Something You Should Know - What Makes You Who You Are & Could You Be A Genius?

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

Everyone knows what “riding shotgun” means. And most people think they know where it came from, which is from the days of stagecoaches. But that is not exactly correct. This episode begins by revealing the real origins of the phrase. Source: Cecil Adams author of The Straight Dope (https://amzn.to/3iPlGfp) What are you? It’s a fascinating question because we often don’t think about what we are made of. It turns out we are made from atoms that have been recycled and have been parts of stars, dinosaurs and even other people. Science writer Brian Clegg author of the book What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You You (https://amzn.to/35TifRq) reveals the latest science about what goes in to making you - you and how you are different from everything else on this planet and in the universe.  If you ever got a bad grade in school, you were probably told to work harder to get better at that subject. While maybe that is a good idea sometimes, it basically sends the message that you should try to improve at things you are not especially good at. And that turns out to be some pretty bad advice, as I explain. Source: Kathryn D. Cramer, PhD, author of Change The Way You See Everything (https://amzn.to/2FW1tpC) What do you think of when you think of a genius? Is it how smart someone is or is it much more than that? Can anyone be a genius or is it something you are born with. Joining me to discuss the whole concept of genius is Professor Craig Wright, creator of Yale University’s popular “Genius Course” and who has devoted more than two decades to exploring the nature of genius. He is author of the book The Hidden Habits of Genius (https://amzn.to/2HjA69S) and I think you will be surprised by what he has to say about genius and encouraged by your chances of becoming one.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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There are atoms in your body that were once in dinosaurs, in pretty well any living thing you can think of. It's about a 10 year cycle that pretty well everything in your body gets replaced. Some of it's a lot quicker, but pretty well all of the atoms in your body will have been replaced in the last 10 years or so. Also why you should stop trying to get better at things you aren't very good at in the first place. And what makes a genius, and what do geniuses have in common?

Most important, they are curious. They are not uncomfortable with being outsiders. They have the ability to learn vast amounts of material and be able to combine it, which will lead to new ideas. All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times,

relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should know when i was a kid and perhaps this happened to you if you had siblings as well i had an older brother and whenever we wanted to ride in the front seat, we would say, I got shotgun. Because riding shotgun meant sitting in the passenger seat of the front seat of the car. Many people believe the origin of the phrase riding shotgun is from the Old West when stagecoaches had a driver

and next to him sat the guy with the shotgun protecting the stagecoach and the driver from bandits. But that's not really true. Stagecoaches did have guards and they did carry shotguns, but they never used the phrase

riding shotgun. Instead, the phrase originated and was used in stories and movies and television shows about stagecoach guards in the Old West. But the stagecoach guards themselves never used the term. The first use of the phrase appears to be in a magazine from 1921. And it is in the dialogue of the 1939 film Stagecoach with John Wayne. It then became popular in other films and television shows, always referring to the stagecoach guard.

But it actually wasn't until the 1950s when the phrase riding shotgun was used to describe sitting in the front seat of a car. And that is something you should know. If I were to ask you, where do you come from? You'd probably say, from your parents. They made you. And that's sort of right, but it's only part of the answer, according to Brian Clegg.

Brian is a science writer who's written several popular science books, including What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You You, which is what he's here to talk about. Hi, Brian. So, generally, when we talk about people, we talk about who we are not what we are so this is kind of a this is really kind of an interesting way to come at this that talk about the atoms and the molecules and the cells that make up what we are i i think it's just fascinating what human beings are you know our brains are incredibly complex things the most complex thing we know in the universe. And basically, you know, it's us, it's where we came from. Everybody's interested in where you come from yourself. I wanted to find

stuff out for myself and hoped I could put this across. So when you ask people, you know, where do you come from? What are you made of? You know, you usually get the answers of, you know, evolution, I came from my parents, I'm, you I'm a result of the two of them. Is our general understanding of who we are close to accurate, or are we way off? I don't think it's inaccurate. It's more that we just see a tiny part of the picture, so that it's not just about your parents, it's not just about your family tree, but it's also the chemical elements that make you up, which came from stars.

It's about how the Earth was formed billions of years ago, and pretty well all the atoms that are in your body were already there on the Earth when it formed. It's about all sorts of things that have come together to make you the unique person that you are So since you mentioned that we come from the stars, that's a pretty provocative idea So explain that, explain what we are, what makes us Sure, we're made up of atoms And those atoms have been here, as I say, for the life of the Earth Before that, they were floating around in space, and they either came from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago,

when the hydrogen in the universe was first formed, or what's happened is stars are really great big factories for turning small atoms into bigger ones. And over time, these stars make the heavier atoms explode as they get old and those atoms are sent flying across the universe and eventually came together to make first earth and eventually you after those atoms have been in other plants other animals you know for instance that there are atoms in your body that were once in dinosaurs, in pretty well any living thing you can think of, and they've eventually ended up in your body. How? How did they get there? Atoms get into us simply by us eating. So we will eat stuff, we will breathe stuff in,

those atoms are out there, and they get incorporated into our body as we grow. Over time, all the atoms in your body pretty well will get replaced. It's about a 10-year cycle that pretty well everything in your body gets replaced. Some of it's a lot quicker, but pretty well all of the atoms in your body will have been replaced in the last 10 years or so. Well, that brings up a question that I never have gotten a really good answer to, that I've wondered. Okay, so you say that the atoms get replaced every 10 years or so, but I've also heard people say that you slough off cells and that you're a different person every couple of months.

So can you reconcile that for me? Well, bits of you are changing all the time. Some of the things that change fastest, for instance, are the red blood cells in your body. They don't last very long at all. They only last a day or two. And the skin cells, as you say, are always coming off your hair. Other parts of your body do eventually come off.

But if you look through the whole body, if you think, for instance, your bones, they're some of the things that take longest for this the atoms engine to be replaced and but over time this all happens so the different parts are being replaced over different time scales and how are humans unique are we so different than other creatures are we if you under the microscope are we all more or less the same in some ways we I mean, if you look at genetics, for instance, the gene that defines really how an animal or plant is put together, then we aren't hugely different from some of the other animals. We're only a few small percentage points different from other apes. And even with something like, say, a banana, there's maybe 50% of the genes

are duplicated. But it's not just about genetics. One of the huge things that makes us very different from the other animals is those brains I mentioned. Ours are far more complex than other animals' brains. And as far as we're're aware there aren't other animals that do many of the things with those brains that we can so they they don't create stories they don't create technology yes they might have little tools and things use a piece of wood or something like that but we're on a totally different scale to any other animal that we know is there a good understanding of what it means to be alive? You know, we're at this pile of atoms that came from dinosaurs in outer space, but so is, I imagine, so is a rock,

but the rock just sits there. We're alive. So what's the difference? That is a really good question because, to be honest, exactly pinning down what life is is something that science really hasn't entirely managed to do so biologists will tell you that life involves various processes so living things typically will grow they eat consume things to produce energy they they give off waste, they reproduce, and all these things come together to make something that's living. But actually saying what's that spark, if you like, what the thing that makes the difference between something that's living and something that isn't living, really is quite difficult to pin down. One of the things that some scientists are starting to look at is the way we deal with energy. That living things can effectively push themselves away from their natural state because of the way they use energy.

Whereas, say, a rock just kind of sits there and is a rock. So there are differences, but they're really quite difficult to pin down. Yeah, well, I imagine if anyone could pin that down, I mean, that would unlock a lot of mysteries if we had some understanding of what it meant to be alive. It definitely would. as we take in the world around us. But that also is a real mystery of what consciousness is, of what it is that makes us able to have that feeling of being alive, of relating to the world around us in the way that perhaps a slug might not, for instance, or a fly or something like that. Well, that was going to be my next question is, you know,

what does it mean to think like, to be conscious? What does that even mean? But I guess that's a piece of what does it mean to be alive? That's right. But it's a very special piece. What we do know is that not everything we do is about consciousness. I don't know if you are a touch typist. I know a lot of people are where they can sit and type without looking at the keyboard. I can do that. And I can type the letter H, say, but I don't know where the letter H is on the keyboard. If you ask me, I cannot tell you where it is. I can just type it because it's not really a conscious action.

Or if you drive a car, there's a lot of things you do when you're driving that you don't actually have to think about, oh, I've got to push this lever, I've got to turn this. It just happens as you go because we push it out of our consciousness. And a lot of things that we do aren't consciously controlled. But there is this consciousness. There's something there, apparently. Some scientists actually believe there isn't really consciousness, that it's only, if you like, an appearance of being conscious. But I think the majority would still say there's something there, and it's one of the biggest mysteries in science still today. Well, that's part of that, I guess, part of that conversation of, you know, do we really have free will? Absolutely. I mean, because that makes a huge

difference. Because if we don't have free will, is it really fair, for instance, to punish somebody for something they do if they have no control over that? I think most of us would like to think there is such a thing as free will, but it is really difficult to pin down when you look at where is that coming from, where is it happening, where is that free will actually based,

and what makes it happen? Isn't that weird, though to think that there might be a possibility that this is all programmed out and that that you really are not a participant you're just a like a chess piece well that's right it goes back really all the way back to isaac newton who had this idea of the universe being a little bit like clockwork where you know everything happens and in principle uh there's a french scientist called laplace who said uh you know if i knew everything about the way everything's put together i should be able to predict everything perfectly into the future exactly what will happen with everything now actually modern science says

it's not that simple because quantum physics tells us that there's a lot of probability going on, that things don't just necessarily go one way or the other. It's only the chance it'll do one thing, a chance it'll do another. But even so, it's easy to think of this picture of the world where everything relates to each other. Everything goes forward like clockwork. And if that were the case, then really you aren't controlling what happens. It's just what will happen. I like to think we've got free will. I hope you do too.

Yeah, I do. But you also have to wonder why some things happen. Everybody has those experiences in life that are either amazingly lucky or amazingly unlucky or you just happen to do the right thing. And you have to wonder is it just you know chance random chance that sooner or later that's going to happen or is there a bigger picture here i certainly think there's there is a lot that is about luck so if you think of what makes us what we are in terms of is it our nature is it the way that we're actually made genetically? Or is it nurture?

Is it our environment? Then there's a lot of evidence that it is random factors in the environment that have a huge impact on the way things turn out. You can be a great writer, but never have the luck to have your book read by the right people so it gets published. You can be a great inventor and come up with a great idea, but the fact is it never gets out there in the world, or you can be extremely lucky, make a guess on the stock market, make yourself a millionaire. And the fact is that a lot of that influence is outside random influence, luck, things that will change your life and the way you develop.

You know, I so often think about what you just said about you hear stories like J.K. Rowling writing Harry Potter and being turned down by all those publishers. And if she had given up, we would have never heard of Harry Potter. And I think how many times has that happened where the person did give up or they just hit a brick wall? And how many things do we never know that could have been wonderful but we'll never know? Well, that's right. I think that's happening an awful lot because in the end, the stories we hear about are the ones where it does turn out well in the end. You know, you hear about the lottery winner, not the millions of people who had lottery tickets and didn't win. And it's the same with life, I think.

When you look at this, after you write a book like this, and your other book as well, but when you, you know, close the cover of the book and sit back and take a deep breath, what's the most fascinating part of this to you? The thing that really gets to a lot of us has to be our place in the universe, in a way. Whether you're talking about, if you have a religious view, if you are thinking about us as being a very small thing in a very big universe. It's that kind of how we, if you can find out more about what we are as an individual, how we then fit into that bigger picture, I guess, is one picture part of it.

And for me, the other bit is this nature versus nurture thing. You know, I got kids thinking about how much do I influence how they are as they become adults and how much is that coming from their genes? How much is it coming from the wider environment? So if you have kids, I guess that has to be one of the big things that it makes you think about. We are taking an interesting and close look at what makes you, you. And my guest is Brian Clegg. He is a science writer and the name of his book is What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You, You.

Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the makes you, you. spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

People who listen to something you should know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Brian, when you look at human life today, I mean, how are we doing? I'm sure life is better than it used to be, but is it continuing to get better?

Yeah. I mean, as you say, if you compare with, frankly, practically any period in the past, if you go back a hundred years, a couple of hundred years, most people had pretty bad lives. There were people who were rich there were people who uh could afford the the kind of things we take for granted now in terms of cleanliness food and all that kind of thing but for most people it was a pretty awful life uh so it's difficult to say really and we also have to remember that we are evolving you know human beings are not exactly the same now as when they first formed about 200,000 years ago. We are evolving. Things are changing both in us as people

and in our world around us. So you certainly can't see, you know, the whole thing will never freeze. It will always be changing. Which makes you wonder, what will we be like in 200,000 years from now? It does. I think what's certainly true is the pictures. If you remember any of the old

movies from the 50s, we had sort of aliens with big bulging brains sticking out of their heads, that kind of thing. That's not going to happen. Evolution doesn't work like that. You're not going to get a huge brain evolving. But the fact is, we do change in small ways sometimes, you know, little things like, for instance, the fact that most of us in the West can consume milk. And that is a mutation. We are mutants. It's not just a matter of the X-Men and movies like that. We are all mutants. Every individual has a slight mutation, slight changes in their genes from their parents, from the people around them. And over time, that does result in various changes. Again, I've got red hair.

Red hair, well, I used to have. Red hair is, again, a mutation. It didn't exist at one point, but we've changed. And so there's subtle changes that come over time. But over a long time span, we can expect bigger ones. We just don't know what they'll be. Yeah. Well, I always think of that chart in science class of, you know, on the left is the monkey, and then, you know, the next guy's a little more upright, and then pretty soon, six guys later, there's a man standing there.

Well, what are the next six going to look like? What's that 12th guy going to look like? Well, the interesting thing about that is it's kind of a myth, that diagram, because it kind of shows the idea that people will get more and more evolved in a particular way. So, evolution isn't something that has an end in mind. It's not saying this is the way to better. So, for example, we know that there were smaller people that were called, sometimes referred to as hobbits, on an island in the, I think it's in Indonesia, where people actually evolved to be smaller and have smaller brains than their predecessors had. So evolution isn't always about getting bigger and better it's fitting better into your environment and the fact is the way we go will be influenced by our environment and how that changes so given that we do know what we're made of and where we came from is there any can you take that information and project into the future what's to come?

I'm always a bit wary of future-ology, this idea that you can somehow look into the future. There was a book back in, I think it was 1970, that tried to show the way that the world was going to develop. It was really big back then. And we often get these books coming along that say, this is the way things are going. And I think that's almost impossible to predict. There are so many factors coming in there. But I do think what will happen is that we find out more.

Then we can also understand more what goes together to make a person the person they are. Do you think we're in terms of understanding that are we just barely breaking the surface or are we just barely breaking the surface or do we know a lot already and we just need to fill in a few blanks there's an awful lot that we don't know i think it's fair to say because human beings anything living is actually a really complicated system a really complicated thing um my background is originally physics and when i say to people physics is actually much much simpler than biology uh often they say

that's true you know physics has all that math. It's really complicated. And yes, there is quite a lot of mathematics in there. But the actual basics of physics is really, really simple. But a biological system, a person, an animal, a plant, when you look down into the detail of what's happening in every single cell in your body, each one of them is like a huge, tiny factory that's been compressed into a tiny, tiny space. So there's all sorts of stuff going on in your cells. There's long strings of DNA in there controlling what's happening. There are lots of little tiny machines made of molecules that do things inside the cell that enable it to split, that enable it to process energy. And all that's going on inside us. It's incredibly complicated what's going on. There's lots more to find out on the physical

side of what's in your body, but also, as I say, things like consciousness is generally described as one of the most complicated and as yet unknown things that we want to find out more about. So there's loads to find out more about, but we are getting there. We are getting more every year. I remember hearing someone say that, I think you were talking about a moment ago, these mutations that we never used to have people with blue eyes.

And if you have blue eyes, you are related to the first guy or whoever that was, woman that had blue eyes. Is that usually true are there were those mutations all kind of run in the family mostly yeah I mean you can have the same mutation happening in two different places but often you can trace that whole thing back and in fact family trees work like this as well we used to trump family trees as being you know a little thing you do your genealogy look you look back a few generations, but you only have to go back, I think it's about 30 or so

generations, 37, I think. And there would be more people in your family tree than have ever lived. Because if you think about it, each generation, there's twice as many people. So you've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparentsgrandparents and very quickly that's a huge number and the fact is actually what happens is a family tree becomes a really tangled thing into the past something where everything is interlocked and it's been shown statistically that you only have to go back maybe about a thousand years or so and pretty well everybody in your area, in your continent, that has a living descendant, so somebody from back there who has somebody living, and everybody still here will be related to that person. So it means, for instance,

that everybody has royalty in their family tree. If you think it's something just the Europeans do or whatever, the fact is everybody in the world will have royalty in their family tree. If you think it's something just the Europeans do, whatever the fact is, everybody in the world will have royalty in their family tree. Because if you go back far enough, whatever region they've originally come from, then descendants of those royal characters will still be around today, and you will be one of them. This may be a bit of an unfair question, but since you've done all this research and you've really looked into what we are what we're made of how we're made does it give you any sense of of why we're here and and and also like are we that unique are humans so unique or or is life on planet earth so unique that there is or isn't likely life elsewhere on other planets? Some people think there are very few planets in the whole universe, or certainly in the galaxy,

our galaxy, that have life on them because it is so unlikely that life would have come together the way it did. It's really quite difficult to start things off. As far as we're aware, in the whole four and a half billion years earth has been here life only started once from scratch and everything else has come from that so it's not something that seems to happen all the time um and because of that uh it seems relatively unlikely that life would evolve on any particular planet um and so we we are probably something of a rarity and you also have to think okay can you think of a reason why there might be something so unlikely and one obvious answer is if you do have religious belief then then that was as a result of some greater cause but as i say some people do think that, you know, in the end, even if something's very

unlikely, the unlikely thing has to have happened for us to be here. It's something called the anthropic principle. If we weren't here, we wouldn't be able to say, oh, this is unlikely. So the unlikely thing has to have happened because we're here to see it. Well, this is one of those conversations that really makes you think about everything. So I appreciate you coming on. My guest has been Brian Clegg. He is a science writer who's written several science books. And his latest is What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You, You. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, Brian. Okay, thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill

about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you

a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled showss for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong. Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice.

Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame

Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. What makes someone a genius? Are geniuses born, or can you work really hard and become a genius? Why is it that some people are not considered geniuses until long after they've come and gone? These are some of the questions tackled by my guest, Professor Craig Wright. Craig is the creator of Yale University's popular Genius course and has devoted more than two decades to exploring these questions and probing the nature of genius. He is author of the book, The Hidden Habits of Genius.

Hi, Craig. Thanks for inviting me, Michael. My pleasure to be here. So we hear the word genius thrown around a lot. People use it a lot. But is there an objective definition of a genius? Or is somebody a genius if you say they're a genius? The funny thing, Mike, is that you could read 300 books about genius, books that would have in the title the word genius. And nobody in those books defines what genius is. Now, I could give you a very long definition, but let me cut to the chase here. Genius is significance times number times duration. What the heck do I mean by all that? Well, the greatest genius is somebody that

is of great significance, in other words, has impact on society, changes society for the greatest number of people. Presumably something like penicillin is more important than a new color in tennis shoes. Greatest number of people over the longest period of time. So duration is also important. To summarize that, genius equals significance times number times duration. It's interesting that that definition doesn't include anything about smarts, intelligence. Yeah, well, that was the one thing that really astonished me after 15 years of working with

all this smarts. I started out with this notion of what a genius is. And a genius was this sort of brainiac with a super high IQ score that would have these aha moments, just slap your forehead, and this great idea suddenly comes to them. Well, it turns out that in almost every way, the stereotypical notion of genius is wrong. And in point of fact, there are so many other things that play into this besides IQ. Having a degree of smarts is important, but having off-the-charts scores on the SAT or the IQ test, something like this, is not the most essential driver of genius, at least in my opinion. So in your view, name a couple of people that fall under your definition of genius. Well, anybody that significantly changes the world. Einstein, Picasso, Edison, Tesla, Marie Curie, on and on we could go.

But those are some of the A-list people. Modern figures, somebody like Tony Morrison, Kanye West, particularly Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. These are people on my list, and I think they are important. And what do those people have in common, if anything? They have a lot of things in common. Most important, they are curious. They have a tolerance for risk. They are not uncomfortable with being outsiders. They have the capacity for sometimes thinking backwards. They have the ability to learn vast amounts of material, remember that material, and be able to combine it in unexpected ways,

which will lead to new ideas. Those are just a few. What about, though, often you'll hear about a math genius because he's able to do math in, you know, incredible equations and all that. It doesn't change anybody's life necessarily. He's just really good at it. Is he not a genius? Because he really doesn't do anything to change anybody's life. I would say that person is not a genius because the most important thing in the definition of genius is creativity. And creativity, again, presupposes impact. It does change society. One could take this to your notion of the

math genius or the calculating genius to its ultimate extreme, and you end up with people that are idiosyncratic. They have the capacity to do math very quickly in their head. They can tell you on what day of the week, particularly the 1st of January, fell in the year 417 BC. But that really changes nothing. Might as well go hire a computer if you want that. Yeah, but it does seem, though, that people make discoveries in outer space or do incredible math calculations or find things that don't necessarily have an impact or may not have an impact for years, decades, or centuries, but by your definition, they wouldn't be considered a genius.

Maybe they will be someday, but they're not now. That's entirely possible, and indeed there are good examples of that over time. The painter Vermeer was virtually unknown in his day. The music of J.S. Bach fell immediately into the category of obsolescence around 1750, and it took a great number of years for each of those to be rediscovered. So occasionally that does happen. But ultimately, ultimately, their contributions are recognized, and people begin to do things differently as a result of their insights. So it may take time in some cases, but again, we only remember the geniuses because they

have changed things. All the people that may have thought of something novel that changed nothing are totally forgotten. So what could someone do to improve their chances of being considered a genius? Well, Mike, I think there's a lot that one can do on very practical terms. Some of these, in a way, are obvious, and some of them, I think, are completely unsuspected. Let's start with an obvious one, curiosity. All of the people that we've been talking about so far are enormously curious. They're autodidacts. They are learners for life. They have the capacity to sort of get themselves out there, the courage to get themselves out there and put themselves in uncomfortable situations where they will learn new things, experience new things, and get a new version of the world in their head.

I think we can also adopt what I call a creative lifestyle. I just mentioned getting stuff in your head. Okay, you get stuff in your head, but then, curiously, to be creative, to come up with an idea that impacts other people and is not merely novel, you have to do the unexpected you have to relax you have to give all of the material that you have put in your head a chance to incubate to percolate in your head and sometimes you do that in the strangest sorts of ways by by relaxing and i could spend a lot of time talking about the importance of sleep and importance of of sleeping at a particular – for particular times of your sleep and the importance of keeping pen and paper by the bed stand so that you can write down some of your best ideas, the importance of keeping pen and paper by the shower, the importance of taking long walks but not with

other people, not talking to other people by yourself, so that you give all these ideas that you've put in your head a chance to percolate and a chance to reassemble in ways that they haven't assembled before. That is, in fact, a creative idea. So you said don't talk to other people about your ideas or do talk to other people? Initially, do talk to other people about your ideas, do talk to other people? Initially, do talk to other people about your ideas, but then you're going to have their ideas. What are your new ideas? Well, then I would say it's very important to go to do a number of things. It happens in a number of

different ways. You can go for a walk, but one, don't think about the physicality of walking. Just get in a regular pulse in which you don't have to worry about, okay, come on, push left leg, push right leg, stand up straight. What you're doing is relaxing. You're giving all of those things that you have in your head the opportunity to not think about anything else, but it's at that stage that these things can recombine into potentially creative insights. I could go on to music. I happen to be in the field of music. The worst thing I can do is actually think about the music if I want to come thinking, I have to discipline myself not to hear a 1-6-4-5 chord progression, but to just sit back and go with the flow of the music because that will allow me to get into this other zone that will allow all of the things that I really do have in my head to combine in ways that they haven't combined before. Same thing with traveling.

Why do so many great people, J.K. Rowling or Walt Disney, who thought of Mickey Mouse and the train ride, why do so many great people jk rowling or walt disney who thought of mickey mouse in a train wide why do they have all these wonderful ideas when riding in a train it's because of that regular repetitive motion they're not really thinking about it it's in the background it relaxes us and now the barriers to creative insights are down and on they come. Is this a deliberate thing? Is it, well, I'm going to go do my genius stuff now, so I'll be back later because that's what I'm going to do. Or is this much more of a gift or just a natural part of who they are?

I don't think it's a gift. I think it's something that we all can do. Look, I'm not a gifted guy and I'm no genius, but I'd like to think I've done a reasonably good job in putting together a volume about the subject of genius. in your head and then put yourself in a situation where you can organize it and combine it and have insights that you otherwise would not have. You have to be intensely engaged in what you're doing, but then strangely, you have to have also the capacity to pull back from it. And then, most strange of all, perhaps, or maybe not so strange, at the end you have to come back in and do the exact opposite of relaxation, and that is to concentrate so that you get the product out the door. You've got the ideas in there. You've written them down on these scraps of paper.

Now get to your office and write them down and organize in some compelling fashion. Now you've got to be productive. Now you've really got to concentrate. When you look at the geniuses that you admire or that you can point to as geniuses, according to your definition, what's their batting average? Is it high, low, or 50-50?

Great question. It's all very high. That's why they're geniuses. Geniuses is relative scale up and down. And we call them geniuses because they're up at the top. They hit it out of the park almost every time. You're probably asking also, do they ever strike out? Boy, do they ever strike out. And sometimes they strike out hugely. Edison struck out hugely with direct current. Nikola Tesla was correct. Edison had too much of what we call sunk cost syndrome. He was so deeply involved in direct current that he really couldn't see the advantages,

wasn't willing to entertain the advantages of Nikola Tesla's alternating current. Edison also went off in some crazy mining scheme in northern New Jersey for iron. How much iron mining do we do in northern New Jersey these days? He spent five years and incalculable amounts of money on this particular venture that proved to be worthless. But he had such perseverance and he had such a wide vision of his field and what might be that he was able to hit other home runs at different times at bat. What about people who stumble onto something, something that turns out to be something big. And it's the only thing they do. And they weren't necessarily full of all these characteristics that you've been talking about,

about curiosity and whatnot, but they stumbled onto something. It changed a lot of things. Are they a genius? I don't think the notion of the one-hit wonder is particularly useful because the impact isn't significant enough. Because if you do it only once, it's a one-time event. Let's think of Velcro, for example. I think the gentleman's name was Georges de Mistral. He invented Velcro, for example. I think the gentleman's name was Georges de Mistral. He invented Velcro. We all use Velcro every day, but nobody thinks of Georges de Mistral as a genius. They think of him, if they think of him at all, as simply something of an oddity, somebody who happened to bump into something that proved to be useful.

The same thing with the post-it note. Art Fry, who was working at 3M, I think, in Minneapolis there, came up with the post-it note when he had this particular idea. Lonnie Johnson came up with the super soaker squirt gun with the same kind of thing. He was working in the jet propulsion lab out in Los Angeles. He was trying to get a pump that would work in a particular way. He happened to think of what was happening as a kid in hot days in Georgia, and invented the super soaker squirt gun. But we don't usually think of Art Fry, Georges de Mistral, and Lonnie Johnson as genius in any particular way because they've only done it once, and we really thereafter don't pay much attention to them. But it would seem though, wouldn't you agree that if let's say Edison invented the light bulb and did nothing else, that's pretty significant. I mean, even if it was only one.

Okay. Yeah, no, good for you, Mike. Fair enough. Here's a good example that I suppose to my disadvantage proves your point. Let's take the discovery of penicillin. That was essentially one thing that Alexander Fleming discovered, and we like to think of it, the story is he discovered it by accident. It's not quite that simple. But that was a one-off invention. But I would say in my defense then, then it takes us back to our mathematical equation of G equals S times N times D, that the significance of what Fleming did with penicillin far outweighs the significance of what, say, Art Fry did with the post-it note. Because obviously penicillin has saved millions of lives over the last hundred years or nearly a hundred years. And the post-it note hasn't saved any lives as far as I know.

I'd love to hear that story if it has. It would be a great story. Yeah, I don't know how that would work yeah maybe but do do you find when you look at great geniuses who have done all these wonderful things that there is something about them that they work better in solitude or if you dig under the surface was there a team or other people that were part of it, they just didn't get quite the recognition. I would say from my research in this over 15 years now, that emphatically know that all these people really are loners. What they're very good at is getting information because they need information. They need to know stuff. They're very curious. They're always reading and talking to

people. Yeah, talk to people. You get information. But in the last analysis, it's you. It has been these individuals. It's been the Tesla. It's been the Edison. It's been the Einstein that individually comes up with these particular solutions, comes up with these original insights. Now, however, people have been caused to ask, was Einstein perhaps the last solitary genius? Because it all seems to be shifting over now, at murky here because, you know, one person's art is another person's garbage. I don't think that's art. So how could that guy be a genius when what he did isn't really art to me? And how does art or even music or literature, how does it change things in a substantial way?

So maybe it's not genius. That's absolutely true, and I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, you go to auctions, look what's for sale today at Sotheby's and Christie's, and you can't believe that. That's art? Where's the art there? I mean, are these prophets crying in the desert, or are these absolute lunatics that will be totally forgotten 50 years from now? Only time will tell. And strangely enough,

who is it that decides the genius? Well, it's we who decide geniuses, and how do we manifest this? Well, we decide ultimately by which of those paintings that we thought were all absolute nonsense end up being in museums somewhere. So we, the public, as we kind of like this or that and people want to see this or that, so we put this into a museum, begin to venerate it in museums. That's how we make movies about the artist. We read books about the artist. We we make movies about the artist. We read books about the artist. We have university courses about the artist. That's how genius is determined as society filters through this information over time. But I agree with you.

You know, I think the guy's name is Marcel Castellani. I think Castellani is the artist's name. He was the guy that made headlines recently by taking a banana peel and pasting it to a refrigerator door. That, to me, is not high art, but it got a lot of attention. What about, just curious, what you think about performers? Like, you know, people would say Jimi Hendrix was a genius the way he played the guitar. And maybe he was because people, you know, it influenced a lot of people that could play the guitar. But he didn't create something that you could hold in your hand or that, you know, he's just a guitar player. But the notion of a performer does not at all fall in the same category as that of genius. They are simply carpenters carrying out the directions of the architect, the creator. The genius is not Yo-Yo Ma, though I've met him, chatted with him. He's very funny, very smart, very kind.

The genius is not Yo-Yo Ma. The genius is the Mozart that he played. Think back, for example, I think I can prove my point this way. How many great actors can you remember from before, say, 1950 or before 1900? How many great performing cellists or pianists can you remember before? They're forgotten. They're just executors. They're carrying out the will of the more important and lasting creator. Well, I think your definition of genius is different than the definition a lot of people have, which is more about how smart they are rather than your definition that is more about the impact they have.

And it makes for an interesting conversation. Professor Craig Wright has been my guest. He is the creator of Yale University's Genius Course, and he is author of the book, The Hidden Habits of Genius. You'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Craig. Thanks, Mike. It's not only been a pleasure for me,

it's been a lot of fun. This probably comes from when we're in school, that when you get a lousy grade, your parents tell you to focus on that subject to bring up your grade. But focusing on what we're lousy at turns out to be a big waste of time, according to Katherine Kramer, who is author of the book Change the Way You See Everything. Self-improvement isn't about trying to improve the things you're not very good at. It's identifying what you are good at and then do those things better. This is called asset-based thinking.

And here's what the research says. You need to spend five times more attention and effort on the skills and talents you're good at as opposed to trying to improve the things you're not good at. You are never going to be the best at something you're not very good at. So don't bother. Focus on what you are good at, and you will be more successful and probably have a lot more fun. And that is something you should know.

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So subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

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