00:02:14.980In general, genius, there may well be people like that
00:02:20.020that will make breakthroughs, but it would just be a small percentage
00:02:25.140of geniuses perhaps indeed are like that, particularly in the sciences.
00:02:30.160But in general, they're not like that.
00:02:31.960In general, they are high in psychopathology.
00:02:34.500So they have, as I said, moderately low agreeableness,
00:02:39.540moderately low conscientiousness, which means they're not rule-bound
00:02:42.600and they can think outside the box and make original connections
00:02:46.420and things like that and thus generate original ideas.0.95
00:02:48.920and they're moderately mentally unstable which means that they are you know they're neurotic0.56
00:02:54.400which means that they are constantly thinking they're constantly generating thoughts and also0.63
00:02:59.040they find the world a frightening and unpleasant place and they want to make sense of it uh and
00:03:04.040in the case of artistic types they want to express it and they and and put it into words and
00:03:09.540and that sort of thing and so this is what seems to predict genius among men and what the and what
00:03:16.560the studies found is that these people are subclinical in terms of personality disorders
00:03:24.440in particular things like narcissistic personality disorder so this would mean that you are because
00:03:31.100you're so neurotic and so on and you have all these negative feelings you adopt a narcissistic
00:03:35.700false self where you tell yourself that you are superior and unique and brilliant and deserve0.62
00:03:41.400special treatment and this makes you incredibly confident and incredibly charismatic and in
00:03:46.540allows you to manipulate people and it allows you to get places in life so so that's interesting
00:03:51.500because on most of those characteristics i'm pretty sure i qualify and and you may also qualify
00:03:58.660for a number of those characteristics but i'm pretty sure i'm not a genius and i don't know
00:04:03.520whether you are but is it that you know you you can have all of those attributes but then you
00:04:08.220need a certain iq threshold and maybe something in the 140s right precisely precisely what about 140
00:04:15.020but but but those plus relatively high intelligence uh so in general social status is predicted by
00:04:21.700high intelligence plus pro-social personality so so 140 does i know 140 doesn't get you there
00:04:28.320when when does it kick in like 160 170 what i mean no no no no no no no no no no much less
00:04:34.500than that uh hands i think argued after about 120 intelligence no longer predicts how well you do
00:04:40.880its personality that hits 140 would be extraordinarily high IQ um but but anyway
00:04:48.260100 so high intelligence uh plus pro-social traits equals social class but then when it comes to
00:04:55.080very high social status i.e being part of the upper class uh or being a highly original innovator or
00:05:01.660whatever that becomes part of the upper class they seem to have very high intelligence plus
00:05:06.300these moderately antisocial traits which lead to for example genius or being a highly charismatic
00:05:12.400influential person or or whatever we're being a cutthroat operator and so on so narcissists i.e
00:05:20.760machiavellian so narcissism then um seems to be associated with these kinds of uh of genius traits
00:05:28.220but it is subclinical according to the analysis among men i.e they are they do not have full-blown
00:05:34.660narcissistic personality disorder which is something that is generally damaging to aspects
00:05:40.420of life or full-blown psychopathy but they have um some of the aspects to a significant degree
00:05:47.620so they are so it's like it's like salt when you're cooking you you do want a bit but if you
00:05:53.080add too much it ruins it is that what you're saying yeah i it's in relation to men and
00:05:57.880achievement then yes that that that seems to be the case that they're not full-blown these high
00:06:03.240achieving men in an analysis by a guy called felix post which looked at this called creativity and
00:06:08.100psychopathology uh they're not none of them were full-blown in narcissistic personality disorder
00:06:14.120psychopathic personality disorder whatever they had um a significant number of the traits to a
00:06:20.580pronounced degree so what i thought was well why has no one looked at this in relation to women
00:06:26.100someone should so i found i found a work by a guy called uh charles murray whom you may have heard
00:06:35.740famous for the bell curve yes and it's called human accomplishment and he did a lot of work
00:06:40.880quantifying who were the most influential people in human history he looked at uh the extent to
00:06:48.040which they were referenced the extent to which they were referenced in encyclopedias how big
00:06:52.420their encyclopedia entries were in order to get a feel for the degree to which they were commonly
00:06:58.540recognized as being a breakthrough people in their field because that's how we would define geniuses
00:07:03.360that they tend they are commonly recognized as making a major and important breakthrough
00:07:07.840in their particular field and so and then he he finds he looks at them and he gave them a ranking
00:07:14.460out of a hundred as regard to the extent to which you know their importance their significance of
00:07:20.060their accomplishment up to 1950 so it's had time to settle in it's become clear that these people
00:07:26.500the geniuses or that they're not so what i did was i i looked at only the women and then i looked i
00:07:32.680narrowed it down to anglophone women women that were native speakers of english such that i could
00:07:37.940read the primary sources and and that that sort of thing can i ask a question at this point0.92
00:07:43.180i mean is there such thing as a female genius and i don't want to sound sexist right i don't
00:07:49.980want to sound sexist when i'm saying this but but my understanding was like okay i mean so for
00:07:54.600example i watched a series on netflix about this woman chess genius it was called i don't know the
00:07:59.560queen's gambit or something like that and i thought oh that's a really interesting story i'll look up
00:08:04.360who this woman was and it turns out they just made her up there's no such thing as a woman
00:08:08.800chess grand master and and my understanding loosely was is that with men you got a flatter0.83
00:08:16.260curve where you had more absolute retards but also some geniuses and with women they just it0.90
00:08:23.680was just clustered in so they're so they're more around the average intelligence so the overall1.00
00:08:29.960intelligence is the same but you don't get the absolute retards and you also don't get the0.98
00:08:34.780absolute geniuses so i thought that was the case this is this is correct so if you look at what he0.99
00:08:40.180found then you find that men on average in adulthood have slightly higher iq than women
00:08:46.880of about four points in adulthood because they go through puberty later they eventually exceed
00:08:52.380women in intelligence and they have an average iq that is about four points higher they have a0.98
00:08:57.660broader range of intelligence i as you say more retards and more in pure iq terms geniuses0.89
00:09:04.500because the male variability hypothesis that is that this is the under harsh conditions0.94
00:09:11.360we have polygamous mating systems and the high status men tend to dominate the gene pool
00:09:17.300such that about 60 percent of males under these systems don't breed at all
00:09:22.680consequently it is worth there being if you are a man so a mutation it's worth there being mutation
00:09:29.900because it's a it's a no it's a it's basically a what you call it you're likely to lose the game
00:09:37.400you're likely to not pass on your genes so it's worth taking a risk unless it's worth taking the
00:09:42.940risk of having a mutation which might be something positive as a consequence men are more mutated
00:09:49.420than women and they have therefore worse genetic health and as a consequence of that you get more
00:09:55.200male outliers that have very high IQ and more male outliers that have very low IQ. You get more0.99
00:10:02.060male outliers indeed in terms of personality, a greater variance in personality than you get0.99
00:10:08.200among females. So what this means is that to the extent that genius is genetic, it relies on0.57
00:10:15.820unlikely but possible genetic combinations, i.e. outlier high intelligence combining with
00:10:21.820moderately antisocial personality and women also on average have a more pro-social personality than
00:10:30.280men because they're not evolved to be in armies and kill people they're evolved to look after
00:10:34.440babies and that sort of thing so on average they are higher in agreeableness they are higher in
00:10:39.180conscientiousness they are higher in mental illness but that's mediated substantially by anxiety
00:10:43.960because you have to be anxious over your babies and and that sort of thing so what you would
00:10:48.900predict would be there would be fewer female recognized geniuses than males and their influence0.99
00:10:55.080would be lower and that is indeed the case so of our you get someone like Isaac Newton who is given
00:11:02.400an influence of you know a hundred um and you get the highest the most genius the most influential
00:11:08.620female anglophone female in the sample was Virginia Woolf who was given a mark of 12
00:11:14.580and her main influence is is the is the stream of consciousness novel and and and that sort of
00:11:21.140thing okay so sorry but but coming back to my point if the curve is shaped differently if for
00:11:27.580minutes it's got that long tail at either side i know the absolute number of men in the genius
00:11:33.720category is going to be even over a period of history is going to be hundreds or low thousands
00:11:39.360it's going to be a genuinely small number but that long tail out to either side of the curve allows0.99
00:11:44.360that to happen what what i'm asking is are there any women who make it at all into that long right0.82
00:11:50.960hand side of the table because you wouldn't necessarily expect that based on indeed yes1.00
00:11:54.840well you uh no you would well you would expect far far fewer of them and you would expect their
00:12:02.020level of influence to be lower and that's that's what you see that you so you you get people that
00:12:08.340are recognized by as having made a major significant breakthrough in their field or being highly
00:12:15.200influential in their field that that's how genius is defined by uh murray uh and and he quantifies
00:12:22.260it in terms of references in encyclopedias and all this sort of thing and on that basis you do0.99
00:12:28.200find female geniuses that make the cut but there's just there's fewer of them and the degree of their
00:12:35.320influence is less than the men on Avram but they but they do exist okay what about this point then0.99
00:12:43.480what about if if you said this was this data cuts off at 1950 maybe there are a lot more female1.00
00:12:51.460geniuses but they had a kid at 21 like you're supposed to especially before 1950 and they never1.00
00:12:58.940got the opportunity to express their genius because i can just imagine the feminists in the1.00
00:13:03.160audience my large brokonomics feminist audience will be saying that okay you're just not counting1.00
00:13:10.600them properly that is perfectly possible it's perfectly possible that if you were to reanalyze0.99
00:13:15.040it with modern data precisely because of the the patriarchal society which has broken down
00:13:19.700and the lower ability of women to be pushed through education at the time and to be pushed
00:13:24.260into things and so on that there would be more geniuses now than there were then that's perfectly
00:13:29.440possible yes and uh but we can't it will it would be um normally with a genius you have to really
00:13:36.140kind of wait until they're dead to to see the full extent of their influence and to understand that
00:13:41.140they were geniuses but that's that's i i i agree but but but theoretically you would still expect
00:13:48.080that even taking into account these changes you would still expect there to be less per capita
00:13:52.980than men and for them to be less influential than the men now the key interesting difference notice
00:13:58.160Remember, with the men, they were found to be subclinical in terms of psychopathology, in terms of things like narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, these kinds of severe mental depressive disorders, these kinds of traits.
00:14:14.040Now, you can understand that because an element of genius is drive, an element of drive to achieve things, drive to get status, drive towards accomplishment.
00:14:24.960And because women sexually select for status in men, men are evolved to be relatively high in drive, drive for status and whatever.
00:14:35.900And this will be a component of being a genius. Now, women, on average, of course, are not like that.0.82
00:14:42.280Women are evolved to live in harems of relative equality in which you alloparent each other's children and share personal feelings with each other and all this kind of thing.0.99
00:14:54.240and so you need to be equal and you need to be very against any kind of harm and you and you0.65
00:15:00.980are relatively low in drive towards that kind of status okay so so i've got i've got another
00:15:07.480question because i'm now wondering we the whole chicken the egg thing here because okay so men
00:15:14.900are uh sexually selective uh sexually successful if they've achieved something or or they have
00:15:22.360something that marks them out it could be strength it could be beauty or handsomeness or it could be
00:15:27.600but they've got a high intelligence and therefore they have achieved more than they should have done0.90
00:15:31.840and they've achieved status and then that gets them a woman whereas with a woman it's quite
00:15:38.200frankly it doesn't really matter how smart she is it it matters how attractive she is and that
00:15:42.560that's kind of the the key defining characteristic so so when it comes to this sexual variability0.71
00:15:48.000um that we talked about earlier i mean maybe the mating system itself is creating that because
00:15:54.980for the men you you kind of have to do that whereas for women it's kind of almost irrelevant
00:15:59.420and therefore it just gets filtered out when actually the key thing is is just attractiveness
00:16:04.140i i'm sorry it well it it is so deeply rooted in us that it is uh very unlikely that this is a
00:16:12.700sociological factor that's creating this this is it's so deeply rooted and you find it even in
00:16:19.000the modern day um in the attraction issues are basically very very similar to what they were
00:16:24.660in pre in prehistory so it seems to me that it is it is it is something that started off
00:16:30.620because uh in uh very unstable environments whereby men and women are relatively similar
00:16:36.020the man wants sex the woman therefore has something to lose from the sexual encounter
00:16:40.340so she wants investment and she wants good genes and the fact that the man has high status in the
00:16:46.060pecking order implies that he has good genes that will survive in that ecology and so therefore she
00:16:50.840accepts the man and his offerings but then he says okay well if you want my offerings if you
00:16:57.380want my resources then I have to know that my offspring I'm investing in are mine and so I
00:17:03.000want patriarchy I want control of your sexuality so you can see how this develops in a kind of1.00
00:17:07.800primal way uh and then the modern day but the the point is that the kind of women that will
00:17:16.040therefore be um achieving a very high status uh and who will therefore have uh extremely high1.00
00:17:23.460intelligence moderately anti-social traits and this sort of drive towards status are going to
00:17:29.900be far less representative of women are going to be far less normal by women's standards than the0.84
00:17:36.340equivalent men are going to be so something has to take hold which forces them to um to to to take0.95
00:17:45.260these risks uh and and and to be uh low in conscientiousness and and to be very very highly
00:17:51.940neurotic and all of these kinds of things that make that push you towards genius in a way that
00:17:56.960is not the case among the men and so what i found uh with an n of 10 but it was stonkingly
00:18:03.480statistically significant because of the rarity of the disorder in question, is that the majority
00:18:09.400of these acknowledged female geniuses would reach the cutoff point for a condition known as0.98
00:18:16.140borderline personality disorder. And borderline personality disorder is a cluster B condition,0.93
00:18:24.420so it's related to things like narcissism and Machiavellianism and psychopathy. But 75% of the
00:18:31.520cases are female. It is about 50% genetic. It has been found that the same genes that express
00:18:39.700as external violence in men express as internal violence in women, i.e. self-harm. And it has
00:18:47.980also been found that when males who are narcissistic have daughters, it is in that
00:18:58.140direction that the the narcissism tends to go and it tends to be more likely to express as
00:19:03.340borderline personality disorder now borderline personality disorder is marked by extreme moods
00:19:10.020i.e emotional dysregulation fear of abandonment uh impulsivity in various areas such as sexual
00:19:16.680risk taking or taking drugs or whatever it happens to be um identity disturbance um let's say a weak
00:19:24.260sense of self um i if you're very very worried and concerned and and anxious then you can never
00:19:31.080be sure what the right thing is to do so you'll you'll you'll assert a strong sense of self i am
00:19:37.620this and and you'll feel that and that's fine but then something will go wrong and you'll have a
00:19:41.980complete collapse and think oh well that was wrong and so you'll try out the completely opposite
00:19:45.620identity uh a bit like tim stanley who has been in the news uh recently so a person has an unstable
00:21:44.620you literally take on the personality of jeremy clarkson you are him so that's that's an element
00:21:50.680of an unstable sense of self right then the next element is a chronic emptiness um intense idea
00:21:57.760like splitting so you you because you see the world as this chaos you want a savior and so you will
00:22:03.180like you you you see the world of very black and white terms you don't like ambiguity so you will
00:22:07.600idealize someone as fantastic and brilliant and amazing and as your savior and utterly be obsessed
00:22:12.280with them but then he'll upset you and then you'll de-idealize him as evil and appalling and dreadful
00:22:16.680but then you'll be concerned that he'll leave you and so you'll re-idealize him and so on back and
00:22:20.780forth and you'll do the same thing to yourself so you'll go through a phase of idealizing yourself
00:22:24.860where you're narcissistic you think you're wonderful and you're brilliant and you're amazing0.99
00:22:27.560but then something will happen you'll collapse you think you're appalling and you're dreadful0.81
00:22:30.520you're no good and at that point you will often change identity to something new then you have
00:22:35.040problems dealing with anger you have self-harm and you have under stress dissociation which is
00:22:40.980when you sort of enter a different fantasy world in your head,
00:22:43.820and in extreme cases, paranoid psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia.
00:22:48.240So those are the traits of borderline personality disorder.
00:22:50.820And if you were diagnosed with at least five of those traits,
00:22:54.400then you were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.0.63
00:22:58.180And what I found was that the majority of these great women,
00:23:01.720these acknowledged great women, this is people like Virginia Woolf,
00:23:05.280Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, for example,
00:23:10.160um had the majority of those traits based on the detailed biographical analyses because look look
00:23:17.780i've spent a lot of time around high achieving people and a lot of them do have these characteristics
00:23:23.420they just haven't been diagnosed with them very possibly yeah i i should have it was it was the
00:23:27.820majority that had them you had some people uh among my sample that only had a few of the case
00:23:32.840the characteristics so they wouldn't be diagnosable like jane austen basically just had depression
00:23:37.040um that was about it or willa cather or uh emily dickinson that yeah they just had depression
00:23:43.460um but then the majority had the traits and had them to quite a significant extent in many cases
00:23:49.140they had almost all of the traits with regard to your comment about sluts yeah um that's that's0.91
00:23:55.500very very yeah that's very interesting because what you're basically dealing with with these0.99
00:23:59.720people um is a what's called a fast life history strategy um so we're all on a spectrum between a
00:24:07.760fast life history strategy where we live fast die young we could be wiped out at any minute so
00:24:12.540there's no point creating strong social bonds we could um there's no point uh selecting for mental
00:24:17.640stability if anything the opposite because you need to be on edge and anxious and whatever all
00:24:22.460the time because you could be killed at any moment and and therefore you live fast die young
00:24:27.260and you have as much sex as possible with as many suitable partners as possible.0.98
00:24:32.600In the case of women, obviously, this is high state.1.00
00:24:35.100They want to go for high status men.0.86
00:24:36.800In the case of men, they want to go for good looking women.
00:24:39.620So I understand how a fast life history works for men's benefit.0.96
00:24:43.520I don't get how it works for women's benefit because...0.67
00:24:46.500It works for women's benefit because the women could be killed at any moment.1.00
00:24:49.860So she needs to pass on her genes as quickly as possible as well.1.00
00:24:52.580Yeah, but for her, it takes nine months and then another 20 years of development.
00:24:56.020Yes, so therefore she will be less fast life history strategic than the man, but she can still be fast life history strategic by selecting simply for the genes that are associated with status in an ecology in which status predicts how many surviving children you have.0.94
00:25:12.440So you would expect whether that status is muscularity and good at fighting, whether that status is something slightly more complicated, that's what she'll do.
00:25:20.620and she'll do it to an extreme degree and one of the things i found in my book is that obviously
00:25:25.020age is a proxy for status because uh you know the older you are the higher status you're likely to
00:25:30.820have therefore women are sexually attracted to age and this is one of the reasons why women go
00:25:36.620through puberty earlier than men so they end up with a chap that is a bit older than them and is
00:25:41.840more likely to have status but therefore borderlines are attracted to extreme age
00:25:47.320so you will get these situations where you know you get a chap whose girlfriend is 20 years younger
00:25:53.000than him and and he can often be expected to be you know the kind of man the kind of narcissistic
00:25:58.180fast life history strategy kind of man so they're fast history strategists um they are therefore
00:26:03.440socio-sexual which is consistent with the impulsive sexual risk-taking the having affairs
00:26:09.300that sort of thing these are fast history traits all of the traits they've got um emptiness and
00:26:14.620depression well that would be selected out under harsh conditions because it's maladaptive to not
00:26:18.480to to not be able to just go away and sleep basically it's not it's not an adaptive thing
00:26:22.680fear of abandonment this keeps you on edge all the time weak social bonds this is a fast life history
00:26:27.520trait um the idealizing and de-idealizing is a way of bonding yourself strongly to someone
00:26:32.920very quickly very quickly which is what you have to do uh in a fast strategy equality you have to
00:26:38.460on very quickly anger fascist strategy uh self-harm what's that doing well it's it's kind
00:26:44.680of a way of saying you could see it as a way of saying i'm dangerous and a fascist strategy it's
00:26:49.920dangerous ecology you need people to be careful around you they might kill you so it's kind of
00:26:53.920saying i'm dangerous if i could do this to myself what could i do to you it's a way of expressing
00:26:58.780violence okay and you and you can also see it as a way of expressing genetic quality
00:27:02.880it's like it's like a costly signal it's saying look i can damage myself and still i'm sexy so
00:27:09.900think how sexy i'd be if i hadn't damaged myself so it's a costly signal of genetic quality and
00:27:15.700then obviously psychosis uh this is paranoia it makes people go away in an unstable kind of
00:27:21.000situation um emotional regulation mood regulation well that dysregulation well that's obviously
00:27:25.500you've got to go from one extreme to another in unstable ecology so they are adapted to an
00:27:29.240unstable ecology, and therefore they would be expected to be sociosexual. And the same is true
00:27:35.440of the men. The same would be true of these kind of narcissistic type males. And now we are attracted0.97
00:27:41.120to people that are genetically similar to us. And so it is unsurprising, therefore, that the kind
00:27:46.440of women that these borderlines will select for will be, yes, high status men, older men, but also
00:27:52.240quite narcissistic men, because the borderlines are narcissistic. They oscillate between narcissism
00:27:57.600and collapse. If you enjoyed that content and of course you did because you are a smart person
00:28:02.980then why don't you go over to lotuseaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for as
00:28:07.840little as five pounds a month which really is not much money at all and you get loads