393: The Intelligence Trap with David Robson
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steve Jobs had genius-level intelligence and built one of the largest and most influential companies in the world. This is impressive, but at the same time that Apple was achieving success, Jobs denied fathering his own daughter, was forced to take a DNA test, and ended up paying a tiny amount of child support for her entire youth despite having millions.
I never met Steve Jobs, but universally, he’s portrayed as a jerk. He’s the super-intelligent guy that you’d rather not invite over for dinner. So what good is a high IQ if your family and friends can’t stand you? What is the point of success if you have no one to share it with?
Intelligence is often put on a pedestal, but the trappings are often glazed over. On this week’s podcast, we’ll unpack the “intelligence trap” and provide a new perspective on contextualizing brainpower.
Listen & Learn:
- Why smart people are prone to motivated reasoning
- How entrenchment and earned dogmatism plague some of the best minds
- How to self distance to avoid the traps
- Why a growth mindset can keep you learning and changing with the times
Links & Resources:
About Our Guest
David Robson is a science writer based in London, UK, specializing in brains, bodies and behavior. He was a features editor at New Scientist for five years and is currently a senior journalist at BBC Future. He regularly features on the BBC World Service and his writing has also appeared in the Guardian, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post. His new book is called The Intelligence Trap.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you could rewind the clock and go back to the day you were born and you could choose, |
| 0:07.0 | if you could tell the doctor, hey, give me a really high IQ or give me a really low IQ, make me really smart or make me a little bit dim. Obviously you choose to be |
| 0:16.4 | really smart. Intellectual power, processing power between your ears. It's probably |
| 0:20.4 | going to play out pretty well whether you're a doctor or a school teacher, |
| 0:24.1 | whether you're a stay-at-home parent, or whether you're a politician's probably going to be helpful |
| 0:28.5 | no matter what you're doing. And the statistics in terms of career success success they track along with this hypothesis. |
| 0:35.0 | But what it doesn't really take into account is the stuff of life that maybe matters more. |
| 0:40.0 | Like how do you do in your relationships? |
| 0:42.0 | How do you do socially? How do you do with friends? Does anyone at work actually like you? |
| 0:46.0 | Right? And this is the intelligence trap when we put intelligence on a |
| 0:53.4 | pedestal and we think of someone like Steve Jobs as God when it just takes a few minutes and a little bit of reading of |
| 0:57.3 | biography is to realize that guy had a whole bunch of things that were pretty |
| 1:01.5 | off kilter. On this week's podcast we'll be talking about the intelligence |
| 1:05.3 | trap on a nuanced level, the different traps that people fall into. It doesn't matter if you have an average |
| 1:10.2 | IQ or you're a genius or you're a little bit on the low end all of us |
| 1:14.0 | can still fall into these traps when we think about intelligence in the wrong way. |
| 1:18.4 | If you're new here it's the Lucas Rockwood show I'm your host I'm a |
| 1:21.4 | yoga teacher trainer I'm a serial entrepreneur but. I'm your host. I'm a yoga teacher, a trainer, I'm a serial entrepreneur, but mostly I'm just a student. I like to learn stuff so I go out into the world of health and wellness, personal growth and development, and I try to find people writing books, doing research research doing important work that can hopefully help you live a more fulfilled life. |
| 1:37.0 | If you'd like to write into the show send me voicemail actually that's even better go to yoga body dot com forward slash |
| 1:43.8 | ask Lucas and if you like this show the best way to support me is simply to |
| 1:48.3 | share the show on social and tag me it's at Lucas Rockwood |
| 1:52.3 | thanks for listening. Enjoy. |
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