[MUSIC] Rebellious disruption, mental disorder, disability. Let's add another d word to our discussion of genius destruction. Destruction, it turns out is necessary to change as well as to progress. And change it turns out is something of a zero sum game. For every new idea or a mode of thinking that enters the world, an old one disappears, becomes obsolescent falls into oblivion. This timeless evolutionary process was highlighted by Harvard Economics Professor Joseph Schumpeter back in 1942 and eventually termed creative destruction. Creative destruction is most obviously at work in the tech world, the inventor of the wheel put the maker of the drag sled out of business. Solar heating is today sending coal miners into other lines of work. Drive up ATMS or making bank tellers unnecessary and internet shopping forces shopping malls to close we all know this. As Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve expressed it quote destruction is more than just an unfortunate side effect of creation, it is part and parcel of the same thing. Society generally seems willing to accept this trade off embracing innovation and forgetting the flipside destruction. Annually the TV network CNBC not only accepts but honors quote the top 50 disruptors of the year. Praising innovative private startups that advance the most significant disruptive technology end of quote. And transformative geniuses are comfortable with this disruption. In 2011, Forbes magazine published an article titled Steve Jobs Create Disrupt and Destroy. Saying in it no person has done more to disrupt the existing way of doing things than Mr. Jobs end of quote. Jobs was willing to destroy his own darling the hugely popular iPod you remember that of course. Because genius Jobs eventually came to see the target that no one else could see. That the future of digital music resided in who knew a telephone. Thus we are willing to accept the creative destruction that attends the progress wrought by such geniuses. But what about the personal destruction the change brought by genius seems to come at a cost to those immediately around them. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion from my years of study of genius is this many great minds are not so great human beings. We have a tendency to want our geniuses to be superheroes, the highest form of the human species. Yet on a personal level that genius almost always disappoints us. The genius is often a jerk, readers of my book on genius are surprised by this fact. And so over the years with my students at the beginning of each iteration of the genius course at Yale, the one that you're engaged here in an online form. I invariably asked the question how many of you want to be a genius? Usually at the beginning, about three quarters of the class affirmatively respond some enthusiastically, others tentatively. In the last class I asked, now having studied all these geniuses, how many of you still want to be one? And now only about a quarter of the group says I do. As one student volunteered at the beginning of the course I thought I did but now I'm not so sure. So many of them seem like obsessive self-centered jerks, not the kind of person I'd wanted as a friend or a suitemate. Point taken, obsessive and self-centered jerks. Why do they behave this way? I suspect it's because they can't help themselves. Many geniuses seem to be so obsessed with their view of changing the world that they are oblivious to the psychological damage that their obsessions cause. As the genius races ahead down the past to creative change the rest of us spouses, children, colleagues, coworkers all become roadkill collateral damage. Are there any transformative geniuses who remained decent human beings? Surely there must be, I suppose on my list I put maybe Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Toni Morrison. But in truth, I don't know much about their private lives. Marie Khoury seems to have been a very moral person but as we've seen not an ideal parent. Nikola Tesla was smart enough to realize implicitly that genius may not be compatible with marriage and family. As he said in 1897, I don't think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men. It's a pity too for sometimes we the unmarried or unpartnered genius we feel so lonely end quote. Indeed, more than half of the iconic geniuses that I have studied, chose not to marry and left no progeny. But for those who did marry getting married or partnered seems to provide no stability. That doesn't seem to reduce the psychic turmoil and separation or divorce often follows. Among the great American writers alone look at these numbers, Norman Mailer had six wives, Henry Miller and Saul Bellow five. Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams four, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill and John Steinbeck three. What about the great American women writers of the 20th century? Well, Pearl Buck Toni Morrison and Ayan Rand, Anne Sexton, Maya Angelou, Alice walker, for example, the highest number of husbands I can find is only two. Several conclusions might be drawn from this, but I'll leave those conclusions to you. Let's stick with male malefactors, familiarly dysfunctional male geniuses. Walter Isaacson has written half a dozen fine biographies and he points out the following flaws of Ben Franklin for example, who abandoned his wife and children for long stretches. And Albert Einstein, who failed to acknowledge an illegitimate daughter and put a son in a Swiss mental institution where he lived unvisited by father Albert for a decade. Nut only in ISaacson's biography of Steve Jobs among biographies of genius do we find this. Do we find an index entry under offensive behavior of [LAUGH] and there are so many instances of bad behavior, we need to start an entire index category. Said Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs first wife quote, he was an enlightened being who was cruel that's a strange combination end of quote. To his readers, author Charles Dickens epitomized human kindness in all that was good in family life. And seems to have invented Christmas as we know it as in the Christmas story. But here's what his daughter Katie, his favorite child said about him after Dickens death. He did not care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home. If you think that's bad, here's what Ernest Hemingway's son Gregory Hemingway said about him in 1951. Quote when it's all added up, he's writing to his father here "when it's all added up Papa, Hemingway, it will be. He wrote a few good stories, had a fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons Hadley, Pauline, Marty, Patrick and possibly myself". Which do you think is the most important, you self-centered ****, the stories or the people? I suspect you wonder what's happened to my filial respect for you? Well it's gone Earnestine dear, it's gone. It's gone with the 100,000 cruelties you have inflicted on people for the last ten years end of quote. Nobel prize winning Hemingway was a bully, a brawler, a liar, an adulterer and an alcoholic. He wanted to engage in macho hypermasculine activities, to go to bullfights in Madrid and to run with the bulls in Pamplona and to kill animals in Africa. The type of activities that he could then write about. Thinking of the world from the point of view of the other and being sensitive to the transgendered son Gregory. For example, was not part of the persona or image that Hemingway wanted to create. Martha Gellhorn who lived with Hemingway for nine years, five of which as his third wife said this of Hemingway in 1945 before she divorced him. Quote, a man Hemingway, a man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being [LAUGH]. Was Thomas Edison, a loathsome human being? Edison's first wife Mary was described by an historian as a fully fledged casualty of her husband's accumulated neglect end of quote. His second wife Mina called Edison the most difficult husband in America. And Edison generally seemed to have had an unconcerned attitude about people in general. He once told an assistant, we must look out for short circuited wires for if we ever kill a customer, it would be very bad for business end of quote. And then there's the story of Edison and topsy the elephant. In 1885 Edison began a campaign to publicly discredit alternating current, the type champion by his rival, Nikola Tesla. Edison claimed that alternating currents capacity for higher voltages was synonymous with death. To make the point Edison engaged an assistant to round up stray dogs and subject them to high voltage AC current. From there, he moved up two calves and then horses and then humans encouraging the state of New York to adopt the AC electric chair, which it did. And finally he orchestrated the execution of an elephant, one Topsy at Coney Island amusement park in 1903. Edison orchestrated the event and even set over a film crew to record it with his new motion picture technology. The short film survives today, it's available on YouTube, it's there but best not to watch it. Given the inhumane behavior of Thomas Edison, why does he remain a national hero in the United States and revered as well in China? Why do we continue to lionize geniuses such as Edison, Hemingway and Jobs? To what sort of standard should we hold our geniuses? This brings us to the question of our next segment genius in the AIDS of cancel culture?
