Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome.

I, of course, I'm Karen Hunter.

And on this day, I'm looking at this space following my radio show, but going deeper into issues that I may not have time because it's a live show to get to.

So today I want to talk about and explore

genius and how it's lost, how it's found. Does it exist? Should we even aspire to it? Should we

claim to be geniuses? We throw around this term a lot. This person is a genius. That person is a

genius. But is that really what we're saying? Joining me today is somebody that I love having these conversations with.

She's also a producer of the Karen Hunter Show, one of the producers. Let me welcome. Tremel McKenzie. Hello. Hey, Karen. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming in. I appreciate you. You sent me this clip. I didn't get to play it on the radio. So this is another reason why we're doing this podcast because, you know, during the course of the week, you may send me about a dozen clips and I might get one of them in on the show with everything else that's going on. But you sent me a clip of Malcolm Gladwell. He has a new book out. He's a journalist who's been doing a lot of, you know, study of why people succeed and why they don't. I'm going to play a little bit of this clip

from Instagram. To wrestle with is, why did that group fail? What's the difference between this

group who did beautifully well and this group who did so poorly at the bottom? And he runs through,

I mean, this question obviously obsesses him and he runs through every conceivable explanation for that

difference. And he says, is it their personalities? And it's not. He says, is it their habits? Is it there? And it goes on and on

the list. And he realizes in the end that the answer is really, really simple. And that is that the kids who did best, these genius kids who ended up succeeding in the world were the ones who came from wealthy households.

And that the genius level kids who ended up utter failures in life were the ones who were born

into poor families. Born into families where parents hadn't gone to college, where there weren't

books in the home, where there wasn't the kind of cultural and institutional support for a habit

of learning and a habit of intellectual activity.

What he was saying, in other words, that even if you endow a child with a brain that is a one in a billion brain,

that is not sufficient to ensure the success of that child.

That poverty is such a powerful constraint on capitalization that it can reduce

that genius child to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity, a lifetime of really profound

disappointment. That's powerful. Profound disappointment. We're going to talk a lot in this

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