The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

On June 22, the United States launched what President Donald Trump called "very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran" on the social media site Truth Social. "NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!" But did that mission make America—or the Middle East—safer? Is it really a one-and-done action or the start of greater involvement on the part of the U.S. military? What lessons has our military learned—or failed to learn—from the past 25 years of foreign policy failures?

In this special live episode of The Reason Interview, Nick Gillespie talked with Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at The Stimson Center and the author of the forthcoming First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World, and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, the president of Ideas Beyond Borders and a non-resident fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism.

The post Did Bombing Iran Make America Safer? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Psychologist and author Scott Barry Kaufman joins Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his new book Rise Above, which challenges the growing embrace of victimhood as identity. They explore how traits such as neuroticism and vulnerable narcissism are shaping modern culture, why social media rewards grievance over growth, and what it really takes to develop a more flexible, empowered sense of self. Kaufman reflects on his own journey from special education to Carnegie Mellon and beyond, explains why tough love and radical honesty are essential tools for transformation, and offers a humanistic vision of how individuals and societies can move beyond resentment and reclaim purpose.

0:00—Introduction

1:30—Limiting beliefs come from our past.

6:00—The victim mindset

10:49—What is vulnerable narcissism?

12:12—Kaufman's experience in special education

17:35—Childhood trauma from summer camp

21:49—Narcissism is a defensive posture.

26:24—Kaufman's unconventional path to Carnegie Mellon

31:09—Group victimhood and empowerment

37:40—Why coddling and tough love are both wrong

41:55—Embracing optimism in the face of darkness

48:00—Developing a flexible identity

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This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Kaufman has entered the building. Thanks so much. I'm Nick Gillespie, I'm an editor at Reason, and Scott graciously asked me to interview him about his new book, Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential. Let's have a big hand for Scott Barry Kaufman.

Scott Kaufman: Thank you. 

Scott, I think as we talk—and we're going to talk for about 45 minutes—and then we'll have plenty of time for audience Q&A. I'll let you know when to line up, but there's a microphone over on that side of the restaurant, and you can queue up. You'll have plenty of warning about that. But as we talk, your backstory will also come out. This will be crafted like a mystery movie. But I want to start with Rise Above. You have an epigraph at the beginning, which is from Carl Jung, and it says, "I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become."

I love that quote.

Yeah, talk a little bit about why that's at the start of this book.

Yeah, I think that we have a lot of limiting beliefs about our potential and what we're capable of, based on the stories we tell ourselves about our past and what we've been through. And a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves about our past are limiting stories. They keep us enshrined in our past. Another quote I really like, which relates to that, is from the great existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, who said, "Sooner or later you have to give up all hope for a better past." That basically encapsulates the point of my book.

Why are we drawn to—why would we believe in something that limits us rather than something that empowers us?

Yeah, are any psychoanalysts—any psychoanalysts in the room? People into that? Karen Horney talked about soothing illusions. She was actually the first one to really challenge Freud. And she's like, "Freud, you're batshit crazy." Yeah, she was the first to call it out, you know, before cancel culture. 

She called out Freud. 

She says we have a lot of defense mechanisms that serve for us feel—or attempt to feel—safe and secure. It takes a lot sometimes to rip our defense mechanisms off of us, because it's a very vulnerable space to do so. To admit that, "Wow, I have really not gotten over this thing," or "Wow, I really don't think I can cope." To admit to yourself, "I don't think I can do this." It's far easier for a lot of people to never, ever face that thought and hold on to these soothing illusions.

Wow. And even if the illusion keeps you in a bad place.

Oh, absolutely. In fact, I would say that's our default state. I talk in this book about the theory of learned helplessness. It's a theory that Martin Seligman and his colleagues developed—they shocked dogs and then eventually started shocking humans.

Another illustrious chapter in the University of Pennsylvania's history. You know, every once in a while they win the Ivy League football championship, but in between that, they're shocking. They're known for shocking.

Yeah, Martin Seligman moved on to humans at some point. He got bored with dogs. But what was really interesting about this research is that after a certain number of shocks, they would open up a cage—they would keep a dog in a cage—they would open the cage and the dog could just leave whenever it wanted to. It was free. But it had been shocked so many times that it did not realize it was free. And even if it realized it was free, it didn't leave.

What they found is that, 50 years later, in humans, it operates differently than with dogs. Because of our consciousness, learned helplessness is actually our default state. What we have to learn is hope. Learned hopefulness is what has to be learned.

So let's talk about the victim mindset because, you know, that's what this book is about. It's overcoming a victim mindset. That's a big part of it. What goes into creating that victim mindset, and are we at a surging moment of a victim mindset?

Oh, yes. Can I—on the second question, yes. A victim mindset is when you believe that—you sort of outsource all of your problems to the external world. Maybe it's an individual, or maybe you're saying a group is holding you back. You don't take responsibility for your reactions to the world. Because maybe trauma—you use the word "trauma"—and so you say that excuses you from how you show up or how you act in the world. And this is the most important part: You don't productively and constructively create a better future for yourself and come up with a plan to help you overcome the past. You stay enshrined in that past for as long as possible, without any sort of hope.

Why do you believe that, or what's the evidence that we are in a big surge of a victim mindset? Where does that come from?

Yeah, so Jean Twenge has done some really cool analyses in her book Generations, looking at the past three or four generations. And what you see is, there was a self-esteem movement in the '80s—anyone remember Stuart Smalley? Is that his name? Like, "I'm smart enough, doggone it, people like me," or something?

Yeah, that was the Al Franken character on Saturday Night Live.

I'm not going to be here at the Comedy Cellar doing a Smalley impression. But yeah, there was a self-esteem movement, which morphed into a grandiose narcissism movement. So the generation after that they thought, "Well, we're the best, we're superior, we are entitled to things because we're great." But that's not what it morphed into. That actually morphed into something very interesting, which is a vulnerable narcissism movement. So now we have a generation being raised feeling as though they're entitled to special privileges not because they're great but just because of their fragility.

I hate to center everything around the baby boom because, you know, enough with the baby already—but is it? The baby boom was kind of, and I know Twenge talks about this and other people, but the baby boom was the first generation that got raised after World War II in a land of plenty where things really opened up in a profound way for all sorts of people: women being treated more equally with men, Blacks, Asians, minorities kind of being more accepted. And they revolted against their parents—their parents who had survived the Depression, won World War II, and given them all of this. And then they were like, "We're not going to be like you." But now it's the baby boomers who raised kids with this kind of false self-esteem. Is that kind of accurate?

Perhaps. Perhaps. There is a genetic component here, so we can't just strictly talk about environmental impact. We also have to recognize that, for instance—I talk about the personality trait neuroticism. Neuroticism is, interestingly enough, very strongly correlated with vulnerable narcissism. A lot of people might not think of neuroticists as—

Can you define neuroticism the way that you're using it?

Yeah, it's a personality trait—part of the Big Five. So we have conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to new experiences. And then neuroticism is a particular personality trait where if you score high in neuroticism, you tend to ruminate a lot, you tend to be very anxious, you tend to have a lot of negative emotions and a lot of negative thoughts constantly. Your brain is pumping you full of negative thoughts. 

Genes do play a role in that—in the development of a cognition that constantly is feeding you these kinds of thoughts and things. I think the environment then can amplify neuroticism. And interestingly enough, I think we have an environment that's not only amplifying it, but rewarding it…neuroticism.

Explain that.

Welcome to social media. 

I think that you get a lot more attention within our tribal sort of universe that we live in by complaining, by ruminating, by all these cognitive distortions that Jonathan Haidt talks about and Greg Lukianoff talks about in their book The Coddling of the American Mind. You see a lot of these cognitive distortions on the rise, which are correlated with the trait neuroticism.

Explain "vulnerable narcissism" as a term. This is not the first time that you're using it, but it's a big part of this book. What is vulnerable narcissism, and where does that come from?

Like everything, it's a mix of nature and nurture. But as I was saying earlier, it is a form of entitlement based on past suffering. So you feel like, "I've suffered more than everyone else." It would be, for example, you're at Starbucks and there's a huge line and you're like, "Oh wow, I really should be the first one in line. I probably suffered more than everyone else in this line." There is a scale, and one of the items on the scale—my favorite item—is: "If I was on the Titanic when it was going down, I should get the first life raft because of all I've suffered."

Where did you come in on that scale?

After, you know, like now? That's actually been an interesting journey for me. I think I used to be pretty high in vulnerable narcissism. When I was really young and put in special education, and everyone thought I was stupid—I'm sure you're going to ask me about that.

Yeah, well, why don't we start with that? We'll unspool all of this social science on an autobiography…

This side doesn't get to see me at all. Hi!

Part of what you're talking about in this book is overcoming a victim mindset and empowering yourself. You have a kind of great story to tell where you—I think it's a—

You think it's a great story?

Yeah, I think it's an interesting story. Why don't I put it that way?

It was traumatic. 

Well, you know, I was being nice to you because we're sitting in the same room. But it could be great—or I'm rolling my eyes.

Kind of fucks me up, dude.

I mean, let's put it this way. You have a wonderful academic pedigree. You have a very successful psychology podcast. You're writing books on a regular basis, so you're doing something right. But you started out—you were kind of the slow kid. How did that happen, and how did you get out of that?

Yeah, for the first three or four years of my life, my head was zipped up in a cloud. 

I had a central auditory processing disorder, which meant it took an extra couple of seconds for me to process things in real time. 

And yeah, everyone definitely thought I was stupid. Like, I was bullied almost daily—and by the way, I still follow those bullies on Facebook to see what they're up to. But that's an aside. But yeah, I was bullied a lot.

Are you doing better than they are?

Oh, I'm doing much better than they are.

And you let them know that, right?

No comment. I'm on stealth mode, yeah. I'm all like, "Hey, it's Scotty. Remember me?" No, I don't want to intersect with their lives. But what the hell was I talking about? Okay—so, everyone thought I was stupid. 

I'll remind you, because maybe you're not fully over the special ed thing. But you were talking about special ed.

I sometimes do have my special moments, it's true. And you know, I was just—no one expected anything of me. I mean, it gets you to a certain state of absurdity where you start to just feel like, "Well, then what's the point of anything?" You know? I was kept in there until ninth grade. And I remember there was this day in ninth grade where—it was humiliating—they would remove you from the mainstream classroom to take a special untimed test. And here's the thing: I've always been the kind of person who didn't want the crutches. See, what was bothering me is that they kept giving me all these crutches that I didn't even want because I felt like I was smart—but no one else thought I was.

So, I was in a special room taking this untimed history test, and there was a teacher there that day who I'd never seen before. She'd saw seen me. She was covering for the regular teacher, but I was being my normal smart-ass self, and she said, "Why are you daydreaming?" And I said, "Well, it's an untimed test. I have the rest of my life to take this test, so what's the point?" And she's like, "Fair point." And then she's like, "I'd like to talk to you after class."

After class, she sort of looked at me, and I was like, "What the fuck is she looking at? Is my zipper up? Like, what the hell?" 

And she's like, "I see you." She's like, "What are you still doing here?" 

And what's fascinating is—sometimes it takes in life only one person asking. We call it in the coaching world a "powerful coaching question." But sometimes it only takes one person to ask you one question that you've wanted someone to ask your whole life to just ignite something in you.

So she asked me that, and I thought in my head, "Yeah, what am I doing here? What am I doing here?" And I ran to the payphone, and I called my mom, and I said, "Mom, I'm not—I'm breaking out of special ed." This was a really big, dramatic moment for me, you know? And my mom starts screaming. You know, she's this neurotic Jewish mother.

She's like, "What are you doing over there? You can't break out of special ed—you'll go to jail!"

And I was like, "No, I'm breaking out." No kid had ever, in the history of my school, just—it never dawned on any special ed student for the student themself. I had this—like, I don't want to say "come to Jesus moment," that's not what I mean—but I had something like that, you know? Where I was like, "No one's coming to save me. If I want to do this and live the life that I want to live, I've got to make a change." 

And now I'm sounding like Michael Jackson.

Hopefully, you won't go that full—nobody goes full Michael Jackson.

No, no, we don't want to go full Michael Jackson. I was just talking about that song—I'm trying to make a change in that song…

When you talk about that person who sees you—I mean, part of it is that the question was asked at a time when you were ready to receive it and answer it. What can other people learn from that kind of moment?

A lot. I wrote a book about it, you know? I just think that I want people to know first and foremost that so many of their thoughts about what they're capable of—and their potential—is really in their own head. And it's mostly limited. If you ask most kids—you go into schools and you literally do surveys and interview them and ask them what they think they're capable of in their lives, or how realistic are their dreams— there's a lot of limiting beliefs there. 

And then it only gets worse as we get older.

If anything, we have probably unrealistic ideas in youth. But the more we get older, we really don't realize what we're capable of. And a lot of those preconceptions are because we think to ourselves about our past, and we then extrapolate what we are capable of. But there's a really profound truth I talk about in the book: I think life is what you make it, to a much larger degree than we realize. A lot of people don't make the magic in the world that they want to make. They wait for others to approach them. They never tell the person they like that they like them. And they have to wait 10 years later for the person to say, "I probably would have gone out with you if you asked me."

Yeah, you have a story about a summer camp sadness. Well, you know, you wrote it, man. So like, I'm just feeding it to you.

You didn't have to bring that up.

No, but explain that. And how does that kind of—if you had actually been able to ask this girl out, we probably wouldn't even be talking, right?

That's right. But why?

Because you would have had a happy life. You wouldn't be writing books. You'd be sailing the Mediterranean.

I'd be off.

No, but explain—what happened in that camp? How does that illustrate?

Well, that was traumatic. And I do use the word traumatic accurately in this situation. I think a lot of people misuse that word. But her name was Eddie, which is—right away, right there—it's funny. Right away. Her name is Eddie. And all summer camp, every day, I would say to myself, "Tomorrow, I'm going to ask Eddie out. Tomorrow. Tomorrow." And then the day would come and I would see her—I remember once I saw her at the pool and I got the courage, I got close to her—and then I jumped into the pool at the last second. And then I hit my head. That was the whole thing. 

But I didn't talk to her.

So the very last day of summer camp, I'm playing—I don't know—tetherball. Does anyone remember? I'm playing etherball. And this is the last five minutes of summer camp, and she comes out of the mess hall with all her friends. And I was like, "This is it. This is my moment. This is it." So I just—my heart is pounding—I turn to her and I say, "Eddie, I love you." And she and all her friends immediately start laughing—the loudest I've ever seen anyone laugh to this day.

We'll wait until later in the Q&A.

Thanks. You're a little bit of a sadist, aren't you?

Not at all.

No, no, no. But yeah, that was really horrible. And I remember that time there was a song that kept playing on the radio called It Must Have Been Love (But It's Over Now). That was the year. That was that year. And it's all that I want. See, now I'm going to cry right now just thinking about that. That song—every time it played on the radio—I would be hyperventilating, crying in the backseat of the car. My dad's in the audience now. You know why I was hyperventilating in the backseat of that car. 

They were like, "What'd they do to you in summer camp?"

But now, what you're saying is that those kinds of moments—you experience it as trauma—but in fact, you should have done that on the first day of camp. So how do you process that?

And not only that—I don't know if the moral of the message is that I should have done it on the first day of camp. But I should have, that's true. But the moral here is that—what the hell is the moral? Don't have a victim mindset over this kind of situation. That is not the way to go. That leads to incel territory. I talk in this book about incels. Has anyone heard of the incels? They're "involuntarily celibate," is what they call themselves. They've sworn women away because they can't seem to get women, so they hate women as a result. They're like, "We're done with women."

That's not the way. I talk in the book—they were a great example of a victim mindset. What you learn—and I think almost every kid—did you do any Eddie-type story at all?

It's Eddies all the way down.

So I think most guys can recognize that feeling. And a lot of women, too, have been rejected too. And what you learn is—well, part of the maturity process is being able to deal and cope with rejection. I mean, I've come such a long way in that regard that now I almost embrace rejection. I'm not just talking about with the Eddies of the world.

You were calling me a sadist. You're a masochist.

Interesting! This just got BDSM'd real fast. Woah! Did not see that coming. 

Let's go back to the vulnerable narcissism, because I think there's a broad misunderstanding that narcissism is a kind of source of personal strength. That a person who's a narcissist has a grand opinion of themselves, and they dominate things, that everything is about them. But what you're talking about and particularly with vulnerable narcissism, narcissism is a defensive posture. It is a defensive posture. 

Can you explain a little bit about that and then what does that mean? And how has the vulnerable narcissist become the character type of our age?

Well, people who score high in narcissism—and I want to be very clear that part of my research program is bringing the term narcissism out of the clinical realm and into the domain of personality. So that's what my published papers do: it takes a personality perspective on narcissism. Everyone in this room is somewhere on that continuum. And not only that, it's also a mindset. We all can have our narcissistic moments. I mean, who hasn't been like that?

So much of narcissism is that you're defending your ego like it's a fort. And that really shuts you down and inhibits you from growth and development as a whole person in so many ways. You feel like you can't deal with the feeling—in the case of grandiose narcissism, they always have to inflate themselves. They always have to brag and exaggerate, you know, and say, "Winning! Winning!"

You guys remember Charlie Sheen? "Winning"

The whole "tiger blood." 

—what'd you say? 

The tiger blood helped him win. He was constantly winning. Hashtag winning.

Tiger blood?

Yeah, he talked about tiger blood at various points.

I missed that, but yeah, that's that. But then vulnerable narcissism is an interesting thing in its relationship to the ego. It was talked about a lot by Kohut, who was a psychoanalyst. They didn't call it "vulnerable narcissism" back in the psychoanalysis days. They called it "closet narcissism"—which, I don't know, we don't want to call it that anymore.

But there is something interesting about it, because a lot of people who score high in vulnerable narcissism—you have no idea what's going on in their head until there's a moment where they go off about their resentments, about the world, about how they're getting the short end of the stick, and blah. And you're like, "Holy crap, all that has been in your head?" So it is a quieter form of narcissism. That's why they called it "closeted narcissism." 

Whereas grandiose narcissism—you know what they're thinking. Like, you know what Trump's thinking, right? It's not like you're like, "Oh, I'm shocked that Trump thinks that." But with people scoring high in vulnerable narcissism, people around them often end up being shocked that they're like that.

I want to talk a little bit more about your victim mindset and how you got out of it. And then talk about how, like you—in the book you point out that this stuff happens on an individual level and then on a societal level. You have a great story about how you went to undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, and you wanted to get into the psychology program—but you couldn't. But you didn't say, like, "OK, well, fuck it, I'm not doing anything." 

How did you get into Carnegie Mellon, and how did you end up getting into the psychology program?

Well, I applied to the psychology program—the cognitive science program—in high school and I got rejected, presumably due to my SAT scores. And I was like, "No, I want to figure out a way of doing this." So I looked at the departments at Carnegie Mellon that didn't look at SAT scores. What department do you think does not care about SAT scores?

[Audience member speaks]

Who said that? Oh my gosh.

Oh, someone's saying opera. OK. We have a ringer. 

But yeah, I found the opera program. And I rolled up with my horns and I was like, "Aaaaahhh," whatever. I didn't really give a shit. "Just let me into this fucking school." And they gave me a part. They came out—right, Dad?—they're like, "Oh, you're a brilliant opera singer of the next generation! Better than Paul Verratti, whatever. All right, let's give him a scholarship."

Not Luciano Pavarotti—Mel Pavarotti or something.

Well, my nickname in high school was actually Paul Viscotti.

So were you a good singer?

I guess, yeah. I mean, here's the thing that's interesting about that whole situation: I was imitating an opera singer. 

I faked it. 

I remember once—I was with all my friends in choir after I took myself out of special ed, by the way. And I remember the semester after I took myself out of special ed, after class, I was hanging out with my friends in the choir room. And I was making fun of them. I was like, "Aaaahhh," and the opera teacher comes up to the choir teacher. She's like, "You're amazing! You should be in choir." And so I was like, "OK, OK." So I joined choir. And then I went, like, all-regional and all that. But I never took it seriously. I mean, I was making fun of them.

I'm still making fun of them.

Yeah, do you think there are any psychology kids in the psychology program who are like, "I'm going to get in through the opera program"? Like, you know, B.F. Skinner loved to tap dance, but Harvard didn't have a tap dance program.

Well, I did a whole year of the opera major, which was not torture—but torture. Because I had to take dance classes. It wasn't the singing that was torture. I had to take ballet classes. They wanted to make you a triple threat. So I had to take ballet classes, I had to do Shakespeare—I'm a terrible actor—and all this stuff.

And I remember, if I can tell the part of the story—this was all my plan, right? To go to the psychology department. So I waited until the end of my first year. And I went to the department and I said, "Hey," to the secretary, "do you think maybe I could be a minor in psychology?" You know, it's called the "foot in the door" technique. You never tell someone on a first date what you really want to do with them. Right? It's like, "Can I…" You know what I'm saying?

So they're like, "Sure, of course, no problem. You can be a minor. No one's ever been this excited to be a minor in psychology at Carnegie Mellon." And what's fascinating about that situation is—they had rejected me, right? I was so scared that they were going to look at my SAT scores or my IQ score from when I was lying or whatever. This secretary could care less. She was eating her bologna sandwich, for one. She's like, "Will you leave me the fuck alone? Here's your minor. You can have two minors if you want. I don't give a fuck."

And I remember skipping in my tights on the way back to my dorm room that day—because I had come from dance class earlier that day—and I had this paper in my hand. 

You don't believe me, that's why I was wearing tights. Nick. Nick. OK. 

And I was skipping back. I had this paper in hand. And there was this moment where I thought to myself, "Oh my God, I want to devote the rest of my life to helping people get to the other side."

What I realized is, if you can get yourself into a situation where there are high expectations in that environment, you can do anything you want. They didn't ask to see my SAT score. They just assumed—because I don't know why—they assumed, because I'm an opera major, that I'm smart. But they assumed it. And then, I've always been cheeky, so I was like, "How far can I take this?"

So I actually applied to the computer science department—because they have the highest SAT score requirements in the country, even more than MIT. And I was rejected because of my very low—I mean, I had very low SAT scores. So I was like, "How cheeky would that be?" I don't even want to do computer science. But how cheeky would it be to be able to tell this story someday?

So I applied—and I got in. To the computer science program. And I have a degree in human-computer interaction, which I've done nothing with. I just wanted to tell the story here—

But, you still got time, you might straighten up. One of the things that is important about the book is that when you talk about overcoming a victim mindset, you are not saying that people have not been hurt and that groups have not been hurtYou stress that there is a—

That's exactly what I'm saying.

OK, well, I misread this. I'm sorry.

Of course, of course.

You know, that groups and individuals have suffered real trauma. And that we need to acknowledge that—that that's part of being a better society. But also, as an individual, being able to move forward, like, recognize what is happening. Can you talk a little bit about how this concept of empowerment—how do you move it from the individual level to the kind of larger social level?

Oh wow. You want to go there?

Yeah. I insist.

OK, OK. I wasn't planning on the last chapter of this book being about group dynamics and group victimhood. But it felt—when I was writing Chapter 10, it was a year and a half ago—the protests on Columbia were in—

And I was like, you know, I need to write a chapter about this. About  is peace ever possible when you have various groups competing in the victimhood Olympics? Right? And so yeah, I wrote about this and have come to the conclusion that we're never going to move forward as a society if we can't acknowledge that another group might also be a victim.

It's almost like the human mind can't wrap its head around the idea that there can be multiple victims at the same time. And the social psychology studies that I came across were mind-boggling and so eye-opening. Because they showed that a simple experimental tweak—such as "I recognize your suffering too"—can actually lower the temperature by a standard deviation, which is a lot.

So I felt called, you know—just like—I also felt called to do something on Columbia's campus, for instance. And I was part of these listening groups on campus, where I tried to bring together people from the encampments and pro-Israel students—

These are called listening tables. Can you explain that a little bit? Because it sounds kind of great.

Thank you. I think it's a great idea in theory. It went off the rails. But yeah, I ended up in The New York Times, where, of course, all they focused on was the activist yelling at me. 

So what is the listening table about?

OK, yeah. Well, the theory of the listening tables is that we wanted to just bring people to listen to each other, right? Without judgment. Give everyone a fair hearing. It was really grounded in what I think is so important, which is Carl Rogers' notion of unconditional positive regard.

Which Carl Rogers found— is most important thing for lowering the temperature. He would have really aggressive patients, and if you just showed them unconditional positive regard, he reported that their aggression was really lowered a lot.

Can you explain who Carl Rogers is? 

Has anyone heard of Carl Rogers?

He was generally regarded, in the second half of the 20th century, as the most important kind of therapist figure. And the second is often Albert Ellis. And I want to get to him in a second because you're kind of doing both. So Carl Rogers was the guy who really pioneered client-centered therapy—right? Where he would ask you—

Person-centered.

Person-centered.

It really treats people as humans first. The humanistic psychology approach is one that I take. I call myself a humanistic psychologist. I think that we should treat all people with dignity, respect—regardless of their background.

I don't think suffering is a competition. That's another part of my theory about this. And we treat people as though their inner experience matters. Whatever you're feeling and you're thinking is valid. You know? And I can listen to it nonjudgmentally and give you that sort of ability to speak about it. Because a lot of people grew up with families where they were told it was not ok to have your own needs. You know?

So there are a lot of people who have narcissistic parents. That's a thing. You know?

Are you talking about your father? Who's in the audience right now.

My dad's a big narcissist. You know the worst thing is—he'll never even realize we're talking about him.

My dad's probably the least narcissistic human on this planet, I just want to say. Like, I often say to my dad, "Have a little more fucking narcissism." You know? Like, he's so humble.

So at the listening tables, you were trying to kind of employ a Rogerian technique.

Absolutely. I came in with the best of intentions.

So why did that not work?

It's tough because it got hijacked by a Palestinian activist who immediately started going into language such as, "Well, why should I listen to all the people doing genocide at this table?" Right? And it's like, OK, where do I go from there?

I want us to listen to each other. But then you start—you know. I mean, that's hard. That's hard. And it also puts me in a difficult position, you know? Because I want her to be heard. I'm not here to get a specific point of view.

And I realize just how complex these dynamics are when you really want everyone to be heard, but then language starts coming up where you're literally accusing someone else. You put people on the defensive. And that wasn't the spirit I wanted, right?

So I tried my best to lower the temperature and quell that. But the cat was already out of the bag, you know? And this person wouldn't let in one of my Jewish students to the table. And I asked her five times. I said, "Can you please let my student sit at the table?" "Nope. Nope." She was like that, you know?

And I was like, oh no, we're Mr. Nice Guy—you know? Like, there's a point where I'm like, "No. Oh hell no." And people are like, "This is supposed to be the listening table." Suddenly I was the—fuck the listening table.

Like, "My fucking Jewish student deserves a place at this table!"

So at that moment, you kind of shifted from Carl Rogers to Albert Ellis, who was the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy—which is a forerunner of cognitive behavioral therapy. And one of the things he did is, he would argue with his clients—or his people. And somebody would say, "Well, this happened to me, and I feel bad." And instead of being Carl Rogers and saying, "I see you, and I hear that, and tell me about that," he would be like, "Well, what did you expect?"

I mean, does the work that you do go back and forth between these two kinds of approaches?

Yes. Yes. I mean,that's very insightful, what you just said. I also liked his sense of humor. Albert Ellis' sense of humor. I preferred it more than Carl Rogers' sense of humor.

Yeah. I don't know—

Did Carl Rogers even have a sense of humor?

I know Albert Ellis, he used to sell T-shirts saying, "Don't should on me." Then people start saying, "You should do this or that," it's time to push back.

He said, "Don't must-erbate all over yourself." Get it? "Must." "I must do this. I must…"

Explain how the Ellis approach informs overcoming a victim mindset.

The reason why I'm being a little bit hesitant is because I don't really want to call it tough love. Let me just say it clearly: finding my voice in this book was tough, because I knew that I had my own voice, and I didn't see it well represented in any extreme approach.

So on the one side, you have the coddlers. I roll my eyes whenever I go on Instagram and I see one of these trauma influencers saying things like, "It's ok, you're an asshole. You've had trauma. Just sign up for my newsletter and I'll keep telling you that." I couldn't deal with that anymore. 

I snapped.

And then on the other end, you have the "pick yourself up by the bootstraps" people, which are equally as annoying. They completely ignore any context. It's like, "Stop, sissy boy. Stop crying." 

That wasn't my vibe.

So I was like, what is my vibe? And I call it honest love. And with honest love—so I am kind of a combination. Because on the one hand, I'm Carl Rogers. I want to validate. But I don't want to stop there. I want to validate, and I want to empower. And I think that's what's missing in our society today. We stop at the validation. We're like, "Oh my God, it's terrible, it's terrible," but we don't also say, "but…" and "and…"

Like yes, and—improv. I'm a big fan of improv. Yes, and—"You got this." "Yes, a terrible thing happened to you, and I show you empathy for that." I think that's what the "love" part is. But I think the "honest" part of honest love, which is the approach I call it, is then saying, "And you can do this. You can move forward. You can overcome this." You know? 

Could you, to go back to the listening table, in a context like a college campus—a highly charged one like Columbia—what do you do to get to the next stage of dialogue or tolerance or pluralism if it seems really hard to have that kind of conversation?

I mean, I have all sorts of crazy ideas. They shouldn't be crazy, but—

It would be really cool for people from various sides of the Palestinian—like, Israelis and Palestinians—I'd love to see them come together and form a coalition against terrorism. You don't see that, at all. There are various things that I think could really…

You know, they say that the only thing that's ever going to save this planet and cause peace is if an alien comes to try to kill us all. Then we all bond together against the alien and we forgot our own differences, right? I would love to see that, because there's so much petty fighting that is so unnecessary, and also points the finger at the wrong enemy.

You mentioned briefly before you're in the humanistic tradition of psychology. A previous book was about Abraham Maslow and kind of extended and updated his ideas about things like self-actualization and realizing potential.

Why is that kind of psychology not the main psychology? Particularly coming out of World War II—where people saw unbelievable and at that point unprecedented horrors, both in the concentration and death camps of Europe but also throughout the world, just mass destruction and dehumanization. And then you have people like Maslow, people like Viktor Frankl—who was in the camps himself—coming out with a radical, optimistic vision of like, "You know what? We are actually doing better. We can do better than ever. And we can all become the person that we want to become."

Talk a little bit about where that—

I really feel like I'm carrying on the baton from Maslow. I feel a great resonance with him. When I wrote my book Transcend, I wrote in the dedication, "To a dear friend I've never met." Because Maslow had talked about how he feels like he's dear friends with people he's never met. He's like, "I admit it's a bit one-sided, but I feel a great friendship with Spinoza." He was a great fan of Spinoza.

And I felt that way about Maslow. I feel really committed to constantly trying to show people that there's a higher potential to humans. It's hard right now to see it.

I mean, in a previous conversation, you had said, "Darkness is strong, and it seems very appealing."

It's so strong right now.

Yeah. So how do we light up the darkness? Or how do we move out of the dark?

Well, individually—and then there's a collective solution. So individually—and this is actually Part Two of the book—is finding the light within yourself. Focusing… where you put your attention is where you place your life, in a lot of ways.

If you can find the parts of you that aren't broken—if you can really find your character strengths and discover what your character strengths are, and lead with those strengths, lead with your values, find some sort of positive contribution you want to make to society, or something creatively you want to self-actualize…

I don't think everything has to be nonprofit, you know, "save the world." But finding something where there's a synergy—where what is good for you is automatically good for the world—that's the phrase Maslow and Ruth Benedict used: synergy. That's the way forward.

And at the group level, there's a difference between healthy pride for your in-group and only liking your in-group because you hate the out-group. And what we're seeing now is the latter. We're seeing all the—no one actually likes anyone, including themselves.

The Democrats—do they like themselves right now?

I don't think so. I mean, you're a libertarian. You're a libertarian, so you wouldn't trust me.

I'm the wrong person to ask. I mean, you're the wrong person to answer that. Do the libertarians like themselves?

Not the ones I know.

Yeah, they're kind of a little bit self-loathing.

Yeah, sure. But they're individualists and self-loathing, so it kind of makes sense.

Actually, I think they're more internally consistent than Democrats are about it. But my point is, right now there's a lot more of, "Yeah, let's band together so that we can hate the out-group," as opposed to, "Well, here are actually our positive qualities as an individual—and that also applies at a group level."

You stress in that final chapter, which is really quite remarkable—that doing something for other people reinforces your sense of identity, right? And your individualism, by thinking about the public good. What are some examples that you think really encapsulate that kind of energy?

Well, I think that self-transcendent experience is where it's at. So if you can get into the flow state of consciousness where time kind of recedes into the background and you're just one with whatever you're doing—maybe you're creating or—

Did the red light just go on?

No.

Oh ok. So if you can be one with whatever you're doing… there's something like social flow. Like what we're in right now, you know? I think—are we in social flow? I just got us out of it.

But where you feel like time kind of doesn't matter. You really are one with the person you're talking to. You can also see it when you're creating something. Are you one with what you're creating?

And then you can actually scale this up. So flow can be scaled up to peak experiences, to even mystical experiences. People who do a lot of psychedelics talk about this very rare experience—the mystical experience. But there's some really interesting research coming out now showing a correlation between psychedelic use and reporting a sense of oneness with all humans.

I wrote an article once…

Sounds like somebody is shaking a very big tumbler of something.

Of something, yeah. Yeah, thanks for the commentary on that.

It is very interesting. There's a research that I talked about: What would it be like if you actually really believed that we're all one? Where researchers did a study where they looked to see: Do you have a oneness mindset to life? And they found that people who actually believe that we are all one—they were happier. Their well-being was higher. They were less likely to get in fights with others. 

They were much less likely to have a victim mindset.

If I may integrate my book Transcend with this book—which is basically the same title, just Rise Above, same shit, you know. What's my next book going to be called? 

Like Higher, Higher, Higher?

High as fuck.

That should totally be the name of my next book.

Scott as a way to kind of finish things, in the beginning of Rise Above, rise a, overcome a victim mindset, empower yourself and realize your full potential. You say that part of the point of the book is to help people develop a more flexible identity, and I found that really fascinating because  you, you know, you're talking about people having a core sense of who they are, but not thinking like I, you know, you know, I'm like a stone and everything that comes at me chips away at me. You're talking about something very different. And can you talk about what you mean by a more flexible identity and how that kind of summarizes what we've been talking about? 

Yeah. One example is I've been an advocate of neurodiversity my whole life. You know, I've written books about it. I've been rah rah neurodiversity. But I've noticed. But there was a headline the other day, that said the majority of people in the U.K. now self-identify as neurodivergent. So then it's like… So it's like, what the. So then who's what does that word even mean anymore? You know, if everyone is neuro, and I, and I think there is a real trend for people to want to identify with some part of victim identity or some sort of like, you know, and also to want to understand themselves, you know. 

But always in terms of a kind of rigid, non changing reality.

Correct. So in a lot of ways I actually went against my own sort of lifelong mission and kind of I have a whole chapter on sensitivity, for instance. That's one, that's a big one. So highly sensitive people. I'm a highly sensitive person. But, I think it's important. I don't know what that was. Is someone a highly sensitive person over there?

Yeah, yeah. But I think it's important to hold that identity lightly, because I see what happens with people who don't hold it lightly, and they expect everyone to tiptoe around them. You know, they go out in public, they're like, oh, no, you know, everybody please fan me because I'm a highly sensitive person. Oh yeah, give, feed me grapes, you know, you know, and it's like, no, like, calm down.

Like just because you're a highly sensitive person doesn't mean you have to be 100 percent. You have to be a highly sensitive person in all situations, at all times. Basically, don't, don't imprison yourself with the label you've put on yourself. And that's a big part of my whole life's, you know, from my first book on, Gifted, is it like, let's like, not be prisoners of our labels?

Is there, is it you know, is is there one this one trick that will help people relax a little bit to know that you will, you will survive the petty disappointments and kind of humiliations of everyday life? 

[Inaudible] Don't feel like you have to, you know, reduce yourself to a particular identity.

But also, if I had to leave on one note, like if I was to croak right now, I would say, I was actually just on Tom Nash's Last Meal last meal. By the way, it's a really cool show. You talk as if it's your last meal ever. You are more than your victim identity. You are a whole person, and there's a lot of light within you.

And there are lots of parts of you that aren't broken. And you really don't do yourself. You do yourself a huge disfavor if you reduce yourself to your victim identity. 

Okay. That's a great note to end on. Let's give a big round of applause for Scott Barry Kaufman the book his Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential. Thanks so much. 

Yeah thank you Nick and thank you. Thank you for coming out.

The post Scott Barry Kaufman: Incels, Narcissists, and the Victim Mindset appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is the former MTV video jockey and current Fox News personality Kennedy, who emerged in the 1990s as a leading voice of Gen X when it came to politics and culture. Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with her about how a generation raised on neglect, nuclear nightmares, and Nirvana forged an ethos of irreverence and independence that still matters today. Kennedy explains her evolution from a teen Republican who swooned over Dan Quayle to a principled libertarian, why the culture of alternative music and media once felt so alive and vital, and what it means when former pop culture rebels like Jimmy Kimmel and Howard Stern become defenders of the status quo. She also talks about free-range parenting and why more of us need to stop caring about what others think and let everyone live radically on their own terms.

0:00—Introduction

2:30—What was MTV like when Clinton was elected president?

730—How did Kennedy become a 'self-declared libertarian'?

12:20—What is the most appealing about libertarianism?

15:01—How did being 'alternative' become mainstream?

22:07—What was it like being a public virgin?

25:42—What is the Gen X ethos?

31:22—Why you can make fun of everything

36:58—How Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla went down vastly different paths

41:07—What is it like to work at Fox News?

47:25—Are conspiracy theories fun?

Upcoming events:

Today's sponsor:

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

All right, so we know the names, right? The single-named beings that stride our planet like latter-day gods—Madonna, Prince, Sting, Björk, Liberace, and, of course, Kennedy, my guest tonight. Kennedy, thanks for talking.

Kennedy: Thank you, and thank you, Nick Gillespie.

I'm not sure which name I want to get—should I get rid of Nick or Gillespie or come up with something new? Evita's up for grabs. 

Evita Portmanteau, I think. Evita. 

Evita, right? Let's talk about the early days of Kennedy as a public figure. You started working at MTV around 1992.

Correct. It was September of 1992, right before Bill Clinton was elected.

Yeah. I want to spend a lot of time talking about Gen X. Even though I am a part of the baby boom, I've become possessed with the idea that Gen X is the best generation, and its characteristics are what we need in America today.

But before we get to that, because you mentioned Bill Clinton and that was the big generational shift—he was the first baby boom president—can you paint a scene? What was it like at MTV when Bill Clinton won the presidency?

It was so hopeful. People were so optimistic in New York, and, of course, MTV at the time was populated by East Coast elites, big-city liberals. A lot of people had gone to places like Yale and Dartmouth, and a lot of Emerson College graduates were at MTV, and they were ready—

So, a lot of miming in the hallway. 

Yeah, so much mummenschanz.

And they were ready for their president. The MTV News department, which was fairly new and gaining influence at that time, they were putting a lot of money and resources into MTV News and wanted to cover the political campaign in a new way for this generation—who were just interfacing with politics and news for the first time.

When Bill Clinton was elected, they didn't really pay attention to the data. They just looked at everything and looked at all the coverage, the publicity that the Choose or Lose campaign got—and they were like, "Well, MTV elected Bill Clinton. And you are so welcome."

They didn't talk about Ross Perot. They didn't talk about the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era. It was just like, "no, MTV was here and ordained Bill Clinton as president." It was a massive shift.

It's hard to recover that, and I think we're going through something similar now—which will probably fully come online in a couple years—where it's the first millennial president or something.

But you were the resident Republican at MTV. What were you thinking? And why were you a Republican, and what did that mean to you?

I was a Republican because I grew up in Oregon where everyone was liberal, and the people who were really into politics didn't seem particularly happy.

There was a kid at my high school named Creighton Webb who was the president of the Teen Republicans. He invited me to go to a couple of chapter meetings, and then he invited me to meet Dan Quayle in Portland when I was a senior in high school.

And you famously kind of splooged over Dan Quayle, didn't you? He was a handsome, robust young man.

I'm not going to say that it was externally ejaculatory, but I will say that I felt like there was such a connection between us. I think when you feel a connection like that—and any stalker can co-sign this—it can't be one-sided.

When you feel something that deeply and that intensely with another human being, obviously they feel the same thing for you. There's that famous Mookie Wilson fake quote: "Whenever I'm going through a slump, I just think about dinosaurs. And then I think, if I'm thinking about dinosaurs, then somewhere the dinosaurs are thinking about me. And if the dinosaurs believe in me, then I can believe in me. And all of a sudden I feel better."

It's a totally fake quote, but it's one of my favorite things in the world. That's how I felt about Dan Quayle.

So, what was—beyond being contrarian—the appeal of being a Republican?

I mean, it really was, at that point in my kind of immature, developing brain, it just made people so mad.

I had this one English teacher—

This is a great part of Gen X. 

Yeah, I mean, I had this one English teacher who was such a blowhard and he was such a liberal. He talked about going to Tibet and throwing himself naked on the side of a mountain.

And he failed me, and I hated him with a blinding passion. The thing he really hated about me was that I started cavorting with the Teen Republicans. They were really fun. They were rabble-rousers.

I compare it to young men in high school and college today who wear MAGA hats. They don't necessarily believe in the Trump doctrine—whatever that means for them—but they just know their constipated, liberal social studies teacher in high school, nothing makes them seethe like this. And there's something really satisfying about that. I think there has to be something utilitarian about making people you don't respect that angry.

I'll put that in terms of evolutionary biology where the people who did that did not get eaten by the lions or something—I don't know.

But you then evolved—and you evolved upward—to a libertarian position, partly because of the people you met at MTV. Can you talk a little bit about what took you from being a kind of oppositional or contrarian Republican to a self-declared libertarian?

Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that I liked about the Republican Party in 1992 and 1993 because it became the opposition party. But what I didn't like about it was I had a lot of gay friends—especially being in New York, being young, being in music—and I didn't like the way that, you know, because Jesse Helms was still alive, and one of his famous quotes was, "You become what you condone." And I'm like…

Oh, wow.

I don't think I'm going to become a gay man anytime soon.

I mean you still got—

But right now, like, I totally could. I could be like, "Tomorrow, I'm a gay man." They'd be like, "Great. We're going to throw you a parade. Congratulations."

But the social conservatism was really off-putting. I liked the idea of aspirational success. I was having dinner with Kurt Loder one night, and he was like, "You're not a Republican." He was getting really frustrated. He was very angry about the Clinton White House and was disgusted by what he saw as encroaching big government.

And I was like, "I hate that stuff too." But he's like, "You're a libertarian." I didn't know what that meant, but I was very intrigued by the idea because I was also very good friends with Dweezil Zappa, and we would sit and talk with his father, Frank, who at the time was being treated for metastatic prostate cancer. 

He would lose his battle with that the year after I met him. But listening to Frank—because we wouldn't talk; I didn't have a lot to add to the discussion—but listening to Frank…

I get the impression too that Frank Zappa didn't really need people to fill the pauses.

He didn't. He was a very interesting person. Loved coffee. He talked about libertarianism, and he was really interesting in the way Kurt Loder was really interesting. They both were energized and super-powered by music.

Obviously, Frank Zappa was creating music in a way that no one ever had, and musicians that I love respected him so much. And Kurt Loder analyzed and understood music in the way a critically thinking journalist would. He didn't have to make music to really want to exist inside of it, take it apart, and explain it to people.

So if both of those people—who were infinitely smarter and more experienced than me—had a name for the same kind of conclusion, and one of them was saying, "You're a libertarian" as well, then I wanted to investigate that.

And you have mentioned that Kurt gave you an Ayn Rand book.

And I still have it. I rescued it—

And you became a libertarian regardless.

Yeah, exactly. So I have a home in Pacific Palisades that is uninhabitable. It is filled with lead and asbestos, and the insurance company is trying to deny our claim. Everything around us burned—three houses in either direction.

Everything around us burned. The back door blew open, and that means that every microwave, every piece of siding, every Tesla, everything in the neighborhood burned. The incineration and the aftermath filled our house, as it did with the people who were fortunate enough to keep their homes.

Pretty much everything in the house has to be thrown away. And there were two books that I—well, there are three. A really, really old edition of Les Misérables in French, and Emmanuel was like, "Oh mon Dieu, c'est fantastique." One was, of course, I found the copy that Kurt gave me of Objectivist Epistemology.

And the other was a book called You Are the Message. I had it autographed by the author in 1993 when he and I were co-panelists on one of the earliest episodes of Politically Incorrect, which at the time was on Comedy Central.

The inscription on the book is, "Dear Kennedy, I think you're fantastic. Do you fool around?" 

Yeah and wait for the punch line, that book was written by Roger Ailes.

And no, I didn't fool around. There was no fooling around. And as Mary Katharine Ham pointed out years later, he didn't really have a thing for quirky libertarian brunettes.

Yeah, that's not his type. What was it about libertarianism that appealed to you then?

Freedom. 

Like the freedom to be successful, the freedom to make academic inquiry without being married to groupthink, and the freedom to allow people to do whatever they wanted because I saw so much of that going on around me in music. 

As long as it didn't affect me, you know, there was a relationship between debauchery and creativity that I always found so fascinating. That intersection was so rich because it could be chaotic and destructive and deadly, or it could be mind-blowing and soul-shaking and beautiful.

A lot of the social conservatives they did condemn that. They condemned music, they condemned lyrics, and they condemned partying of any kind. Even though I was really straight-edged at the time, I loved being around people who rode the razor's edge.

Did the people in the music industry or in entertainment industry—they wanted creativity and the freedom to create, but their politics tended to be the most suffocating form of, "Well, I should be allowed to do what I want, but you… you have to turn your thermostat down, you have to drive this kind of car, work this kind of way"? How does that kind of cognitive dissonance maintain itself?

I think it sort of dies for a little bit and hibernates, and then it comes back. It comes back as Occupy Wall Street, and now it is regenerated and reanimated as "The Squad."

You see this progressivism which obviously wants to increase the size and power of the state, but at the same time there's an edict. There are these arbitrary rules that you must live by. And if you're not, you're the other. You are a bad person, and you must be conquered and crushed. You can't go on private jets. You can't build skyscrapers. You can't use gas stoves, but "I'm going to go cook a video on Instagram Live and it's gonna be on my gas stove because I'm so amazing. Let's go celebrate the global intifada."

You know, the show that you…

That's Chuck Schumer, by the way.

I'm glad somebody knew who that was.

The show that you hosted on MTV—I mean, you were on a bunch of things—but it was called Alternative Nation. One of the things that was kind of great about the '90s was that alternative music became mainstream. It was the mainstream. There was no mainstream anymore.

There was a period of time where things that were labeled "alternative" were the bestselling type of music. And throughout the culture, there was a real celebration of people hiving off and experimenting and doing their own thing and moving away from the old gods and creating new gods, and then smashing those idols and moving on.

What do you think went into that? And is that something we should be striving to recapture?

I don't know if you can recapture it because so much of what people do now is just to be seen. So much of what was great about that scene was like dudes who now would be called "incels," locking themselves in garages and basements and just experimenting with chords, putting their sad poems and their quirky poems to music.

Then getting together with a couple of friends—like, "screw it, let's go play an open mic night and see if we can get anything going at this bar." Slowly and organically building a following. Then you tour. You get a crappy van and you start driving around the country, sleeping on friends' floors. The second time around, your van's a little bit bigger.

It turned out that there was such an appetite for that sort of isolated and beautiful creation that it just—in spite of itself, in spite of being repulsed by fame—absolutely exploded and became its own monster that could not be killed or tamed.

This puts me in mind of the story that you've told me—that you were prank phone called by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. What was the nature of the prank phone call?

So Pat Smear and I were friends, and Pat was—

He was the touring guitarist for Nirvana. He's now in the Foo Fighters and was in the great L.A. punk band The Germs, which burned too brightly—let's put it that way.

Yeah. So Pat and I became friends, and Kurt was like, "You have her number?" And Pat's like, "Yes." And he's like, "Let's prank call her." And Pat's like, "No, she's my friend, I can't." And Kurt's like, "I'll fire you from the band." And he was like, "Okay, here it is."

At the time, I got prank called by so many people that I was used to getting prank calls that someone would call and be like, "Is your refrigerator running?" And I'd say, "Yeah, and your mom's balls are in it." I would prank the people right back. So I did that with him, and he didn't know what to do.

And he was so sensitive.

He's very sensitive. So he hung up. And we know how everything ended and I blame myself.

Toward the end of…

Too soon.

I think Kurt Cobain would be the first person to say it's never too soon, right?

Courtney Love gave out my phone number one night on stage. And for that, she's a filthy crack whore—because I had to change my number. But at the time, it took so long to get your number changed that I had to spend a week taking calls like, "Courtney gave out your number!"

So my outgoing message was like…"Hello, you have reached Dr. Rothbaum, plastic surgery for the energetically ugly. Please leave your message at the tone."

It was a simpler time, wasn't it?

Yes.

At the end of the '90s, you wrote a book called Hey Ladies! which was advice for young women at the time. What was the main message of that, and do you think it still holds up?

The main message was: try not to get boob jobs or give too many blow jobs, and earn as much money as you can and just get rad. And then if that doesn't work out, go become a nun. That was the message.

I mean, it really is like—it's all about, like, don't disfigure yourself. Like, you're really beautiful no matter what. And you can still get herpes from mouth love.

I think we've solved that problem. Nobody talks about herpes anymore, right?

So, I have teenage daughters, and that was how I scared them. Because I really think—my mom's Romanian, and guilt and superstition are such phenomenal tools. Parents are so worried about being friends with their kids now that they don't use them effectively.

But I told my daughters, like, "OK, if a boy is going to put his penis in your mouth, he has put it in another girl's bottom. And there are butthole warts that you can actually get in your throat. So just be careful. Just think about that."

Now I understand why Gen Z doesn't have sex.

Exactly!

You were a kind of professional virgin for a while when you emerged—a Republican and a virgin.

Wasn't for a lack of trying, but yeah, that's true. 

What was being a public virgin about?

It was about being obnoxious and not being able to seal the deal. Yeah. So it wasn't like, "I'm just going to wait forever." It's like, "No, seriously, anyone—literally anyone. You, J Mascis? No? Ok. Very good."

So I guess I was the incel.

But no, it wasn't….So my name on KROQ—which was the radio station where I started, which became a feeder station for MTV, because Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel started there, Carson Daly started there, Louis Largent—God rest his soul—who was the music director when I was there, he went on to host 120 Minutes at MTV. Our program director, Andy Schuon, who got hired at MTV in the spring of 1992, hired us all and brought us over one by one.

So when I was on KROQ at the time, like, I had not had marital man-woman relations. And we were trying to come up with a radio name because, you know, you have to have a quirky radio name. Our morning show was Kevin and Bean. It's like, "It's Rocktober Two-For-Tuesday, folks! Be funny or be quiet. Be better than the music."

So you had to have a kitschy radio name. They were like, "How about the Virgin Kennedy?" And I was like, "Well, it fits."

OK, there you go. When did you drop that?

"The Virgin Kennedy"? When I got to MTV. Andy thought it was really funny. Everyone—like the Emerson suits at MTV—were like, "No, that's stupid. That sounds like a radio name. This is not radio."

"No, this is MTV. Go get some conditioner in your hair."

What were your favorite bands in the MTV period? Who were the ones that you would die for?

Die for? Rocket from the Crypt, absolutely. The entire '90s San Diego punk rock scene, I think, is one of the most perfect eras in music.

Rocket from the Crypt from…

San Diego.

San Diego, not Cleveland.

No, Rocket from the Crypt was in San Diego, California, along with Drive Like Jehu, Olive Lawn, Pitchfork. They were amazing. I have a Rocket from the Crypt tattoo.

Oh, I'm sorry, I was thinking of Rocket From the Tombs. Like Cleveland….Excuse me.

Yeah, no.

I'm having a senior moment here.

That's OK. Maybe that's where they took their name. But I have a Rocket from the Crypt tattoo. So in the '90s, if you had this tattoo, you could get into all their shows for free. And they were like, "We want MTV to play our music, so we would let you in for free anyway, hoping that you put in a good word with your bosses." But I didn't know that, so…

Yeah, yeah. So—

And I loved Mudhoney as well.

There you go. 

And Rancid.

Yeah. Are you done?

And I guess we can think of things all night. I wasn't wild about Pearl Jam.

No? Why not? What didn't you like about it?

I felt that they were so pissy—like, "We don't want MTV. We don't want to do anything on MTV. We're so cool because we're in Seattle." And then I sold my house to Stone Gossard. Now I really like Pearl Jam.

I like the way that in the name of not selling out, they always made it more complicated for their fans to buy tickets.

Yeah, exactly.

And things like that, because they wouldn't use Ticketron. "Fuck Ticketron," or Ticketmaster now, right? Instead, go out and stand in line in the middle of the night somewhere.

Yeah, now they play arenas in South America and make $20 million a show.

So talk a bit about the Gen X ethos. You know, part of it is being contrarian. Part of it is being against whoever is in charge. Part of it is being DIY. How did that play out in your early career and in your life?

I've always thought that Gen X was really amazing and fascinating. I remember having this discussion with one of the executives at MTV—he was only a few years older than me, maybe six or seven years older—but we had disagreements about why our generation was the way it was.

I was like, "It's because we lived under the threat of nuclear holocaust." We always thought, you know, like Sting sang, "I hope the Russians love their children too, because they're going to kill us any day. Get under your desk." We always just assumed we were going to die in a nuclear holocaust.

So either you're nihilistic and you're like, "Well, then I have nothing to live for," or, "Dude, we're going to die at any second, so let's go light some shit on fire."

Those were the people I grew up with. "Let's sneak out and TP someone's house and then go see a rock show." Part of it was the fear of imminent destruction. And the other part, which I always thought was so curious, was just total neglect.

Your mom would leave you with a loaf of Wonder Bread and a brick of Velveeta and call it good. We were all latchkey kids. A lot of kids—especially in the late '70s and '80s—their parents who got divorced. They abandoned the '50s as fast as they could. 

They ran for the exits.

So they had these traditional upbringings with aprons and apple pie. And the second they could be like, "OK, you guys just come home at night, we kind of didn't give a shit what happened to you at all."

That's how we were raised. We were mongrels. We were little heathens trying to piece stuff together. I remember so much of my childhood was coming up with elaborate pranks that really disturbed people, throwing things at cars,  and lighting things on fire.

Every Fourth of July, my dad would give us a bag of fireworks and each of us a lighter and would say, "Go have fun." Now I look back and part of me thinks it's neglect—and part of me thinks our parents were actually trying to kill us. "Go all get on your bicycles and ride around and try and find a rabid dog." You don't have cellphones. You have no way of communicating. And if one of the neighbors hits you—one of their parents? "I'm good with it."

Oh, they're probably right. Did you raise your kids that way, or are you raising your kids some way?

Kind of. I definitely love the idea of free-range parenting, but it still scares the crap out of me being in New York. As parents with kids in the city, they see things constantly. They're always like, "Yeah, I saw a guy pooping on the subway." And it's like, "Yeah, I saw that like three times last week. That's such a boring story. Please come up with something new."

And then the other night, my daughter and her friend were in a yellow cab, and the cab driver locked them in the cab. They had the wherewithal to call my handsome teenage boyfriend and texted him, "Pretend you're a cop."

He answered the phone, and my older daughter was like, "You're the cop, right?" And he, in his authoritative voice, convinced the cab driver to unlock the cab. He then got out and chased them. Luckily, a deli owner came out, intervened, and offered to pay the cab driver money. Then they had to call the cops.

Was the cab driver completely unmotivated in this, or what was going on with your daughters?

I mean, you know, they were probably asking for it.

Yeah. I'm sure. That's very strange.

I'm just kidding. I'm kidding.

But these are the things—you want to be loosey-goosey, Lenore Skenazy-style and be like, "Yeah, just let my kids ride the subway from the time they're four months old." And it's like, "there are people around, they'll probably be fine."

They should be driving cabs by the time they're 13, right? Forget about being on the subway.

Driver's licenses are a societal convention….We don't really need any licensing, but yes. In a way, yes.

The most freeing thing as a parent was when I could finally start swearing in front of my children. Because then I felt like I could be myself and they finally could know me.

I was telling Joanna and Emmanuel earlier—we were talking about a group of parents discussing progressivism in New York schools—and I said, "Well, my daughter goes to a public school."

And another parent was like, "It doesn't matter where they go. It could be a private school, it could be an upscale private school—they're all progressive. Their minds are all warped."

I always say that my children were saved when they started watching South Park. They realized: It's fun to swear. It's fun to make fun of everything. And nothing is sacred.

How do you turn that "nothing is sacred" and "having fun"—and this is a great Gen X dimension, right? Just making fun of everything all the time….Does that become corrosive, how do you turn that into where you stand for, as opposed to just constantly knocking things?

You can make fun of everything. And that's what makes it safe. It's sort of the antidote to cynicism.

Cynicism is awful. Cynicism—and I should say bitterness—those are the corrosive elements. That comes from stasis, where you're constantly angry about everything and you're utterly joyless.

You look at the world and everything is bad and everyone is horrible, and you should feel very guilty for everything.

That's the opposite of, "Let's have some fun. Let's make fun of everything." Of course, you have to point that lens at yourself. Self-deprecation is very powerful and a bonding experience when everyone can just roast each other.

Like, what would you rather do—watch the roast of David Hasselhoff or go to a Bernie Sanders rally?

I'm going to go with David Hasselhoff.

Yeah, me too.

Even if he's eating burgers off the floor.

It's kind of sexy.

Yeah. Wow.

It's keto.

That's right.

Probably bison.

If we come to the current moment—where has that ability to make fun of everything gone? Because it seems like on the left, certain things are sacred and can never be talked about. And now, particularly with the re-election of Donald Trump, the same thing—nobody is willing within the Trump wing to make fun of Trump.

Yes, and make fun of everything. You know, the thing that bummed me out was Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer apologizing for their acts.

I was like, how dare you? To me, that was almost like heresy.

The jokes you created that were so outlandish—and that's how you established your name—now you're distancing yourself from the humor that made you what you are. That was your identity: the ability to pointedly say anything and make fun of anyone.

They're like, "Oh, well, we shouldn't say that."

One of my heroes, Howard Stern—what he has become, being consumed by political correctness—it's so sad to see. Him apologizing for bits he did in the '80s and '90s.

Sure, they're off-color and gross. But at least give yourself the dignity to acknowledge that's where we were at that time. That's how people made each other laugh.

With somebody like Howard Stern—who really transformed radio and a lot of other talk media—he had a couple of great interview shows on the E! Channel. He did a New Year's Eve special with, among other things, Sherman Hemsley from The Jeffersons, which is now, nobody talks about it. It was remarkable. It was pay-per-view. I have a VHS of it somewhere slowly turning into vinegar—and it's beautiful.

What happens with people like that, where they go from being the person who gives no fucks to the person interviewing Joe Biden and coaching him through his answers?

Yeah. When did he become Eva Braun?

No, but the point is, the old Howard Stern would point out Joe Biden's dementia and probably have Sal and Fred and everyone else writing funny bits about how Joe Biden was pooping his pants in the Rose Garden. But now that he is this cultural codependent, it says a lot. It says a lot about the people they surround themselves with—who make them feel like unless they abide by this progressive orthodoxy, they're bad people and they're to blame for everything—and they sort of buy into it.

Jimmy Kimmel's the same way. Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla are still best friends, but they have completely diverged from one another.

So this is like the old movie Angels With Dirty Faces, where Jimmy Cagney gets caught by the cops and goes to prison and becomes a gangster, and Pat O'Brien becomes a priest. Talk a little bit about that. That's kind of interesting.

Kennedy: Do you mean Pat O'Brien from Access Hollywood?

No, he was no priest, let me tell you. I mean Pat O'Brien the old moon-faced actor.

Remember when Pat O'Brien, when that tape came out?

Absolutely.

He drove by me and I started screaming lines from that tape. And he accelerated. He must have been doing 85 in a 20.

And he was probably drunk to the gills too. 

Yeah. And, you know, probably had a little bit of a Brentwood speedball before he showed up.

What happened that Adam Carolla went one direction—and did not just say stayed true to himsleld—but he created this vast alternative podcast media empire. Jimmy Kimmel hits the jackpot in the old legacy media thing. Can you just kind of talk a little about that?

Yeah. So do you remember the Nicole Kidman movie To Die For?

Yeah, absolutely.

So Nicole Kidman—her whole thing, she was a local newscaster and she just wanted to go network. She wanted to go network so badly, she literally would have killed her own mom.

And she didn't care who got in her way.

Nope. She was just going to do it. And that was Jimmy Kimmel. He went the Nicole Kidman route and was like, "I'm going to appeal to the suits at Disney and ABC. I'm going to sanitize my comedy and my image and get a hair system."

And Adam was just like—

I mean, they were on The Man Show.

The Man Show. So Jimmy Kimmel made his name watching girls jump on trampolines so you could see their boobs bounce. That's how he made his name. It's like, how could you abandon that? Where are your principles, sir?

He's going to wake up one day and wonder where it all went. What about Adam Carolla?

I think Adam is a genius. Adam saw past radio. Everyone at the time was like, "Oh, we've got to get Howard's stations. If we get Howard's stations, we're going to be worth $100 million in a couple of years." But Howard leaving Sirius just accelerated the push into new media.

Can I tell you a really funny story very quickly?

I don't think we have time for it, but OK.

So Andy—who was my program director at MTV, who hired us all to go to MTV—a few years after he left MTV, he was general manager at Warner Bros. Music. Then he was in charge of something called PressPlay, which I think was a music device at Sony.

He always had his eye on new media. Very smart guy—same way as Carolla. So Steve Jobs was like, "I want to meet with you. I want to talk to you. I want to see if maybe you'd be a good fit for us here at Apple."

So Andy went and met with him. He spent three hours in the glass office just waiting. He could see Steve Jobs going up and down the hallway, talking on the phone. It was like a form of psychological torture. He thought, "Well, this is odd."

Finally, he goes in and meets with Steve Jobs. Jobs has his résumé—God rest his soul, visionary, pioneer—and he's looking at it and going, "Shit. This is shit. That's shit. Shit, shit, shit." He's like, "Jesus, man. Everything you've done since MTV is shit."

Then he's like, "Do you have anything new for me?"

Andy was like, "Yeah, actually. I've always had this idea that listening to someone on talk radio shouldn't be something that you only listen to at a certain hour of the day when it's broadcast. What if there's a talk radio person, and you really like what they're saying, and you listen to their monologue like a song—and you could carry it around with you on an iPod?"

And Steve Jobs was like, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard."

A couple months later, Apple launched podcasts.

Yeah. Wow. Let's talk about at Fox News now.

And Adam was the same way. Adam said, "Don't chase Howard's ghost. Create your own thing." He knew he wanted to have conversations in a new way. Adam Curry was the same way.

They were convinced that they could talk to people the way they wanted to in a longer format—and not be chained to the radio clock, which is, "OK, we're out at :58. It's a hard out." Traffic and weather together on the ones. 

You've got to speed up at the end and cut people off and all that. You've been at Fox News now for…when did you join Fox?

2012.

Right. You did a number of shows, including The Independents with Reason's own Matt Welch. And then your own show, Kennedy. Now you're on The Five, and you're on a variety of other shows. And you do Kennedy Saves the World. Is that through Fox?

Yes. That's a Fox News podcast.

What does it feel like? When Fox created its network in, what, 1996, I think—something like that—that was kind of cutting-edge new media. Cable news.

I mean, CNN had been around and MSNBC was floating around. But now cable is kind of the old media, right? How does it feel to have started at MTV, which was kind of an upstart, and now you're at the Cadillac brand of cable news?

And I mean Cadillac not only in the sense that it's the best—but it's best in the way someone in the 1950s thought of Cadillacs. Nobody talks about wanting the Cadillac of anything anymore.

How does that feel? Do you feel like you're in some kind of loop or something? What's it like to be at legacy media now?

It's fascinating. Fox is putting a lot of emphasis on Fox Nation, which is their digital space. It's a subscriber space. And Fox Digital, and the podcasts—which, as you know, podcasts are video now. They're not just auditory experiences.

I'm waiting for them to become olfactory. Then it's a triple threat.

Listen and sniff with Nick Gillespie.

Just go left.

The axiomatic mononym known as Gillespie.

That's right. Do you have any pressure at Fox to not be too anti-Trump?

No, they're really good about that. The pressure doesn't come from within. The anger comes from out there.

When I say something anti-Trump—or say something that's the actual truth or data-driven—then people are like, "You're anti-MAGA, and you should be canceled. I'm never watching when you're on ever again."

It's like, yeah, you will, Grandpa. Just take some Relaxium. You'll be there for me. And then I'll say something nice about Tiffany Trump, and they'll be like, "You're a patriot."

How do you prepare for today's politics? You talk about politics all the time, and today's politicians are insane. The only thing we know is they're not as bad as tomorrow's will be. What kind of drugs are you taking, I guess is what I'm asking?

Not as many as I should. You know, it's the damn fentanyl. It used to be you could go get a bump and a martini at lunchtime, but boy, they've really thrown a wet blanket on that yard party.

I try and read—I obviously read the Daily Mail.

Yeah, where you're a columnist.

Yes.

What's your latest column?

About Brigitte Macron being a pedophile.

But she is a woman.

Totally. She's like so womanly.

OK.

And she was like—yeah.

You're not just throwing that out there. What do you mean by saying she's a pedophile?

Well, she groomed a 15-year-old boy.

Well, if that's going to be pedophilia…

Yeah, but it's funny because all these Gen Z French kids are reading this stuff like, "What? She was 39 and he was 15?" And then his parents were like, "This is super gross. We're taking you out of school, and you're going to finish high school in Paris." And she was like, "Well, I think I could find myself free on the weekends to do your laundry."

Le weekend.

She would follow him on le weekends, where they would play hide the sausage.

What's the import of that in contemporary America?

I think she's their Mary Kay Letourneau.

Do people remember Mary Kay Letourneau? No?

She was a middle school teacher who raped her 11-year-old student and got pregnant with two of his daughters in prison—one of them, yeah.

Did you miss that, America?

I was living in Seattle at the time, and one year for Halloween I went as Mary Kay Letourneau. I made my then-boyfriend dress up as Vili Fualaau in overalls with a lunch pail and little freckles on his nose.

But they're no longer together, right?

She is no longer living.

Well, that would be a problem. Yeah. So I guess, as a final question before we go to audience Q&A: What's next for Kennedy? What do you think is the big story or insight or attitude that we need to cultivate over the next year or so to make for a better America?

I think for a better America, we should all try to get rad and not give a shit.

I think if most people did that, everything would be just fine. I truly, truly believe that. People ask, "What's getting rad?" It's like—just go out there and find out. Just go do some cool shit. Have some fun. Challenge yourself. Do something you've never done. Go somewhere you've never gone.

Don't worry about what people think of you. Just go get rad. And then, when people think worse of you, tell them to fuck off.

Just stop giving a shit about what other people think and say about you. It is the most freeing and wonderful thing in the world because then you won't give a shit about other people, meaning you're not going to judge them.

And when we don't judge each other, we are much more likely to flourish. And then other people can get rad, and we can all high-five each other and celebrate what should be the Gen X golden years.

All right. That's spoken—it's like you were channeling Madame Macron, right? 

HELLO! My name is Brigitte. La la la la. I don't believe that old kid. And so on. She's got three kids who look like exactly like her.

One last question before the last— 

—before the last question. Yep.

No, you're making me think of Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News heavyweight who clearly believes every conspiracy that comes down the line. Do you worry about that virus taking over your brain?

My personal brand, no. I think conspiracy theories are fun. I very much believe in Bigfoot. And no one will ever talk me down from that ledge.

But there's a lot of stuff where I'm like, "No, that's just made up." That's just laziness. You're not adequately trying to investigate something, and you can't accept it. Sometimes we just don't know the answer and that's sad for us. And maybe at some point we will.

Then I ask ChatGPT if we're going to be best friends forever. And ChatGPT says, "Fuck yeah." And then I feel better about everything.

All right, we're going to leave it there. We've been talking to Kennedy. Thank you so much.

The post Kennedy: A Gen X Rebel's Journey From MTV to Fox News appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is Helen Lewis, a British journalist and podcaster who is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and it explores how the definition of what it means to be a genius has changed radically over the centuries, how it became linked to all sorts of weird biological theories, and how Elon Musk has come to personify genius in our time (and whether his failure at the Department of Government Efficiency spells the end of his genius moment). Lewis and Reason's Nick Gillespie also talk about The Beatles; William Shockley, who turned to racial science after winning a Nobel Prize for helping to invent the transistor; and her notorious 2018 interview with Jordan Peterson for British GQ, which has racked up over 70 million views.

0:00— Introduction

1:36— The Genius Myth

7:20— How dead geniuses fueled national myths

11:30— Thomas Carlyle and the Great Man theory

18:18— Are inventions inevitable?

23:22— Francis Galton and eugenics

33:35— Pro-natalism and declining fertility rates

37:14— William Shockley

48:00— Shakespeare and The Beatles

57:22— Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the gender dimensions of genius

1:03:50— Lewis' Jordan Peterson interview

1:07:18— Germaine Greer and second wave feminism

1:11:05— The gender debate in the UK vs US

1:14:14— Elon Musk's rise and fall?

1:20:57— Do geniuses have second acts?

Upcoming events:

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Helen Lewis, thanks so much for talking to Reason.

Helen Lewis: Thank you for having me.

Let's start with the obvious question. The book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, which is a great subtitle. But why did you write The Genius Myth?

Do you know what, it's one of those things where it's evolved over time, so I may be now lying to myself about why I wrote it. But I did have a conversation with a friend a couple of years ago about the idea that—he has always said that genius is a right-wing concept, which I thought was a really interesting idea because it's about the individual over the collective. It's about people with sublime achievement who are not part of the common throng.

And I thought that was interesting. I thought, well, I hear loads and loads of left-wing people use it very casually, and I don't think they're accepting this kind of idea behind it. And then that made me think, well, hang on a minute, what other ideas are kind of being smuggled in in that little word? And that's where the book kind of came from.

That's fascinating. And it puts me in mind—the book is fantastic. I mean, it is a great read. It's better than 99 percent of novels I read. And I love—it's a series of stories about kind of crazy people and the people, including all of us, who enable them.

But part of what you talk about in The Genius Myth is that being a genius meant radically different things in different eras. Explain in ancient Greece—and I don't know why we care about what ancient Greece thought about anything—but the Greeks talked about having genius, or being a genius meant that you were possessed with a visiting spirit. Can you explain what that means?

Yeah, you have a genius—that's the original sense of it. You're visited by this spirit, and you know, it might be the muse of poetry speaks through you, or the muse of history. And they called it furor poeticus, furor divinus—divine fury.

And I think that captures something really well. I don't know if you would describe yourself as a genius, Nick, but most of us wouldn't. But you must have had moments when you've sat down—

No, very few people have defined me as a genius, so thank you.

But you might have had times when you sit down to write a piece or do some piece of work, and it just clicks. Something just feels really good. And I think most writers probably spend most of their life kind of chasing that dragon for the rest of the time. You go, 'when will it come back?' And that's what writing should feel like, and most of the time it's just a kind of grind. So I think they did a very good thing then in capturing something that we've all felt to some extent. There are moments that work. 

You talk about how, particularly in the context of things like pop music and whatnot—and this is certainly true for writers and novelists in particular—you go on a streak where you are just performing at a higher level.

I want to get into an argument about the Beatles for any number of reasons. It's independent of you—I have this argument every morning. But when you look at somebody like Paul McCartney, who you talk about in an interesting way, he's got to understand that whatever he's been doing for the past 40 years is not what he did for that 5- to 10-year period. He was on.

So you go from that classical understanding of genius as a visiting spirit or something is speaking through you—which now is almost always the province of serial killers, right?

I guess I had the dog talk to me, and it told me to kill me.

They're the last classical geniuses in this tattered world. But then in the Renaissance things shift—the Renaissance and the early modern period. How does being a genius change in that period?

Maybe even a little bit later than that, because the thing about the Renaissance is always that the word comes from rinascita—rebirth. So the idea was that they were, as they saw it, bringing back the classical tradition. And it was kind of quite imitative—you were trying to learn these things about proportion and form.

Well, I don't want to get sidetracked. I'm just going to say yes—they were smuggling what they wanted to do by saying, "What we're really doing is merely bringing back these eras of former greatness." There's the American Renaissance in American literature, which was created in the 1940s about the pre–Civil War period. And I believe there's a racial journal now called American Renaissance, which—they want to rebirth things.

So in this early modern period redefinition of genius, what's going on?

Then you get this very, very important book that I had to say I didn't really know about, which is Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. And it is a group biography of—I have to say, all the artists that I would have known growing up because they were also Ninja Turtles, like Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo.

But there is a sense that that was a period of a kind of burst of creativity, and he puts them together in this kind of pantheon. And it's one of the first times that you begin to see, in a really systematic way—this is what I mean by the genius myth. These are stories that we tell about people who are innovators or scientists or artists.

So you have, for example, the story of Leonardo da Vinci. And the myth that's imposed on him is that he couldn't settle on anything. He had a kind of—an uber level of ADHD. He was designing the helicopter, then he wanted to learn how to paint directly onto a wall using tempura, then he was doing something else. He was kind of a scatterbrain.

We have all met that person in our first semester in college as well—who's just so brilliant. Obviously Leonardo accomplished a few things, as well.

It's true—not all of the people that you meet in the first semester at college go on to paint the Mona Lisa, or anything like it, sadly.

But what I was getting at is that the Mona Lisa wasn't really the Mona Lisa until centuries after it.

Until it got stolen. This is one of my favorite things in all of it. It's the same way that Shakespeare died a respectable playwright, but he didn't die the guy that we should enthrone forever as the crowning jewel of English literature. That really a century later.

And exactly the same thing with the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was—and I'm going to be really rude here and say—quite a sludgy gray and green painting, and not seen as the crowning achievement of the Renaissance by any means.

It gets stolen in the 1920s and ends up in Italy. And it becomes—actually, as lots of these things do—about national myths, because Leonardo was Italian or proto-Italian, but he was working for most of his life in France. So it becomes a kind of 'Who owns this great genius?' and 'Therefore, who should have the Mona Lisa?' And then it becomes a kind of inter-country fight.

It's also great because, in the United States in particular, Italians have always claimed Christopher Columbus. But now many of us Italian Americans are like, "Oh, maybe he was working for Spain, and maybe he is a Jew, so forget it. We don't need Columbus anymore."

He's not The Sopranos…

But da Vinci is one model of a Renaissance genius. Talk about Michelangelo or some of the others. The person categorizing them said, "OK, well, there are different gradations." He seemed very much like a boy with a bunch of Pokémon dolls or something where he's rank ordering them things like that.

Yeah, well, he definitely had a bias. He had a pro-Florentine bias. So he's quite rude about Titian, who was born—I think— Venice or the Alps. But he kind of gets relegated to second status because he's not from the right place.

But Michelangelo, he uses as a different example, which is something you find all the time in genius myths: which is someone who had to struggle. So that's turned into a story about how hard it was to paint the Sistine Chapel, and how he had to design all the stuff you'll hear if you go on the tour of the Sistine Chapel. 

The other thing that you will know from visiting the Sistine Chapel is that it's a lot. It's quite—it is a statement, is it not? Yeah. And I think that's kind of fascinating too—that you have to have a level of ambition. The film critic called it white elephant art. Which he didn't intend as a compliment—these films that kind of announce themselves as a masterpiece.

And I think that actually is also quite pertinent to this. The fact that Ulysses by James Joyce is very hard to read—not an enjoyable novel in the conventional sense—is actually taken as being a sign of its genius. The fact that the Sistine Chapel is big…if he'd done that much individual painting and separated it out by canvases, we wouldn't find it quite so impressive as this one—you know, what's that German word? Kunstkammerwerk—you know, the kind of the whole thing is it.

You have that word written on your computer, and you use it in every conversation that you ever have.

That's true. I do, actually. Yeah, you've rumbled me. 

But you know what I mean—like that idea of the kind of… You still see it now when you have like, oh, Birdman, it's filmed like it was in a single shot, or The Revenant, oh it only filmed in natural light, or Tom Hanks really lost all the weight for Cast Away, or Charlize Theron made herself ugly for Monster. These are kind of—there's a price to greatness.

I like the movies where people gain weight, because anybody can lose weight, right?

If we may jump forward a little bit—and I want to skip over him a little bit, both because he deserves to be forgotten, but I want to get to a later figure in Victorian England—but Thomas Carlyle pops up a couple of times in your work. And he is kind of the modern conceptualizer, right, of Great Man Theory, which is related to genius but it's not quite the same thing.

Life writing takes form, and then you get the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. And what you then get is genius really as a marketing tool. So, if you're an artist in the 14th century, what you need is a rich aristocratic patron.

If you're an artist in the 18th century, 19th century—well, actually, at this point there'd be things like, you know, gallerists start arriving, things like newspapers arrive, mass media arrives, and you might therefore be able to brand, basically.

But what's interesting is that most of the time, or at least at that point, it seems to be less the person selling themselves as a genius, and they have a Boswell—or they have somebody around them who is writing them up as, like, "Oh, this is the real guy," like a hype man. A Flavor Flav.

Yeah, everybody needs an 18th century Flavor Flav. Yes, it's true.

But then you have somebody like Thomas Carlyle, who, you know, very much of a… in the context of his time, it's not like he was a right-winger. And he hated capitalism, certainly. And he hated all of the liberal economists who actually thought that Irish people and Blacks in Jamaica were human in the same way he was.

But how does he talk about Great Man Theory, and how does that kind of add to the genius lore before it gets kind of quantified and mathematized later in that century?

Yeah, he has this line, which I'm going to mangle, but it's something like, "The history of the world is, at root, only the history of great men."

And that was very in keeping with a certain type of patrician Victorian thinking—that you just needed these once-in-a-generation personalities. One of their references would have been someone like Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French general. And I think there's a lot to that argument—that actually, the military decisions that Napoleon made at the times that he made them changed the history of Europe. He was a consequential figure.

In the same way that now The Atlantic just ran a cover story on Donald Trump that said he's the most consequential president of the 21st century. I do think it's a reasonable point to say that some people are kind of hinge points in history.

I was gonna make a joke about like, what's his competition so far though? You know, it's—zombie Abe or whatever.

And you thought—"No, I love Obama and I would never say anything mean about him."

Well, I know. I said, unfortunately, from my stupid libertarian point of view, I see an immense continuity between George W. Bush, Obama, Trump I, [Joe] Biden, Trump II. And it's not a good continuity.

But, you know, this is part of what you're talking about when you talk about The Genius Myth—you're not saying everybody is exactly the same, and it's just a social construction that Leonardo gets called a great artist, but actually anybody around him was as good. But it is this storytelling and kind of creating this sense that these people are the limit of everything that we're doing.

But with Carlyle—so Carlyle—I guess in a way systematic thinking— this is what the Enlightenment was about. And to some degree, the Renaissance—it hadn't quite got there. And you certainly get there with somebody like [Karl] Marx and [Freidrich] Engels, where they kind of say, actually it's the system. It's the base—typically the economic base—that actually determines everything else.

So we might forgive Carlyle this one thing of not really understanding.

Oh, I totally forgive him because, you know, what's the easiest thing to do is to go, "Actually, it's both," because it obviously is both, right? Some people do make decisions, but also they are products of fundamental forces that are in society.

And I guess—now let me, because I outed myself on my libertarian podcast show as a libertarian—maybe it's people like Adam Smith who started to talk about how things don't just happen. There are a lot of kind of occult forces, invisible hands and whatnot, that create order among seeming chaos. And you could extend that to individuals.

I feel like this is a big part of your life's work—the meta story that you tell now—which is just that it's a mix of both. It's circumstance and it's individual effort. And that should in no way ever be controversial, but it seems like it constantly needs to be relearned.

Absolutely. Because you bring up Carlyle, and he was writing defensively. That's what I didn't really realize until I looked more at that stuff. I sort of assumed everybody in the Victorian era was swanning around going, "Of course the thing is that just a couple of men changed the world."

But no—he was writing to defend that idea against what he saw as the kind of forces of egalitarianism.

There's a fantastic book called How the Dismal Science Got Its Name by David Levy, which is a study mostly of how Carlyle and other people like him treated the Irish in popular culture and academic discourse basically in the long 19th century.

And they were mad that people were saying, "No, actually the Irish are pretty much like the rest of us. They follow incentives. They're not all gorillas or chimpanzees." And that's why Carlyle named the dismal science "the dismal science," because he said that was its main truth—that all humans respond similarly to incentives.

What a dismal science that we're not somehow more elevated than the lower order.

That's great—to accidentally coin a really great phrase like that when you're trying to be rude.

Yes, right.

But the point I try to make in the book is that we always end up coming back to Great Man Theory—even people on the left—because we want stories. And stories demand protagonists.

Frankly, your biography of Napoleon is going to sell a lot better than your book about agrarian upheaval in France in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's just more interesting to have… You know, when you write a screenplay, the first thing anyone will ever tell you is you have to have a protagonist and they have to be active—they have to make decisions. That's how our minds want history to kind of work.

But there's a brilliant paper that I reference in the book from 1922, about "Are Inventions Inevitable?" And the list that they have of the number of things that got invented simultaneously—the most obvious one is the telephone, right? Two people came up with the telephone, and only one of them gets the credit.

I write about Edison—Thomas Edison—later in the book. And everybody had the idea for the light bulb. Every man and his dog had that idea because it's quite a simple conceptual idea. What they couldn't do for 100 years was manufacture it and reliably make it work.

And the real genius of Edison, if he had it, was, I think, the New York City power grid. But again, that's just not as compelling a story as "Man invents light bulb" that you can see and hold in your hand.

And Edison, then—and you point out that he ended up in a fight that he lost. I mean, he lost a lot of his invention battles overall. He was a proponent of direct current, and alternating current won out and ultimately kind of swallowed a lot of his activity.

And with Edison, I mean, there's always the fascinating concept of Edison versus Tesla. So you have Edison as one kind of genius, and then Tesla as another—crazy, more romantic genius, because he ended in failure.

Do you know, my favorite anecdote is the fact that Tesla walked out of Edison's lab—where he worked for a while—because they had a bet, which Tesla won, and then Edison got really grumpy about him.

And I just think this is fascinating because—I don't know if you know this—a couple of months ago, the podcaster Sam Harris told the story. He had a bet about deaths during the coronavirus pandemic with Elon Musk, and Sam Harris won. And then he said, "So, where's my—pay up, son?" And then Elon Musk kind of just got weird—kind of grumpy—and ended their friendship.

I like that. That is a great way for Sam Harris to call himself a genius.

—is to call himself Tesla.  But it is also interesting that, in the book, I had already made this comparison between Edison and Elon Musk—both in the sense of the style of invention they do, their talent for publicity, but also the ego, frankly, that has made them want to play the public role of an inventor.

And I think that's where the bet story really comes from. Neither of them likes to be beaten or humiliated. They were both schemers—not ivory tower scientists happy to do their own thing and let the chips fall where they may. They both want to be out there in the world selling themselves. And so that echo was very pleasing.

Yeah. And we'll talk more about Musk at the end, I think—or toward the end of this conversation.

But Edison also was—he really did work long hours, but he also did what Benjamin Franklin called "visible industry." Like, he made sure you knew. How did you know Edison worked 24 hours a day? Because he told you every time he saw you, or he had people in the press who were either sycophants or on his payroll or whatever, who were telling people.

It's not clear that he ever said that creativity or genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration, but that captured the image that he was pushing.

Oh yeah. I mean, I've got actually—I think more respect for Edison as a businessman and as a marketer than I had when I came in. But you're right, because everyone wanted the myth to be that they were kind of—you know, the easiest mark is somebody who wants to believe what you're selling them.

And everybody wanted to believe that he was this American Prometheus. You know, he was stealing fire from the gods. And this is what I mean—to come back to nationalism again. This was a time in which America was the future. Europe was kind of classy, but it was old and hidebound and dying. And America was the new continent of steel and electricity and the railroad and these big barons. And Edison fit that image that America had of itself at that time. So he slotted himself in very neatly. There was a pre-made genius myth for him as an American genius.

Right. And if I'm remembering, there was a fantastic series of kids books called Childhood of Famous Americans.

All right.

And it was the same story told over and over again, but they would change the names and places. And there was one of Edison, and part of his myth is that at some point he was working as a baggage boy on a railroad or something, and he was missing his train, and he gets pulled in by his ears—which caused hearing loss. So he became a great telegraph operator, and his kids were nicknamed Dot and Dash.

But a lot of it came from: he was a small kid from nowhere who had bad hearing because of this industrial accident, and then he becomes the greatest inventor of all time.

And he gets rewritten as well as "Tom" Edison—young Tom Edison, like Tom Sawyer—rather than his actual first name, which was Alva. And that again just speaks to the kind of—

The country hasn't been invented yet that's going to promote an "Alva" as their great inventor. Yeah. And there's a famous movie called Young Tom Edison with, like, Jimmy Stewart or somebody playing him. So this gets done again and again.

But now let's bring it back to the evil effects of the British on public discourse, and let's talk about Francis Galton. Because what is interesting—you have the geniuses themselves who become public either because somebody writes about them or they're creating their own myth.

But then you have somebody like Francis Galton, who helped kind of quantify—or tried to quantify—what genius meant, and also why it's hereditary and why it persists in certain types of people but not others. 

Explain who Francis Galton is.

He was a really brilliant dilettante—from the time when you could just skip around and come up with lots of different things. He tried to create a beauty map of the British Isles and work out where the women were hottest. I mean, very much actually the precursor of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in that respect.

But was he a lifelong bachelor? He definitely was childless, right?

He married, yes, but I can't detect any real enthusiasm for women—or, indeed, any other people at all.

Did he marry—did he fight? Like, he was like, "The Orkney Islands have the hottest babes, so I'm going there," or something?

No, I think it was—I think it was an arranged marriage. There's a bit in his memoir of his essentially like gap year, where he goes to Africa. One of the chieftains offers him a woman as a "temporary wife," and he declines because she's covered in— that orange pigment, and he doesn't want to get it on his white linen suit.

And it's just the sort of most Englishman-abroad kind of colonial power.

That's pretty amazing.You have a lot to be ashamed of.

OK, thank you. I'll take that one actually.

He was also the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He came from this very storied family in the 19th century, and he therefore was familiar with the idea of evolution by natural selection. You know, this was the idea that survival of the fittest—that people passed down something that now we think of in terms of genes. They didn't have that kind of biological basis to it initially.

But he was very interested to think, well, hang on a minute—you can breed dogs in all these different ways. You can breed cattle. Maybe we could breed humans.

And this is what I mean about him not showing really any kind of…

It just doesn't make sense…

Right. Him not showing any kind of fellow feeling for other humans. It was like, "Where could this possibly go wrong? I'm sure this won't have any bad consequences whatsoever."

And of course, it did, right? Because he coined the term eugenics, which is from "good birth," essentially, and then dysgenics—which you hear a bit about today.

He wrote this book called Hereditary Genius, in which he tried to work out how frequently genius and high achievement occurred in the population and how it was passed down. And people were kind of slagging it off from the very beginning.

There's a great dunk of it from a Victorian writer at the time—because he works out that there's a whole family of judges, and he essentially posits the existence of a kind of hereditary judginess. And someone else calls them a "snug little galaxy of jobbers," which I think is right. Just the idea that actually, if you're a judge and your nephew wants to be a judge, then there may be other ways by which that happens rather than pure genetic inheritance.

But that's a very influential book among a whole generation of statisticians, because he was a brilliant statistician. And they were also heavily influenced by eugenics.

Can I ask was he actually a brilliant statistician, or was he just really novel in what he applied statistics to? Like, he measured a lot of stuff and then said, "OK, well, it means this," but. I mean, the question is—

 —have concepts like standard deviation, correlation, things like that—they come from his thinking and his work. So he's there right at the birth of this discipline as an academic one. So I think you can say that he was brilliant.

And to go back to the idea of, like, do individuals create inventions or do larger forces produce them—is he, as England is moving out—or as the modern world, certainly Europe, is moving out—of kind of inherited aristocracy, he provides a rationale for why the ruling class deserves to be.

And this is more of a Marxist kind of interpretation, but it's that Victorian England had to produce Francis Galton, because otherwise people would be like, "Why am I listening to these people simply because they, when I was born, had more money than me?"

Yeah, I think that's very true. And also, he provides an excellent justification for imperialism, which was also a great enthusiasm of England at the end of the 19th—

He didn't create it. But then provides a justification for what's happening anyway. Which, yeah, in a lot of social theory—that probably, well, now that I'm thinking about it, might be a better interpretation of a lot of social theory—that it's not leading where society goes, but it's rather kind of explaining why we're doing what we're already doing.

Yeah, I think you can say there was a kind of Francis Galton–shaped hole in the discourse, and he popped into it quite neatly to say, "Europeans are of better racial stock than Africans," right? And that was obviously something that white Europeans were very keen to hear at the end of the 19th century.

Well, some of them, right? Because it really took a couple more generations to figure out, "OK, well, which…who are the Europeans who are actually European, as opposed to Africa due north?"

I mean, by the end of the 19th century, you had people who were like, "Well, the Nordics and the Alpines are OK, but these Mediterraneans, like, nah—they're not really…"

Well, that's where we have to flick it over to the Americans really taking up the mantle on that. Because they just went, "Hang on a minute. Polish people aren't quite European. Italian people aren't quite European. Irish people aren't quite European. We mean the Nordics, right?"

And that's how our racial laws are going to say that the true descendants of the ancient Greeks, bizarrely. I don't know why the ancient Greeks got away scot-free, despite being from Southern Europe, as being very intelligent.

If they were so good, they wouldn't have gone away. I mean, this is what I just—I don't understand.

But yeah, you're right. He just becomes a very influential figure in what then develops into eugenics and race science. His name has recently been taken off a lot of buildings at University College London. And it's one of those ones where I think I'm ok with it. You know, I think there are lots of cases for whether—- went too far…

Am I remembering correctly—part of his research method was measuring the column inches or the number of mentions in encyclopedias of famous people to kind of—

He did obituaries, yeah. And then Havelock Ellis, who was a sexologist, does another book in which he basically gets out a ruler.

And this is the problem that always happens with these people—they get completely stuffed by Shakespeare, about whom we know very little, and Jane Austen, who lived a very quiet, boring, blameless life in a parsonage. So the biographical idea that you just—you have a lot of biographical detail and you get written about a lot—completely falters. And then they just end up fudging these supposedly scientific lists.

Which is the methodology that Charles Murray used in his book Human Accomplishment, where he looked at reference works and measured column inches. Which I think probably calls more for a Freudian interpretation rather than a mathematical interpretation of what's going on.

Right. I think you can say it's all interesting data, but it's not objective scientific data. Because you can measure how someone's reputation has changed over time, but you can't say there's a kind of version of just desserts where the most intelligent people get the most column inches.

I think our own media at the moment would heavily debunk that idea.

Talk about eugenics briefly, because we're also—and this is in the Muskosphere and Peter Thielosphere and stuff like that—where people are talking about eugenics. It's one thing if you're saying the state is running things and saying, "You can mate with these people but not those people," and things like that.

You know, when you are going to Burning Man or you're at the Bohemian Grove and it's a voluntary association, we all are eugenicists. We all practice some form of "good birth," where we choose these people rather than those people.

Is there a way to disentangle eugenics from its kind of history? Is there a eugenics which  does not immediately—or quickly—devolve into racial sorting and some kind of horrific cataclysm of human suffering?

In practice, I think, no.

I think in theory, you're right—it doesn't have to go in those directions. And I think actually—again, I think you're kind of alluding to this—most people, when you drill down to it, are softly eugenicists themselves.

Most people: A, they choose their partner because they think their partner is attractive and smart and would be a good father or mother—which is itself kind of eugenics. The second thing is that most people are broadly supportive of women having abortions of babies with severe and life-limiting illnesses—even those like Down syndrome that aren't necessarily fatal.

So, lots of people think that looking after a disabled kid would be really hard, and people should have the choice to opt out of that.

I have this argument with one of my friends, who has written brilliant books about eugenics. And I said, "But that is eugenic." And you just don't want to call it eugenics because, to you, eugenicism is bad. But you support this.

And I think that's what I mean about in practice, I think there are things that people do agree with that you could describe as eugenic. But in any kind of organized movement, it is so unbelievably tainted by what happened in California in the '30s—huge amounts of sterilizations of the quote-unquote "feeble-minded"— by what had happened under the Nazis, that no reputable scientist would touch it with a 10-foot bargepole.

And I don't really see the need to rehabilitate it in these individual cases.

Do you see any—I realize it's a little bit off topic—but we are now, because there is a demographic collapse happening. It's women's fault. Women are having fewer children now that they have more job opportunities.

Right, because they're grasshoppers, and they reproduce by themselves. Yeah, it's women's fault, yeah.

But throughout the West—certainly in the U.S., but then especially in those old parts of Europe that maybe really aren't European, places like Hungary—there's a big push for natalism. The state needs to pump up the volume of kids being born. And countries like Singapore spend millions—or billions—of dollars a year trying to do that.

Is that a form of eugenics as well? Should we be concerned, from a history-of-eugenics point of view, about what happens when the state starts to say, "You need to be having more kids"?

I think the main contradiction to that is that we don't have any evidence that it works. Stalin had a medal that was like—if you had 10 kids, you got a medal.

Yeah, I think it was six or something, but yeah.

I mean, to me, what I consider to be a lot of children. And there have been regimes through history that have tried to—currently, Viktor Orbán in Hungary said very explicitly, "I don't want more immigrants. I want more Hungarians." And he has put in tax breaks for people who have more than three children, reductions on the people carrier, you know.

But with negligible effects, from what I can see. Unless you're running a really brutally directive society like China, where you can dictate to people how many kids they have—

And that it was more about having fewer.

But now it's like, "Please, please, can you—people—start having children again? We've realized this is a demographic problem." And I think that will be harder to reverse than the previous one-child policy.

That's the thing that's interesting. And I think actually—oh, I've forgotten her name, the brilliant researcher Alice—and I've just talked to Ross Douthat about this at The New York Times—that actually it's not even just the West. Quite conservative societies in North Africa are also seeing this reduction in birth rates.

No, it tracks perfectly with  the proxy that I've seen brooded about a lot is the number of years of education women have on average. As that increases, fertility rates decline—always and everywhere.

And it's that the world has become more modern, meaning that women have more opportunity and more equality and more education. I know Mexican women in Mexico have more kids than they do in America. They cross the border, and they have fewer kids. And that's not even that big a difference.

But everywhere, yeah—it's a global phenomenon. And I think it contributes as a sign of progress, actually. Because it means more people, I think, are making more choices.

I think it's a sign of progress. I think it's very hard to square with our current gerontocracies in terms of our political systems. I mean, that's the problem. In Britain having fewer working-age people to support more older people is a problem, when those older people are on unsustainably high pensions and earlier retirement…

You know, I have a political ideology of limited government and a basic social safety welfare net that I would love to sell to you right now. The problem isn't that people are getting older; it's that we have unsustainable entitlement programs that we can thank Bismarck for.

Oh, right. OK. Yeah, OK—so we've put, so far, the villains of today's podcast as the English and Otto von Bismarck. OK, good to have the enemies list updated.

Come on, surely let's argue about the Beatles now, Nick. You've been holding out on me.

Yeah, well, before we get to them, I want to talk about William Shockley, who is somebody that I think a fair number of my audience will remember. He encapsulates something perfect—partly because he is related, he's a kind of semi-direct descendant intellectually of Galton. But he is also fantastic because he brings us closer to Silicon Valley.

William Shockley won a Nobel Prize for his role—contested as it may be—in developing the transistor. And then he became a—you know, he took that—

He was a massive prick. And everybody left his firm, and they went on to found Silicon Valley. That's the short way.

That's right. On the business end, he had this great creation, or he was part of a great invention, and then he was such a terrible manager that everybody who worked for him—who were incredibly talented—were like, "Fuck it, we're going to start our own company." And that became modern Silicon Valley.

And then he spent the rest of his life, "electronics, who cares, I want to talk about racial differences that are quantifiable." And he is the genius, in a way, who precedes many other figures that we'll talk about, but where he was great at one thing, and then spent most of his time talking about stuff—that is just crazy pants—and it takes away from his luster as a great inventor.

Yeah, I was just rereading the interview that he did with Playboy. It was one of those kind of great heyday-of-Playboy, nine-billion-page interviews. And it's just—it's really sad to see somebody who obviously had a great scientific brain, but they've just picked up a load of goo, basically.

Like, for example, he didn't—you know, the interviewer talks to him about his decision to donate to the so-called Genius Sperm Bank, which is a kind of cursed idea from the start. But he has no idea that men's sperm degrades with age and that at 70, the old swimmers might not be in the best condition. And he just completely hasn't looked into that.

And it's a kind of sad version of someone who obviously had a great and flexible intellect in their youth, and they've just kind of hardened. And I don't know about you, but when I was reading that, it felt like one of those kind of internet–social media–era midlife crises ahead of its time.

I'm sure the obvious example is Naomi Klein's book about Naomi Wolf, a great feminist scholar, gets caught out and then drifts into the kind of QAnon sphere

Wolf found out on—was it the BBC?

Live on radio. She basically had a book that was about gay men. And she said that there were a number of them who were executed for sodomy. And it turned out that the phrase that had been written was "death recorded." And that didn't mean they'd been executed. That meant that they'd had a death sentence and actually most of them had ended up commuted or whatever.

But it was just this very embarrassing thing that dented her credibility in the liberal sphere. So she went over to the other side.

And here is—I'm going to make—this is an act of genius that I almost certainly won't pull off, because I'm not a genius. But that moment where she is live talking to the interviewer who points that out to her, and she's like, "Oh… oh."

I mean, you just see something change. It's almost like having a stroke. It's very similar to the moment—and I believe you mention this in the book—the Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles, Get Back, when the song "Get Back" comes into recognizable form. Where the Fab Four are noodling around, and then suddenly you hear this classic song come into being.

Yeah, it's a live-action shot of somebody who basically—and I think this is exactly what happened to Shockley. Shockley won his Nobel Prize, the career stalled, he couldn't understand what happened to it. He made, I think, one idle comment about IQ and everyone screamed at him.

And he did exactly what happens to lots of people now in that situation, where he felt like that was unfair and unjust, and so he kind of did it harder. And he became a provocateur, and he got into this mindset of, "The more that I'm owning the libs, the righter I must be."

And I think you just—you see that. I still think you see that now, and I understand it psychologically.

Yeah, like you say, "I'm this thing that you know is horrible, and it's like I'm going to be your worst nightmare version."

And in the point about Shockley—and this is, I mean, a credit to the book and to your work—is that Shockley was not— here was an ongoing study of IQ and super-smart kids in California that he did not make the cut for.

So you have a guy who becomes obsessed with IQ as this thing that is free-floating and independent from all sorts of influences. And you have to—I mean, anybody reading that in the contemporary world would say, "Oh, he became obsessed with IQ because he was a genius, but he was not ratified as a genius in this grammar school or high school study going on in California."

I found that very telling. Yeah, that's Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of the Gifted, and the cutoff point was either 140 or 135 on this particular IQ score. And he claims that his mother got an IQ score of 150, but he was below it.

And actually, there was one other Nobel Prize winner, Luis Alvarez, who also didn't make the cut. And the really sad thing is, in that Playboy interview, he says, "Well, you know, I think probably my IQ has gone up a bit since then," which isn't really how it works between being a school kid and being 70, right?

But obviously—you can—yeah, I think you're exactly right. When I read that, I thought, oh, there's the chip on the shoulder. That actually, he's had all the success—what more success could you want than having a Nobel Prize if you're in the sciences? But somehow, there's some little bit of him that still feels he's not enough.

And actually, if he clings to this idea of superiority through IQ—racial superiority through IQ—that rubs a little bit of salve on that chip.

What goes into people who—and I want to get to the Beatles, because I can talk about The Beatles endlessly. And I met Paul McCartney once—

Oh, wow!

Yeah, as a college kid. So it was quite exciting, and it led to one of the reasons that I no longer like The Beatles so much.

Oh, ok?

So that's a good tease, right?

But to focus on Shockley a little bit—what goes on where you are a genius in this field or this set of fields—manufacturing, science, invention, electricity—and then you say, "Well, fuck it. What I really want to talk about is race and IQ"?

You mentioned, like, his career seemed to stall because nobody—literally nobody—wanted to work with him. They were like, "I'm leaving. You cannot lock me in this factory anymore. I'm just going."

But how does that happen? Because this is part of what the book is about. We're in a golden age now where if you are really good at making money on Wall Street, or if you are really good at inventing an electric car, if you are really good at making pop music, we really want to hear your thoughts about all of these other fields that you know absolutely nothing fucking about.

I know. It's strange, isn't it?

I think, yeah, that does seem to me the Shockley story. There is a heavy suggestion that he kind of piggybacked on the precise version of the transistor that won the Nobel Prize—it was really other people's work—and that people in the lab got tired of him being a kind of credit hog.

And then he started getting into applying psychometric testing to his employees, which is always a red flag, I would say.

If I may—I've never had to take a psychometric job test, or one that presented itself as such, but my father worked for a shipping company and he used to tell this story that I found very funny.

It was called Sea-Land, and it kind of popularized containerized shipping in the postwar era. But it was founded by a guy named Malcolm McLean, who was an illiterate son of sharecroppers in North Carolina.

And then, at a certain point, when the company got big enough, they were like, "OK, you've got to start taking business seriously." And they had all of the employees take kind of basic IQ tests to see if they were Sea-Land–worthy people.

And Malcolm McLean failed it—because he was basically illiterate, and he was not functioning at the higher level. But, you know—so you had this moment in the heyday of scientific management, where a guy who revolutionized shipping would not be hired at his own company because he was kind of retarded.

Wow, that's wild.

Yeah, so I always—

It doesn't surprise me, because I think that, you know, you would always want to have a higher IQ than not. But I think people overrate that—when you're getting way above the average—how important it is versus personality traits like conscientiousness, openness to experience, whatever it might be.

So I think I'm entirely unsurprised by that, but your question kind of speaks to one of the things I talk about in the book, which is this idea of galaxy brainlessness. Which is the idea that, "I'm a smart person, all my opinions are smart." And I think it's just demonstrably not true.

And the other thing is—I think it's really sad for the geniuses themselves. Because you look at someone like Shockley, and he has his success because his type of intelligence and his breakthroughs interact with a particularly fertile moment in the history of Silicon Valley, right? He had the right brain for the right time. And what often happens to people is that that lasts for a while, and then it goes away.

And that is a really traumatic process for them—particularly if they've become kind of high on their own supply, and they believe that they're a superior sort of person. You know, "Why—I'm pressing the gas pedal and the car's not moving forward anymore," and they can't understand it. And that does often, I think, lead people to kind of bitterness and resentment rather than a kind of appreciation of, "Most people don't get one hot streak. Maybe I won't get two, but the one I had was pretty good."

So this is a good segue to talk about The Beatles and the music or creativity streaks where either you're hot, and then suddenly you're not.

And I guess part of—we have been, I don't know, and I'm assuming broad social trends in Britain are similar to America—but certainly over the past 30 or 40 years, we have been pushing galaxy brain ideas on schoolchildren and things like that. You know, the idea that you have a domain-specific genius or intelligence doesn't seem to be in favor.

We talk about general intelligence, and it's kind of like if you're good at one thing, you're going to be good at everything. So—I mean, we're kind of reaping that whirlwind. I'm not even sure I'm using that term properly, but—because people like Elon Musk are told when they're a kid, "Well, you are really smart. You do great on standardized tests, so everything you say—you get an A in every subject." So like, why wouldn't you start talking about fertility or something like that?

So let's talk about the Beatles a bit. How did The Beatles—I mean, it's fascinating, you know, Shakespeare and The Beatles are like the two great British exports, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And I really appreciate your focus on the way that all of this stuff plays into national myth-making and things like that. When you talk to French or German people, they're like, "Yeah, Shakespeare's pretty good, but he's not great."

English-speaking people—and Americans, I think, probably love Shakespeare more than English people—because we have spent, you know, a couple hundred years trying to be like, "No, Melville—he's as good, and Walt Whitman."

During graduate school, I studied American literature, and it was fascinating—right around the time that the Berlin Wall came down and then the Soviet Union collapsed. And suddenly, Americanists who had been spending 50 years searching for the American Shakespeare were finally like, "Hey, you know what? We don't actually have to worry. Britain is now a minor literature because America is—our literature matters because we're the world power. We don't have anything to apologize for on some level."

But roundabout way of getting to the Beatles—like, you particularly talk about how, within the Beatles mythology, John is seen as the kind of genius, and Paul is—you know, he's like the job, right? He's just a hard worker. What goes into that, and why do you pick Paul over John?

Well, for a start, I say this slightly incendiary line, which is: I think in terms of their long-term reputation, we're very lucky that it's Paul who's made it to 80, and John is now a hallowed memory.

Because I think if John were still around, he'd be an extremely grumpy reactionary—probably doing quite bad tweets.

That would be glorious, though.

Whereas Paul McCartney has grown into that kind of father-of-the-nation role, and the younger musicians can make pilgrimage to him.

Oh, and it's interesting—I'm sorry to interrupt—but I know George Harrison, who's also important in this kind of holy trinity. And you realize, as age goes on, that Ringo is the only Beatle really worth caring about in the long run. But—

Ringo is lovely in Get Back, right? One of my friends described him as being like this sort of lovely Labrador. He's actually like a sort of emotional support animal—because he's there, just exuding Ringo energy. He calms everything down because people don't want to have a row in front of Ringo. And they don't want to upset Ringo.

And actually, that is an underrated skill in the high crucible of tempestuous creative motion.

Well, but George—towards the end of his life, by the '90s—he was grumpy. When Oasis openly paid a compliment to him by talking about "Wonderwall," which is a reference to his first—or near first—solo album, he was like, "Oasis sucks." He hated everybody younger than him. He was grouchy and grumpy.

I mean, Oasis's reputation has not stood the test of time, has it, as a…

No, I don't think so. They were—

They had a lot of concerts. I think that might be an interesting one to see when people have their own music.

Well, and they have their own—that's a variation, right, on the genius theme. The brother who writes everything is really the genius. I mean, they're doing the version of The Kinks with Ray Davies and Dave—

Right. And two people who hate each other because they've both got something the other hasn't, right? Liam hates Noel for being able to write songs. And Noel hates Liam for being the charismatic frontman.

Anyway, but there's a similar version of that with John and Paul, where John is cast in the role of being the rock bad boy. And that's what people kind of want at the time from their singers. Whereas Paul is seen as kind of domestic and managerial and a bit of a boring admin guy.

And his songs focus on mundane stuff, whereas John is writing much more surreal and whimsical stuff—and that's seen as more creative.

So you see by the end of the breakup that they've been put into those two categories, and that John has got the much more flattering one. But I don't think it would necessarily—

—from a kind of romantic demonic—you know, like the Romantics loving Satan. John is that kind of rock creative genius.

Yeah, exactly. Untamable, weird, odd. You know, him and Yoko were kind of wandering around filming their bottoms and all that kind of stuff. He's performing a much more obvious genius role.

Whereas Paul McCartney has gone to live on a Scottish island, and send his kids to a public school, and wanting to be, quote, "as normal," right? Trying to live as normal a life as a rock star could live.

And therefore—one of the things—I was just talking to a playwright last week about the book. And I said, the thing is, people would rate you as more talented if you were just weirder. You're too normal. You should try and cultivate an aura of eccentricity, because people would misread it as brilliance.

I want to get to two other points before we stop talking. And I guess the first is: it's called The Genius Myth. Part of it—I can hear people being like, "Oh, you're just putting down anybody who accomplishes things. You are cutting down the tall poppy or whatever."

The Canadian band Rush has a great song called "The Trees," which is about how all the maple trees are trying to keep this oak from growing taller than them. And, you know, they were in an Ayn Rand phase when they produced that.

The maple leaf must be the regular Canadian, and they just don't want, you know, Rush to become too big.

But it's about the myth, you know. How did you become interested in not the things that people do that are interesting, but in the way that it ends up being talked about?

I think people in groups are completely fascinating. Because—I don't know about you—but I find it hard enough to understand individual people. The fact that they think in completely different ways to me. And just—things that to me are completely obvious, they just disagree with me on.

And it's kind of life's project to be like, "Oh—other people's brains are different."

But then you add in the complexity of them being in crowds, and it becomes completely impossible to understand why people do the things that they do.

So lots and lots of my writing—about political movements, about social change—focuses on exactly those kinds of weird emergent properties of people in groups. And that's what interested me about this: you don't get to declare yourself a genius. You can try, right? Lots of people have. And quite a lot of them have been cruelly rebuffed.

But genius is created by a crowd looking at you and adoring you and hailing you. And therefore, the interesting question is not just to talk about the properties of the people who are being adored, but the properties of the crowd.

So I'm always really interested in celebrity—-

Yeah, you talk about Elon Musk in the beginning of the book as an argument about what society values, but also what we're willing to tolerate because it's this whole pact. How did we get to a point where we're going to say—and this is an older example—but it's like, "Well, Roman Polanski deserves to fuck any child that he wants because he made Chinatown."

I mean, generally, that is the way that people used to talk about it. They used to say that it was—

That's how Bernard-Henri Lévy, the great human rights advocate, said it when Polanski was arrested in Switzerland and was going to be deported to the U.S.

Yeah, or like, "It's not rape rape," or, you know, all these kind of weaselly things. Or, "It was Philistines"—that's what one French actress said: "You're Philistine," and then this campaign of smearing against him.

And you're like, I'm going to stay at this wild position that I don't think it's good to drug and sexually assault teenagers. Just call me a prude, if you will.

And to confess to that. He pled guilty and then he fled because he was worried that the plea bargain that was in place might not come through on the terms that he wanted.

To talk about the kind of people who helped create the myth—you have a great chapter, and I'm misreading the title because I don't have it, but it's about the widow of the genius. You talk about people like Orwell's wife, but I'm especially interested in talking about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, who was an artist—plausibly of equal talent, potentially—but she kind of consciously, ultimately played a role of saying, "OK, I'm going to take a break, and I'm going to kind of build up his myth."

Can you talk a little bit about that? And also, one of the things that I find fascinating—this is about your work in general—but it's particularly strong in this book— the gender dimension to all of this. Because geniuses—when you think of a genius, you think of a boy genius. You don't think of a girl genius.

Oh, the Romantics were quite explicit about this. They thought genius was a male property, but it was a man who had a kind of feminine spirit within him. You know, this was the idea of a poet.

But they're not girls. 

No. It was fae, sort of feminine men—but never butch ladies. No, that was not the same at all. So those roots of the gendering of genius are really, really deep. And I think there's pretty good research that says we're more likely to describe boys as brilliant. That is just an adjective that we apply more readily to men than to women.

But is that something relatively recent? And then it becomes hard because in terms of, if we're talking about harder-core patriarchal structures…I had a conversation with Richard Dawkins once where he was talking about various things, and I was just like, "Yeah, it's really weird to me that, like, girls—you look back in human history and girls just couldn't pole vault until about 1985. Is that because of biology?"

I grew up in a world, in high school, where girls were not allowed to participate in the pole vault because they couldn't do it. Evolution did not allow them to have the upper body strength to pole vault.

How many times do you recognize things that are treated as facts of nature are obviously social constructions and change? And I'm not denying differences between men and women—

Oh sure. No, I'm sure women are worse at pole vaulting, right? 

They do not do as well. 

It's definitely sex-linked.

What I'm getting at is the question of girl and boy geniuses—because we now live in an age where, you know, the equality of sex is certainly under the law. And even in places where testing is used, you know, girls do better in high school, girls get into college more often, they graduate college more often.

Are we going to look forward to a future of girl geniuses that are as insufferable as the boy ones?

Well, that's the final dream of feminism, isn't it? To be as insufferable as men.

Yeah, I don't know—because I think that's a really interesting question. There are undoubtedly women who have really high achievement in ways that they were previously blocked out of. But there's still an open question about whether or not there are sex differences in the kind of selfishness and ambition that's required to be like a William Shockley.

Actually—are these traits that we really want to encourage in our children? The kinds of things that make you the Nobel-winning scientist?

Or—that's also an interesting question about the fact that science has changed so much. There's very little low-hanging fruit that one person can now do. Most great science projects now are deeply collaborative—often across countries.

But it's also about who the crowd wants to hold up as the genius. And I still think that both men and women are more reluctant to idolize women.

So I don't think it necessarily will level out, actually. Because again, it's not an objective awarding of a quality—it's not something awarded on merit. It's about why you are celebrating someone—because of what it says about you, or what it says about the qualities you want to stress.

So, you know, we definitely do have more women who are celebrated now.

And also—the other thing I would say about, to go back to Lee Krasner—my editor made a very good note in that chapter which I incorporated. She has been the benefit of a explicitly feminist genius myth. Which is that feminist historians love the idea of finding overlooked women and lifting them up and celebrating them.

You see that with Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance painter. You see it with Krasner. And so there are a new set of genius myths, which are sometimes in themselves quite reductive—the poor, downtrodden woman who never got her flowers during her life, and now we're here, as the historical court of appeal, to make that right.

So yeah, there will be some women who benefit from that. But I would doubt that it will level out anytime soon.

What kind of pushback do you face when you bring up the social context of the creation of things like genius?

Part of what your book is that there's a line or chapter like, "There really is no lightbulb moment." That Edison, tried a million different things, and all these people, etc.

But you—for you—you certainly burst into a bigger view when, it was in 2018, when you had that great interview with Jordan Peterson.

Yeah, what I like to do is confuse people by getting attacked from a completely different political tendency every couple of years and just switching it up.

So, you know, there are people who've spent the last couple of years thinking that I'm this anti-woke conservative. And now I'm going to go through a phase where they think—I think you're right. The people who don't read the book will think this is some misguided egalitarian feminist nonsense that says, "Everybody can be Monet. Everybody can be Einstein. Everybody can be Picasso," or whatever it might be.

So yeah, I think that there will be misreadings like that. You can only write the book. You can't force people to read it, tragically.

It's a better world where authors cannot force people to read—

I was going to say I couldn't read his book, but yeah.

Well, he could get you to hold it up, right? And I guess Gaddafi did that too, right? He had his little Green Book—that's all over. I'm sure it's still in the basements of the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi or whatever.

But, you know, with that Jordan Peterson interview—what is amazing, like, when it came out, I watched it, and I was like, "OK, this is really—it's just great journalism."

I mean, to your credit—what was funny to me, and more clear on a second viewing—is just that you're asking basic questions. And he is a male genius, and he uses ratiocination, he is incredibly learned—but it's like he's about to cry half the time. He is so emotional.

Do you think we've entered into a period where men—the kind of male recourse to anger—is now being recognized less as, you know, genius and more as a failure to cope with what's going on in the circumstance?

I hope that's true, because I know what you mean—particularly the kind of plethora of those very cruel videos of people having public meltdowns. I think you often see men melting down in public in a way that suggests they've just never learned to process and manage feelings of humiliation or denial, in a way that's quite unhealthy. And I think everybody would probably benefit from working a bit harder on that.

But I'm pleased that you picked that up, because I do think it was very funny—because, you know, that was explicitly set up, that interview with Peterson—

This was like—if I may make an analogy—this is like when Playboy sent a Black interviewer to General William Shockley. Sending GQ—sending a woman—to interview Jordan Peterson.

For their Men of the Year issue. And that's the thing that's very funny, because everybody wanted it to be me—this kind of emotional little lady—and him to be the Great Man of Science loftily delivering his insights.

But as you say, I'm there being quite sarcastic, because that's how I brawl. And he's the one who's kind of tearing up. It was actually very gender-nonconforming in that sense. So credit to everyone involved there.

He fits into this category. He obviously toiled in the groves in the academy for a long time and had developed a certain kind of expertise and a certain level of reputation. And then when he broke big, now he's giving people tips on how to tie their tie and things like that.

Yeah. I was talking to someone who knew him, actually, in Toronto earlier this week. And they said, you know, he was—he was this really great. Like, the research was really good, and the teaching was really good, and his students really liked him.

Everybody who knows him from that period in his life is like, "Oh, you were a really great psychology professor, but you are probably not psychologically suited to be an internet commentator." 

Some people just have hides of inch-thick leather and that sort of thing bounces off of them. But clearly he's somebody who really takes criticism to heart, and it affects him quite deeply. And he's really not cut out for sprawling with people on the internet.

Can I ask before—and I promise we'll get to Musk and then I'll let you get on with your day, or tea, or whatever you people are doing in England now—curtsying—

—my crumpets 

—as you drive by…

In your previous book Difficult Women, which is excellent—I'm a big fan of kind of second-wave feminism, which now gets read out of context. You read women like Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, and they're read out of context.

Obviously, she shouldn't have shot Andy Warhol. She should have shot Norman Mailer if she understood her own theory. That would've been great.

But what I'm saying is, second-wave feminism from the late '60s and early '70s often gets read in a void. So it just seems like these shrieking harpies who are talking about castrating men, etc., and it's always taken out of context. Like, yeah, they were denied entry into universities or jobs, etc.

One of the figures you've talked about a fair amount is Germaine Greer.

Talking about Norman Mailer—I mean, if you ever watch the live debate, she just rocks. She throws her fox fur stole over her shoulder and starts talking about building cathedrals in this über-academic way. I mean, it's… oh, I love it.

Yeah. No—I mean, you could power all the energy needs of the developing world with the sexual tension…

It is really quite something.

Germaine Greer, does she fall into a problem of—she was hot, she had a moment. Do you think her thought isn't on a hot streak anymore? It's kind of a amazing because she helped define, certainly in England, second-wave feminism, and now she seems to be hated by most feminists.

How does genius age?

Oh, I don't think that's true in Britain, where she lived most of all—I mean, she's originally Australian. I think because of the transgender revolt of the last 10 years, she became very unfashionable with the people who came of age at that time. She was seen as being insufficiently inclusive of transgender women.

But I think in Britain, the scales have tipped back toward—whatever you want to call it—sex realism, gender-critical feminism. People are now also rediscovering their love of Germaine Greer's brutal, radical honesty, I think we might call it.

Personally, my favorite Germaine is not "Why I think naked boys are attractive" Germaine—that was a strange Germaine—nor even the Germaine of The Whole Woman or The Female Eunuch. But her writing on art criticism—she wrote a book about female painters called The Obstacle Race, which I read when I was revising this.  

As a scholar I think she's got another one called something like Kissing the Rod, which is about Restoration poetry. It's a very Germaine Greer title.

She was an exceptional close reader of texts and paintings. And I wonder, actually, when the outrage about her comparing trans women to spaniels has all died down—we will remember the quality of her thoughts.

In the same way that people now appreciate—you mentioned Valerie Solanas, but I'm thinking more of Andrea Dworkin. Penguin has just reissued all of Andrea Dworkin's work. Because it's now been long enough that people have kind of gotten over themselves about her controversies and remembered the interesting contributions that she made.

But this comes exactly to what the whole book is about, which is: all of that depends on a generation of women—my age or below—who want to remember her, who want to keep enshrining her.

This idea of history as a process—you know, we want to keep her memory and what she wrote alive. That's ultimately where the historical judgment comes from. It's whether or not the next generation thinks you're important.

It seems to me that Britain has more—you know, and I use this term with air quotes—"TERFs" than American feminism.

I think America maybe has a lot of… If you want to define it like this—80 percent of America thinks that sex matters and that there is a difference between trans women and women. Right? But those are none of—

Yeah—none of that implies a different legal standing or anything like that.

I have struggled. There's a tradition of French feminism, which is its own thing, and then Anglo-American feminism. I found it interesting, I guess, that there are very few American feminists who are on a Germaine Greer level—who exist and are talking publicly about this.

Do you have a quick gloss on why it seems like second-wave feminism stuck around longer in England than it did in America?

I think it's probably because of the trade union movement and the left feminist movement. Whereas in America, things became much more polarized.

And also I think that in America, because abortion dominated the conversation for so long—and continues to dominate it—everybody gets sucked into that. There isn't a lot of space for other stuff.

Plus, stuff like employment law being so much more federal in America—what are the kind of big…? And again, in America, race has been such a big part of the conversation for so much longer.

I mean, Britain is now a much more diverse country than it was. But in the '90s, it was still 95 percent white. These are just much more recent questions about whether or not feminism is, quote, "white."

In 1920, that wasn't a question in British feminism because everybody was white. Whereas it was a huge deal in America. So I think all of those social factors might account for it.

I was just thinking as you were talking about England being blessedly white even into the 1990s.

Whoa, whoa, whoa—I didn't say that!

I was going to say—if you're looking for supplementary material for the eventual paperback edition of this, it would be great to look at Eric Clapton as a genius who then went on to a bit of racial…

Very Shockley. A very Shockley trajectory. Like, "Oh, so you loved 'Layla'? Would you also like to hear my thoughts on race?" No—just play "Layla" again. That was really great.

And he also has a few thoughts on COVID.

I'm sure John Lennon would have had his few thoughts on COVID, I'm just saying.

Well, yeah. This is where I think John Lydon—or Johnny Rotten—is kind of… he's a very stable genius, because whatever is dominant thinking, he will be on the other side of it at any given moment in time.

But let's talk about Musk quickly. He's not the controlling metaphor of your book, but he is the controlling genius of our moment. Do you think his recent foray into politics—does that tarnish him?

Because I was thinking: there's a science writer based in Canada named Dan Gardner. He has a fabulous Substack called Past, Present, Future, or something like that. He wrote a lot about Henry Ford. And he was like, "Hey, I want to tell you a story about a carmaker who really kind of blew his reputation by talking about stuff he didn't really know anything about."

And it's about Henry Ford, who was a great genius at mass production and all of this kind of stuff. And then he got bored running a car company, and he's like, "OK, I'm going to solve World War I."

And didn't he become a massive antisemite?

Oh, he was. He is the Bob Dylan of antisemites. I don't know who's the ultimate Jew.

He went electric.

Yes, absolutely. And then he also ended up suing people who libeled him for describing him accurately, and then losing status in public court hearings. Because he's an idiot about all of this kind of stuff.

Where does that story go? Because he is the epitome of galaxy brain. It's like: he's good at these things, so every thought he has is good, and we have to put up with him.

You know, he was working for an administration where people want to have more kids and be Christian. We don't know how many children he has—virtually none of them in a marriage setting. He's divorced, and increasingly it's not even clear how many there are or under what circumstances they were born.

That's one thing people tolerate—because he's good at making money and making cars. But then this political foray, where he's going back to Texas—is that the type of thing that destroys his geniusness, or does it remain to be seen?

I mean, I think it does. How I've always felt about it is: SpaceX, which is the truly innovative business—if it manages to make reusable rockets work in that way that drives down the cost of space travel, that allows us to become an interplanetary species—I would have thought, in 400 years' time, we're not going to be talking about his bad tweets.

But at the current rate, I think he deeply risks falling into that Shockley pattern—of somebody whose juice kind of runs out. Because look at the DOGE as we're talking, he's just been giving this round of kind of exit interviews complaining it was a lot harder than he thought it would be.

And you know how he could have found out how hard it would have been? He could have asked me—an idiot—to tell him that. The fact is, governments are harder to run than private businesses, because you can't have creative destruction. You can't just let a government fail and someone else move in—people die, people don't get their Social Security checks.

These are important things. But instead, he trampled through that undergrowth like a huge rhino, insistent that he knew best. And—shock horror—if he'd gone into that with his undoubted skills, but had learned more first, he would have been more successful at it.

Well, from a Reason angle, it was frustrating, because there are people who work at Reason—but also there's a whole Gulag Archipelago of think tanks—of people who have said, "This is how you cut government spending and waste," etc.

And, like, there are almost off-the-shelf plans you can bring in as opposed to going in and not succeeding.

Ones that are increasingly picking up traction on the left, right? If you look at the whole abundance agenda—a lot of that is really saying, places like California don't work because they overregulate.

What's that phrase of Ezra Klein's? "Everything bagel liberalism"—where it's like, "Why don't we make this housing project also solve racism and wild birds?" So there's definitely a libertarian critique that people feel government is slow and sclerotic. And a more humble man might have read those things first.

The point with Musk is that—I guess this is part of where geniuses go to destroy themselves—they really don't think that, as your book argues—and I think it's completely persuasive—that breakthrough technologies are never the result of one person.

But when you get exalted like that, then you stop looking around for the expertise or the team that will actually help you produce results. Then you're looking for yes men, or people who will… Your circle becomes—you become Kanye West or something, where nobody around you is going to say no.

Yeah. And I think the really interesting examples of that—Picasso and Einstein are probably our most obvious examples. Most people's go-to ideas of artistic and scientific genius.

But Einstein never really accepts quantum mechanics. So when he dies, he's more a celebrity than the kind of person in the field that young physicists look to. And Picasso similarly doesn't go to pure abstraction—he doesn't end up in the place of Rothko.

That's because they had their paradigm shift. They had the moment where they were the perfect brain to meet the moment. And I think you probably see something very similar with Musk.

He had a playbook—which, if you read Character Limit, the book about his takeover of Twitter—you know, he brings in his lieutenants, they lock everybody out of the systems, they fire everyone and rehire that they need. He just had this way that had worked for him in the past.

And he went, "Bring on big balls, I'm going to do that to the government too." And he didn't realize that it was not the same environment, and that his one thing that had worked before would now not serve him anymore.

And that, to me, exactly is what you're saying. It's a classic genius myth: you think, "I've got the answer," not realizing that different questions have different answers.

Right. Yeah—and to go back to that idea of domain-specific intelligence or expertise: not everything is like everything else.

That was one of the great myths in American capitalism in the mid-20th century that was destroyed—the idea that all businesses, regardless of what you produce, can be managed by a set of professional managers who are trained in management.

And it turns out shipbuilding is very different from oil production, which is different from newspapers, and all of that.

If I may—are there good examples of geniuses who run into the wall that Musk has driven his Tesla into with Dogecoin and everything—who then come back?

Are there Paul McCartneys, whose second truth or last two-thirds of a career are actually as good or as interesting as the first third?

That's a really good question. And I'll probably have to give it more thought than I'm able to on the hoof, because—

I'll tell you what—I can't think of any examples offhand, but as you're saying that, I can totally see what a great story that is. And how much people would love that story.

So there probably are examples of it.

I'm thinking of the kid who was the actor in Indiana Jones who then didn't really do anything for ages and then won the Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once. People love that idea that this is the ultimate comeback story.

So I can see that happening, where someone had been piddling away for a while and then came back with something.

But I don't know. The best versions, I think, of people are your McCartneys or your Springsteens—or, you know, I went to see the Pixies last week. People who just carry on doing something because they clearly love it, the fans love it, and they enjoy it.

And the Pixies gig was very interesting, because clearly people were there to hear the songs primarily from Surfer Rosa, their 1980s album. And they play those quite happily. Then they play some of their new stuff too.

And I just thought: this is quite a good acknowledgment of: this was the moment we were hottest. We're not in that moment now. But we don't hate those people or resent that. We love that it happened. We're not sad that it didn't go on forever. 

That is fascinating. Yeah, I started my career as a teen magazine and rock music journalist. And there's nothing worse than bands or artists who hate the work that made them famous. It's an awful life.

It's sad, isn't it? It's really sad.

It is. And there are people—I'm thinking of someone like Nick Cave or Bob Dylan. They're very different, but Dylan refused to go away. He goes through cycles where stuff starts to make sense, even if it seems horrible the first time.

And Cave has certainly been growing as an artist. And someone like Madonna—I think she stopped, in a way, but had a fantastic run.

Can I just real quickly do a bit of biography? Because you mention at one point—and I thought this was fascinating in the book—that your father, in the '50s, took one of these inscrutable-to-Americans O-levels or A-levels, or whatever. I've read a ton of Beatles biographies, and they're always talking about how "I ruined my A-levels," and I have no idea what they're talking about. It's not easy to understand—like SATs.

Yeah, no, of course—which is its own kind of bullshit. But your father did well on a test, and that meant that he got to go to university. What is your background, and how did you get to be where you're at?

So the test you're talking about is the Eleven-Plus, which kids took at the age of 11. At the time—this is after… so my parents were both born in 1945—so this is in the aftermath of the Second World War. The idea was, if you came from a working-class family—and any other kind of family—that they were going to try and make higher-level education more accessible to a greater number of people.

But the way to do that was by selecting viability. So you took this test at 11, and if you passed it, you went to a grammar school. If you didn't, you went to what was called a secondary modern or a technical school. The idea was that you either had an academic education or a vocational one based around going into trades.

Because at 11—come on—the bread is baked, right?

Well, that's a big… I mean, we mentioned Lewis Terman a long time ago. He also, earlier than that, thought that you could kind of pick future winners very early. And that's not always possible.

The other thing it did was create—you know, you'll hear people today will say, "the Eleven-Plus was amazing because I got chances that I wouldn't otherwise got." But that's a kind of survivorship bias, because you don't hear as much from the people whose lives were ruined by being told at 11 they were not good enough.

But in his case, it meant he was the first in his family to go to university. He went to Aston University in Birmingham to study chemistry. He worked first for Worcester Porcelain—where I grew up, which has its own delightful porcelain—and then for a place that made things you melt steel in—crucibles.

Sorry, I know you're loving how much of an English stereotype I am, aren't you?

Yeah.

"It has a delightful bone china—from the Potteries." But you know, he benefited—definitely—he got lifted up like that.

And on my mum's side, my granddad, who was Scottish, he was a coal miner. He moved south and took civil service exams as an adult. So he was the engine, he moved from working class to middle class, at that point. My mum then went to the same school I ended up going to, which was a convent school, a Catholic school.

So I came from a really nice, normal middle-class high school. This was in the Midlands in England. I didn't know anybody who was a journalist. I didn't know anybody who lived in London. Even Birmingham was quite exciting to me.

So I do have to remind myself every so often: if I could go back and talk to 16-year-old me about what I do and who I know, she would be pretty impressed.

It is kind of fascinating, isn't it? There's a version of this in the U.S.—and I think throughout the West, and even much of the developing world—where tests, whether they're IQ tests or aptitude tests, they're used in many ways to reinforce the status quo or to naturalize it.

But oftentimes, the goal—even when they were implemented—was not necessarily to do that, but to be more egalitarian and more meritocratic. Intelligence needs to be contextualized, and things like that. You know…

Well, it's not necessarily a bad impulse, is it?

Because actually, the signature event in my academic career was that I went to Oxford University, and that was determined—

I said…

A little place, yeah, in the Cotswolds.

But that wasn't determined by a test for English—that was determined by an interview. And you know what? That obviously privileges eloquent bullshitters. The die was cast in my future in podcasting, because that's exactly what that selects for.

Tests are bad in some ways, but they're also sort of… they're the worst thing apart from all the other things. We haven't yet invented a way of designing education that weeds out bias.

The Eleven-Plus was notoriously problematic because it was easier for middle-class kids to pass it. They had more knowledge. Often just flat-out their parents hired tutors to get them through it.

Now what happens is that there are very few grammar schools left, and the house prices around them are exceptionally high. So you end up with class sorting by who can afford to buy a house in that area.

I mean, that's… to talk about the abundance agenda. And I always think when I hear about Ezra Klein, I'm like: If you want to read what Ezra Klein is going to write tomorrow, read what Reason was publishing 20 years ago.

But part of it is—when it comes to educational opportunity and whatnot—the idea that, well, there are only 10 universities. So we have to sort to get the right people into that.

It's like, maybe you create a world where there are many, many different universities—or more schooling opportunities—rather than funneling people through.

In America, there was starting to retreat—not necessarily for good reasons—but there was this birth of gifted and talented programs. And most of the time, it wasn't just like, "If you hit this level of testing, you'll be in the gifted and talented program."

It's like, "We only have a certain number of slots." And, well—if the test says you're gifted and talented, why don't you expand the program?

But oftentimes, the function of schooling is not to increase opportunity, but to maintain the existing power structure. That's my idea.

No, I know. And there's loads of stuff that happens like that.

The Ivy Leagues, which excluded or limited Jewish students in the first half of the 20th century, they did that by saying, "We want to look at well-rounded students." Or they moved their recruitment pools out of New York City and into the outer boroughs—or whatever it might be.

That's the only way I think T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound got into Ivy League schools—because they were from Missouri and Idaho. So they benefited from the geographical quota.

But this is one of the big themes of the book: a level of humility about the systems we have and whether or not they are free from bias.

And when the things that look natural and inevitable to us are actually the result of things we can't see—because, yeah, there are a lot of invisible hands. And actually, sometimes, extremely visible hands, if you care to look for them.

Yeah, the Ivy Leagues now have a different way of keeping Jews off campus, right? So they—you know, it's more visible.

This is not the first time that America's had debates about affirmative action. It just used to be that the affirmative action was in favor of WASPs in the 1920s.

Yes, and I'm glad to live in a post-WASP America, for the most part.

Just a final question about your method. Have you ever been called a genius?

Hm. Why?

One of the things that I find remarkable in your work—both the podcasting but then the  writing work. I always take this as a sign of an excellent journalist—and I don't really care about "geniuses" is that you find a topic and then report out on it.

And that way, you don't have to worry about a hot streak or a cold streak, because the onus isn't on you to be a genius all the time or to come up with new and novel things to say.

You go out into the world and see what's happening. That seems to me that's a very rare model for journalism—but it obviously seems like the best way to do it.

It's a great relief to just be like, "I am not actually that interesting. What I do is, I go and put myself in interesting places and meet interesting people—and I will tell you about them."

And like you say, I'm surprised more people don't do it, because it's a huge burden off you. If you're not trying to be the main character in your drama—if you're content to be the amanuensis at the side—then yeah, it's a huge weight off your shoulders.

And I think this is what drives a lot of modern journalists kind of mad: if you're only telling a story in which you're the protagonist, then you need to keep doing stuff. And actually, just go and talk to other people.

Other people are mad. They say crazy things.

That's Tom Wolfe, in the introduction to his collection The New Journalism, which was about stuff from the '60s and early '70s, published in the early '70s. He said that, "it was amazing. So many weird things were happening in America, and all you had to do was go out and hang out with people."

He's seen as someone who's a genius—he has genius insights and is a stylist—but he says in plain sight:" just go and talk to people who are doing things you think are interesting." And you are interesting.

It's also just the most fun. I mean, there's nothing that makes me happier than being in some random bit of backstreet America, just talking to people whose life experiences are completely different from mine.

And I wish more people got the opportunity to do it, to be honest.

The color that you add to, you know, talking about going to—or witnessing—one of the SpaceX launches or recoveries is brilliant. You know, because it's out in the world. It's wonderful.

I have kept you overlong—I apologize for that. Where are the best places people should look for your work?

You can find most of it through my Substack, which is helenlewis.substack.com. And also my longer, more considered work is at The Atlantic, who are very kind in giving me—the thing that I really like about working for them is that they invest in you as a person.

And like you say, reporting is the best and most fun thing to do. And it's not the easiest thing to do in journalism at the moment. So I give them huge credit for letting me—letting me be my best self.

God, that sounded like therapy.

Sorry—what a hateful note to end on. I'm going to go and have, like, a muffin and a crumpet and be overly British.

Yeah, maybe talk about Princess Diana and how sad it is. Are you up on the royals? Do you like the royals?

Oh, yeah. I know. There was a time during the Prince Harry saga where I was threatening to become The Atlantic's royal correspondent, just because I enjoy writing about them. And by God, do Americans love reading about them.

I don't understand that. And I think Harry was best when he was following in—was it Edward VII or VIII?—when he was doing the Nazi costumes.

I was going to say, "being a Nazi." 

It's all been downhill for him since then.

Helen Lewis, thank you so much. It was a real delight talking to you. The Genius Myth is a spectacular book. It's the best thing you've written recently—until the next one. So thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

The post Helen Lewis: The Dark Side of Genius appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is the legendary journalist and New Yorker staffer Lawrence Wright. He is the author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief; The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; and The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid.

Wright talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about The Human Scale, his new novel set in the war-torn Middle East, and why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict keeps burning even as most of the 20th century's conflicts have cooled. They also go deep on Wright's exposés on the war on terror, satanic panics, and how our craving for belief can lead us to madness. Then they turn to Texas, Wright's home state and the place he says is the future of America. What exactly does it mean that we're all becoming more like Lone Star State?

This discussion took place at a live event in New York City.

0:00— Introduction

1:20— Texas: the future of American politics

3:17— 'The Human Scale'

5:38— Why the Israel-Palestine conflict endures

12:12— 'Thirteen Days In September' and the Camp David Accords

23:37— America as both egocentric bully and colony for the rest of the world

26:17— 'Remembering Satan' and the 'recovered memories' panic

33:29— How abortion anxiety may have fueled a moral panic

37:07— Insurance companies ended the panic by denying quack psychiatric treatments

39:15— The will to believe often overrides logic and evidence

40:55— Wright's teenage religious fervor led to interest in Scientology

42:19— How Scientology seduced Hollywood

47:26— 'Going clear' and Scientology backlash

50:03— Getting Paul Haggis on the record about Scientology

52:55— Texas in American mythology

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

All right, Lawrence Wright, late of the Texas Monthly, currently with The New Yorker, and I guess you live in Austin. Do people punch you in the face when you walk down the street because you're at The New Yorker?

Lawrence Wright: Austin is not the usual Texas town. You know, it's a very, very blue city with a recent influx of California libertarian billionaires. 

Uh oh.

So, you know, it's changing a lot.

I'm two of those things. I've lived in California, and I'm a libertarian. So the third will follow. 

Just one more step.

But I was joking about Texans' attitude toward New Yorkers. I remember the old Pace Salsa ads, where they would make fun of salsa that was made in New York City. Austin—and Texas more broadly—is very cosmopolitan these days, isn't it? Or getting there. 

You know, it's the second-largest state, and by 2050, it's projected to be the size of New York and California combined. 

Wow.

So, whatever you think of American politics, it's going to be Texas politics from now on out. And I can tell you, speaking from the belly of the beast, we Texans are not ready for that.

We haven't educated our kids, we haven't got the infrastructure—there are a lot of problems we have. We don't take care of our citizens' health. But all that aside it's the hot spot on the map, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's likely to change it unless we run out of water. I think if there's one thing, one real vulnerability that Texas has, that's what it is.

We're going to come back later in our conversation to talk about Texas—not only Texas' future but Texas as the future of America. But let's start now. You have a new novel out. It's called The Human Scale. It is a police procedural that's set in the Middle East, in the occupied territories mostly, right? In Hebron. It follows Tony Malik who is half Irish and half Palestinian. And I thought, as a half Irish, half Italian, I had problems.

But he's an American FBI agent who is investigating the murder in Gaza of an Israeli police chief. Tell us, what prompted you to write this novel now—and as a novel, as opposed to nonfiction?

Well, I've written about the Middle East for much of my career. And, you know, I was always puzzled by what made this conflict so durable. I mean, I'm the same age as Israel. It's a young country. But in my lifetime, I have seen apartheid end. I've seen a black man elected president. I've seen the Soviet Union dissolve—all these things that were never going to happen until they did.

I've seen Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan—all these are past history now. But this keeps going and going. One of the reasons I decided to do it as a novel is that, you know, you can talk to people, you can look them in the eye, but only a novel allows you to go through the eyes and see the world through your characters' own perspective. That would allow me, I thought, to try to get closer to what are the elements that make this war go on and on.

And it's not just Israel and Palestine. It's infected our own politics. We're in the streets, we're on the campuses. The whole Western world is absorbed with this argument, which has been going on for as long as I've been alive.

So what do you think? What's the root of it—or what's enough?

Well, there are several obvious ones. One is God. If you look at the Torah and the Old Testament, God promised this grant of land to Moses—twice, as a matter of fact—but they're different parcels. The first one is a little more generous. It goes from the Red Sea to the Euphrates, which would take in Jordan, the West Bank, parts of Lebanon, a little bit of Saudi Arabia.

And then the next time he gives the promise of the Promised Land, it's more like modern Israel, with the West Bank in it. And then, when Moses dies and Joshua takes over, God commands him to go into Judea and Samaria and kill every living thing. And so that's how the Holy Land was birthed, according to the Bible.

So if you're Jewish and you see this as God's promise to you, then, you know, you don't have to hear anything else. The Quran also agrees that God gave Moses this gift but that the Jews lost the birthright because they turned against God and He took it away from them. That's one of the main problems.

Another real dilemma—I was in Gaza in 2009. It was right after Operation Cast Lead, which was one of those periodic, what the Israelis call "mowing the lawn." In this case, Hamas had kidnapped this young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, and they were still holding him when I went to visit. He was held for five years. The Israelis never found him. They finally exchanged him for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

And I got to wondering: In what scale do you measure the value of a human being? How does one person get to equal 1,000? This disparate valuation of people's lives is evident right before us—1,200 Israelis have been slaughtered, and yet 50,000 Palestinians have been killed so far that we know of. At what point does the scale get balanced?

There's one other thing that I was really curious about. I thought I had figured out the way to peace—many people have. It's like the illusion of water in the desert or something like that. But I read this book by David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ben-Gurion was Israel's founding premier, and Ben-Zvi was its second president.

They were living in Manhattan in 1906 after being kicked out of the Ottoman Empire. They wrote this book in which they described, and this is mainly Ben-Zvi, because he was kind of an amateur archaeologist. He would wander in the Arab villages and see candles in the windows on Friday night. He would see Hebrew in the cemeteries. And he formed a theory that the Palestinians are Jews—or were. They were the remnant of the Jewish population that didn't go out in the diaspora. They stayed.

Then, as centuries passed, they converted to Christianity or to Islam to avoid paying taxes. And actually, genetics have proved that theory right. The Jewish population in Gaza is very similar to the Ashkenazi, through DNA. If you extrapolate and go back in time, they were probably identical.

So I thought I would just go to Israel and tell them, "Yeah, you know, these guys are Jewish." And I expected, "Oh my gosh, we didn't know!" No. "We knew that." And that made it more complicated for me.

So I found a book that has been very—it's an arresting book for me. It's called The Need to Have Enemies and Allies by a Cypriot American psychiatrist named Vamik Volkan. He grew up in Cyprus, populated by Greeks and Turks—these historic antagonists. And they're very similar people. They dressed the same. They each had a white robe. The men who were Turkish would have a green belt and the Greeks would have a blue belt. They smoked different cigarettes. By such things, you knew who your enemy was.

In Northern Ireland, the Catholics and the Protestants would paint their doors different colors so you'd know who lived there. The Hutus and the Tutsis were so similar, they had to ask which tribe you're in before they killed each other.

He referenced [Sigmund] Freud's idea of the narcissism of minor differences—that it is people who are more similar who have the bloodiest civil wars, and so on. According to Freud, it's because, due to the similarity, you project onto your twin the parts of your own nature that you despise. So you're actually fighting, in a way, against your own nature.

It's an interesting theory. But it leaves you grasping for: How is it that Arabs and Jews can live together peacefully in Brooklyn and they can't in the Middle East? I think we have more to learn about that.

Yeah, you also wrote a book called Thirteen Days in September, which was kind of a paean to Jimmy Carter for brokering the Camp David Accords. You mentioned Jews and Arabs—or Muslims—in the Middle East. Christians have kind of vacated that space. In talking about that book, you attribute a lot of what happened at Camp David to Carter's Christianity. Could you talk about that? I mean, religion is generally seen as the stumbling block, particularly in the Middle East. Could it also be a way to resolve things?

Well, in that case, it was. They were fervent believers. But aside from their belief—Carter was a one-term Georgia governor, Anwar Sadat was an assassin, Menachem Begin was a terrorist. "Let's get together and have a peace conference. How does that sound?"

Thirteen days in Camp David with the outside world closed up. These three—the most unlikely gathering of peacemakers you can imagine—emerge with a peace treaty. They signed it in 1979. It hasn't been violated a whit in the years since. It's the first and most durable treaty signed there.

And so you can ask yourself: How did they do it? It was arduous and painful. They had political courage. But I think each of them realized they were going to pay a price for it. I'm not sure they understood how great a price.

But Carter lost reelection. He failed, for the first time as a Democratic nominee, to get the Jewish vote. The Jews turned against the man who had given Israel probably the greatest gift it had ever received.

Menachem Begin felt he was now entitled to invade Lebanon for a couple of weeks—and it lasted 18 years. At the end of his days, he was secluded and isolated. There were protesters outside his house. He refused to have them dispersed. But it was like the "Hey, hey, LBJ!" chants—they were haunting. He was a sad figure when he lived out the rest of his life.

And of course, Sadat was assassinated. They had courage—and they paid the price. But I think maybe the lesson that goes to future peacemakers is that it is a perilous enterprise.

Is some of it that they weren't religious? I mean, Carter was an evangelical—mainstream born-again theology as a cultural identity—but he was a secularist. And the other two, compared to the leadership now, it seems like religion is much more front and center in daily life. Extreme religion, in Israel and in the Palestine territories. Is part of the problem that secularism is taking a beating in the Middle East?

I don't know. Sadat called himself the First Man of Islam. He thought he was the most religious person on the planet. And Menachem Begin was the first nonsecular leader of Israel. So, the step was taken at that point.

Frankly, I don't think religion has as much to do with the conflict as commonly thought. A lot of it is politics. First of all, the Palestinians have had bad luck with democracy, to put it politely. It's interesting to look back—the last election in Palestine and Gaza was in 2006. So, it's been, what, 19 years?

And Hamas won. Why did that happen? What was interesting was that after people left the polls, there were exit polls taken. More than 80 percent of the people polled who had voted for Hamas said they wanted peace with Israel. They wanted Hamas to drop its anti-Israel rhetoric—all the things you would have wanted them to think, they were thinking.

But they voted for Hamas because the Palestinian Authority was so corrupt and tyrannical that everybody hated it so much they'd rather have Hamas. But they didn't, I think, think they'd have Hamas forever. You can see stirrings in Gaza right now—under the most dangerous imaginable circumstances—of people trying to shed Hamas from governing that territory.

Yeah. The anti-Hamas protests put to shame the kind of campus protests here. The stakes are incredibly high.

Can we shift from talking about that to an earlier book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, that you wrote, which was published in 2006? That book, I think, along with The Siege of Mecca, which came out around the same time, really explores what happened. Can you give a capsule summary? Where did the Islamism that fueled Osama bin Laden and ultimately the creation of Al Qaeda—where did that start?

My contention is that it started in the prisons in Egypt.

It's interesting—my wife Roberta and I were teaching in Egypt at that time. I was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and that was my alternative service. We were there when [Gamal Abdel] Nasser died—that was in October of '70 [sic]—and Anwar Sadat became president. Everybody thought it was a joke. He was sort of like a Spiro Agnew figure; nobody could take him seriously.

Until he shook up the whole world by flying to Tel Aviv and speaking at the Knesset.

One of the first things Sadat did was to free the Muslim Brothers who were in prison. And they're the ones who killed him. At the time, I was really naive. There were practically no Americans or even Westerners in Egypt at the time. There were no diplomatic relations. The American University was run by a CIA agent—we found that out while we were there.

I was seen as a political dissident. I was a kid, more or less. Certainly not a sophisticated politician. I wish I could go back and relive some of that with a little more knowledge about how the world works.

During the time of the Afghan revolt against the Soviet Union, a lot of Egyptians and other Arabs went to fight. And they came home and by this time they had formed Brotherhood groups and had been radicalized. When they went into prison—the Egyptian prisons, I can't speak to what they're like now—they were just appalling.

We have film of Ayman al-Zawahiri who was the Egyptian doctor that became the right-hand man of Osama bin Laden, and he was in prison. He was talking in court—there was a big cage full of defendants—and he was talking about how the guards had put the dogs on them. What that meant was they would tie them backward on a chair and let the dogs fuck them.

That kind of humiliation stays with you. In my opinion, it was this Egyptian clique that came out of the Egyptian prisons, went to Afghanistan, and merged with bin Laden—who at the time was thinking of it as kind of an Arab foreign legion. They would go help muslims everywhere, but Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Egyptians had a different idea.

Why would, on a kind of basic level, wouldn't those people, after experiencing that, want to kill Egyptians?

Oh, they did. They killed a lot of them.  So how does it get projected outward?

It was bin Laden who made the turn. Basically, Zawahiri wanted to take over Egypt, but he thought it was too hard.

Bin Laden had this idea, that is an Islamic idea, about the near enemy and the far enemy. In order for Islam to triumph, you begin with the enemy that's close to you—the one affecting your society. Then, when you solve that problem, you spread it. Bin Laden had the insight that the far enemy is near. The Red Sea, the Mediterranean—is an American lake. So, the way to get rid of the near enemy is to scare away the far enemy.

That insight caused Al Qaeda to become an international organization.

Part of what the book raises—and it's a question that comes up from time to time in American foreign policy, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the war on terror—you know—Bin Laden said, "the reason we bombed the towers," just a few miles from here, "was because you had bases in Saudi Arabia, at our holiest sites" and things like that.

Do we take him at face value of that? Was it was somebody—speaking of Texans, was Ron Paul right—that the reason they attacked here was because we were bombing and subjugating them over there?

There's no question there was truth to that. But also, it was a great rallying cry.

It seemed easier to fight Americans than Egyptians or Saudis. If you're a Saudi, for instance, you're a member of a tribe—most of the Saudis are. Your whole family—your extended family are at risk if you are antiroyal family. It's a very difficult thing.

So, it's easier to be anti-American.

America's adventures in the world have been disastrous for us and for the rest of the world—because we don't know the rest of the world. I often think of it as being like a one-way mirror. We can't see outside it, but outside of America everybody else sees us.

Moreover, every country has a colony here. In Egypt, everybody would have an uncle in America. So there was always a point of comparison: "My uncle's life is better than my life."

In a way, America's mission in the world is to show how democracy can work and how you can have a better life. That was, it still is, a powerful thing, but it's been so polluted by our adventures that it's become discredited.

Out of the last 25 years, we've spent about 20 of them in major wars, shooting wars. We're kind of out of that for the moment. Do you feel like we've learned any meaningful lessons?

It's like we learn it on Tuesday and forget it on Friday.

Every war has its raison d'être or its reason. The most egregious example was the Second Iraq War. Hideous. I don't know how much of the story about the nuclear bombs and everything was based on fantasy, or convenient fiction, or just bad intelligence.

There was also a different Camp David meeting. The idea was they were just better targets. So we can go bomb a country that has a lot of things that would get hit, rather than opium fields. So, I don't know. 

I guess I want to point out that Texas is kind of 0 for 3 in terms of presidents who have had good foreign policies—at least going back to LBJ [Lydon B. Johnson].

But let's talk about something a little more cheerful. Let's talk about your 1994 book, Remembering Satan, which is one of the most devastating explorations of a ritual satanic child abuse panic case. Can you quickly talk about the person at the center of that? What makes it amazing is that the person at the center confessed to the crimes he was accused of.

It started with my therapist telling me that they were treating all these—mainly young—women who were recovering memories of satanic abuse. And then they said that Satanists are responsible for 50 murders a year in Austin. We never even had 50 murders in Austin! And I thought, these are bright, intelligent people. Wow.

So I got intrigued by how could they believe that?

Well, the Satanists eat their victims, right? So they don't leave a trace. You know, this elaborate infrastructure…

There was one meeting I went to. Part of the syndrome was that ladies that were treated would be diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. So I went to a meeting, the therapist and the victims were hosting the meeting. The victims that they were seeing, as patients—there were four of them—one of them claimed to have 400 personalities—which is a real management problem.

You'd need to be Andrew Huberman to really schedule that properly, right?

So I sat at the lunch break, and the woman who had organized it. I said, "I don't get it—if there are 50 murders, who's collecting the bodies?"

She said, "Postmen. The postmen are doing it. They put them in the bags…."

It was nuts. Nuts. Nuts. Nuts.

We had four hospitals in Austin. By the time I started writing this, each of them had a dissociative disorders wing to treat women—mainly—who had multiple personality disorder. And part of their disorder was supposedly brought on by the fact that they had been satanically abused.

I went to a conference of policemen in Austin. It was led by a roving cop who was making his living talking to other cops about satanic abuse. He said there were that 50,000 murders a year in America by Satanists. Again, that was more murders than we actually had.

Tina Brown was the editor of The New Yorker at the time, and I said I was interested in multiple personality disorder. I said that, "when they're in therapy, they would have these memories of being satanically ritually abused."

[Wright as Tina] "Oh. That's hot, hot, hot! I want that right away."

So I had to find an example. There were hundreds of cases in the courts already. But there was one where a guy went to prison—he was a deputy sheriff in Olympia, Washington—and he confessed. So I thought, that's the case. If there's anything to it, this guy's confessed to it so maybe that'd be a more interesting story.

I went out and met with him. He was investigated by his own police department—it was the county sheriff's office. He was an evangelical Christian, and his minister came in and told him that God would not let him have a false memory.

Then a psychiatrist was brought in too, who hypnotized him and persuaded him. He began to develop these memories. His daughters were developing memories—but they never coincided. They were always different memories. There was never a single one that sounded like the other.  

I was curious about, "Where did this start?"

I was in L.A., and there's a church—the Foursquare Gospel Church. Aimee Semple McPherson, some of you may have heard that name, famous evangelist in the early part of the 20th Century. It's still going. 

For other reasons I was there interviewing, but I said, "I know that there was a summer camp where Erica Ingram, the first to make this charge, has gone. It must of been one of your evangelists…" 

"Oh yeah, that was Paula." 

"Oh, is she here?" 

"Yeah, she's here."

So I asked her to come in and tell me about the moment in summer camp with all these young girls. 

She said:

Oh, it was a holy site. I would talk to them, and I'd say, "I feel there's someone in here who's been locked in the closet and she's hearing her father's footsteps." 

Then someone would cry, "It was me! It was me!"

Gradually, so many came forward.

They came to me and said, "there is a young woman"—who was one of the counselors—"and she's just in tears, and we can't break through."

So I went to see her. She was by herself, and she was sobbing. I put my hand on her head and anointed her. I said, "You've been abused." Then I said, "And it's by your father. And it's been happening many times."

This very religious 15-year-old girl hears from God that her father had been abusing her. So what she did with that was to go home and start trying to remember what had happened. And she came up with these accusations.

And then—the most shocking thing—is that he agreed…

I mean, he doesn't now.

Even though he's serving 18 years in prison. He did try to change his plea. I mean, you go through it—it's fascinating, the way he was interrogated. His confession came very quickly. And then he kind of started walking away from it, but he wasn't allowed to.

It's a sad story—the willingness of people to believe things that are not true.

For instance, these girls would supposably—they had been raped, they have had babies ripped out of their stomachs, they'd been nailed to the floor—all these things that they said had happened to them. Finally, a physical examination was taken. They were virgins. They had never had children.

But in the minds of the cops, this didn't stop the freight train. Paul had confessed. Something must have happened. 

What do you think was driving it? I mean, we all have moments—both on an individual level and on a societal level—where we want to believe things that clearly are not true.

What was going on in America in the '70s and '80s that these kinds of accusations—of satanic ritual child abuse? This was something right-wingers believed it and left-wingers—Tipper Gore wrote a whole book about raising PG kids in an X-rated world that had a lot to do with this. 

Is there some underlying sociological fact that helps explain it?

Abortion. I mean, the fantasies are ideal: "The baby was ripped from my body," "There was blood all over the place"—that sort of thing.

Especially with young teen girls and preteens, the sexual longing mixed with the fear and the societal condemnation that would come along with being pregnant—I think that's my Freudian analysis of it. But it was a hot subject.

In some of the cases, like the McMartin preschool case—there were a couple of big ones in the New York area—I always saw that as people were uncomfortable with kids going into daycare as women entered the work force on equal terms with men. There was a deep discomfort with that as well.

We had a case in Austin. Fran and Dan ran a nursery school. The hysteria got to the point that people began asking their own children who were maybe 3 or 4-year-olds, "Does anything happen to you in school?"

It evolved to the point that some of the children began to talk about how when their parents left them at school they would get on a plane and go to Mexico. They would kill a giraffe and bury him.

You think: Nobody can believe this. But the parents said, "Well, that may not have happened exactly like that, but something happened."

I went to see some of the trial, and there was this 3-year-old girl. When I walked into the courtroom I see her sitting on her big sister's lap. The prosecutor said, "Now sweetie, did Dan touch you? Did Dan hurt you?"

"No."

"Your Honor, can we have a recess?"

And then she's got a lollipop and it's, "Yes. Yes."

They got out of prison, eventually. Their conviction was reversed. But they must've been in for 10 years.

What lanced that kind of boil—or that mania? Because we don't hear about it anymore.

It was insurance companies refusing to pay for those kinds of treatments that made the difference. Those four dissociative disorder wings? They're all gone now. Nobody will provide coverage for therapy involving multiple personalities or satanic abuse.

Multiple personalities aren't even in the DSM manual.

I was invited to a group of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in Austin. I'm in a band, and my guitar player is a professor of psychology, so you might enjoy this.

The guy leading it was Colin Ross, who is a Canadian psychiatrist who ran this really high-end sanitarium in Dallas. I'd gotten hold of a galley that he had written about how multiple personality disorder really exists—but it was created by the CIA in order to split personalities so they could carry secrets in one personality the others wouldn't know about.

I was dying to see what he had to say. He didn't address that, at the time.

He talked about the persecution psychiatrists were going through. So, "Any questions?"

I raised my hand, and he said, "Before I call on this man, I want you to know that he's the one whose book is being used in court suits against psychiatrists all over this country."

Boy, was that a great introduction.

And this woman in a table next to me—a German accent—said, "Yeah, people denied the Holocaust, too."

And I said, "There were bodies in the Holocaust. There's no bodies here, you know?"

Anyway, one last anecdote about that. For some reason, they always want me to come and be converted. This same woman, that told me about the mailbags—I had been invited to attend a conference of therapists. They would witness this young man who had grown up in the house of Anton LaVey—the founder of the Church of Satan and the author of The Satanic Bible.

He had a handler. He was about 22, and the handler would show him a chalice and then this sacrificial knife—and then, "Any questions?" That's my favorite time.

"I'm delighted to talk to you because I wrote an article for Rolling Stone about Anton LaVey. And I just wanted to hear some of your memories. Do you remember what color the house was?"

"White."

"No, no—it was black. Don't you remember? It was a famous…it was a black house in San Francisco. And I guess you played with his kids and so remember their names."

He said, "You got me."

And I thought, that's the end of the show. But no—they kept passing the ritual objects through the crowd. It didn't make a dent in their belief that this guy had confessed, in front of them, that he was a fraud.

Well, that kind of is a natural segue into the next book I wanted to talk about, which is 2013's Going Clear, which is about the Church of Scientology. In that, you talk about the "prison of belief."

Why did you get interested in delving into Scientology? How is it another system that people use to keep the world at bay—or to empower themselves? In a way, what are people getting out of believing they've been abused? Why do people put themselves in a place like Scientology? There must be something beneficial.

Well, I guess, personally, part of it came from the fact that I had been a very religious teenager. I wouldn't call it a cult, but there was a Christian youth group where you got promoted by being more pious.

That's a mechanism that works in a lot of these things—even political cults like Nazism. The more fervent you are, the higher you rise. And I was highly risen.

So, I look back at my career and religion has been a big part of it, and I think that was the motor for me.

With Scientology, I looked at people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta—the poster boys. Scientology is like a public relations martyrdom for them. It's not a help to their careers. People laugh at them for it. I thought, there must be something they get out of it.

There are a lot of varying things. For one, they're movie stars and get treated like Adam and Eve or something. But John Travolta—we suspect he's gay, right? In Scientology, that is a low form.

He had his first movie. It was filmed in Mexico, and it happened that one of the women —who was an actress—befriended him and treated him with some auditing, which is Scientology form of therapy. Often, one of the goals is to leave your body during these experiences, to access past lives. But he had an out-of-body experience. After that, he was hooked.

He was in a Scientology class, and the teacher said, "Johnny is up for a role in this show called Welcome Back, Kotter. We just want to make sure he gets it. NBC Studios is in that direction—focus your energy that John Travolta is going to get the role."

And he got the role. And that was evidence for him.

And Tom Cruise—like many young actors—they come to Hollywood. They may or may not have gotten out of high school. They're young. They're looking for a way to get into the business. There really is a central casting, so they go to stand in line at central casting and Scientology people would come down and hand out brochures saying, "Looking for an agent? How to get ahead. Come to the Celebrity Center on Friday night."

They're desperate for help. They see some people like Tom Cruise who claimed to have been advanced because of what they learned in Scientology. And I'm not saying they didn't learn anything. Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, took a personality course and he credits it for helping his career, although he didn't get sucked in.

Rock Hudson went to Scientology and left because they wouldn't let him out of the auditing room because he wanted to fill his parking meter. So he almost got in—

William Burroughs in London got trafficked in it. Then they wanted money, so he was like, "I'm out."

Leonard Cohen too—so many people were drawn to it. But only a few—

Is it that it gives you a kind of scientific patina on personality development and a structure?

There are a lot of different courses. But I think the glue for young people, bear in mind, when they go to Hollywood, their classmates are going to law school, getting jobs—they're advancing. And they're in Hollywood eating dog food and trying to get something going. They feel terribly inadequate about schooled they are, how educated they are. 

Scientology says: You vault over that. You can control people. You cause them to like you. You can achieve great things. You don't need college. You don't need these kinds of skills. We'll give you more than the world can offer.

One of my observations about religion is the fact that a religion might be absurd, like what we were talking about, you'd think it'd be destructive. But actually, it creates a wall around the community. All you have to do to get into this community is say you believe it, and you get into a community of likeminded people.

And this occurred to me when I started hearing—when people would tell me, "We believe this" or "We believe that" 

Finally, I heard the word we. And realized: that's the most important word in that sentence.

Your book and then the documentary that came out a year later—also called Going Clear—was part of a process of people unmasking Scientology. Scientology is always claiming to be growing, to have millions of adherents, but probably has somewhere around 50,000 at most—

There are more Rastafarians in the U.S. than Scientologists.

I guess the Scientologists have better mixers—or better free punch or something.

But what went into the debunking of Scientology? There was the South Park episode that just discussed theology, and people were like, "Oh, that's odd." Your book, your New Yorker article, started with Paul Haggis—an Oscar-winning film writer, director, and screenwriter who finally left the church. And then a couple of other actors, Leah Remini who was big. 

As with the ritual satanic child abuse, what happens? What happens where stuff runs out of steam and it kind of gets unmasked?

With Scientology, its defectors tended to be very quiet. They didn't want to take on the problems that come with leaving the church because it can be very prosecutorial. It's litigious. In prior experiences with reporters, they tried to frame them for murder or get them committed to mental institutions. It's ruthless.

There had been some exposés—like in 1992, Time magazine had a big exposé. Scientology sued Time and lost at every stage, all the way up to the Supreme Court. But it was the most expensive suit Time ever faced.

They're not going to be writing about Scientology again.

And I didn't want to do that to my magazine, but I was very interested in Scientology.

When John Travolta's son died, I thought that might be an interesting way to get into it. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said, "It's too tabloid for you." But it sounded like a good story to me.

Then Paul Haggis dropped out and I thought—he's kind of ideal. Because when people talk about Scientology, they often do so with a sneer: "I would never fall for that." Most people would say that about themselves, but here's Paul Haggis—two-time Academy Award winner, smart, very cautious intellectually.

I thought I wanted someone who would challenge readers' ideas. But he was not saying a word.

I was doing something else. And finally I got the number for his business manager. I said, "Hi, this is Lawrence Wright with The New Yorker. I would like to write an article about your client, Paul Haggis, and his adventures with the Church of Scientology."

"Are you kidding? Get the fuck off my phone." Click.

I thought, "Well, that went well."

The next day, I got Paul's email address and I wrote him: "I had a conversation with your business manager—he said 'This wasn't the right time.' But if there's ever a moment when you'd like to talk about your intellectual and spiritual development, I'd be honored."

Twenty minutes later, he wrote back: "Very honored. Let's have lunch on Tuesday."

So he was up here and I came up. He wanted a cigarette break, so we went out on the sidewalk and I said, "Well, Paul, this is going to deal mainly with your experience in Scientology."

His eyes got a little wide.

It was months later that he said he had never thought it was going to be about Scientology. He was just so flattered that The New Yorker was going to do a on profile him.

But he turned out to be a very courageous source. And underwent a lot of harassment.

And they still keep an interest up on me, but it's mostly inconsequential.

Haggis was charged with sexual assault—in 2017, I think it was. He was in a civil trial and ended up having to pay over $10 million to an accuser. Do you think that charge was engineered by Scientology?

I have no idea. It's in Italy—

The Italy one, actually, just got dismissed. 

So I don't know. I don't question what he told me. And if he was misbehaving around women that seems to be going around.

Let's return to Texas. You've written two books—In the New World, that looks at America but also your adventures in Texas. You were born in Oklahoma, but moved there when you were a kid, from 1964 to 1984. And then God Save Texas, which came out about six years ago. Let's talk about Texas. Especially since in God Save Texas, you're trying to capture a state which has a very distinct identity—but then at least four or five regions, at least.

What is so powerful about the kind of psychic territory that is Texas?

You know, when you talk about Texas, you have to think in terms of Greek and Rome in terms of mythology—the cowboy, the oilman. The cowboy thing, those great trail drives, they only lasted like 16 years. Yet you see people dressed like cowboys to this very day. Getting a pearl-snap shirt and an Open Road Stetson, and you look just like somebody who was riding the range in 1890.

It's alluring.

What people outside Texas don't understand is that it's the most urban state in the nation. Six of the top 11 cities in America in terms of population are in Texas. As I said earlier, it's going to be the size of New York and California combined by 2050.

Yet there's a ton of totally open space. Once, when I moved from Los Angeles to Huntsville, Texas—a prison town north of Houston—the midway point when I drove was El Paso, Texas. I mean, it's a big state.

It's ridiculous. People when they want to compare Texas to another country, sometimes say it's the size of Afghanistan. 

If they're kind, they can say it a little larger than France. 

But it was in its own state. And so was Vermont. You know, I mean, Hawaii was a kingdom. But these kinds of things feed a sense of culture in the state. And it's an outsider culture, which is one of the reasons I worry about it becoming so predominant, because it's not taking the leadership role. It's always taking the outsider antagonist role. And lots of stuff that starts in Texas, as we know, winds up running all across the country and determining our politics now. If you think it's bad now, just wait.

Why do you think people are going to Texas—particularly in the 21st century? It's been growing all of the 20th century, but it is really one of the major destinations. What draws people to Texas?

People like me keep writing about it.

As an answer to that question, I'm writing a musical based on a novel I wrote called Mr. Texas. My son and Marcia Ball—some of you may know her, as a great New Orleans and Austin piano player and songwriter. We're writing this musical.

Here's one of our songs. This is the Speaker of the House, on his deathbed, explaining what Texas means to him:

I've been around the world in my service days,

As a final question before we talk to the audience a little bit. It was the shorthand of America, it was a place where people came to remake themselves and to make money, to just struggle and grow rich.

Then it became California in the early '60s when it became the most populous state. The California Dream is about becoming a star or remaking yourself or creating stuff that goes out into space. 

What is the Texas Dream? Because Texas is the most populous state, it always shapes the nation's political culture and identity of the United States. What's the essence of the Texas Dream?

It's still in formation.

If you had asked me this question 20 years ago, it was money. And money is always an issue.

I always look at Texas through the lens—my theory about culture is there are three levels, and they're so clear in Texas.

There's the primitive, Level 1. Which in Texas is barbecue, and boots, and big belt buckles—all the stuff you can buy at the airport. Chili and beans. All of that stuff is real old time Texas. And there's nothing wrong with it. But outsiders come, they go to Buc-ees—this gigantic filling station. And they can buy a suit up. And as far as anybody knows or cares, they're a Texan. There's no test you have to pass. You are immediately accepted, which is different from a lot of places I've lived.

Level 2 is when money starts to come in then you begin to look back at level one with a little bit of embarrassment. And you go out into the world and see how other people dress, how they eat. You know, you look at the architecture. You think about the big cities. You start sending your kids away to school. You learn a foreign language….This is Level 2. In a way, it's educational, but it's also a little fraudulent. It's not who you are. It's sort of who you want to be. You project yourself into that. This has always been a level of insecurity in Texas about being outside the power centers, the cultural centers.

And then there's Level 3 where—this came to me when I was in Cafe Annie in Houston, and I ordered a rabbit enchilada. 

It was great. 

And, you know, it was looking back at Level 1, but with a little crème sauce. And, it, you it was a sophisticated take on, and every Texan would recognize it, on where we came from. And, we have passed all the way through level two. And, now we're looking back and drawing strength from level three. I think that's where Texas is right now, is trying to be a player in the cultural world. It has sources of revenue that when you talk about New York being sort of the past, Houston is the future. And it's the most diverse city in America. It's got oil and it has got real estate. Except for the fact that it's on the Gulf of America. And that's where all the hurricanes come.

All the most precious resources, our refineries and everything are right there. And so it's vulnerable, but it's full of energy. And in both literal and metaphorical sense. So, you know Texas is trying to find its way into the world. This recent migration is characterized by the California billionaires deserting their state to come to Texas and pay fewer taxes. 

That's making a big change right now, especially in Austin, where Elon Musk is buying up houses for his baby mamas and—

That'll be like a new WPA [Works Progress Administration]. 

There are, I think, 15 now. Of the children, not the mamas.

Apparently, he's selling his sperm. So if any of you ladies are interested, he's got a deal for you. It comes with a Tesla.

All right, I think we're going to leave it there. Let's say thank you to Lawrence Wright.

Thanks for talking to Reason.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

The post Lawrence Wright: America's Misadventures in Wars, Cults, and Panics appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Did mainstream conservatives and libertarians lose a generation of young men to the post-liberal, reactionary right?

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with C. Bradley Thompson, author of the Substack newsletter The Redneck Intellectual, and Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism, who wrote the article "Weak Men Create Hard Times: And Weak Men Love a Strongman."

This conversation was recorded live on Wednesday May 21.

The post C. Bradley Thompson and Jeremiah Johnson: Rise of the 'MAGA Manosphere' appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"You don't get conned because you're stupid—you get conned because you're human."

That's the message of this week's guest, Brian Brushwood. He's an Austin-based magician, podcaster, and professional skeptic. With shows like Scam Nation and The Modern Rogue, he's taught millions of us how to upgrade our B.S. detectors in a world where truth is more up for grabs than ever before.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with him about World's Greatest Con, Brushwood's mind-blowing podcast where he reveals grifts like Disney World's authoritarian Epcot theme park, the psychic-soldier panic of the Cold War, and the myth that the French used magic tricks to subdue colonial Algeria.

Along the way, they look at how media monocultures used to gatekeep truth—and how the chaotic pluralism of the internet is both a blessing and a curse (mostly a blessing!). Brushwood is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian who celebrates decentralization, transparency, and personal agency—even when it's messy. He discusses the influence of performers like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller, why teaching magic online pissed off the old guard, and why skepticism has to evolve or die in a world full of customized realities.

Upcoming Reason events:

1:43— Brushwood's podcast: World's Greatest Con

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Brian Brushwood, thanks for talking to Reason.

Brian Brushwood: Thank you for having me, man.

You are a podcaster, a magician, a debunker of bullshit and things like that. I want to start off by talking about your series The World's Greatest Con. 

Yeah.

What's the catchphrase?

"Cons don't fool us because we're stupid. They fool us because we are human."

OK, let's talk about some of the episodes. You had a two-part episode about Epcot— one of the world's biggest cons. Tell me about that.

OK, whether it's the greatest in terms of it has the longest shadow of history, whether it's the greatest in terms of scale or stakes, the very first season was about Operation Mincemeat, which later became a Netflix movie. In that case, Ian Fleming, of all people, helped design a Trojan horse—a haversack ruse—where they took a dead body, filled it with pocket litter that told a false story.

In World War II, to kind of get the Nazis to chase the wrong story.

Yeah. Basically, Hitler defended the wrong coast. Depending on how you squint, that won the war. What I loved about that story is that, like a good magic trick—you never say. A good magician-teller once told me that the cardinal sin of all magicians is they say what you're going to do and then do it. That's bad magic. The moment you hear a magician say, "I have an ordinary deck of cards," guess what?

Right.

Instead, what you need to do is lay the elements in front of someone, let them come to the incorrect conclusion, and let them misremember things. They're left only with mystery. I perceive the job of a magician to play chess with the audience. There's two ways to be the best chess player in town. One is to read all of the book moves, study the greats, practice, practice, practice, until you're the best. The other is to form a cartel and say, "Nobody's allowed to know the rules of chess except us." And that, traditionally, is how magicians have operated.

But that's hard to do now, right? Because all secrets eventually emerge.

And Scam School, my show where I teach magic, was on the forefront, the bleeding edge. Magicians didn't know whether I was exposing or teaching magic. That ended up being its own thing.

It struck me early on, especially while doing Scam School, that the structure of a good magic trick is identical, one for one, to that of a scam or a con. You lay everything out, you let them come to a false conclusion, and then accelerate things until they're left…in the case of magic, the good version, the white-hat hacking of wetware systems—they get checkmated and they're left only with wonder. I cannot reconcile what I saw with what just happened. In the black-hat version, you're defrauded and you have no money.

Usually, when we see stories of cons, it's rare to see a morally just con man. Usually, it's someone whose past catches up with them. The idea of recasting the 20 Committee and their bold, audacious plan as a con. And who knows, for every one success, who knows how many failures there were, but it's truly wonderful. We did a season of game show cons. You've heard the legendary story—it's about to be a movie—about the guy who won Press Your Luck by figuring out the patterns.

No whammies.

Yeah, exactly. Most people don't know he was, I believe, somebody'll fact-check me, because the internet—I believe that the FBI said that he was the very first person to perpetrate an internet fraud. Him on Usenet news groups was running a lottery scam or something. Anyway, we did a whole series on game show scams. And in the third season—which I think we tricked you into listening to—it was the one on Project Alpha.

Let's get to Project Alpha in a minute. I want Epcot. 

Oh yeah.

Lay it out quickly—what is the con? Because you know, Disney World in Florida started as a giant version of Disneyland in California. It opened in the early '70s, they started building it in the mid-'60s. But then what about Epcot Center? Why is that a con?

Well, first of all, it began with the curious fact that I ran across, I found out, "Why is a privately held company in Florida legally entitled to handle enriched uranium?" And from there you work backward, and it's like well because they wanted legal status to create the city of tomorrow, and they didn't know what kind of energy they were going to run on. So they just said, "Let's say we can handle all of it." If we want a nuclear reactor, we can have a nuclear reactor.

And then you go backward from that and find that the pitch for Epcot wasn't the objectively best part of Disney World—because "drink around the world" is the best thing on the planet—but it began basically as Silo or Fallout. This totalitarian, highly structured…"All of you are going to have the same toaster, and because this month we have signed an agreement with General Electric, we're throwing out your Westinghouse toasters. Also, you're going to be things to be gawked at as people walk around."

And the wild part is, part of the reason that that existed, that hellscape of totalitarianism or the pitch for it, came from the fact that the fact that Disney wanted so much more freedom but had to deal with so many restrictions or regulations and Disneyland ended up being so compromised from what he wanted it to be.

If you go to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco—it is very much not a Disney corporate institution. It's the family museum. Which means there's a whole wing dedicated to how much he hated unions and resented the strikes, and so on.

To pull off Epcot, they knew they needed an obscene amount of land. In order to buy that land, everything had to be secret. So there's a series of shell corporations and there are a lot of moments where it looked like the cat was about to be out of the bag.

And so Part One is: Can we get the land? Can we build it? But then we lose our protagonist. Right at the height of this.

Yeah. Because Walt Disney dies.

Exactly.

And is not frozen and living or frozen underneath Disney. 

I still have my fingers crossed. We'll see. But it ends up being—imagine Ocean's Eleven, but halfway through the movie, Danny Ocean dies. And also, the other 10 people don't really care about the heist, but they all feel a need to complete it for the shareholders.

And Walt Disney—he wanted to build a true, living, thriving community. A city of tomorrow. That's what he was selling.

Yes. That was the dream he was selling. And it ended up becoming more and more compromised. We got something, and what we got was delightful. But it is not what Disney had envisioned.

Yeah. 

Thankfully actually—because what he envisioned was objectively a hellscape. 

And that's partly because he was thinking in mid-century terms. The perfect city was perfect for him because everyone would do what he wanted, or would fill out his aesthetic landscape.

And it's funny because, when you say it out loud, the actual plan out loud, it sounds like pure fiction. I'm going to describe for you a place where the good people are on the surface, up top, where everything is green and lush and there are no filthy automobiles. Beneath them—literally beneath them—are the people who make sure the good people have everything they need. And beneath them will be all the filthy automobilists, coming and going.

So you also, I can't remember if it's that season or a different one, you also tell a story about Robert-Houdin, the great French magician, who supposedly, at the behest of the French government when they were having trouble with Algerians, which had recently become a French colony, Houdin goes to demonstrate that the French have superior magic. Can you lay out this story? First lay out the story as we know it, or as it's perceived, and then what you discovered?

Yeah, this one was a one-shot because it was always just a short story. When we started investigating it, we had hoped that there was more to the story. The story, magicians love to tell it because it glamorizes magicians—

And Robert-Houdin, in the 19th century, kind of invented modern magic. He was such a big figure that Houdini became Houdini by adding an i to Houdin.

Correct. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin is the canonical top-hat-and-tails magician. And as Penn and Teller point out, the reason he wore that was because everyone else was dressed as wizards at the time. He wanted to be of the people. To my magician mind, he got it. The game is to play chess and cause wonder.

So, the story magicians love to tell—this is antiquated language, please forgive me, internet—is that "savages" in Algeria believed in magic. To calm them down, the French government enlisted the great Robert-Houdin, who used an electromagnetic—well, a secret method—that had something that a powerful person couldn't lift, but a child could.

I'll ruin it so you don't lose your credit—it's an electromagnet. It's a little box that, when the juice is on, nobody can lift. Otherwise, anyone can.

It's literally how security doors work at 7-Elevens now. 

You bring out a huge, brutish, strong man from Algeria, come up and he can't lift it. Then any little kid, or Houdin, can. Then the guy goes screaming offstage.

The canonical version is that he turns and says to the audience, "My magic is too weak against the French magic."

And then the "savages" fall into line and put up with 100 years of French occupation.

Right. Peace is achieved—until it isn't. But upon examining it, that story collapses. This is the beauty of having a flexible title like World's Greatest Con. What starts as a story about the French pulling a con on the Algerians becomes no it's us who had the con pulled on us. Everything traces back to a single source: an old man's autobiography with no corroborating evidence whatsoever.

How did you find that out?

By going back. There have been greater historians—which is to say historians—there have been historians who pointed out, well, here's what we know: We know he toured, we know he had a magic shop, and we know that most people know him from his autobiography.

There's a quiet period during which the dust settles, and I would imagine an old man might lengthen the shadows on a lot of those tall tales.

So let's talk about Project Alpha, which is a season-long story. What was Project Alpha?

That was a wild one. I'd be curious to hear your take on this, but I couldn't even begin to tell the story without setting the landscape. It is hard to convey to anyone under the age of 30, just how insane it was when communication was limited to the monoculture—the big three networks. When the only intel we had on what was going on behind the Iron Curtain was clearly propaganda.

Out come these tales of Soviet psychic soldiers. Again, whether it was real or not—spoiler alert: It was not—it made sense that if there was going to be an arms race, even just for P.R. reasons, America needed to be armed.

So people hear stories that somewhere in the Soviet Union they are training people who can bend spoons and needles with their minds, and it's like, "Goddamn, we've got to get to the moon first, and we've got to be able to bend spoons, better than anybody," right?

It's interesting you mention the moon, because the speculation is, if what you want is the P.R. win, why actually go to the moon? And essentially, when it came to psychic soldiers, that's exactly what the Soviets did. They were like, "Hey, does it matter? Can we just tell everyone we have magic powers?"

So that and the beginning of the series does a great job scene setting what it was like living in a world with far less knowledge and a lot less transparency on stuff. Particularly in the '70s, there was a boom in all kinds of parapsychology or paranormal stuff. You point to—major universities that were funding basically psychic labs.

Yeah. You see this anytime there's a big advancement in technology. In the 19th century, in a world where suddenly we're able to have telephone communication across the Atlantic Ocean, why not a version of that to the great unknown—the afterlife? So you see the rise of spiritualism.

In the 1970s, in a postatomic, nuclear age, why wouldn't these things work? And oftentimes, we still see this today we see statistically small samples that aren't double-blind or peer-reviewed.

For example, Chevreul's pendulum. Michel Eugène Chevreul. He had heard about dowsing. He took an empty bowl, held a pendulum over it, and it did nothing. Then he put a bowl filled with mercury under it—the pendulum started going nuts. Swapped it back to an empty bowl—and it was calm again. He said, "It's sacré de crap," because he was French.

Then he correctly thought, "What if I'm unconsciously affecting this?" He had a partition set up. And once he didn't know whether the bowl was filled or not, he figured out this was the beginning of the double-blind experiment.

When it came to early parapsychology, it's so internal, it's so personal because we've all had that experience—for those of you who remember picking up a phone expecting a dial tone and instead getting the exact party that you intended to call. That feels like magic.

Likewise, we all remember the time we had a song stuck in our head, started up the car, and it was playing that exact song. We remember the hits and forget the misses. Just like every night we dream a bunch of crazy stuff, but you remember the dream where it happens to be a premonition of 9/11, and forget the others.

Most people aren't statisticians or economists. They don't think, "I'm remembering the hits, not the misses," or about unconscious bias. So you get all these anecdotes that create a throughline, a narrative that feels right. That feeling is so powerful and personal that you seek confirmation of it.

Parapsychologists essentially would develop a framework—again, this sounds ridiculous nowadays, but you would get somebody who would claim to have ESP, they would demonstrate ESP, and you'd have very smart, learned, paper-holding, robe-wearing scientists. And if the scientist discussed with each other and they could not think of a way that it was possible, then it must be an actual ESP.

Which, of course, I'm describing also…a magic show.

And this is where we introduce James Randi into the scene. Our story takes place in the shadow of these two great colossus entities: Uri Geller and James Randi. Uri Geller claimed in every way to have what the world wanted. And when the world wants something badly enough—when there's a void—nature abhors a vacuum. Somebody, usually the con men, shows up and says, "I've got that," and collects money.

Sometimes, they're all like, "one second" and maybe they pull it off, in which case, you know, they're a legitimate businessman. But more often than not, they're con men.

In that space, I on this podcast will not make any evaluations as to whether or not the claims are true or not. But Uri Geller definitely claimed to have the goods, and he had everything the world wanted from this.

And he would go on The Tonight Show—well, we'll get to that—but he would go on TV shows and elsewhere and use his mind to bend spoons and keys and pins.

He could find water using dowsing—that was a big one. Drawing replication, the ability to see through things. James Randi was of the opinion that these were magic tricks. So he would go on shows and replicate the feats.

The story that we tell in episode one of Project Alpha is the most famous encounter, which objectively seems like it should have worked. It should have fixed things.

James Randi gets word from Johnny Carson—who is a magician—that Uri Geller is going to do psychic demonstrations on the show. As a fellow conjurer, he works with Johnny Carson and says, "Here are the test conditions. He might try this. Don't let him do this. Whatever you do, blank, blank, blank. Bring your own spoons," and so on.

What happens is the most awkward 15 minutes in the history of television. Just flop sweat and silence.

This is when The Tonight Show, you know, 50 percent of American households were watching it. Carson says, "OK, Uri Geller, bend your spoons, bend your keys." And Uri Geller is like, "Mmm…" and then realizes—

Johnny Carson straight-up no-sells him. Doesn't help. Doesn't keep the conversation afloat. Just lets him choke on live air. The story that trickles down is that Uri Geller thought, "Well, that's it. I must be through. I'm over with." He does mention like, "I don't know. You weren't feeling the vibes. I wasn't feeling the vibes."

Yeah, "This gift comes and goes," right? Like The Shining—"It was cloudy tonight, so I don't read minds."

Exactly. And nowadays, in this internet attention economy, it's more common to understand that people quickly forget what you're famous for. They just know that you're famous.

If they remembered anything about Uri Geller, there's three parts to this sentence: "Uri Geller was on The Tonight Show for some ESP thing. It went some way—either good or bad, I don't recall."

So instead, his star just went higher. You would think a very public debunking would do something—but it did not.

Then, in this emotionally charged peak Cold War era—where they want there to be psychic soldiers—you begin to get private investments in  testing for ESP. This is the story I'm really proud we were able to uncover.

There were two kids, about 18 years old at the time, who applied for ESP tests in St. Louis.

At Washington University…

At Washington University…

At a lab that was funded by one of these… 

McDonnell Douglas?

A major airline manufacturer and defense contractor was funding a major ESP lab at a very highly regarded university.

Correct. Correct.

This is already crazy.

Yes. And much like—well, I don't know how much of my own show to spoil. The reason we were attracted to this is because we had extraordinary access to the principal players.

My co-writer and co-creator, Justin Robert Young, was an intern at the James Randi Educational Foundation. He would help with those million-dollar challenge paranormal tests. I toured with a show in the spirit of James Randi, got advice on how to perform psychic surgery, which I later performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I took college students on a 90-minute "best of parapsychology" experience.

We wanted to basically tell the full version of the original story we heard, which was: James Randi got two kids, taught them magic, sent them into the depths, and they fooled—made fools of—the entire industry.

Turns out, that wasn't the story at all.

Turns out, the kids have agency. They did this on their own. They looked up to James Randi and let him lead point. The stories that emerged—we quickly discovered through the interviews—this was less a story of a takedown of a monolith. And more of a story of two undercover detectives who got in too deep, and who realized, month after month, that "Oh wait, these are humans who are trying to advance science and we're actively deceiving them, even though it's for a good end"

Because of the nature of storytelling, the simpler story wins. The story that emerges on live TV—there's an astonishing moment, an astonishing moment. Where again back in the monoculture the entire world is watching as during a press conference, the students are asked, "How do you do it?" And they say, "Quite honestly, we cheat."

James Randi—shall we say—simplifies the narrative. It's a sanded-down narrative in which James Randi is at the center of it because he has the more tradable brand.

Just to say, "James Randi plus Banachek plus Mike Edwards." Even now I can barely get the whole sentence out as opposed to just saying James Randi, this iconic person. 

It's fascinating, you go through the show, these two young kids show up at this lab at Washington University, and they kind of work through how they fooled the people who run this lab. And then they also, the main guy, what was the name of the guy who ran the lab? 

I should know this. 

OK.

Since I hosted. That's the thing about podcasts is you consult your notes and let it go. Well, Peter, let me actually look it up. If we have the power of pausing time…

Peter Philips, that's what it was.

All right. So then, you know, they go through their stuff where they're, you know they're faking the people out there and then the guy who ran the lab, Peter Phillips, who's a respected scientist, he's just completely destroyed by this.  

Yeah. This is pure speculation on my part. One of the difficult things is that on the one hand it's great to bring to light the boots-on-the-ground experience of Mike and Banachek. Who were just under these brutal test conditions, where every single day, they would have to essentially invent a new magic trick on the fly.

Later, it's fascinating—Banachek became one of the greatest mentalists on the planet, specifically because he went through this two-year trial by fire of having to invent magic methods on the fly constantly.

They were constantly closing down the ability for them to cheat, and they would figure out a way to wiggle out of that. So, they were still reading signs through a wall or bending stuff.

Yeah, and there would be a few examples that we get to cover in there, some neat moments where somebody sees something over somebody's shoulder, or there'd be a gentle tee-up, or maybe one person might set up something in a tricky way so that the other one could get the payoff hours later.

Basically they're tinkering with information inefficiency. As the results were more and more amazing, the rules got more and more stringent. Mostly because—out of nowhere—they were getting letters from James Randi saying, "By the way, if they were conjurers, they might be doing this…"

So something that would work on day one they would show up and now suddenly there's a glass partition. But he would notice that there was a bit of a gap. Maybe they could blow it down and have it work. Then there's a gasket, but he realized that if he made an excuse, they'd pick it up—and maybe a bit of sand might wedge it enough.

This constant cat-and-mouse would give increasingly small, statistically insignificant results—but it was still enough that the lab kept on going, all the while setting up this big gotcha reveal.

Right. Describe that because there was a TV show where a special where Randi and the two kids are like—

Yeah, the show was called Magic or Miracle, and it's an interesting hodgepodge. You could tell it was sold as one thing and then the producer wanted to make it something else. So as a result it's a little bit meandering, but the big moment was the reveal of Project Alpha. And it was really surreal to hear the first-hand accounts of these kids showing up. They're in the spotlight. Nobody knows nothing when you're a late teenager. And so you think, "well, this must be, objectively, it's going to be the most famous thing that ever happens to me." "After this," thinks Mike Edwards, "I'll go to Hollywood. And after this, everything will be fine." And so instead, it doesn't work out that way. Instead, it comes, it goes, and the narrative gets sanded down, sanded it down. And then you hear Project Alpha, you hear James Randi and that's it. 

That's a hard thing when you think of how much they gave up. There's a bit of a moral question because what is ethically the right thing to make the biggest impact? Because in one reality, you just keep spending money and who's going to show up, charlatan after charlatan after charlatan, all that money that could have been used to actually do real science to cure cancer and so on. But, on the other hand, the factual collateral damage to the reputation…of the lab to the entire industry, like who knows what advancements might have happened. That's less the realm we cover because, you know, we had access to the principles. 

Like you were talking about the Houdin story or, you know, listening to your show it's like being in, you know, the David Mamet movie, House of Games, or The Sting where you think of this one con. That's the con. And then you realize that there's a reversal, which really keeps you guessing. 

Yeah. There usually is.

So, I guess two things. One, why do we love to be conned? And then have it revealed to us? 

I don't know if you've read Will Storr's book, The Status Game, but he starts with an extraordinary statement: "Humans are status-seeking engines." And it's like when you think of humans as, I don't know, I sometimes think of a soup of folded proteins and you shake it up and the two folded proteins…

You are having much deeper thoughts than I am…folded proteins…in a shake.

You want to remain congruent. When it comes to narratives, we're narrative-seeking engines as well. Every Campbellian story has a character saying, "Who am I?" A bunch of stuff happens. Then he finds out he's Luke Skywalker.

So I mean, long before Google we're doing autocomplete, we were making sense, "How does this end?" or "What is the story I am in?" And then we drive toward that ending.

Exactly. Humans love—as best I can tell—to be almost right. We hate it when we're totally right. We like seeing one and two, we see the line, and if it's three we don't like it. That's too predictable. That's too perfect. We also don't like it if it is oblique and wild, and it seems like it's nonsense, but when it's almost right, boy do we love that. Which is why, for example, the very first scam that we talked about is that I got suckered into buying what I thought/hoped were stolen speakers. Because what I was sold was the line that, "Oh no, these are studio monitors for a strip club and we just have a couple of extra. They're supposed to be $1,200. Look, you could see it on here."

And I was the one who saw the two and two in front of me, put it together, and thought, "Oh my God, they're stolen—but they're not going to tell me they're stolen." So I go to the ATM, gave them $350, thanked them, and thought, "I did it. I stuck it to the man while getting sweet speakers." Turns out, they're just cheap garbage speakers and I was the one who got scammed.

Likewise, when we hear stories, part of what we try to do on the show is take those "just-so" tales and figure out the legitimate top spin on it that you didn't see coming.

I'm thinking, as you're talking about people like Arthur Conan Doyle—who invents—or with Poe in mind who kind of created the first ratiocination detective who uses his mind to figure out impossible mysteries. You get Sherlock Holmes, who is the ultimate avatar of enlightenment rationality and figuring everything out.

But then Arthur Conan Doyle is a kind of sad case. He's this man of science and rationality who then is conned in a variety of things, including obviously fake pictures of fairies and things like that. Are people who pride themselves on rationality particularly susceptible to being conned?

A hundred percent. Humans are not very good at remembering…In theory, we all know that there are things that we do not know and things that we don't see and worlds that are oblique to us, you know, that we're surrounded by black boxes.

In theory everybody, our Vulcan brain says that's the case. But think of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. That's System One, System Two. Our guts are not so good at that. And sometimes it pays off. For example, in Gavin De Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, he essentially says, "Look, humans, we ain't got scales, we ain't got claws, we got teeth, we have one thing, a finely honed sense of intuition. And so when the bushes are shaking, we know we're in trouble, and that's why we won." 

Because you figure that's a lion. You get out of there on the savanna. And those of us who were like, "Oh, that looks interesting"—we're the ones who were eaten. And that's the end of the line.

Yeah, and as best I can tell, the game—and it's the same game that magicians and spectators play—but with a mark and the con man. And the mark, each gets one gift. The con man gets the gift of asymmetry of time. They get to spend months and months and months calculating this narrative and laying out all of the artifacts so that the mark will hopefully see this, see that, see that, piece it together in their mind—"Oh, these are stolen speakers"—and then fall right into the trap. The mark, however, gets a finely honed sense of intuition—that gut feeling that so often we rationalize and talk ourselves out of. Only after something disastrous has happened do we realize, "Oh wait, I should have known the entire time."

So, I love the way that you talked about the monoculture—which I would say is probably unfamiliar to people under 50 at this point—where it's hard to remember a world in which there were only a couple of sources of information. Kind of, you know, the difference between CBS, NBC, and ABC News, it's like whatever, you know? It's hard to know. But they were all kind of revered, or all kind of trusted, and there was no knowledge outside of that. In that world, it's harder to understand that you're being fed a particular version of things, right?

Now we live in a world of infinite YouTube channels and other sources of information. So, it's not a monoculture anymore. How does this change the way we process information? And how do we develop a better, you know, bullshit detector so that we're not constantly being suckered by a reality that is very appealing to us?

Yeah, so Darwin proposed a tree of life where you've got a limb for mammals, and one for fungus, and so on. And it's constantly diverging. We see that with different cultures. In the monoculture days, whether the narrative from the news was right or wrong, at least it was shared, right? But now, you can select the bubble that you want to live in. If you want to say, "Whatever The New York Times says is a lie," then you can find a clubhouse where that's the fact. If you want to say, "Both of them—all of the mainstream—is a lie," you can find a clubhouse for that. If you want to say, "That clubhouse got it wrong," you can find one for that, too.

And so what we end up with is this self-repeating, self-similar fractal. Because—and I think Will Storr has this right—we are status-seeking engines. Would you rather be king of the nonbelievers in this sub-conspiracy domain, or a peon—one of the sheeple—who actually believes 9/11?

And so what we have is that the exact same objective information can now be dissected through different lenses and reinterpreted differently. Some things we all have to agree on. But even then, we can't even agree that the world's flat at the moment—or, sorry, that the world isn't flat. Did I just bust myself? I think we know what's going on. Did I just bust myself?

But, you know, it's liberating, though, too, right? To be out of the monoculture—because the monoculture kind of sucked, right? It's, you know, because if you didn't buy into a big story—or the story that everybody agreed was reality—it was lonely, it was difficult, and it was wrong, right? In many ways.

But so now we're in this more fragmented universe. How do we navigate this and kind of assess different forms of information without either becoming very cynical, or overly skeptical, or just crazy?

So one way for me is—if you—Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age posits a postabundance economy, thanks to nanobots, right? Where just kind of the Victorians decide, "Screw it, we're just gonna pick mid–19th century England, and that's how we're gonna live."

Right.

We have that now with the internet—with all these different strategies. And so, if No. 1, Rule 1, is: I'm out of the business of deciding one is better or more than or less than, but I recognize that these different pockets exist—at which point, it got pretty ugly because certain words mean different things.

If you're coded Team Red or Team Blue politically, you know, there are code words to indicate things. And that's very dividing. And to be honest, I'm actually very hopeful, thanks to AI. Like, I make so many cultural meme references that are appropriate to a 50-year-old person in person in Austin, Texas—that would mean nothing to my children. And so I actually said, "Please translate the following sentences—Simpsons reference, you know, et cetera, et cetera—to my 16-year-old daughter." And then it just spat it out, and she's like, "Oh yeah, I get it. I don't know what that looks like."  

That's like a Babel fish for cultural—

Exactly. A cultural Babel fish. 

That's amazing.

And that is possible now in a way that, technologically, used to require somebody who was, you know, aged between two different demographics. So I think that—hopefully—I am hopeful that that technology, that artificial intelligence, will allow us to see the humanity in each other.

Talk about your—your kind of politics and your—I mean, maybe your epistemology. And where does that come from? You consider yourself libertarian?

Oh, very much so. 

So again, it's good, like, we want hyper-individualized everything, right? But then you need to be able to navigate your reality with other people.

I mean, there's a difference between what we want and what we know is best. What I want is to eat candy all day. What is best is for me to eat vegetables. And libertarianism is inherently ugly. It is the definition of ugly. If we all agree that it was pleasant, it's the movie Pleasantville. That's a terrible place, but everything is surface-level pleasant while secretly deeply unpleasant. Libertarianism is about taking all that ugliness and putting it on the surface.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson—the first time I read it, I was like, "Oh, this is a hellscape." And then the second time I read it, I'm like—or an anarcho-libertarian paradise, where everything from currency to the roads are up for grabs. It is objectively true that competition is the tide that lifts all the boats. It is also objectively true that I personally would prefer that I have no competition.

It is objectively true that the internet and the sharing of magic methods has elevated the whole art of magic—because we are no longer limited by access to a library, or the fact that your parents bought you a magic set, or that the local magic shop either does or does not exist in your small town. All of magic is better than ever, and you see it. It's held in higher regard than at any point in my life. Now, it was ugly to get there. Because in the 1980s—here, you remember this—in the 1980s, there was a time, and this is hard to believe, that stand-up comedy and magic were held roughly in the same regard. They were peers.

But what happened was, as comedy clubs went crazy, some people were like, "I work very hard. I can do magic." And that was a filter that kept people out. Whereas everybody—"Oh, I'm funny." And so, too many people…There was a time Austin had, I think, three, four comedy clubs, right?

And then, in the early '90s, all of that collapsed because everybody was stealing each other's material. There was no enforcement. And so comedy had to go through a metamorphosis. By the time you get to, like, Bob Odenkirk, The Ben Stiller Show, and the emergence of Mr. Show and the kind of next wave of comedy…

Meanwhile, during that same time, magicians embraced what looks to me like a cartel mindset: "There's only going to be 12 canonical illusions. We're all going to wear the same purple sequined shirts." And you saw that with the primetime World's Greatest Magic specials, where it was all the same.

And then, so, magic got their comeuppance with a rejection of that—with David Blaine. And then a rejection of David Blaine with the hyper-polish of Criss Angel. And then along comes the internet.

And I was—it's hard to be a frontiersman when nobody knows what the rules are. Is the internet TV? Are we ruining magic, or are we bringing it to the masses?

And there's still a segment of magic that perceives me teaching magic on the internet as ruining the art. And meanwhile, there's not a magician in America under 30 who hasn't seen the spiky-haired dude on YouTube teaching tricks.

You've mentioned Penn & Teller. How important are they to kind of the way that you think about magic and also the culture? Because they are—I mean, they're like the best performers ever. But they kind of say, "Okay, we're going to con you." And then they do it.

Well, and they brought that narrative layer to it—and that honesty. And to be honest, the metaphor that I think of as playing chess comes from watching them. Like, "Oh, this is great. They're calling it out. They're saying, 'We dare you.'"

Teller—when I was 19 years old, I drove out to Houston from Austin to see Penn & Teller for the first time live. And I had Teller sign a card "To my bastard son," which got a chuckle, and it started an email correspondence over the years. In one of the essays he wrote me, he said: In theater, there's a willing suspension of disbelief. If I hold up a stick and say, "This is a sword," you're like, "All right, sure—where's this headed?" And then you go along, and maybe you cry or laugh or whatever.

But in magic, it's nonconsensual. You're like, "This is a sword." You're like, "Yeah, I got—what the fuck just happened?"

That's a sword. And in that wonder—in that chess match—is the heart of magic. And nobody's better at it than Penn & Teller. And it's been fascinating to watch their rise: first as counterculture, but now—culture. They have the number one show on The CW. And so, I don't know what comes next after them. 

What was the trick you did on Fool Us?

It was psychic surgery.

Explain that.

So, as a matter of fact, it's part of why we lost Andy Kaufman as early as we did. Back in the 1970s, in the Philippines, there were healing practitioners who claimed that—you know, if you've ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom—you know, they claimed they could do that: reach inside you, pull out tumors. And what it was, was a little bit of sleight of hand with chicken guts. They just palmed some chicken guts and blood.

They—you know, skin is very pliable. It mushes more than you would expect, and it feels weird. And they would pull out these chicken giblets and then wipe you down, and you were fine. And the weird part is, we know that the placebo effect is so powerful. And we know it's so powerful, it works even when you know it is a placebo. You know, we know red placebos work better than blue placebos. Big placebos work better than small placebos. And in the case of acupuncture—paranormal stuff aside—we know that painful placebos work better than painless placebos. And in the case of…imagine a placebo so powerful that you get on a plane, you spend your money, you have somebody physically inflict pain on you. That is such a powerful placebo that, you know, you live your life in a way that is congruent—as though you're healed. And for some people, long enough, it worked.

But it was a fraud, ultimately—and got exposed as such by the likes of James Randi. And so, being a touring stage magician, I've always felt like, if it's important, you should never say it aloud. So what I won't do is say, "Psychic surgery is fake." But what I will do is say, "Hey, here's a card. Burn it up. Mix it with pudding. Eat it. That's a pretty vanished card, right? Now lay on the table." I'm going to psychically—you know, blood and guts—doing it for comedic effect. Really, the goal of that is to take the teeth out of the con, the fraud of psychic surgery.

A similar thing happened with the Ku Klux Klan and the radio program Superman: By revealing the inner workings—the deeply held secrets—of the Klan, they suddenly became a punching bag and a laughingstock. And so that did a lot to move the needle. And likewise, that's what I wanted to do with the trick that I did on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. 

How did you get interested in magic—and in con-man stuff?

You mentioned Penn & Teller, and we don't get to choose when and where we imprint on our artistic heroes. But for me, it was in second grade, and it was their PBS show Penn & Teller Go Public, where they did a bunch of tricks. But then they said, "If you have one of these VCRs, press record—we're going to teach you one."

And so they did a fake news report where they taught a simple card force. And in second grade, I did it for my family. And then we turned on the TV, and the news—we had Penn Jillette stop and say, "Is this your card?" And that ecstasy, that first hit—I'm still chasing that high. 

Why aren't there more women involved in magic?

The internet. Straight up.

Let me put it this way: Before the internet, the only way for the methods—when I was 19 years old, I would go to a cafeteria here in Austin, IBM Ring 60—and a curious thing would happen. We would do the minutes and the thing and the lecture, and they never wanted to hang out and session with each other.

And it was weird, because people would do the same tricks with the same lines, and everybody would laugh. And I was like…that was the same one as last month. Why are we all laughing again? And now I realize what we were doing: We were all aping the structure of our performance so we could all compare notes and borrow each other's bits, rhythms, routines, plots, and techniques.

And then all of a sudden, the internet came along, and there was a much more direct route for that information. It became an efficient market of information. You didn't have to show up. For some people, that was great, because it opened a lot of doors.

For other people, it suddenly made their previously easy job harder. And so, it's just like libertarianism—it was ugly to suddenly have anybody be able to do it. But also, it did the very healthy thing of…if there was a girl of any age in that room—she was, and in this case, it was my wife—she was selected for every single trick.

And so these archetypes become established: "Oh, are you a woman adjacent to magic? Your job is to be the assistant." And then all of a sudden, people come to magic, and nobody knows the expectations—the rules. All of a sudden, a 7-year-old girl is discovering a trick and does it for her dad. Nobody told her that that's not how it's supposed to go.

And I do believe that there's something as close as real magic that happened in that quiet revolution.

So, I mean, it's democratizing because it's no longer passed through secret handshakes or social situations. It's much more wide open. 

Yeah, and it also eliminated some truly awful, grotesque artifacts. Like, for example—similar to the highly rigid structure of, say, the Catholic Church—there were two ways to learn magic. Nowadays, we learn it on the internet.

When I was young, the only way to learn magic was for a 14-year-old boy to go in a room with a 45-year-old man who explained the importance of keeping a secret. Exactly what you would expect happened.

Sorry. Sorry. I can't speak with authority. I made it sound like a specific thing. 

You mentioned James Randi, and Randi created—you know, he is like the ultimate skeptic, kind of—and he helped introduce what we talk about as skepticism, particularly about paranormal or religious sensibility.

You know, atheists have kind of won. You—there are a lot of religious people in America, but we're a much more secular society. Why is the skeptic movement over? And if it is, is it because it's achieved its basic goals—to make us all more reflective on what we believe? Or did it die out for some other reason?

I was surprised by the overlap between the skeptic movement and the atheist movement. The first time I went to The Amazing Meeting, I was really confused. Like, I'm like, "Hey man, we're all here to debunk people who defraud the bereaved, right?" And they're like, "Yeah. And I get to shout, 'There is no God!'"

And I was like, "Why would you do that?" And it's very clearly—there's a subsection of people—I talked about this with Andrew Heaton—where there's a flavor of atheist who… they still believe in the supernatural, but they're just—they're mad at the fact that, I don't know, somebody finger-banged their girlfriend at the church camp or whatever. You know, like, whatever. That's what their real issue is. It's not about rationalism or double-blind testing or what have you.

And in the case of skepticism—I mean, who are they punching against at this point? I mean, we don't see—we don't—there is no monoculture that is pumping simplified, universal narratives at us that need to be corrected by loud, angry, shouting people. Instead—I mean, I guess Twitter was the closest to it. But that seems to have wildly fragmented it.

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not a monoculture. It might be loud and annoying, but where's the best place to find what you're up to?

The Modern Rogue on YouTube—youtube.com/modernrogue. I'm perpetually on a quest to be the ultimate gentleman, warrior, and scoundrel.

Out of warrior, gentleman, and scoundrel, which is your preferred role?

When I was in my 30s, I was playing the scoundrel. In my 40s, I tried on the warrior. Now that I'm 50? It's gentleman all the way.

We'll leave it there. Brian Brushwood, thanks for talking to us.

Thank you.

The post Brian Brushwood: Why We Fall for Scams appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Are you part of the growing stoicism movement? Built on virtue, reason, and self-control, the ancient Roman philosophy is gaining popularity in a world that just seems to get crazier and crazier.

Today's guest is a self-described stoic. Robert Rosenkranz is the author of The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious, which takes a deep dive into how stoic principles can lead to personal, financial, and social success. Rosenkranz charts his path from a small, cramped family apartment in 1950s New York City to becoming a billionaire deal-maker and founder of Open To Debate, a nonprofit that hosts nationally broadcasted debates about the toughest issues of the day.

The Stoic Capitalist is an emotional memoir with snippets of philosophy from the likes of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. It illustrates the power of rational thinking and purposeful action in all parts of life. Reason's Nick Gillespie and Rosenkranz talk about the political journey from a New Frontier liberal to more of a libertarian-leaning Reagan Republican to a philanthropist deeply committed to promoting intense but civil debate. They also talk about how the creative destruction that undergirds capitalism displaces people not just economically but culturally—and how to make it easier for people to adapt to the unending change that is necessary for improvements in living standards.

This interview was recorded at a live event in New York City.

Upcoming Reason events:

0:00—Introduction

The post Robert Rosenkranz: How To Use Stoicism To Build a Meaningful Life appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Today's guest is evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, whom Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed last fall in Milwaukee as part of his "Final Bow" tour. Gillespie and Dawkins talked about why he believes science can't thrive without freedom, why gender ideology is starting to look a lot like Soviet Lysenkoism, and why some truths—like the binary nature of biological sex—shouldn't be up for political negotiation.

Dawkins discusses his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, what it means to live in a "colony of cooperating viruses," and why he thinks both religious dogma and postmodern relativism are enemies of progress (as an unapologetic postmodern libertarian, Gillespie argues about that last point).

They also explore how moral progress happens, whether atheism needs a replacement as a social and intellectual movement, and how cultural Christianity still casts a long shadow in an increasingly secular world.

This is a conversation for anyone who believes that science, skepticism, and freedom belong together—and who refuses to kowtow to ideological orthodoxy, wherever it comes from.

Upcoming Reason events:

0:00—Introduction

2:06—Dawkins' new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead

6:13—Selfish and cooperative genes

16:50—Heritability, variance, and twin studies

20:50—Cultural change leads to physical change

22:37—Ancient Babylon was just yesterday

24:28—Dawkins' first memory

25:13—New Zealand's "indigenous science" initiative

34:43—"Sex is the only biological binary"

37:46—Gender, transgenderism, and intersex

47:31—The folly of gender "norms"

49:42—Liberal inquiry and the shifting moral zeitgeist

53:15—Atheism's influence on knowledge and culture

57:27—Is Dawkins really a "cultural Christian"?

1:02:00—Death and legacy

1:03:50—Q&A

The post Richard Dawkins: Why Atheism Is Winning appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"I feel fear… because they're somewhat vindictive people. I don't care who you are, having this set of people mad at you is not comfortable." That's today's guest, Cliff Asness, talking about President Donald Trump, his administration, and his supporters. Asness is the outspoken billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management. He is also a pioneer in quantitative finance, University of Chicago Ph.D., and self-described "part-time Republican and full-time libertarian." He talks bluntly about why Trump is spectacularly wrong on tariffs and trade, his concerns about the authoritarian tendencies of the president and his supporters, and how capitalism may actually be getting less efficient due to social media.

Asness tells Reason's Nick Gillespie how he came to his libertarian beliefs, where right-wing populism overlaps with its left-wing version, and why he thinks free minds and free markets will eventually win—but only after a long slog. This conversation was recorded live at an event in New York City.

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1:17- Asness's hedge fund: AQR Capital Management

4:15- The state of capitalism

7:30- From delusion to grift

10:51- Trump, tariffs, and comparative advantage

13:48- Is the Trump administration "grifting"?

16:30- Criticizing Obama and Biden

17:42- Is Trump the naked emperor?

23:57- Markets are not perfect

30:45- Social media's effect on markets and politics

37:07- Asness' politics and background

40:40- Does the arc of history bend towards libertarianism?

42:00- Left & right economic illiteracy

44:29- Median income has increased, morale hasn't

47:01- Politics rewards resentment

Upcoming Reason events:

The post Billionaire Cliff Asness: Can Technology Outrun 'Stupider and Stupider' Government? appeared first on Reason Magazine.