Helen Lewis on Shakespeare, Elon Musk, and the Stories We Tell About Genius

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, from Shakespeare to Elon Musk, Marie Curie to Taylor Swift, what actually makes a genius and why are we so attached to the term? In her latest book, “The Genius Myth,” journalist and Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis explains.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Bianna. And Helen Lewis, welcome to the show.

 

HELEN LEWIS: Thank you for having me.

 

ISAACSON: Your book’s called “The Genius Myth.” Let’s start with that. Why is it a myth and why in your subtitle do you call it dangerous?

 

LEWIS: Well, I think the first thing I should say is I’m not trying to argue that genius, you know, the idea of exceptional talent and wonderful innovations that doesn’t exist. But what I do think happens is that we end up writing stories around those talents. Myths. You know, they end up with the kind of these templates really, that we kind of jam real life human stories into. And you can see that, you know, one of my most obvious examples is somebody like Shakespeare, undoubtedly an incredibly gifted playwright. But when he died, he wasn’t recognized as the Shakespeare that we know today. He was, you know, a well-respected playwright. And it took a lot of people over the course of the next two centuries to build up the myth, the legend of this kind of the Bard of Avon, you know, and to make him into the figure that he is now.

 

ISAACSON: One of those myth makers you talk about in the book is Vasari, this wonderful biographer, especially of Renaissance, of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, I think, and others. One of the things Vasari writes about Leonardo da Vinci is, “He was touched by God with his incredible talents as if he had been anointed.” And when I wrote about Leonardo, I’m going, no, no, that’s not right. This guy wasn’t necessarily a genius different from everybody else, but he worked harder. He taught himself, he read books, he did experiments. To what extent is genius innate, the way Vasari says, and to what extent do you have to work at it?

 

LEWIS: I think it’s fair to say that there are people who are, who start off with a particular talent you are exactly right. What they choose to do with that talent is part of it. And one of the things I think the research does bear out is lots of people, lots of very senior politicians and lots of military leaders, lots of people we would describe as geniuses, often had a really broken or unhappy childhood. And that seems to have given them some sort of internal engine that drove them to succeed. So I think what you found researching Leonardo is born out by so many other cases. You have somebody who has an aptitude, but they also have this kind of drive in them that takes them past other people. And also, one of the things I think is underrated is they have to be willing to deal with, with envy. You know, they have to be willing to be somebody who is seen as being different. And not everybody actually finds that particularly comfortable.

 

ISAACSON: You begin your book and you end your book with Elon Musk. And you have that problem we all have, I’ve been there, of people wanting it to be binary, which is, oh, he’s a genius. Oh no, he’s a total idiot and just stole everything. We’re not very good at this non-binary thing. Explain that when it comes to the genius myth.

 

LEWIS: Yeah, I think you are right. This is my idea that geniuses, you know, anointing somebody a genius is often a kind of political argument behind it. And Elon Musk is a really good example of that. You know, the people who champion him often see him as this kind of superman, you know, this kind of American dream of somebody who just had this exceptional drive and talent and made it on their own. And then you get what people on the other side of the political aisle who don’t like that story, they much more want to stress the, the kind of, you know, the influence of society and the fact, the support he got from the government and all that kind of thing for his businesses. Or they want to debunk him entirely because they don’t like his politics, and therefore they feel that championing him as a businessman is in a kind of an extension of championing his politics.

So most people who are geniuses, there is some kind of argument going on about the assessment of them. You know, and that can be in the case of perhaps some of the people in the Renaissance, an argument for one city in Italy over another city. It could be an argument in the case of Shakespeare for the English language being the most beautiful language in the world. And so they, you know, end up kind of conscripting these people into, again, this more, this wider mythology.

But I really liked one of the things that you said about Musk in the book, which was that the way to understand him really, apart from anything else, is as a risk taker. Because I think that does give you a really good insight into the fact that, you know, there’s a kind of, they call it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you know, the idea you fire at a barn door and then draw a circle around the bit with the heaviest density. He’s the, you know, he’s the one risk taker out of everybody else who maybe took as many risks as him for whom those risks came off. And that, again, we look at the person, the finished product and try and work back. And maybe that isn’t, you know, maybe there is a version of him for whom one of those really big gambles didn’t come off and we’re simply never going to hear about them.

 

ISAACSON: One of the things that happens to geniuses in your book, this it’s all me phenomenon, is they get sort of intoxicated. As Leonard Lauder used to say they love the smell of their own perfume. How often does that happen to geniuses and is that a problem you see with Elon Musk?

 

LEWIS: I mean, I think that does happen. Because you know, if you just think you’re a special person, you don’t start to think, I’m a talented person who was lucky to have these people around me and be under these social conditions. You think I can transfer this anywhere? And I do think Musk is a really good example of that. and I think you’re right to say that people often downplay his earlier achievements because they don’t like his politics. And actually I don’t think you need to do that to say that Tesla and SpaceX are both really, you know, innovative companies and exciting companies. But to think that you could transfer the lessons of the private sector wholesale into public sector and government was hubris, you know, that was I think a mistake. And sure enough, it ran into trouble because it’s a lot harder to make things work in a government that has to serve everybody than, you know, if you’re running a car company that, you know, that you’re trying to sell to a particular segment.

I just saw a similar thing earlier that Sam Altman of OpenAI had written this manifesto for artificial general intelligence. And he said, one of the ways that we can tell we’re not at super intelligence yet is we haven’t cured all diseases. And I thought this was really kind of fascinating to me because it’s implying that curing all diseases is purely a technological problem. And now if you look at the last five years, the mRNA vaccine against COVID and maybe other diseases in the future, that is an incredible breakthrough in science. But guess what? Lots of people don’t want that vaccine because they don’t trust vaccines. They don’t trust big pharma. And so to it, the idea that you would think that solving disease is only a technological problem, seems to me to be a version of what I’m talking about, the genius myth. No, you need people to advocate for treatments, you need delivery systems to get those treatments to them. You know, you need all of this stuff around that is about society and politics. But because people get so into their lane and used to being treated like they have all the answers, they don’t necessarily look and see the full picture

 

ISAACSON: Okay. Let’s take Paul and John, you know, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. And I wanna talk about collective genius, because maybe it’s only when you put these two star systems together that you get genius.

 

LEWIS: Yeah, I think that’s a really lovely idea. And I think it would, people being more aware of it would help them deal with the fact that most people have a kind of hot streak and it doesn’t last forever. And, you know, that does make people vulnerable to think it’s not all you. You know, you need someone else, whether that is a muse, whether that’s a brilliant manager, whether that’s your songwriting partner, whether or not, you know, it’s your illustrator and you are the writer or whatever it might be. But I think this is what I mean about the genius myth ending up sometimes being quite poisonous, because people do start thinking, it’s me, it’s all me, you know, and everybody else becomes a kind of supporting character, and they’re the protagonist of reality. 

 

ISAACSON: Well, we talk about The Beatles. I remember Steve Jobs, who was trying to figure out genius at one point, sitting there in his living room, and he’s playing the bootleg tapes of Paul McCartney and John Lennon trying to get “Strawberry Fields Forever” right over and over again. And he said to me, “It wasn’t just genius, it was two people iterating, working with each other until they got it right.”

 

LEWIS: I think that’s really beautiful. And I think it almost scares people because it makes it seem even more random and unpredictable. And I think if you watch “Get Back,” that wonderful Peter Jackson documentary about The Beatles, you know, one of the things that I, this is sort of slightly heretical to say this, it’s a beautiful documentary. It is in places almost boring because you’re watching genuinely how long it takes for them to sit there, noodle around on stuff, set up the equipment, and then somehow “Get Back,” which is one of my favorite Beatles songs, sort of just emerges outta Paul’s fingers on the guitar. And what I think you’re watching there is that process of someone putting themselves into the creative state where a moment of genius can strike, but obviously you can’t force it. And neither, you know McCartney nor Lennon ever wrote as well with other people as they did just the two of them. So clearly there was that burning intensity relationship, which o, which was finite, which only lasted for a certain amount of time.

 

ISAACSON: One of the issues in your book is why are geniuses so often jerks, as we’ve said. And you even use an example I wrote about, which is Wozniak, Steve Wozniak, the partner of Steve Jobs. At the beginning of my reporting sort of said, “You have to ask, did he have to be so mean? Did he have to be so cruel?” And at the end I asked Wozniak, what’s the answer? He said, “Well, I would’ve been nicer. I would’ve given everybody stock options, but if I had run Apple, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to the iPhone.” Tell me, to what extent do you have to be a jerk in order to push your genius?

 

LEWIS: I really struggle with that. Because again, I wonder if we just, you know, we have a sort of sampling bias of hearing about it because people feel innately that’s kind of, that should be how it works. One of the most interesting discoveries for me, and I dunno if this is, you found this in your reporting about these kind of big figures, is how much the people around them get from this exchange. There’s a very simple story we tell of a kind of Stockholm syndrome where people are around a brilliant jerk, and their lives are miserable. But the funny thing to me was finding out how many of those people have chosen to do that, you know, they could walk away.

For me, the example was Sophia Tolstoy, the wife of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist. She hated being his copyist and having, you know, more than a dozen kids with him so she was constantly pregnant. She was copying out all his manuscript drafts, you know, he was plundering her life for his novels. But when in middle age, he drifted away from her and he had a new primary relationship in his life, he had this very strong friendship with a young military officer, she was absolutely devastated. So, you know, she wrote in her diary about the fact that she was suppressing what she felt was her own creativity and genius in the service of this great man. But when that got taken away, she was heartbroken by it. And I think that is a really interesting thing is that, yes, one of the things is maybe people like being around the brilliant jerks because they feel something big is happening, and if their sacrifices are being made, then there’s something, there’s something exciting going on. And that was something I didn’t expect when I went into writing this.

 

ISAACSON: You don’t really have any examples, I think, of a woman who is considered a genius. Why is that?

 

LEWIS: Yeah, I mean there are some that would, I think, enter the canon. Like Marie Curie, for example the chemist, it would be one example. Maybe people would say Taylor Swift now. But I think you have to be very honest, and I say this to someone who’s written a feminist history, that our canon of geniuses is really male. And now the interesting question becomes, is that something that is biological or is it social? And I think the jury is out. There are things, things you could say, for example, that men are on average more ambitious. They are more willing to sacrifice family and domestic life for their careers. They’re more willing to be selfish in those careers. But there’s also a fact that society has traditionally made it much easier for them. And I think the thing it’s easy to forget now, you know, sitting here in 2025, it’s just the enormous amount of barriers that there have been to people who were excluded from the category of genius. So to give you a couple of examples, you know, in Britain where I live, women couldn’t go to university until 150 years ago. You know, Hertha Ayrton, who I mentioned the book, an extraordinary physicist. She won the Hughes medal from the Royal Society, but she wasn’t allowed to join the Royal Society. So these places where these – 

 

ISAACSON: She was a very close friend of Marie Curie who also won the medal and wasn’t allowed to join the academy in France.

 

LEWIS: Right, exactly. And I think only inherited her professorship when Pierre Curie died. And they said, okay, well you can sort of, you can have it. But that, you know, that if you can’t join those royal societies, those professional associations, you’re not being in the place where the most interesting, exciting discussions are happening. You know, you could say the same thing from the exclusion of Black Americans from larger parts of the academy, or actually the way that the Ivy League discriminated against Jewish Americans in the early part of the 20th century. You know, it wanted to try and preserve the kind of waspy nature of those institutions. So you get, through time, huge numbers of categories of people have these immense legal or social barriers put in their way. The question is whether or not that will change. I am not entirely sure that it will completely change. ‘Cause I also think we are more happy to look up to men. And a lot of this is about us, the kind of the crowd, the kind of hero worship of the crowd. And I think maybe there are more men who are willing to climb onto the pedestal, but maybe they’re also, we are more comfortable with men doing that. We don’t maybe take it so well when women are overtly ambitious and driven in the way that you have to be to be called a genius.

 

ISAACSON: One of the great groups of talent was the founders. We’re now coming up on the 250th anniversary. And you look at the true geniuses, I think Madison and Jefferson probably count, and you look at the passion of people like John Adams and Samuel Adams who’s be in that category, but the person who’s the glue is Benjamin Franklin. He’s not the smartest of them, you know, he’s not the genius there, but he’s the wisest. How important is wisdom like that compared to genius?

 

LEWIS: That’s really interesting that you would, you would say that because I hadn’t ever really thought of it like that. But actually having, you know, too many giant egos in one place can be exciting, but it can also be intensely combustible. And I, you know, I’m not, this is probably the first time this comparison has ever been made, but I wonder if to some extent Benjamin Franklin is a bit like Ringo Starr in, you know, in the “Get Back” sessions, which is everyone just likes having him around, and actually you are right, he’s the glue. He’s the right fit for the other kind of combustible personalities that holds the whole thing together. And I think we can often underrate those people because they aren’t demanding to be pushing to the front of being a protagonist. So yeah, I think that’s, I think that is really interesting.

And you’re right, there is a really interesting interplay between knowledge and original thinking. And lots of the studies of creativity have looked at it over a lifetime. And it is true that some things we do think do seem to peak early. You know, mathematicians really do peak early. But for lots of other professions, actually having, building up knowledge is good. But again, sometimes it’s about why you should, you would want to work intergenerationally, right? You would want to work in a lab, whether some people who are older who are totally across the field, and then you have some people who are younger who don’t have any preconceptions, who don’t know the way it’s always been done. And I think, again, if you’re trying to set up, you know, companies, that’s a really interesting thing to think about. Are you going to have the best Silicon Valley company, if it’s everybody in it, is a 30-year-old with the same life experience, or would it be more interesting to have some 60 year olds around? I, and I wonder if that’s something that kind of, that kinda gets missed.

 

ISAACSON: As we enter this era of artificial intelligence. Do you think machines can be geniuses? And what can that quest teach us about genius?

 

LEWIS: I, yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because clearly there are people who have developed very quickly, very intense personal relationships with AIs. But I sort of, I go back to, there’s an interesting paper which showed people poetry written by AI, and they found out that people rated the AI poetry higher than the human poetry or all they thought it was as good as it. Because AI can do a very convincing imitation of a Seamus Heaney or whoever it might be. But when they found out that it was written by an AI, they changed their minds. They liked it less. 

 

ISAACSON: Alan Turing in that paper though, that launches artificial intelligence in 1950 says, but maybe a sonnet written by a computer is something only another computer can fully appreciate. Maybe we’re the outliers.

 

LEWIS: Well that’s true. Yeah, well that’s true. But you, but you know what I mean. I think there is a, you people want to know the biographies of famous people and innovative people. You know, it’s one of the things that drives people mad about Shakespeare is we just don’t have a full picture of his life. And so people say, maybe it’s the Earl of Oxford, you know, maybe it’s Francis Bacon, maybe it was a woman, because they kind of can’t live with the idea that there’s this huge body of work and we don’t have everything that we, you know, we want to know about the person behind it. And that, to me, you know, it, I think there is that desire to read a novel and feel that we’re connecting with another brain across time, that these are human emotions. And so I don’t think that’s the bit, that, that’s the bit that AI can’t replace is that feeling of of, maybe it’s, you know, maybe it’s all a facade. Maybe we’re deluding ourselves, but I think we want it.

 

ISAACSON: Is there some usefulness to the concept of genius? Isn’t it something that actually is good for us to have?

 

LEWIS: That’s, I think that is true, and I think that’s where maybe a bit more tolerance for whatever you wanna call it, neurodivergence, for example. I think the concept of genius really helps with that. Or tolerance for people who, you know, maybe struggle with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. You know, they’re difficult to be around, but that doesn’t mean that they’re useless and they can’t contribute. I think Genius has helped those categories of people because it has been recognized that sometimes, you know, you, you don’t get one thing without another. I think Stephen Fry, the British actor and writer talked about living with bipolar and people said, you know, would you rather not have it? And he said, well, you know, the lows are really, really bad, but the highs are incredible and I feel so productive and I can’t really imagine what it would be like to be without it. So I think that if at, in its best form, the idea that some people are different from the norm can express itself as genius, helps us to live and be a bit more flexible about people who have great achievements inside them, but they also demand a level of tolerance from other people.

 

ISAACSON: Helen Lewis, thank you so much for joining us.

 

LEWIS: Thank you.