Hello and welcome to a new series of Everything Else, the FT Culture Podcast.

I'm Grizalda Maya Brown and I'm one of the arts editors here.

This week I'll be asking my guests while that elusive and slippery thing, genius, is.

Is Kanye West a genius because he keeps saying he is?

Is it something that we should all actually be striving for?

Or is it okay to be simply average?

And later in the show, the actor Clark Peters,

best known as Detective Lester Freeman in The Wire,

will be discussing his role in the new film

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

If you listen to the last series, you might be wondering where my co-host Al Gilmore has got to.

Well, Al is on parental leave, which is very different from an extended holiday and much harder work than being at work, I'm told.

So I'm holding the fort, along with some very exciting guests.

Today I'm joined by the actor Lucian Masamati, who is star of the National Theatre's production of Amadeus. And Amadeus picks apart the competitive rivalry between Mozart and another composer no one's ever heard of now called Salieri, who's played by Lucian.

And I'll also be welcoming Peter Aspden back to the podcast. He writes about the arts for the FT.

I'll be grilling them both about the nature of genius.

I wanted to start by really kind of trying to get a hold on this, on this term genius and trying

to define it a bit.

Peter, can I start with you?

What is a genius?

Yeah, good luck with that one.

I'm reminded of this by a very good friend of mine who once went to an interview to do an

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