have that ability that motivation to keep on going even in the face of failure. And that is something that turns out much more important than intelligence per se. And the third factor is you got to have creativity or imagination in most of these fields. You have to have something to say, something that gets back to what I said before, something that's unique, something that's distinctive. There are people who are very, very intelligent. They have very, very high IQs. They may even have some motivation and drive and determination, but they don't really have anything to say. Perhaps the best example I can think of, and I hope she's not listening to this because she'll be offended, but the person who used to be in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest recorded IQ, and that's Marilyn Vos Savant, and she has a regular column every Sunday in Parade magazine. Where she answers questions from people who think that you have to have an IQ to answer these questions. You don't really, but it doesn't make any difference whether you need a high IQ or not. The point is there's nothing really distinctive about what she's offering the world. Almost every single thing she says you can get by doing a Google search. So there's nothing that sets her apart that makes her a Beethoven or Napoleon or a Michelangelo.

So then what you found from, you know, 50 years of looking at this and really quantitatively digging in on 500+ people is they had resilience, they had some kind of imagination or creativity, and they had above-average intelligence, right?

That's, that's good. If you put in a nutshell, that works. Yeah.

All right, now for people listening to this, can you raise your intelligence to be above average if you're just average?

To some extent you can. I mean, you can intellectually. I mean, a lot of people don't do anything intellectual during their lives. I mean, watching TV is not an intellectual experience. Maybe listening to your podcast might be intellectual.

Maybe a little bit. I'll give you that. Feed my ego, come on.

But I mean, just, you know, watching, you know, binging out on Netflix or whatever series It is not an intellectually stimulating thing. You know, reading extensively, actually doing problems. One of the things I used to love doing is I used to blog the Mensa. I don't anymore because it's kind of dumb. Is you can get a Mensa calendar.

Did you just say Mensa was kind of dumb? That's my favorite quote ever.

Well, there's nothing. There's nothing to do there. I mean, all you do is, you know, you attend these conferences where everybody is acting intelligent, but there's nothing really interesting about it.

Okay, eat olives or something.

I hear you. But the point is, is that, um, you can get a Mensa calendar and every day you get a problem to solve, and they're different kind of problems.

I thought it was going to be the least attractive set of centerfolds ever, but that's not what's in a calendar.

Probably that too.

Just kidding.

But, um, the thing is you have to do things to stimulate yourself, you know, learn a language, uh, attend cultural events, um, you know, do problem sets.

Does that raise your IQ though? Does that really do that?

Ah, that's a good question, um, because a lot of the research suggests that a lot of it tends to be very specific to the particular problems you're working on, and it doesn't generalize very well to other tasks. And, um, and it also takes too long. If you want a quick fix, we're talking about devoting decades to trying to stimulate yourself and then maybe raising your IQ by half a standard deviation. Are you willing to do that?

I'm not willing to do that. But there's some, there's some other shortcuts. In Game Changers, I wrote about some of the software for increasing fluid intelligence and sort of doubling the working memory, which it's really painful, but in that you feel like a complete failure for a while. But you can do it in about a month. And I mean, I, my IQ test on different ones rose by 12 points from doing that.

Oh, that's good. That's, that's, you know, a standard deviation.

So that was, that was pretty amazing. And I do some other neurofeedback related stuff that has some, some good science behind it too. Were increasing the charge, basically the charge of firing of neurons, which is a trainable effect. So there's some weird stuff that may help. And Daniel Amen's come on the show and said if you're dealing with toxins or dealing with low blood flow in the brain, I believe you can actually regain 15 points of IQ points that you've lost just because your brain wasn't well taken care of. So I'm looking for those things. And you're saying that even without any tech, it's possible to get 5 or 6 IQ points just by working and doing your crossword puzzles, your other cultural activities, making your brain work.

Yeah, I mean, this is not my research area because I don't do experiments where I take world-famous geniuses and put them in a room and try to raise their IQs.

That'd be a lot of fun. That's the sort of stuff that I like to do.

But most of the stuff I do on intelligence postmortem assessment.

So yeah, yeah, but just, just so— but you've also been, you know, 50 years of reading and you've written 500 publications, so you think about intelligence more than most intelligent people do. So that— if that's one of the three, all right, so maybe it's possible to raise your IQ by working really hard. What about this, uh, creativity, imagination thing? I mean, there's the famous Albert Einstein quote. How do people go about, you know, becoming someone who you might want to write about after they die? In terms of increasing that ability, have you found ways that these successful people became intelligent or were they just born that way? Not intelligent, became imaginative, or were they just born that way?

Well, one of the major personality predictors of outstanding achievement in both creativity and leadership is a personality characteristic called openness to experience. And people who are high in openness to experience are people who just like to try various things out. They're very explorative. They're very curious. They'll try different kinds of meals. They'll read different things. They're open to different kinds of values and so forth. And this is something that is a very good predictor, like I said, of both creativity and leadership. Because a lot of times in order to come up with new ideas, you have to— you've heard this term as a cliché— think outside the box, right? You got to think outside the box. So you got to be really, really curious. And a lot of times a solution to a problem that you're trying to solve comes totally out of the blue. So one good example of someone who is a historical figure who had very high openness to experiences is Galileo. That the great Italian scientist— a lot of people don't know this, but he was very interested in a lot of things besides science. He was very interested in literature. He was very interested in the visual arts. He actually had training in the visual arts. And it turned out that his interest in the visual arts allowed him to solve a problem in astronomy that stumped everybody else. Uh, when the new telescope came out, a lot of people thought, hey, let's point it at the moon and see if we see anything. So all these people pointed to the moon, and all they saw was the same moon they normally saw, but bigger. They saw a smooth surface with some discoloration on it, like a marble, but nothing particularly outstanding. He pointed his telescope at the moon, and he saw mountains. And he not only saw those mountains, but he drew the mountains because he had learned chiaroscuro, which was an artistic technique in Italian art of depicting, uh, lights and dark shades, shadows, uh, and highlights. And he learned that technique, and he drew these beautiful, beautiful drawings showing that the moon had mountains. And then all of a sudden, people looked at the moon through the telescope and said, "My gosh, he's right, the moon has mountains." But they never saw that before, partly because Aristotle said that the moon had a perfectly flat surface, and so they just saw what they were supposed to see, but also because they didn't have any artistic training. And by the way, it's kind of interesting, Galileo's drawing of the moon was good enough that one of his artistic friends actually included in a painting of the Madonna, where he has the Madonna standing on the Moon, with the Moon having mountains instead of its normal smooth surface as in traditional paintings. So that's an illustration of his breadth of interests. His interest in the arts and literature gave him a perspective that allowed him to become a great astronomer. Now, how do you get that?

Well, it sounds like cross-domain stuff is part of that. Naveen Jain, who started 7 companies ranging from a company mining the moon for minerals to another one looking at the human bacteria and the— or the, the bacteria in the human gut, just all these different things— who says to be really great in a field, you have to come from outside a field. So is that part of this, just being curious about all kinds of stuff?

Curious about all sorts of things. And recognizing that there's not necessarily any boundaries between these various things, that your interest in this may end up having consequences for that. So you're interested in Buddhism and you end up working in high-energy physics and you decide to come up with— I'm talking about Gell-Mann, by the way, got a Nobel Prize. And he comes up with the Eightfold Path, which is actually inspired by Buddhism. You know, where does that come from? Or the quark, the word quark comes from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. So having a curiosity, in fact, one of the things that's interesting was a study done where this person looked at great scientists, he stratified these scientists, The highest level scientists were the people who are Nobel laureates. And then the next level were people who were like elected to the National Academy of Sciences. And then there was your normal run-of-the-mill scientists. They have, you know, jobs at good research universities, but they're not in the National Academy of Sciences and they certainly haven't got a Nobel Prize. And he looked at their avocations. Did they have any hobbies? And it turns out that the greater the scientist was, the more likely they were interested in literature or the visual arts. Maybe they did photography, did painting, they played an instrument. A lot of people know that Albert Einstein every once in a while would take a break and play Mozart sonatas on his violin. He also liked sailboating. You know, that's another interesting thing.

It's kind of funny, the former CTO of Microsoft during their big growth years, Nathan Myhrvold, was also— no one knew it was him, but he was one of the guys behind sous vide cooking, this technique of using very precise temperature control, and ended up writing a huge set of books about that, which is completely orthogonal to software development and all that stuff. But we see that. So, all right, so someone's listening to the show and they're saying, all right, I want to turn on more of this. Does that mean they just need to go do something that they have no interest in or just like, how do you put this into action if you actually want to be more like one of these great geniuses throughout history?

Well, first of all, just— yes, a lot of us have curiosities that we don't pursue because they say, well, that's going to take time away from something more important on my list, like Facebook. Yeah, right. Uh, that's an interesting thing, by the way, in the way I haven't figured out, because there's been major changes in technology And I don't know if it's a net gain or net loss, because one thing Facebook does do is there's all this stuff that you're exposed to out of the blue, you know.

That you could be curious about, right?

That you could be curious about, and you could follow, and you may end up having another interest, you know, or surfing the internet. It's so easy just to click on a link and you're someplace else, and you click on another link and you're someplace else. And next thing you know, you're studying the ancient Sumerian language or something, you know, totally random. But the point is, is you got to pursue those and just follow your curiosity. Don't say, well, I don't have time to do that. And sometimes a lot of people have these things they've always wanted to do, but they never got around. Say, I've always wanted to play an instrument. Well, why not? Why not take lessons? I've always wanted to paint. Why not?

You know, that's one of those things I would say that writing a book is a great way to do it about something you don't know anything about. Which is like, I've written a few books now at this point. You've written about 100 times more than I have, at least published things. And that is one of the ways, but I've also said, this was going back 15 almost 18 years ago or something. I said, "I'm going to learn how to play the guitar." So I bought a guitar. I still haven't learned how to play it because the investment in time to get even halfway decent seemed really high. So then I bought Rocksmith, which lets you learn much more quickly by playing a video game with a real guitar. Then I realized I don't have an hour a day to do that. I, to this day, haven't done it, although I follow a lot of other interests. Is there some sort of way of figuring out which interests have the highest return on investment for that time you put into them that are more likely I don't know about that.

I mean, I think one thing is that when you pick up something new, like you've already said in your own experience, you do find yourself getting to a point in some areas where it's, you know, it's a law of diminishing returns. I had that happen to me. I learned guitar and I played in rock and jazz groups for a while, but I reached a point where I realized that no matter how much I practice, I was never going to be really good. You know, I just— I was— it was just not worth it anymore. And so that was something that I was willing to give up. Now, there's other things I realize I'm never going to be really good at it, but there's still some benefit off of it. So, for example, I have this hobby of learning Spanish, okay? And I, you know, I listen to tapes and I do readings and all this kind of stuff. And I finally realized that I've plateaued at intermediate Spanish. That's just where I'm going to be forever, which means if I go to a Spanish-speaking city, I can get around and I can go to the store and things like that and get to the airport. But I'm never going to carry on a conversation in any fluency at all. But I'm still learning about Spanish culture and, you know, Mexican culture and all that.

The benefit to your creativity of being an adequate guitar player and an adequate Spanish conversationalist isn't that you're the world's best in those things, in that they contributed to your genius in your core field, which is understanding—

They open up your mind. Yeah. Right.

What do you think when people confuse IQ and genius? Does it make you mad? Does it make you sad? What happens there? Why is the difference so important?

I think the main thing is there's too much emphasis put on IQ and intelligence test performance. There's no doubt that general intelligence is an important thing to have. You know, no one wants to have low intelligence. You know, it even becomes a political issue recently. You know, who's, who's intelligent and who's not, who's got the highest IQ in politics. I won't name any names, but I'm sure your listeners can guess who I'm talking about. And the thing is, is that it is one component of what is necessary. And too often people say, well, I'm not really bright enough to really do anything. Heck, you probably are. There was this classic study that was done at Stanford where they tested over 1,500 young kids and they picked those that had IQs of 140 or above. They snuck in a few that had IQs below 140 because they were relatives of some of the people and they didn't want to offend anybody. But in any case, they were very, very high IQ kids. And then they followed them all the way into adulthood to see if they became geniuses, adult geniuses. And what was interesting is There was not one single Nobel Prize among them, which was kind of a disappointment. You think with 1,500+ kids with IQs in the top 1%, you'd get a Nobel Prize or two, and they didn't get any. However, there were two kids who took the test and didn't satisfy the criterion. They were too dumb to make it into the sample. And they both got Nobel Prizes in physics, one for inventing the transistor. At first, particularly one of those kids, they were really kind of disappointed because they thought, God, I'm not smart enough to be in this group. But they didn't let it get them down. They went ahead and got PhDs at top-flight graduate schools. They ended up getting Nobel Prizes. And so I think the problem is that when people think that they don't have a genius-level IQ, they may think, well, they're doomed, they're not going to be able to achieve it.

So a learned helplessness there.

Yeah, it's like a learned helplessness thing. Feynman, you know, I mean, everybody knows how, you know, great of a mind he had, great imagination he had, and his IQ was 125. You know, uh, Watson, his IQ was about 125. So, um, and, you know, he found discovered DNA, you know, co-discovered DNA. So, um, you can't let the IQ score determine who you are. And that's what bothers me, you know. If I don't make Mensa, that means I'm doomed. Well, not necessarily.

Well, I hope that's inspirational for people who have, uh, inadequacy thoughts about their IQ, because there's ample evidence that that's not what's going to get you there. Although It helps. It's sort of like being tall, right? I mean, you look at, uh, uh, you know, your odds of getting paid, they go up something like $1,000 a year for every inch over 6 feet you are, right? You know, that's just kind of how it is. But there are plenty of people who are a lot shorter than me who make a lot more than I do. So, you know, you don't have to— you're not, you're not bound by those laws, right? In 1999, you said something else that was really interesting. Uh, you talk about how The more intelligent a president is, the harder it is for them to get elected.

Yeah.

Why is that?

That's an interesting result. I mean, that was an old study and it hasn't been replicated. So I, I don't know. It hasn't, it hasn't been disproven, but I haven't updated the data. Okay. Because I stopped doing research on presidents after a while. But anyway, I think what it is is that if you are too intelligent, then you have problems effectively communicating with the people who are going to be voting for you. And it's interesting to me, there's some evidence, for example, that British prime ministers on average have higher IQs than presidents of the United States. And that's because in order to be a prime minister, you have to be supported by your fellow MPs, your, your fellow parliamentarians. So they are already above average in intelligence. Okay. And, and so you have to be more intelligent than them. But in our system, you have to appeal to the American voter. And so that means that you can be too bright to be elected president of the United States. And partial support for this, even though I haven't replicated this for more recent presidents, I had a study come out in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2018 where we actually looked at managers and looked at their rated effectiveness on the part of the people they manage. These are standard businesses. And what we found was that the managers could be too smart. To be effective leaders. And in fact, they fit perfectly this mathematical model I published way back in the 1980s where their intelligence had to be a little bit more than one standard deviation above everybody else's. But if it was much more than a standard deviation, then their leadership effectiveness decreased. So we'd like to have leaders that we can understand. Basically.

It reminds me of a, a great friend of mine from when I was going to business school who I think was the smartest person in the class, and I had to work really, really hard to just follow a conversation with her, right? That's sort of— I think there was not as many people talking to her because, I mean, it was work, it was intellectually stimulating, but— and to her, she was probably dumbing it down so I could understand it. But I— so I've felt that. I think all of us has someone who's so smart that they can't communicate with us. And you're saying that that effect can be more subtle, but even at a presidential level, if you can't communicate well.

And then if you try— and the problem is the catch-22. If they try to lower their level of intelligence when they're communicating, then they often sound like they're talking down to you. Yeah.

And that's even worse than sounding too smart, right? No one wants to do that.

There's a very interesting study that was done. It's a classic study of highly intelligent kids in New York, in the New York City school system. And she found this kid who was considered to be the class nerd. Everybody looked down on him. He talked over all their heads. He was using words like capitulation and ennui in elementary school, you know. And it turned out that there was a special opportunity class for gifted children that had been set up in the New York City school system. His IQ, by the way, was 180.

Okay, that's a really smart guy.

That's a really smart guy. They put him into a special class where the average IQ was in the 160s, and he was immediately elected the class leader because now he had a followership who could understand what the heck he was saying.

Because he was within 1 or 2 standard deviations. Yeah, that's within 1. Okay.

Yeah.

Now, in your book, uh, which is— it's fascinating because it takes a long time to, to fully just boil down and understand all of this amorphous data about intelligence. You talk about intellect and drive and how those are important to everything, but then you also boil down to creators do one set of things and leaders do another set of things with their intelligence. Can you walk me through the difference between creators and leaders and how they apply intelligence and genius?

Well, um, first of all, they, they are very similar in a lot of ways. They both tend to be higher intelligence, like you said. They tend to be higher in motivation, uh, they tend to be higher in openness to experience, but there's one fundamental contrast between them, and that is that the leaders are far more extroverted and the creators tend to be far more introverted. And I'm using extroversion in the very broad sense that it's used like in the Big Five personality inventory, where it's not just being sociable, it's interest in exerting dominance over people. Influencing people. It's associated with a high need for power. And, and leaders have that. And most creators are not that interested. Some are. But those creators who are, they're more likely to become like lab directors and then move up into administration, become president of the university or something like that. But most creators, they just want to, you know, go to their studio and do their painting, sit down at their desk and do their mathematical derivations. They're not really that interested in influencing people. And, you know, to be a leader, you have to spend all the time just thinking, okay, what can I do next to get, you know, more people to follow me? Or to win the next battle, uh, in one way or another asserting dominance, win another election, you know, that's a really major difference between them.

I, I remember this, this interview with— this was years ago— someone who had worked closely with Michael Jackson, who certainly has a, a cloud over him right now, but as a creative genius, I think everyone would acknowledge that was a creative genius. And the— in the interview, this is one of his producers or something saying, like, Michael's always pushing, just pushing, pushing, pushing. And the producer had asked him, why, why do we have to do this? And why do you have to do it so fast? And Michael's answer was, because if I don't do it, Prince will. Now, well, I guess the artist formerly known as Prince.

Yeah, right.

So that's an example of someone who clearly was a creator, a creative genius, but also had that desire for power and leader. Have you studied people who scored high on both, where they had to have that power and leadership and have high creativity at the same time? Is that super unusual, and what do people like that turn out to be?

Well, I mean, one of the things that a lot of creators face is they have a lot of investment in being outstanding in their field. They want to, they want to be outstanding in their field. And it's sometimes hard for them to recognize that they actually do have competition. And it's particularly true when you consider that they're not being weighed on the same scale. Well, I mean, you could say there's some things like, you know, how many records sold or whatever. But Prince is not doing the exact same thing, same thing as Michael Jackson is doing. They're doing something distinctive and unique. You can, you can tell when you listen to them who you're listening to, right? Um, and yet, um, you know, you want to feel that you stand up higher than anybody else, okay? So, um, you see this all the time, like, uh, you see certain rivalries that come up, like there was a big rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. They were competitors, and they actually had this one competition where they depicted the exact same scene, you know, in the form of drawings. And then the question is, who did the best version of it? And so I think part of it is they have a huge investment of their self-esteem in being the best. They want to be the best at what they do. And sometimes it's hard for them to accept that they do have competition. And particularly, this is one problem that all creators have to face, is that creativity, whether you're a scientist or an artist, is never guaranteed. You may have a really great song and maybe this really great mathematical equation, and then you have a flub, you have a failure, something that doesn't work. And, and meanwhile, here you have these other people around, these other people in your same field who— they're having successes when you're having failures. Even someone like Albert Einstein. A lot of people don't know that Albert Einstein wasted 3 decades of his life working on a unified field theory that just completely failed. It didn't— it just didn't work. And meanwhile, there's— he had these younger colleagues who were being much more successful, and they're being much more successful because they were using quantum theory and he refused to use it. So he, he, you know, you invest a tremendous amount in being great in your field, and it's not always easy to accept the fact that you have competitors. Now, I don't know if they want to control people. I don't think it's a matter of like a leader trying to exert influence. They just want to be the best in what they do.

So if this is one of the things that sets apart, you know, the genius is just the desire to be the best, there are a lot of people I've met who say, I have no interest in being the best at all. Right? Does that mean that they're dust?

Good for them, because that's what We, we need them.

So I want to be the best at being average.

Yeah, we need someone who's not interested in being the best, right? Who just does the job that they're supposed to do, right? They meet the job specifications. That's, that's perfectly fine. I don't know if that's arrogant or not, but we don't need everybody trying to be the best, you know.

It's a tough call. I mean, there's— I believe there's a core intrinsic pleasure in doing something well, like even if it's brushing your teeth. I did a crappy job brushing my teeth, or I brushed my teeth and my teeth were clean and they felt good. Like, just trivial things. It feels good as a human to do things well. At least it does for me. But I can tell you, when I was getting my MBA, I intentionally didn't even want to be at the top of the class because I realized they'd give me an MBA even if I was at the bottom of the class.

ROI.

I had some really smart classmates, man, I tell you. That mindset maybe is a little bit different, but in order to be one of these, what I would call game changers, what you're calling creative geniuses or geniuses throughout history, they all shared that desire to be the best. Are there creative geniuses out there who just don't care about being the best? They just want to They just want to tinker, yet they create—

Well, I mean, there's some— I mean, one of the things we do see, um, is the one-hit wonders, the one-shots. You know, they, uh, they come up with a great idea and it's great enough that they become famous for it. Uh, like they have one hit song. And I mean, you can actually Google this, you know, one-hit wonders, and you'll get a huge list of all these pop artists who had one hit, right? And that was it. And the thing is, is they were— some of them were not happy with that, and they kept on trying to record more. But a lot of other ones, they were perfectly fine with that. You know, they, they would every once in a while do a concert and sing their one hit, and, uh, and they were content with that. And, uh, you know, Truman Capote, the novelist, had one great novel and he was working on another one when he died. Well, it wasn't really a novel. It was a— what would you call it? A fictionalized nonfiction or something like that. Yeah. But, you know, he had one great book and then spent most of his time doing the celebrity circuit, maybe talking about the next book. But he didn't seem to have the need to be a Dickens or a Jane Austen that keeps on going, producing one book after another after another. So there's some people are willing to say, okay, I did one really good thing and I'm really able to rest on my laurels now, you know.

So that may be just a personality thing, or maybe it's upbringing. Okay. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the majority of people who listen to Bulletproof Radio are interested in the sort of things I talk about. Do one thing every day to make yourself better. Not necessarily the best, but at least to improve your condition, your happiness, your whatever you wanted to improve. Just because being better at whatever the core things are probably reduces struggle in your life. Avoidance of pain, if not pursuit of pleasure through excellence. Now, if you have that lens on and you had something to say to them, how would— especially for younger people, how do you know if you're a creator or a leader? Because I mean, if you'd asked me when I was 24 or 25, I'd have both. I have to do both with excellence and I wouldn't necessarily have kind of known how to slice and dice those two sides to what I like to do. You're, you're 71, I think. How, after all of your life's experience, how would you tell a young person to know which one of those they are?

Well, first of all, you have to do a lot of exploration when you're younger and try out different things. And you're probably going to find yourself naturally channeled into those things that are really you. You know, we're all born with a certain potential. We're also born with a lot more non-potential in various things. Like I mentioned earlier, I learned I could never be a musician. I just never had it in me. I also learned that about sports. I tried and tried and tried, but I could never be a really good athlete. But how do you know that? You have to try it. You have to go out for the team and not make it. You have to try— I went out for the school choir. And didn't make it when they took almost everybody, you know. So you have to be willing to fail, you know, spend a lot of time trying things out until you find that thing that is really you. Now, the problem is, is sometimes it takes a long time for this discovery process to work out. So a lot of times people have talents that they don't realize they have. Until they're adults, even old age. I mean, the best example I can think of is Grandma Moses. Here's somebody who, um, she just did embroidery, and she was perfectly willing to spend the rest of her life doing embroidery. She did one painting once using normal house paint, um, but Didn't do— didn't go anywhere with that. And then she wasn't until she was in her 70s that all of a sudden she realized she couldn't embroider anymore because she got terrible arthritis. And she started getting very depressed. And a sister of hers said, well, you tried painting once before. You probably still can hold brushes because you don't have to be as adept holding a brush as you do to, you know, do all the embroidery needle. So she took up painting, and all of a sudden she became famous. There's a painting by her in the White House. One of her paintings, one of her paintings is on a postage stamp. Her, her first painting sold for $5, and pretty soon they're being sold for tens of thousands of dollars. She found out she had a talent for producing, you know, we call it outsider art. Uh, I think it's good art. I mean, it's, it's an art that fills a particular niche— Americana, you know, Fourth of July, that kind of stuff. But it's— it— she didn't discover she had that talent until what she thought was her talent was no longer, uh, allowed. She was no longer able to do. So sometimes, and of course if she had died when she was 69 years old or she died when she was my age, 71, she never would have discovered this talent that she had.

You talk about BVSR, blind variation and selective retention, when it comes to creativity. What the heck is that?

It's actually a term that we have other terms for— trial and error, generation and test. Those are basically synonyms. But the basic idea behind BVSR, or trial and error, or, um, or generation test, is that the only way you can make major discoveries— and when I mean major discoveries, I don't mean just scientific discoveries, I mean major artistic, uh, discoveries, you know, like discover new styles like Cubism is a discovery. Analytical and aesthetic Cubism was a discovery that Picasso and Braque made. In order to make discoveries, in order to invent new things, you have to be willing to try things out and fail. And so what BBSR basically involves is taking risks. I mean, you probably know this literature better than I do, given your background, but they find that entrepreneurs who are most likely to be really successful are the ones who have the most failures as well.

So BVS is, is an elegant and academic way of saying willing to fail and then get up again and do it anyway.

Do it over and over and over again. Because the thing is, is that you don't— if, if you know ahead of time that it's going to work, then you're not venturing too far beyond your comfort zone in terms of knowledge and expertise. So you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to take risks. And one of my favorite illustrations is Thomas Edison. A lot of people don't realize how many failures he had before he had successes. He he tried over 1,000 different kinds of filaments for the incandescent lamp until he finally settled on one that no one could even imagine would even work. He carbonized bamboo fibers, and that's what was the first electric lamp. There was one time he was working on a battery with an assistant, and they tried 900 different configurations to see if they could get a workable battery that was an improvement on a storage battery that they already had. And none of them worked. All of them were worse. And his assistant complained, "We've got nothing but failures." And he says, "No, we have 900 successes. We know 900 things that don't work." Right. So we've moved forward. We're never gonna try those 'cause he took, you know, very detailed lab notes. He had lots of successes, obviously, the electrical, you know, the commercially viable incandescent lamp, 'cause there's other people invented incandescent lamps before him, and the phonograph and so forth. But he had horrible failures as well. And a lot of people don't realize he worked a long time on a process for extracting iron from low-grade ore. He lost huge amount of money on it. The process never worked. And one time he asked his accountant, okay, how much did this cost when he finally gave up? And he says, you're not gonna like this, boss, but you basically lost all the money you earned from the electric light bulb.

Oops. Oops.

One of the things he worked on that was a total failure was an electric automobile. No one's ever heard of the Edison automobile. The problem is that it kept— only went so far before it ran out of electricity. You know, not surprisingly, he worked a long time on the fuel cell, which is a cell that generates electricity directly from the fuel, bypassing dynamos and steam generators and stuff. Never worked. The closest he got to working is he blew out the windows of his laboratory one day. But he never was— we have fuel cells now, but not— he would never succeed in doing it.

So definitely the people who are doing the biggest things fail the most.

All right.

Yeah, I, uh, I, I think it's really inspirational to, to say that. And certainly for people early in your career, uh, you see the, you see the Zuckerbergs of the world, uh, who, you know, 25, started Facebook and you never looked back and all that stuff. But that's highly unusual. Most entrepreneurs, like you including me, have failed more than a few times.

Well, I mean, if somebody founded MySpace—

and I think the guy who founded MySpace walked away with hundreds of millions. He did all right, but eventually MySpace as a company didn't ultimately succeed. Now, you wrote something— this is about 22 years ago— you wrote a book called Psychologists Defying the Crowd: Stories of Of Those Who Battled the Establishment and Won.

Well, that was an edited volume.

That was an edited volume, okay.

And I just contributed one chapter.

Got it, got it. So I guess it was your chapter. It was called It's Absolutely Impossible: A Longitudinal Study of Response to Conventional Naysayers. So when people flout conventions, what did you learn from studying people who went against the grain?

Well, first of all, It's sort of like what you said when at the, at the very beginning of this interview, um, history is written by the winners. Okay. And, um, and this is one fundamental bias in the research that I do, is that I tend to study the ones who are successful to some degree, right? So there are A lot of people who failed in the initial part of their careers, who just had— it gets back to that determination and persistence and energy and drive and all that. And then they finally have their big success. They may have more failures later too. And who knows, given what's going on, Facebook may end up failing. It's possible. But because of that determination, they finally have a success. What I don't study is all those people who failed and failed and failed and finally gave up.

Or just became excellent at failing and never—

Because the thing that's interesting to me is that if you just do, you know, on the back of a napkin calculation, the number of creative geniuses out there And I focused on creative geniuses rather than leaders because leaders are restricted in the number of positions they can occupy. There only can only be one president at any one time. But one thing that's nice about creativity and creative genius is, um, you can invent your own domain. You know, it's done all the time. You know, there's all of a sudden something, you know, that, you know, like the smartphone or whatever that didn't exist before. If you look at creative geniuses A lot of them— well, I was going to say, back to the napkin calculation, there should be probably about 10 times more than we actually know, roughly. In other words, there's probably a huge percentage of people out there who didn't make it, and they're now, you know, Uber drivers or you know, whatever, and they're not successful. And you might, you might want to say, well, um, there's something in them that is— that they're not smart enough, they didn't have enough drive, whatever. But I'm not buying that because I think a lot of them just— it's the luck of the draw. They, they had some ideas Uh, some of them, sometimes I— they have really good ideas and then all of a sudden they're, uh, scooped by somebody else. I, I had a graduate student who did this really, really great dissertation and she's getting all ready to, to write it up for publication in a major journal, and then she saw that article had already been published on the exact same topic. And so she was scooped. Okay.

Yeah, that can be frustrating.

She got a postdoc and retooled herself and did something else. But the point is, is that there's a lot of people even with good ideas that find themselves preempted. I mean, have you heard of Gray? Have you heard of Gray's telephone?

Exactly.

Have you heard— you've heard of Bell Telephone, I'm sure, but you haven't heard of Gray Telephone. Okay, well, Gray's patent application was, was delivered the same day as Bell's patent application, but it was processed second.

It's really interesting. There's a paper written by a Stanford law professor I used to do yoga with in, in Mountain View, and it's called The Myth of the Lone Wolf Inventor, or The Lone Inventor And he goes through all these major inventions like that where at least 2 or 3 people seem to have the same idea at about the same time, and it was sort of a race to the patent office. And so just saying that it's rare that there's one, just one person who's working on a problem, and no one can explain why that is, but it seems to hold true.

Actually, I've done research on that.

Oh yeah, cool. Do tell me what you've learned. That's what we're here for.

There's a phenomenon called the multiples phenomenon where two or more people come up with the same idea, an invention or discovery, roughly the same time, but completely independently of each other. Okay. It turns out that you can fit a probability model to that. It turns out primarily a chance phenomenon. And this is how it works. You have a bunch of people who all basically learn the same thing. They develop a similar expertise. They all go to graduate school and study physics or study engineering or whatever it happens to be. And so, they have a pool of things in their head, and then they start generating combinations. And just by chance, you're going to have 2 or more people come up with the same idea at the same time. Okay. And in fact, it has— they almost have to come up with the same idea at the same time because the second one guy or gal communicates that idea, that preempts anybody else. For example, right now I can, I can guarantee you that absolutely no one in the world is working on inventing the wheel because that idea has already been disseminated. Everybody knows it's been invented already. Okay, so everybody's working on combinations of ideas, and you can actually— that haven't been produced yet, and then as soon as it's communicated, then that terminates any other— any further work on that particular problem. And what's interesting, for example, is as you look at the history of these multiples, because scientific communication has become more and more efficient, the time lag between the first and last duplicate has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. In fact, now it's almost instantaneous because people can post it online. They made a major discovery, they can post it online. And so it turns out it's a totally probabilistic phenomenon.

That is so fascinating, but it makes sense. And it's something that would be invisible unless you'd studied it. When you went through and you looked at people who defied convention, you asked them 4 different questions. And I want to finish our interview by asking you those same 4 questions. And one of the questions that you, you asked was, what, what, if anything, would you do differently now? So if, if I could ask you that, like, what are the things now, as you had this, this career studying these things, what would you have done differently given the value of hindsight?

Oh, and the value of hindsight. Yeah, I guess the main thing I would have done differently is When you defy the crowd, when you try to do something unconventional, it's kind of hard to stay cool, you know, and to suffer fools gladly. And so there's a number of times that I would get really upset and really angry. I have had a number of in-class fights with teachers and things like that because I'm told you can't do that.

Watch me, right?

Why can't I do that, right? You know, and, uh, in retrospect, of course, having the advantage of, you know, hindsight, I could say, well, I know exactly where I'm going and I know it's going to work, right? So just leave me alone, okay? Just leave me alone. We don't have to fight about this, okay? So that's one thing I would do differently.

One thing. Another thing. So, and you wrote this paper, like, when you'd asked all these people these questions about 16 years ago, so One of the things you asked was, what are the costs to you professionally of defying the establishment? So I've got to ask you, even over the last 16 years since you wrote the paper, have you continued to defy the establishment knowing what the costs are? Have you mellowed with age and experience?

It's not so much that I've mellowed with age, it's that the establishment has moved closer to where I am. Okay. When I was a graduate student, I was told point blank that you're not going to be able to publish any research in good journals. Okay. Well, I started publishing my stuff in good journals and I still publish my stuff in good journals. It just takes me fewer revisions before I finally get an acceptance. My critics are more willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Instead of having me labor uphill. And so I've become close to— I mean, I'm a distinguished professor at a research university. Okay. And so I finally got to the point where I don't have to buck. Now, you could say, oh yeah, that's a safe thing for you to say. You've actually become more conventional. Okay, you've actually become more conservative and you don't really have any good ideas anymore. And there may be some truth to that. I mean, it's hard to— it's hard to know. There was a survey of eminent scientists where they were asked what— and these are all very established people, okay, famous scientists. And they were asked, okay, what's the best work that you've done in your— during your career? And most of them said, well, that's an arrogant thing to ask me. The best work I've done in my career is the thing I'm working on right now. Well, well, I'll bet you that most of them, that's not true. Just like Einstein. Yeah, he would say the best thing I'm working on is unified field theory. And but he was wrong. It was the general theory of relativity.

In fact, there, there is a study of preeminent physicists that I came across, and most of them did their best work in their mid-20s.

Yeah, early 30s. Yeah.

And that's when their big breakthroughs happened. And after that, they were still doing fantastic work, but the, the thing that won them the prize, uh, was something that happened early on, even though maybe no one realized how important it was for, for a while. So there's something going on with that. Well, Dr. Dean, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom from these multiple decades of looking at what creative geniuses and leaders do. I appreciate that you put so much, so much time and energy into these things that are really hard to study and are ephemeral, because I think it sheds some light on who we are as human beings and how people get to be fantastic at what they do. I I appreciate you and I really appreciate your new book on the topic.

Well, thank you very much, Dave. I really appreciate it.

The title of your new book is The Genius Checklist: 9 Paradoxical Tips on How You Can Become a Creative Genius. A word of warning for you if you read this, Dr. Dean has packaged some cognitive dissonance into a book because one of the examples in there is score really highly on an IQ test. By the way, skip the test because it doesn't matter that much. I love that kind of thinking, but really, if you want to look at becoming a creative genius, let's look at what the best creative geniuses throughout history did, what we can learn from them, and a rigorous study of them. It's very much the same kind of mindset that's in Game Changers. How do we go through all of this data? How do we boil it down? In this case, 9 tips on creative genius. It's worth your time to read the book. I would highly encourage you to check it out. Dr. Dean, thank you for being on the show.

Okay, and thank you for putting the plug in for the book.

Of course, of course.

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