There was a recent interview with Elon Musk where he said something, my mind is a storm.
I don't think most people would want to be me.
They may think they would want to be me, but they don't.
They don't know.
They don't understand.
What do you think of that?
Elon's someone that people probably look up to and admire and aspire to be.
One of the downsides to high-level genius is you might describe it as hypomania.
So here's a simple test that people can do.
So this is a test of something called verbal fluency, and verbal fluency is associated with creativity.
And so here's a simple verbal fluency test.
Write down as many four-letter words as you can in three minutes that begin with T. okay that's that's pretty constrained four letters in t or or write down as many words as you can in three minutes to begin with s that's less constrained all right so there's quite a powerful correlation between the sheer number of words that you produce and your lifetime creative achievement right especially in the artistic and verbal domains That's different than vocabulary.
Vocabulary is how many words you understand.
Fluency is how many words you can produce in a given amount of time.
Deployment of those words.
Yeah.
Well, people vary to a degree that you can hardly imagine.
So some people, if you get them to do the four letter test in three minutes they'll write down like 12 words and some will write down 150.
And the ones who are writing down 150. their minds are going at a hypomanic rate.
They're just thinking five times as fast as- Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
Yeah.
Without any remission whatsoever.
And When that gets completely out of control, you have manic.
You have someone who's manic.
And there's nothing fun about manic.
That's where the word maniac comes from.
And someone who's manic has a thousand different plans, each of which are one sentence long, that they're hyper enthusiastic about.
They'll spend every cent of their money pursuing them, and things just go immediately to hell.
And so that's the outer limit of pathology on the creative front.
And someone like Musk, who's clearly a genius.
That's what he's contending with in his internal landscape.
Now I'm not saying that he's manic, because I see no signs of that, but someone that creative is on that edge.
Or you see someone like Ben Shapiro.
I mean it's very interesting to talk to Ben because and Russell Brand is the same way shapiro speaks, i think, more rapidly than anyone i ever met.
But if you're with him you see very clearly that he's probably thinking five times that fast and that's a lot.
And when i was writing maps of meaning, which was my first book, i had a very difficult time shutting off my mind.
I was obsessed with that book and so i was writing about three hours a day and then i was thinking about the material like for 12 hours as and the thoughts came as way faster than thinking.
They probably came about as fast as i can read.
I can read about 1200 words a minute if the material isn't overwhelmingly dense, and so it was just non-stop thought for like 16 hours a day.
That's part of the reason i started lifting weights, because If I was lifting heavy enough weights- Can't be thinking of 1200 words a minute while I've got a hundred pounds on my back.
Exactly.
It was enough to shut it down.
And it was also one of the reasons that I drank, because that was another thing that would shut it off.
Yeah.
Well, I think the price that people pay to be the person that you admire is just such an interesting frame.
To look at someone like elon musk, my mind is a storm.
I don't think most people would want to be me.
The price that you would have to pay in order to be me is not one that you would be one of the richest men on the planet and you get to.
You know, dance on stage and release cars that are bulletproof and put rockets in space and stuff.
Well yeah, but What about all of the baggage?
What's the price?
Well, he also appears to me to be hyper-conscientious.
And I know people who've worked with him.
Like, Musk isn't just a creative genius.
He's also an extremely conscientious engineer.
And really conscientious engineers, they have very interesting minds.
I like talking to engineers because my brother-in-law is a great engineer.
And when he understands something Jim, when he understands something, he understands how to build it out of atoms, right?
Like he understands it at every single level.
And Musk appears to me to be someone who's this rare combination of hyper creative but also hyper conscientious, and i know that he works all the time.
Yeah, does that sort of uh, hypertrophied executive function help to wrangle some of the diffuse creative energy?
Oh, we're going to put it into this one thing, at least for a while, and then we'll move on to another.
Yes yes definitely, definitely you, you.
Eric weinstein's a good example of someone.
I hope eric isn't annoyed by this, but eric is unbelievably creative, but he's not particularly conscientious, and so his and and i think he found an occupation where that works extremely well because he's he.
I don't know if he's still doing this, but he worked with peter thiel for quite a long time as his idea man right, and eric's an extremely interesting person.
Musk is hyper-creative and, as far as I can tell, hyper-conscientious.
And the conscientiousness does focus.
And that lots of people who are creative aren't conscientious.
Well, it's rare.
There's no correlation between creativity and conscientiousness.
Okay.
So if you're one in a thousand, if you're the most creative person in a thousand and you're the most conscientious person in a thousand, you're one person in a million.
And Musk is probably more like one person in a hundred million. right?
Something like that, maybe more, or maybe a billion, right?
Maybe.
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