Stuff You Should Know - The Sad Story of William James Sidis

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Are geniuses made or born? Listen in today to the story of child prodigy William James Sidis. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there and it's just us today and that's fine because it's a Thursday. We get a little crazy on Thursdays.

We have a potluck. Yeah. Today I brought gavelta fish and Chuck doesn't like it but we're just moving forward and this is Stuff You Should Know. I think it's good. I brought my my deviled eggs. Yeah, they're good. Thank you. You took my advice and used the secret ingredient, Coleman's mustard. Oh, I have a couple of other friends who are way into Coleman's, by the way. It's really great in deviled eggs. I'm not kidding. I believe it. I'm sure if you're a mustard fan, it's the one to go to. Oh yeah, you hate mustard, don't you? I forgot that's right. Remember the narrative, I hate mustard and you refuse to accept that? Yeah. Yeah, it's just so bonkers that I can't wrap my head around it, I guess, is the problem.

Speaking of narrative, this story today is a bit of a cautionary tale on narratives, I think. Oh, well put. Yes, agreed. We'll get into it here in a second but it's the story of a young genius prodigy and in researching this, there are a lot of conflicting accounts about how his home life was and how his parents treated him and it's a story of media sensationalism and it's a story of parents who were ahead of the curve in a lot of ways for the time but also, I don't know about victims, but also just sort of fell into the usual state of parenthood at the time, which is end of the sort of beginning of the 20th century. So it's not like parenting then was at its peak. Yeah, and you can also say that his parents conceivably and him went against the

grain of normalcy and status quo and that the American public and media kind of bristled at that and that they were treated poorly for that. How much do we need to question of what is said about them from journalism at the time and it's a big morass basically. I think to paraphrase what you're saying, it's a cautionary tale about making cautionary tales out of anything, right? Yeah, although I do think this is a cautionary tale. But okay, so we'll get to the end. In the end, we'll reveal what you think it's a cautionary tale about. Yeah, and you know, let's just get into it. Let's talk about William James, is it Sidus or Sidis? Sidus. Is it side ice? I don't think so. That's what you keep in your pocket for when

you've got some lukewarm soda. Well, just like everything else with this guy, I heard a couple of different pronunciations on YouTube. So I saw it's spelled out a couple of different places that seem to know what they were talking about, Sidus. Yeah, so with the emphasis on the side. But I had not heard of him before, had you? Yeah, I mean, we did a chapter in our book on prodigies and I, he wasn't in the book, but I remember reading a little bit about him at the time. And I think just the whole idea of child prodigies really is super fascinating to me. So I would like to do one on prodigies, maybe tackle. That'd be maybe one of the first book chapters we retrofit as a podcast. Okay, cool. Yeah. But yeah, they just have always fascinated me. And

Billy was interesting in that a lot of times prodigies are prodigies in like a single discipline, not necessarily saying they're big dumb-dumbs everywhere else, but there's like one major focus. But young Billy was a language prodigy, a math and science prodigy. He was just a well-rounded, kind of know-a-lot kid. Yeah, he really was. And he was, he's very frequently lifted up as the prodigy, perhaps the most gifted child that has ever lived, certainly at least in the recorded history in the West. And maybe the smartest human. Yeah, it's entirely possible. Sort of quantify. Yeah, it is, which I think is another thing that will really come up in that prodigies episode is, you know, exactly how do you, how do you say who's the smartest and who's not? Is it, you know,

or IQ test reliable? Which I think in addition to prodigies, we need to do one just on IQ tests too. Okay. Yeah. And I also want to go ahead and correct myself when I said he was well-rounded, he was academically well-rounded because as we will see, he was not very well-rounded as a young child. And that was one of the major mistakes that his parents made. Yeah, for sure. And one of the other things that he's also often kind of held out as an example of is this burning question that we still have today is, are gifted children the products of their environment? Like, can you just take basically any child and make them a gifted prodigy? Or is it, you know, genetics? Is it really just, you know, is that we're gifted apt, apt, you know, where like you're kind of born

with this, you didn't do anything to earn it or deserve it. You just, it's just who you are. You're a gifted, intelligent person from a very early age. And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of that. But, and he actually, he kind of muddies that answer to that question more than answers it at all, you know? Yeah, because, I mean, I definitely believe that you are born gifted, but then from the moment you're born on, everything else plays in. So, he comes, one of the reason I think he muddies the answer to that question is he comes from very intelligent stock. Both his mother and his father were extremely intelligent people, but they also were the kind of people who tried to educate him starting around age two, maybe even a little earlier. So, he's an amalgamation

of those two things. Parents who were incredibly intelligent, who would have ostensibly passed along some pretty smart genes. And parents who, you know, made him, produced an environment for him that made him into, you know, a prodigious learner. Yeah. So, let's, let's start with this folks. His dad, Boris, they were both Russian immigrants. And his dad was put in jail in Russia before he managed to get out of there for, apparently in a prison that was so small, he couldn't even like recline himself fully and sleep. Had to sleep in a little like fetal position, I think. And he was, he was jailed for, for teaching. And he was teaching peasants. He didn't have permission. They didn't like that in Russia. He was let out after a couple of years on

the condition that he didn't teach other people how to read anymore and supposedly didn't read himself, was under surveillance, but then got the heck out of there. Yeah. He was like, I see the writing on the wall. It's time for me to get out of here. I'm going to go to America because at the time America was this shining beacon for immigrants saying, come, we're a land of opportunity. We turn the lights on in the Statue of Liberty. Tom Brokaw did it himself. And just like a Motel Six. And it's, it's, it's the doors are open basically. So he and Sarah, Billy's mom, both took America up on that. Although separately, they actually met in America, although they're both from the Ukraine, I believe. Yeah. And Boris, he, he sort of bucked a lot of trends back then.

And this was in the late 1800s. He was an atheist, which was, you know, not in fashion at the time. He later got into, like he made a big name for himself in the early days of psychology and psychoanalysis. And he was an opponent of Freud, which was certainly rock the boat at the time. And then he really despised traditional education and kind of all its forms and the way it was back then. Particularly rote memorization. It was, he just hated it so much. He saw zero value in it whatsoever. And so like that's kind of the basis of his concept of educating not just children, but anybody. It's figure out what the basics are, learn the basics, the fundamentals, and then use those to reason your way to answer basically any question that you possibly could have.

And that that idea applies to everything from philosophy, to math, to literature, to history, to language, that you can figure anything out if you understand just a few fundamentals of it. And so that's what his big focus was on that. Yeah. Sarah, his mother, she worked your way through college, paid for it herself. She worked as a nurse at night, went to medical school during the day, I believe was the first woman admitted to Boston Medical School or Medical College. And she never became a doctor, though. She instead chose to parent. And they both worked their way to the, I mean, by the time they came to the East Coast in the 1880s, they both worked their way to the top of as high as you could get in academic achievement in the United States. I think

Boris had his bachelors and masters from Harvard in three years. And yes, Sarah went to Boston U. And they were both overachievers and obviously had a kid. I never really, they had a daughter named Helena, but I didn't see how much she achieved. I don't know either, although I saw that she and her brother shared a lot of similar interests. So they were close throughout his whole life. I'm sure she was pretty smart, too. Yeah, I would guess so, too. Something tells me she was no dumb, dumb. No, certainly not. But one of the things about Boris and Sarah is both of them, everything you just described that they achieved in America, they did within 10 years of arriving. And when they both arrived, neither one of them spoke a word of English. It's amazing. So they went from

speaking no English to things like MDs and PhDs within 10 years. So they made quite a splash. And Boris himself enjoys kind of a separate fame from his son as well. He was a really well respected pioneer in psychology, I believe. He was instructed under William James, who was considered one of the two founders of psychology, who basically believed that behavior, human behavior, was a way that humans adapt to our environment. And so if you could just kind of study the environment, study behavior, you could just kind of understand the world that much better. And that was his kind of foundation for psychology. And Boris Citus was one of his protégés. Sounds like a disease. Boris Citus. Yeah, it does. But man, you really threw me off

with Boris Citus, because now I can't stop thinking about what Boris Citus is. Enlarged foot? Sure. There you go. All right. Boris Citus. Like a big cartoony, like keep on trucking guy foot, but just one of them. See, and then now we can put it to bed. Thank you. Because I think it would have thrown off the whole rest of the episode if we hadn't just addressed it on his face. So Boris looked up to William James so much he named his son after him. It's William James Citus. So he was respected in his own right as well. But it was Billy who became far and away the most famous Citus. And it was largely because his parents really welcomed the spotlight and then realized far too late in Billy's life that that was not a good thing for a kid.

Yeah. Should we go over the... You took up these from Sarah Citus' another condition. You put Citus on anything. Yeah. I guess you have to have two syllables like Josh Citus doesn't sound like it. No. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You got to have two syllables in there. Chuck Citus. Chuck Citus, no. Chuck Citus, I guess. It's something that ground beef can come down with. Or Jerry Citus. Yeah, sure. It has something to do with Miso. It does. It's Miso overload. Like the blue man who took too much copper. You just start smelling like Miso. It comes out of your ears. So should we... I think before I break, maybe let's run over what you dug up from Sarah Citus. I don't know if this is from her book that she wrote later, but she kind of outlined her

and their parenting sort of checklist, which when you read it, it does not seem like a parenting checklist from the early 1900s. No, it's super progressive, isn't it? It is in a lot of ways. Then I'll get to the part that they kind of really forget at the end, but avoid punishment in all ways possible. Not bad. Why? Because it's the first cause of fear. Pretty sensible. Sensible. Try not to say don't to your children. Instead, explain why what you say is so. That's awesome. That's a good one. A lot of these are still very valid. Awaken curiosity, for sure. Never fail to answer and never put off your child's questions. Probably the hardest thing to do as a parent, but valid. Right. Because they come hard and fast. Never force your child to learn,

nor judge their ability to learn by adult standards. Now, that's a big one for them that I wonder if they really abided by. Either that or they did abide by it and they were misinterpreted and mislabeled later on, you know? There's a few more here. Implant ideas at bedtime just before sleep. I don't know about the science behind that, but it sounds reasonable. Sure. Like when your child is going off to slumber land, you can introduce them to the concept that they'll die eventually one day before they go to sleep. It really sticks in their head. Never lie to your child or use evasions. That's impossible, but sure. Refrain from showing him off. I think that's where they really dropped the ball. Yeah. That's almost revisionist to add

that because there's just no way that they knew that from the get-go. They just didn't follow it. They didn't even seem to consider following it. And I think they really grossly overestimated the warmth of the response the public would greet young William with. Yeah. And then the big one that I think it just wasn't a thing back then. So I'm going to give them a pass, but we now know so much about what they call social-emotional development and teaching and parenting. And it just didn't really exist back then. And young Billy certainly didn't get any of that. So he suffered for that reason. So they released this and American parents responded by saying, we're tired just reading this list. Right. So should we take that break so we can get some rest?

Sure. All right. I got to go put up this big foot and let it relax for a little bit. We'll be right back. You have borositis. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're

going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we kind of went over Boris and Sarah's list on how to raise a child. And it kind of underscores this premise that was basically the entire premise of Boris's approach to childhood education was that if you do this with a kid, if you say, okay, if you create curiosity and interest in a child and then nurture it with lots of books and lectures and whatever you can find to keep the kid's curiosity going and just feed it 24-7. If they have a question or something like that, you just sit down with them and you talk it out. That if you do this and you start a young enough age, by the time your kid is 8, 9, 10, they should be at least as intelligent,

if not more intelligent than an average adult. And his premise was that you could do this with any kid and that you kind of should do this with any kid. And their proof of concept was their son, Billy, who had a really impressive list of accomplishments to his credit by the time he was like 8, 9, or 10, right? Yeah. I mean, we'll go through some of these. I think some of these maybe take with a grain of salt because records from the early 1900s are what they are and his story has been sort of, I don't know, the best word to use. Convoluted, exaggerated in places? Maybe exaggerated in places, but I don't want to take anything away from them because a lot of it checks out too, but let's just go through them. Supposedly, at 18 months,

I was reading The New York Times, by three, new Latin, by six, new Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Armenian, and Turkish, was typing letters at three to Macy's about Christmas toys. Very cute. Right. I also saw that he taught himself to eat with a spoon by eight months old through trial and error. All right. I've seen babies do that. An eight-month-old baby? Yeah, it's hard to remember. Okay. All right. What else? Maybe not. I don't know. It just seems like something that baby would be like, I don't know what this, it'd be more likely to go in their eye or their ear than in their mouth, you know? I'm trying to remember. It's all a blur. Let me see. He apparently graduated, I mean, he went through grade school in like no time. He entered the first grade and graduated and

through primary school entirely in seven months. It was basically like Billy Madison. Yeah, which I've never seen, but I didn't know the story. Okay. Between six and eight, he wrote at least four books. And at eight, he passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam, and then the entrance exam to MIT, and also at eight, and then at his own language, called in a book. The book was called Book of Vendor Good, and the language was Vendor Good. Yeah, not like, you know, just some gibberish or whatever. He took from like Latin and Greek and some of the romance languages and figured out different ways to conjugate words based on this language. And like he created his own language. It wasn't just some lame thing where words were

replaced with words. Yeah, I think there were like eight cases or something, grammatical cases. Yeah, it was really impressive stuff. Yeah. And it was the kind of thing, I saw somebody put it like a linguistics professor would have been, you know, well received for having written a book where they debuted their own language. And this kid was doing it and, you know, before he was 10. Yeah, so he's flying through school. This is all going great as far as the plan that his parents had to raise a really, really smart kid. But a very bad thing happened as he was doing this, and the press noticed. When you get into Harvard at nine years old, they didn't let him until he was 11. But when, you know, that's going to be a news story. And by 1909, when he entered Harvard

as an 11 year old, it was the full court press from the media. Apparently he would, and this was before he went to Harvard, he would come home from elementary and high school. And there would be like two photographers waiting outside his place. And one of them would hold him while the other one would take his picture, like physically hold him. Yeah, like he had no say in this, whatsoever. He'd be accosted. Yeah. So I hear this. And I think that's awful. The media is terrible. But I also think like, where were, where was his mom? Where was his dad? Well, these photographers are holding him out in the street. Well, you know, he's a free range kid, I guess, in that respect. I guess so. And that's pretty bad. That's definitely a very unpleasant

thing from childhood. And even worse, that would basically lay the groundwork for his relationship with the media from that point on. And they would just keep going after him. Even after he'd been out of the limelight for decades, they would still, they'd be like, whatever happened to that weirdo Billy Cytus. And they'd look him up and write an article on him. And he was just, as we'll see, he became a very private person. It was a huge invasion of his privacy. But that's where the whole thing started. But one of the other reasons I think also that he was such a private person and that the media spotlight was even worse to him than it would have been for any other child his age, is that you touched on it, I think earlier, that his father eschewed play. Like,

there was no play involved. There was no socialization with his peers. There was no encouragement whatsoever for him to make friends. And I get the impression there was actually a bit of a prohibition on him going out and making friends because his friends couldn't have possibly kept up with him. So how could he possibly be enriched by hanging out with other eight year olds? And I think his family kind of acknowledged that later on that that was a huge misstep. And if they didn't, the rest of the world has admitted it for them. And they've been vilified in a lot of ways for doing that. And I think rightfully so. Like, if they've been vilified, not all of it can be justified. But there's a couple of things that you can be like, yes, that was a really bad thing

to do with Billy and it messed him up. And that was a big one of them. For sure. When he got to Harvard, he started showing his massive capacity for math and mathematical courses. He was designing his own logarithmic tables. He gave his first lecture, including to faculty, when he was 11 years old, to the Harvard Mathematical Club about four dimensional bodies. And then, you know, he sort of had apparently he had this little act down with the press, he would introduce himself and he would, he would try and, you know, I think he was described as precocious a lot. But it came across, I mean, precocious is sort of a nice way of saying that he was rude to a lot of adults who he thought he was smarter than. And I don't think he was ever really taught any different

by his parents. The thing is, though, is like, that's a really good anecdote. And it does illustrate like what he was like at age 11, granted. But the problem is, because you have so many, so few anecdotes about him, that it gives you the impression that he was a jerk. And I saw after he died, a friend of his rode into a newspaper or magazine and said, you know, a lot of these editorials about William Sidus are really misguided. And one of the things that you should know about him is he looked down on no one. He was a kind, gentle person who looked down on no one else. And I really think that you got to take that along with that anecdote about him, like, you know, kind of talking down to some of the professors at Harvard during that lecture.

Well, he was 11. Okay. That is a much more succinct way of putting what I was trying to get at, I guess. There's a lot of 11 year old jerks. You age out of it, hopefully. Sure. But that lecture, Chuck, it's a really pivotal moment in his life. For one, it basically said, hey, world, I am maybe the smartest person on the planet or whoever lived. Check it out. And then that brought all that media attention. But it also showed like to the people who were paying attention and who knew what he was talking about, that like, this was a legit dude, this guy was going to contribute to who knows how many different fields in his lifetime.

And in fact, Norbert Wiener, who became the father of cybernetics, who was a child prodigy himself, he was like 14, I think, at the time, he went to Harvard starting the same year as William Cytus did. Yeah, that's that lecture. Yeah, there were some interesting stories about those two being there at the same time. Yeah, because they were definitely not the same person, even though everybody lumped in together, you know, both being at Harvard as like an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old. But Norbert Wiener was at that lecture and he noted that, like, this lecture is based on

this guy's original thinking. This is not just a summation of a bunch of different work, other people's work, on bodies in the fourth dimension. Like, this is what this guy came up with about the fourth dimension and it all checks out. Like, that's impressive stuff. Yeah, there was an MIT physics professor named Daniel Comstock who said that, you know, he has a real intellect. He said it is not automatic. He does not cram his head with facts. He reasons. And there's a difference. That's a different kind of intelligence and just, you know, memorizing a lot of stuff so you can be on Jeopardy, which is, you know, another kind of intelligence. No shade to that?

No shade. Sure. I mean, I would love to go on Jeopardy and perform well. Intent. But Comstock, oh, I would not do well, so I don't want to go, but... I think I would freeze. Do you think you'd freeze? I just, I'm not Jeopardy material. Okay. I'm Jeopardy from the couch material.

Yeah, yeah, you could shout it out occasionally only when you're 100% certain you're right. Yeah, but I'm not good enough to be on that show. I know. Comstock went on to say, I believe he'll be a great mathematician, the leader in science in the future, the leader in that science in the future. And a lot of hay has been made about IQ, not just for him, but certainly for him, but just period. I mean, like you said, we should totally do one on IQ tests and whether it's even valid or not. But he retroactively, they have basically said that they think he had an IQ of about 250 to

300. Above 130 is considered very advanced. They have retroactively said that Einstein had about a 160, DaVinci had about a 180, Newton may have been about a 190. So take it for what it's worth. All this is just to say that Billy Psydus was super, super smart by kind of any measure. And so that Harvard lecture definitely brought the spotlight on him, not necessarily to like an adoring spotlight. And then also at the same time, his father delivered a lecture that became a book, really kind of 45 page essay called Philistine and Genius. And it was basically where he lays out this idea that any kid can be a prodigy. And then ultimately we're doing our children in disservice by being lazy and just living with the status quo and not producing

geniuses because we're just not up to the task. And that was not very well received either. So everybody started to hate Boris because he was an outsider. He's a recent immigrant from Russia and he was Jewish and he was basically telling America that its parenting skills sucked. And then at the same time, his son steps out or steps into the spotlight as like the super brainiac who's a proof of concept of all this. And so the attention that was lavished on both of them and on William for the rest of his life was, you're a weirdo. We need to tear you down because if your father's correct, then we're all doing our kids a disservice. So there has to be something wrong with you or else we're the ones who are wrong. And so the media and the

American public basically started to delight in tearing William down every chance they got. And he really just tried to run from the spotlight as best he could. All right. So let's take a break and we'll come back and kind of pick up at Harvard where this 11-year-old was still studying right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology,

but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So little Billy's at Harvard. He was commuting with his parents. And then they decided that they were going to leave and go to New Hampshire and go into business, the mental health business, basically. Boris opened a sanatorium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And they said, basically, try out the dorm. Let's see how it works. He moved into the dorm. It did not go well at all. He was bullied. He was the butt of jokes and pranks. He did not have interest in girls. They teased him a lot about that. He eventually moved into a rooming house.

Instead of the dorm. And even still, he graduated magna cum laude at 16 years old in 1914 and told reporters after he graduated, I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds. He vowed to remain celibate. That was kind of his life. I don't think he necessarily was that way by nature. I think he was sort of forced into retreatment because of what happened to him with the press and having no social skills because he was not socialized because of his parents. A lot of factors going into it. For sure. And on that celibate thing, a lot of people made a lot of hay about that at the time because he revealed it publicly somehow. He had taken a vow underneath

the tree that he would remain celibate throughout his lifetime, which a lot of great thinkers have. I think Da Vinci did and Newton did and a bunch of others. And he followed in their footsteps, but he kept a picture of the tree that he carry around with them to remind them like, oh, yeah, I'm celibate. But the media, again, they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity to tear this guy down. He's a total weirdo. He's not interested in girls. He's not even interested in guys. He's interested in nobody. Let's use that as evidence that this guy is out of his mind. And we did. Very, very sad. So he leaves Harvard with that degree. And for a little while, he teaches math at William Marsh Rice Institute for Advancement

of Letters, Science, and Art. Eventually they just said, can we just call it Rice University? Be much easier. He arrived in December, 1915. He was 17 years old, taught Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, and freshman math. And didn't last long there either because he was younger than the people he was teaching. And it was just really, really tough. Eventually he went back to Harvard Law and left after three years without a degree, but with good standing, apparently. Yeah. But he didn't flunk out. So he got back, I guess, when he was at Harvard Law, it must have been, that he became interested in socialism, fervently interested. He was described,

I think, Chuck, as a libertarian pacifist by a friend after he died. And that his whole thing, he was really passionate about trolley car transfers, about Northeastern Native American history, about a lot of varied stuff. But his great passion was the idea that every single person should be free to live their life as they see fit. And that the role of government, and you needed a strong government, was to protect those individuals' rights from encroachment in that sense, that that is what he cared about. And for a little while, it was directed towards socialism and communism. And he was actually arrested and considered unpatriotic and un-American at this one Mayday rally, and almost went to jail supposedly for assaulting an officer,

although everybody says that didn't actually happen. Yeah. It was for riding two charges, riding and assaulting a cop. And it was all over the newspapers because of who he is. I think 114 people were arrested, including a young lady named Martha Foley, who he actually fell in love with. So he tested his celibacy with Martha, even though I think it never grew beyond a close friendship. Isn't that right? Yeah. Well, yeah. And I don't really understand what her feelings were about if she was just like, we're just friends. He was always in the friend zone with her, or she was like, you know, you're actually not interested in me, we'll be friends. Who knows? But she went on to marry another man. And I get the impression that Bill was left to

kind of just pine for her while looking at the picture of the tree that he took the vow on. So back to the arrest, he was released on $500 bail under the condition that he be released under his father's care, or both of his parents, I guess, at the sanitarium. So he gets shipped off to New Hampshire. He said in his own words, he was kidnapped by his parents by arrangement with the DA and was taken to the sanitarium operated by them and kept there a full year under various kinds of mental torture, consisting of being scolded and nagged at for an average of six to eight hours a day. They said they pumped him full of sleeping medicine, threatened to send him to just sort of a standard insane asylum is what they called him at the time. And it just sounds like

sounds like things went really, really bad between he and his parents at that point. Yeah, I think I don't really know what the relationship was like, but it seems to have finally fully deteriorated during that year. I don't think they ever spoke after that. Well, his parents wanted to, they used to try to track him down and they would find his whoever his friends were and try to get them to turn him over to them because they were like, it's for his own good. He doesn't, he's crazy or whatever. That just estranged him even further from them. But if it wasn't deteriorating before, it was after that year at the family sanitarium that or sanatorium that he had to spend. Yeah, so he eventually is released after that year. I

think he goes to California for about a year, then makes his way back East. And basically, from this point forward, he did, I mean, they call them uninspired jobs, kind of mostly where I saw. I don't think he was doing the goodwill hunting thing. Been doing like custodial work. Mostly what I found is that he was doing work, I mean, they call them adding machines, like accounting work, what they really were were sort of the first calculators, the comptometers. And even then, apparently, he would do work on two of them at once, one with his left hand, one with his right hand, and would do his eight hour workday in about an hour, but would sort of move from job to job whenever, you know, it says here whenever people would recognize who he was, I think it was probably

a little more nuanced than that. I would guess like when the press got ahold of it. I don't think it's like if someone in his office realized who he was, he was like, I'm out of here. But he would kind of go from job to job. He said that the very side of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill. But here's the thing, he, I think a lot of publications make it seem like he was shunning smarts and doing anything worthwhile. But the entire time, he was just pumping out books. A lot of, most of them not published, many of them under pseudonyms, but just writing about all kinds of stuff. He wrote that book on transfer tickets. Yeah, he did. 300 pages on collecting transfer tickets. But he wrote a lot. Eventually, he did write one book that became fairly well known called

The Animate and the Inanimate in 1925. Yeah, which is a super daring premise in that it talks about the origin of the universe. It describes things like dark matter. It predicts black holes, which a lot of people are like, this is years before black holes were discovered. Well, I think Einstein had predicted black holes in his theory of relativity, like a full 10 years before or five years before he was writing this. But it's still super impressive. But the reason it's daring is because he is one of the few people to suggest and back up mathematically or attempt to, that the second law of thermodynamics, that matter in the universe, tends toward chaos and disorder. And there will eventually be a total loss of energy because of

that, that it can be reversed. And his premise was that life itself is an example of reverse entropy, where disordered atoms are put into very orderly, very efficient machines called organisms or life, which is pretty awesome. And that was just part of it. But that's what really made him like a kind of a pioneer. And that was his big contribution. And I get the impression that this book that was published in 1925 is one of those things where I could see people going back in 50 years and somebody rediscovering his ideas and say, Oh my God, like you just advanced, you know, quantum physics by light years. It just been kind of languishing until then, you know. Or here's the cure for cancer. Yeah, maybe. It's in his foot locker.

This is all really sad, though, because I think the narrative that at the time was that like, boy genius goes bust because he's working these jobs. And by all accounts, you know, he lived the life he wanted to live. And he had, he had, I don't think like tons and tons of great friends, but he did have some very close friends who, like you said, described him as a good guy and kind of a could be kind of a fun dude. And he wasn't completely maladjusted because of his childhood. And I think just wanted to be left alone. Yeah. So that's why in 1937, that New Yorker article on him was just so devastating was because he'd been trying so hard to be left alone, like his one and only publicly received book had been published a full 12 years before.

He totally dropped out and the New Yorker sent a woman reporter to basically become his friend under the guise of just being his friend and to gather information and then publish an article about him, you know? Yeah. He said it was humiliating and made him sound crazy. He sued. Now, this is where I got really confused. And I don't know if you got to the bottom of it. He did sue them for invasion of privacy and malicious libel. And I saw all kinds of things from really good sources that the case was dismissed. They basically, and it's used in privacy law as saying, if you're a public figure, you're always a public figure. But I also saw that he did win some kind of settlement from them. I think there were just multiple suits maybe. Yeah, I think that the private,

the invasion of privacy suit, he lost and it was upheld on appeal too that, like you said, once you're a public figure, always a public figure. But I think that libel was what he might have gotten a settlement for because there was misreporting that he reported that he'd gone to Tufts. And I think that was Norbert Wiener who'd gone to Tufts. Just a couple of technical things, nothing really, really big time. But he hated this article so much that I get the impression he wasn't about to drop it. And the New Yorker settled out of court to settle it. Yeah. So this was 1937. Lawsuits followed. And then very sadly that the sad end to this story is that in 1944, at the age of 46, he was found dead by his landlady, died of cerebral hemorrhage.

The same thing that killed his father in 1923. Yeah. And I mean, you can get a really good impression of how he was treated by the media with just the title of the obituary they ran about him in Time Magazine. It was called Predigious Failure. That was the title of his obituary in Time back in 1944. Or Smart Guy Who Lived His Own Life. Isn't that the title? Yeah, exactly. Why did he have to perform for you? And then over time, the idea that he was this great example of what happens if you just give your kid too much attention and try to turn them into a genius too young. This is what happens to them. They burn out and they end up running adding machines rather than doing anything useful. That became that narrative that you have to look out for.

Yeah. Really interesting story. Yeah. So you got anything else about William Cytus? No. Look forward to a full sort of more robust episode on prodigies. For sure. When you mentioned Goodwill Hunting, did you see too that he in part inspired that movie? Oh, really? Yeah. That's interesting to do that parallel. And then I want to give one shout out. So you know, he gave that talk on four-dimensional bodies at Harvard when he was 11? Yes. I was like, I have no idea what that is. And I looked around and I found finally a really comprehensive, really understandable explainer on four-dimensional space. It's called What Is Four-Dimensional Space Like? It's by JD Norton. And if you were all

interested in figuring that out, I would strongly advise going to check that out. I wasn't talking to you. Yeah. Since Chuck said, yeah, it's time for listener mail, everybody. How about them apples? All right. I'm going to call this sort of a double-metal email. Quickly, we got one from a gentleman named Kirk Bratvold in White Rock, BC. Nice. Who challenged me on saying Bruce Dickinson was the metal god, the god of metal on the Damascus Steel episode. He said, I think you'll find that Judas Priest's Rob Halford is widely acknowledged to hold the title of metal god. Okay. And I wrote Kirk back and I said, well, it's subjective. And I like Iron Maiden more than I like Judas Priest.

Yeah, I do too. Yeah, you do? Oh, yeah, yeah. I like Judas Priest, but I really, I mean, I think Iron Maiden, I just like him more. Yeah, me too. I like their songs more. Yeah, I think I could see where he's coming from. It's much more melodic and maybe in that sense, a little less metal than Judas Priest. Yeah, maybe so. And then someone, we got a shout out gunner who took your side in the ACDC debate. Recently, I listened to two unrelated episodes. And in both episodes, Josh said he didn't like ACDC. So to you, Josh, I just want to say, you're right. Finally, someone else thinks ACDC is overrated. They're just not that good. Although some of their early songs are written by The Flash and the Pan. And I love Flash and the Pan.

ACDC just doesn't do it for me. And that's from Gunner and Gunner. I'm here to say that you were wrong. ACDC is great. I thought it was subjective. Well, that's my whole point, is I'm making fun of him saying right and wrong. Oh, I see. You turned it all over on it. So, confused me in the bargain. Man, check this out. We're talking about metal, we're talking about hard rock, and we're getting emails from dudes named Kirk and Gunner. I mean, how perfect is that? We should start that band that we always wanted to start. Kirk, Gunner, and Flash and the Pan. Yeah. Have you heard of Flash and the Pan? I never have before. I hadn't, but I had to look that up, too. They were an Aussie duo who produced some of the early ACDC stuff, apparently, and then

were a band in their own right. So, gotta check them out, too, now. The ACDC and they wanted to produce the Spice Girls. They're two big successes. That's right. And we're going to get that band with those guys, but I get to be Flash this time. I'm not going to be Pan anymore. I'll be Pan, then. Can I be Pan? Sure. But I'm going to really play up that super light Pan flute kind of thing that's my jam, and I'm going to address, like, what's the half-goat, half-man God Dionysus? Oh, no. It's, oh gosh, I can't think of it. I guess it wouldn't be Dionysus to be Pan. Anyway, I'm going to be like the Greek God Pan, okay? Yeah. That's my jam. And I'm Flash, so I'll just go out there and open my overcoat. And no one will notice. That's nice. Somebody will feel it. Yeah. Well,

I'm just leaving that one alone. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and I, like Gunnar and Kirk did, our new pals, you can email us at stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everybody Yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball,

international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.