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:

• Reason Versus debate: Jacob Sullum and Billy Binion vs. Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael Mangual, June 24
• Reason Speakeasy: Nick Gillespie and Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the MAHA Movement, June 25

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Transcript

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.