8 Emmy contenders that show off real-life L.A. locations
There has never been a shortage of TV series that take place in Los Angeles, the longtime hub of the American television industry and its players. But the 2025 Emmy season features such a wealth of shows set and shot in and around L.A. that we couldn't resist spotlighting how several of them use the iconic locale we call home.
The Apple TV+ comedy, which follows an interconnected group of co-workers, friends and neighbors, is set mainly in Pasadena and Altadena. Location manager David Flannery, a fifth-generation Pasadena native, notes, 'So often [these cities] play for everywhere else in the world. But we want to show exactly where we are — which is just a little more specific than general L.A. — and that the characters are grounded in very real places.' These sites have included the Rose Bowl, Pasadena City Hall, Pasadena's Central Park (featuring the landmark Castle Green building) and the South Pasadena train station. The Laird and Bishop family homes, with their adjoining backyards, may look like a set but are actually neighboring Altadena houses, both of which survived the Eaton fire.
Although Hulu's Emmy-winning comic mystery is the ultimate New York tale, its Season 4 opener sent its crime-solving lead trio to Tinseltown to pursue a movie adaptation of their popular podcast. Co-creator and showrunner John Hoffman, calling in during the show's Season 5 shoot, says, 'Last season had to start in L.A. It really kicks off a season that is specific to cinema, to moving images.' Filming took place on the classic Paramount Studios lot, at the historic Il Borghese condo building in Hancock Park and at an 'ultra-glamorous, deeply L.A.' Hollywood Hills home, which served as studio exec Bev Melon's party house.
Creator-showrunner Erin Foster can't imagine her Netflix rom-com about a progressive rabbi and a gentile sex podcaster set anywhere but her native Los Angeles. 'You have to write what you know, and that's what I know,' she says by phone from her West Hollywood home. 'In L.A., people are following their dreams, so it says a lot about who someone is. I think the same applies to locations in a TV show: They all signal where [the characters] are in their life and who they are.' Some of these illustrative locales have included Westwood's Sinai Temple, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown, the Los Feliz 3 Theatre, Calamigos Ranch in Malibu and WeHo's Pleasure Chest sex shop.
Seth Rogen and company's raucous creation about a beleaguered movie studio chief is rooted in firsthand experience. 'Seth knows this town very, very well,' says supervising location manager Stacey Brashear. 'He and [co-creator] Evan Goldberg wrote in 90% of the locations, including the [John] Lautner-designed, Midcentury Modern houses that studio executives like to collect.' Among these eye-popping sites are the Silvertop house above the Silver Lake Reservoir and the Harvey House in the Hollywood Hills. Adds Brashear, 'I feel like our locations are actual characters in the show.' Among the Apple TV+ series' many other L.A. locations: the Warner Bros. studio lot, the Smoke House Restaurant in Burbank, Lake Hollywood Park and the Sunset Strip's Chateau Marmont.
This Netflix limited series revisits the 1989 murder of wealthy Beverly Hills couple José and Kitty Menendez by sons Erik and Lyle, a crime notoriously connected to Los Angeles. 'It was such a period of decadence and grandeur, and Beverly Hills was kind of the poster child for that,' says production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson. 'I wanted to recapture the [town's] glamour and celebrity culture.' He also notes, of L.A.'s diverse architecture, 'You can get quite a few different looks all in the same place.' These 'looks' included a grand Hancock Park-area home standing in for the Mendendez mansion, Koreatown's Wilshire Colonnade office complex, a 1970s-built Encino bank building, Beverly Hills' Will Rogers Memorial Park and the former Sunset Strip site of Spago, restored to look as it did in its heyday.
Unlike past seasons, in which L.A. often subbed for Las Vegas, Season 4 of 'Hacks' is mostly shot and set in Los Angeles. Says Lucia Aniello, co-creator with Paul W. Downs and Jen Stasky, 'Much of [the season] is getting back to the roots of L.A. comedy. It really is a love letter to Los Angeles — and to the comedy world.' Adds Downs, 'The show is a lot about people outside of the industry looking in. By being in L.A., we got to really explore what that means.' Some key locations: CBS Television City, the Lenny Kravitz-designed Stanley House, the Americana at Brand and Echo Park's Elysian Theater; the Altadena estate doubling for Deborah Vance's Bel-Air mansion was lost in the Eaton fire.
Loosely based on the life of Lakers President Jeanie Buss, this Netflix comedy is 'filled with a lot of L.A. DNA,' says co-creator and showrunner David Stassen. He adds that, like Buss, the show's star, Kate Hudson, 'is also part of a dynastic L.A. family. Plus, she knows Jeanie, she loves the Lakers and she grew up going to games.' Though much of the season was filmed downtown at Los Angeles Center Studios, location work included the Pacific Coast Highway south of Venice (where Cam, played by Justin Theroux, crashes his Porsche), downtown L.A.'s elegant Hotel Per La and homes in Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills. The L.A. skyline gets quite the workout here as well.
Netflix's reimagining of Judy Blume's 1975 novel unfolds in 2018 Los Angeles, where it evocatively explores first love between teens Justin and Keisha. Showrunner and L.A. native Mara Brock Akil considers her adaptation 'a love letter to Los Angeles and to the idyllic life we're all trying to live in this city, where dreams are not isolated to one particular neighborhood.' Key parts of the story take place around Keisha's home in the View Park-Windsor Hills area, with the show's many other L.A. locations including Ladera Park, St. Mary's Academy in Inglewood, the Grove and the Original Farmers Market, Griffith Park and the Santa Monica Pier. Adds Akil, 'A lot of people [in L.A.] are moving around on public transportation, which I wanted to shine a light on too.'
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Harvey Weinstein case judge declares mistrial on remaining rape charge as jury foreperson won't deliberate
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Elon and the Genius Trap
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Was Elon Musk ever a genius? Yes, he revolutionized the electric-car industry and space travel. Yes, he once seemed to represent America' restored American confidence in its ability to innovate at the cutting edge of technology. But Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and he doesn't regularly appear in headlines as a prominent tech genius. In fact, many well-informed people probably don't even know his name. So what makes one man merely wildly accomplished and another a genius? And which descriptor makes a man more likely to engage in an ego-crushing battle with the president? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Explaining how Musk tanked his reputation has many ways: First, he alienated environmentalists by teaming up with Trump, and then he alienated Trump fans by insulting their hero. Another way is clear by looking at American culture's historical relationship with 'genius,' and how it tends to go wrong. Genius, it turns out, is less a series of accomplishments than a form of addiction. It traps the men who indulge it, and they often end up, like Musk, depleted. We talk with Lewis about what Musk has in common with Thomas Edison, how the psychedelics fit into the archetype, and what the possible paths are for Musk moving forward.[] News clip: The bromance is over. President Trump and Elon Musk trading barbs today over Republicans' 'big, beautiful bill.' Hanna Rosin: Well, last week, something no one could have expected to happen finally happened. The president of the United States and the richest man in the world had a spectacular falling out. News clip: A pretty intense back-and-forth between Donald Trump and Elon Musk— News clip: Musk now claiming he won Trump the 2024 election to Trump threatening to cancel Musk's federal contracts— News clip: Elon Musk tweeting within the past one minute: 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That's the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!' Rosin: The feud between Trump and Musk escalated at a bewildering pace. Donald Trump: Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if it went well anymore. I was surprised. Rosin: Trump may have been surprised, but to a lot of us watching, a partnership of two egos this huge was doomed to break up. This week, Musk has tried to patch things up, saying he regrets some of what he said, without specifying what exactly. But Trump is more or less not engaging, and it looks like, for the moment at least, Musk's reputation has hit rock bottom. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we consider the long arc of Elon Musk in the context of other historical figures who, like him, were given the revered title of 'genius.' Not that long ago, Musk was considered a visionary by Americans across the political spectrum, an inventor solving climate change, space exploration, and, really, whatever he set his mind to. But as we all know, the last few years have seen his reputation crater on the left: His support of Trump, his buyout of Twitter, his online presence, loaded with memes and conspiracy theories. Basically, anything to troll the libs, many of whom had been his fans. Now his fallout with the president is making him suspect on the right, leaving him a constituency of no one. So how do we understand the arc of Musk, someone who could have gone down in history as one of the great tech geniuses but, instead, used his reputation to get himself more and more attention and, in the process, seems to have torched that very reputation? As it so happens, staff writer Helen Lewis has a very timely book out next week that helps explain this pattern. It's titled The Genius Myth, and Musk is its quintessential modern example. As Lewis argues, societies build myths of individual geniuses, and often those geniuses overstay their welcome, having second or third acts as they try to be experts in every field or to simply keep the attention they're accustomed to. I asked her to put the week's Musk news into a wider picture, and to explain why she thinks we should avoid the label 'genius' altogether. Here's our conversation. [] Rosin: Helen, welcome to the show. Helen Lewis: Thank you. Rosin: Sure. So I wanna start before this feud between Trump and Musk, maybe even before Musk bought Twitter. So let's say it's 2020, and this is when Trump publicly calls Musk 'one of our great geniuses' and compares him to Thomas Edison. What is it about Musk that qualifies him for that rarefied public title of genius? Lewis: At the time, I think the assumption was that he had revolutionized not just one but two industries, which is very rare. You know, in driving down the cost of space parts, he undoubtedly challenged, essentially, the kind of government-funded monopoly and the slow way that space exploration was going. You know, there was this humbling period for America, where it couldn't even get its own astronauts up into space. It had to rely on, you know, hitching a ride with the Russians. And he managed to, in that sense, restore a kind of American pride in itself. And then, obviously, you have Tesla and its electric vehicles, and turning electric vehicles away from their previous reputation, which was the Toyota Prius, which is a sort of thing you bought as a kind of hair shirt, right— a hair shirt with wheels on to say, I'm sorry for killing the planet—into the idea that an electric car was something you might have because it was cool and it was a good car. And both of those really did remind me actually of Thomas Edison, because both of them are kind of—the nickname that Edison had was the 'American Prometheus.' They were both about an idea of America as a place that still is at the white-hot edge of technology. You know, a place you can still build things and do things. Rosin: Okay, so Elon has these amazing accomplishments. He restores a certain kind of American confidence in itself. But is a genius just someone who accomplishes great things? Like, in the book, you make a really interesting comparison to Tim Berners-Lee, who's thought of as the actual inventor of the World Wide Web. So why does one get to be a genius, and the other is a man who just does a lot of amazing accomplishments? Lewis: Well, you have to also, I think, be prepared to play the role of the genius in public and inhabit that role. And you know, Tim Berners-Lee has had a lot of acclaim. He's got a knighthood here in Britain. He's an honorary fellow in lots of places. But he doesn't swagger about like he's a kind of special sort of human, a class apart, which is I think what Musk, you know, has accepted for himself—that, you know, and has again, like Thomas Edison done, driven a lot of that mythology himself. You know, Thomas Edison notoriously worked through the nights at the laboratory in Menlo Park with his team. And Elon Musk had a similar mythology, which is all about the fact that, you know, he never sleeps. You know, he would have a sleeping bag on the floor of the factory because he was so dedicated. And, like, he was just relentless, and everybody had to be 'extremely hardcore.' So the argument in the book is that achievements are one thing, but we're also into this idea of a kind of mythology around a person. There's this kind of embrace of specialness. And the line that I give that's the, kind of, classic example of this is, you know, Elon Musk currently has—where are we now? I mean, who knows by the time this comes out how many acknowledged children we have, but I think we're currently at 14, and they're called things like Romulus and X Æ A-12. And, you know, Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called Alice and Ben, right? Rosin: (Laughs.) Lewis: This, to me, is just, like: One of you is just a normal person who happens to have done some cool stuff, and one of you has decided I'm gonna try and, like, optimize everything in my life to be a really great story to sound special. Rosin: Right. So the key ingredient of genius is that you're willing to step into the role or mythology of genius. You're willing to sort of lean into the story about yourself as a public genius. Lewis: Right. And you also become a symbol of something bigger. That's what I mean about—becoming a national symbol is a very obvious version of this. William Shakespeare is not just a brilliant playwright—I think that's unarguable—but he became, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, an argument for the English language at a time that Britain was expanding its ambitions abroad. You know, this was the kind of high point of the British empire and, therefore, we needed a playwright to match. And I think you can actually see a similar thing with maybe someone like Chinua Achebe, who becomes a kind of symbol of the nation, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Nigeria now. You know, she's writing novels that are concerned with the Nigerian experience or the Nigerian American experience, inhabiting that bigger role than just being another writer. Rosin: So when you think of Musk in these terms, like how he has successfully styled himself as this very special category of person—the genius—how did that play into his relationship with Trump? Lewis: Well, if you have two people who are both convinced that they're geniuses, it doesn't usually work well. And actually, maybe this is something that Musk should have known, because the car company he owns—obviously, Tesla—is named after Nikola Tesla. And Nikola Tesla, an absolutely brilliant engineer, walked out of working there. He just couldn't get on with Thomas Edison. The story goes that he had a bet, and he won it, and Edison refused to pay up, which bizarrely has an analog in the story that Sam Harris, the former member of the 'Intellectual Dark Web,' tells about having a bet about COVID deaths with Elon Musk. And Sam Harris won, and Elon failed to pay up. So, you know, I think the trouble is genius is always a story about ego, and I don't think I was alone in predicting that the Trump-Musk relationship would at some point explode, because you have two giant silverback-gorilla egos wrestling for dominance, and that is a tension that simply can't be sustained. Rosin: Right, right. And it is true that Trump called himself a genius. He doesn't call many people geniuses, but he did refer to himself as a genius. In the book, you write about how if we declare someone a genius, we believe they have magical powers to do anything, as opposed to, say, specialized skills to do a few specific things. I was wondering if that contributed to Musk's downfall—this idea (that maybe Trump had also) that he could fix any problem, like inefficiencies in the government, just whatever. You set the genius loose and the genius fixes everything. Lewis: Yeah, DOGE is a story of enormous hubris. I think everyone would agree that the American government, like all governments, has a certain amount of waste and inefficiency built into it. But the idea that you could do what Musk did—which is go in with a small cadre of lieutenants, lock everybody else out, and start deleting things based on simple-keyword searches—and that this would not have any negative or unintended consequences is laughable. And the reason that I think Musk thought that worked is that, to some extent, it had worked, particularly at Twitter—which, in the book Character Limit, his takeover there is chronicled. And he did exactly what would then become the DOGE playbook there: you know, brought in his lieutenants, cut the head count, told everyone that they were lazy and that only super, 'extremely hardcore' people could stay. And, you know, sure enough: Twitter is not what it once was. And I thought his tenure at Twitter would be a disaster, and I think probably in economic terms it has been. But what it did was it bought him the attention of Donald Trump. And that looked like it was a very good bet because he was then in a position to make sure he had extremely preferential access to the government in terms of his contracts. That's now a more questionable outcome, given the falling out between him and Donald Trump. Rosin: It's very interesting how you describe the history of Twitter, given your book, because even though his management of Twitter was not genius-level successful, it does seem to have increased his mythology as a genius. Like, he sort of spread the word and myth about himself via Twitter, even as he was doing, you know, less-than-genius things at the actual company. Lewis: The original title for the book, working title, for a long time was The Selfish Genius, which I liked as a pun and, it turned out, no one else got. But it did go to this idea that you are more likely to be held as a genius if you run a kind of election campaign for it. So, you know, one of my examples would be Isaac Newton, undoubtedly a brilliant mathematician but also extremely keen that he got the credit for calculus rather than his German rival, Gottfried Leibniz. You know, these things don't necessarily happen by accident. Often, the genius themselves or their fans, you know, run a kind of publicity campaign for this idea of them as a genius. Rosin: Right. Part of being 'the genius,' like, with quotes around it, is being your own PR around the genius. Like, you just have to be good at that. Lewis: Yeah. Or you have to go and sit in obscurity and kind of let other people create the mythology for you. Rosin: Right. And I guess Musk does both. I mean, he's able to rally an army of fans, stans, and to also do his own PR. Lewis: And there's a phrase that Manvir Singh, the anthropologist, uses about shamans in traditional society, which is that they cultivate an air of 'charismatic otherness.' And I think that also very helpfully describes what geniuses do, or the people around geniuses do. I can't remember who it was who said that every Silicon Valley startup essentially functions like a cult. You know, there's this mission, and there's this one guy at the top of it who's leading everybody on the mission. And I think probably, in the case of Musk's earlier businesses, when he was trying to, essentially, solve climate change and solve space exploration, people did want to join the Elon cult. It's just when the mission is Let's turn Twitter into a more effective vehicle for racism and videos of people losing their shit on street corners, who wants to join that mission? Who wants to, you know, sacrifice their weekends to believe in that? Rosin: Well, this is such an interesting moment because as the breakup is happening—and we're in the middle of it, so we don't know where it will land and what will happen to Musk's reputation, but—the language and the reputation is shifting in real time. So Trump has now reportedly referred to Musk as part genius, part child—he adds the word child—but also crazy. And I'm just wondering if there's some moment where, you know, it's the one drop in the milk that curdles the milk—like, some line where what people used to perceive as eccentricities of the so-called genius suddenly seem like, you know, real negatives, not fake, charismatic negatives, but actual negatives—and if you've been tracing that line. Lewis: The danger for Elon Musk now is that, having alienated basically anyone on the broad left of politics, you know, his original constituency—back when he was a Democratic donor and he was talking about electric vehicles as necessary for combating climate change—they're all gone. He's now alienating anybody on the right who is loyal to Trump, which is, on the surface, everybody. You know, who knows how they feel in the secrets of their hearts, but ostensibly the Republican Party is the Trump party, so he doesn't really have a kind of caucus who want to advance him as an argument. This is what I mean in the book, about genius being an argument for something. Calling someone a genius is often a way of making an argument. And the argument that Elon Musk, as lionizing him, was making, is the idea of: Government is slow and sclerotic and holds back innovation. You know, You need to let Tesla do its thing. You need to let SpaceX do its thing. That's the only way we get to the future. And of course, that's a partial story. Tesla makes a lot of money by trading carbon credits to other car companies. It makes a lot of money from government subsidies from electric cars. You know, these stories are very rarely as rugged and 'Randian' as they appear on the surface. But, you know, Elon Musk was used as an argument for the singular innovative genius, and that's a right-wing argument predominantly in America as it currently stands. But having lost the left, he's now just quite spectacularly lost the right, and you look at his approval ratings, and they are in the Mariana Trench—I mean, just could not be lower. Rosin: When we're back, I ask Helen what happens when a reputation craters like Musk's has, and what the myth of genius can leave out of the story. That's when we're back. [Break] Rosin: And so that's what we are witnessing in real time now with Elon Musk, the kind of deconstruction of whatever mythology he had built around himself, and we just still don't know how it will play out. So once he no longer effectively represents that argument, maybe the sort of glow fades like he's not a genius anymore, because genius needs a purpose—like, a political or social purpose, the label 'genius.' And when he's not doing it effectively, Trump is less interested. Lewis: Well, yeah. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Musk is no longer as useful to Trump. Not least, I think the biggest thing that he did that was a mistake was to give his interview to Mishal Husain of Bloomberg and say, I'm not going to give any more money in the midterms, at which point, your reason for stifling your doubts about why this guy is toting his kid around and, you know, jumping in the air, and doing mad posts, and all that stuff is just taken away, right? There was a lot of Shut up and, like, We need his money. And as soon as you say, I'm cutting off the money, then people are free to air the opinions that they've clearly always held in the background anyway. Rosin: Right. Like, the news about Musk's drug use, which had been bubbling up but is now pretty voluminous—although, we should say that Musk recently said he's not taking drugs and simply tried prescription ketamine a few years ago. That said, I could imagine a world where, previously, people would look at his reported psychedelic use and kind of excuse that as the habits of an eccentric genius. And now they look at it more—now that the 'genius' label is fading—as more just genuinely dysfunctional. Lewis: Yes. I mean, you are right to mention, you know, the drug use, because it's interesting that, again, genius is a sort of connection with the divine in a secular society. It's a promise of something superhuman. And so it's not surprising, to me, that you see lots of these tech guys talking about going to Burning Man, talking about doing ayahuasca, talking about altered states of consciousness—because that, again, positions them as modern shamans. You know, they're in connection with something that is outside of the experience of ordinary mortals. I have this line in the book that genius transmutes oddness into specialness. And I think what happens is a lot of reverse engineering, where somebody gets anointed a genius, and then their whole biography is kind of combed through for things that confirm the theory. So it can be, you know, Oh, look at his childhood. In the case of Elon Musk, the things we hear about his childhood was that he would have these reveries, where he would drift off, and that he was badly bullied. And those are, funnily enough, the same things that you hear about Thomas Edison's childhood. He was deaf and seemed to be spending a lot of time in the world of his own. Now, that's true of lots of children, most of whom don't go on to greater achievements. But because you've put this label on someone, we look back and read everything through that prism. Rosin: Right. Okay. So what does the template leave out then? Like, in the case of Elon, you know, there's a template. It leads to your rise in success. What parts are not told? What people get left out of a story like this? Lewis: I mean, all the support staff, really, and all the people who kind of grease the wheels for the great man get slowly downgraded—you know, all the collaborators. You know, I still regularly catch myself and copy wanting to write 'Elon Musk, founder of Tesla.' And, of course, he wasn't, right? It was founded by two other guys, and he took it over. I mean, he was an early investor, but he got the title co-founder as part of a legal settlement. You know, and the fact that X—you know, he was forced out of PayPal by Peter Thiel and the board. You know, he had failures along the way too. All of that stuff kind of gets hastily kind of airbrushed away. Like, I always think of it a bit kind of like a scaffolding around the kind of statue of David, right? And we knock away the scaffolding, and then we just got the perfect statue. And that's the way that we tend to look at geniuses. You know, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, I have a chapter in the book, obviously, about wives. You know, having somebody who is both your kind of domestic partner and somebody who is maybe a muse or maybe your kind of collaborator, but happy to take a secondary role, that's a huge, huge advantage to you. And also, material conditions: You know, why did Elon Musk move from South Africa to America? Because he wanted to study at the best university, where people were doing the most interesting stuff. He wanted to get funding from venture capitalists who are based in Silicon Valley. You know, Elon Musk could not have been Elon Musk in Pretoria. If he'd stayed there, he might have been a very successful businessman, but he wouldn't be who he is today. So this is what I find deeply irritating about the people who think that, you know, it's all them and they're this unique success story. Elon Musk's success story, credit to him—he has a great deal to do with it. But it is also a story of universities, of American culture, of American wealth, of everything that [Silicon] Valley built up over the course of more than half a century. There are a lot of other bit-part players in the story who shouldn't be, you know, downgraded so we can focus only on the protagonist. Rosin: You know, I deeply appreciated your chapter about wives because one fact that always breaks my brain is how, across the decades and even up until now, we so closely associate the term genius with men. And you created a very simple formula, which is that a genius needs a wife, and it's much less often that a woman has a wife. And so, you know, that's part of the mythology. Lewis: Yeah, I mean, Gertrude Stein had Alice B. Toklas, and that worked out pretty well for her. But it's been throughout history, yes, I think straight women have particularly suffered. I remembered this from writing Difficult Women, my previous book, which was about feminism. I had a chapter on the suffrage movement in the U.K., and there was a quote from the suffragette Hannah Mitchell that said, No cause was won between dinner and tea—which, to translate that into American meals, that's actually lunch and dinner. But her point was that if you had domestic responsibilities, your thinking time was disrupted, and actually not just, you know, in sheer volume of hours, but just in the amount of your kind of brain space you could dedicate to having big thoughts. And it's really interesting that so many—you know, look at the MacArthur genius grants now. They are about taking away money worries and domestic concerns, in order that people can excel to their fullest potential. We all acknowledge that it's really, really hard to manage that kind of big, demanding career as well as being a primary caregiver. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. I mean, Marie Curie managed it, just about, but very few people do. Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Now, Elon's interest in propagating little Elons—in your book, you describe a long history of geniuses being very interested in the continued propagation of geniuses as a special class. How does he fit into that history? Lewis: Well, it's the propagation of people like themselves, really. I think that's the thing. Rosin: But isn't it also this idea that you can propagate yourself? I mean, it's almost like trying to sort of take this idea of the genius and reduce it to some kind of perfect science? Like, you can just replicate it or clone it. Lewis: Yeah, it's hardcore belief in the power of hereditary genius, which that's the title of the book, the 19th-century book, by Francis Galton, the eugenicist, Hereditary Genius, in which he attempted to categorize all of Britain into different classes, which he all gave a different letter to and worked out how many people fitted in each one. Which, you know, to me, now that obviously sounds like a sort of deranged plan, but this was at a time when people were obsessed with classification and, also, because of the recent discovery of evolution by natural selection, a real interest in breeding and its effect on animals and, therefore, humans. And from that, as you say, you do get this horrific legacy of eugenics, as practiced by both the Nazis and in lots of America, including California. But it persists in these soft forms about people wanting to have smart kids. Now, that's something that everybody would like to do at a kind of basic level. But there is this often-recurrent belief among supersmart people that their children will be supersmart. And actually, statistically, the issue with that is that there is a very common phenomenon known as 'reversion to the mean,' which means that, you know, if you are very smart, you are an outlier—you've probably got the kind of best version of all of the genes that influence intelligence—and that your children are not likely to be outstanding to the exact level that you are and the exact way that you are. So it's, to some extent, you know, a delusion, but it's a very recurrent one. And the story of the genius sperm bank, which there's a book by David Plotz about it, which I highly recommend to people. Essentially, an eccentric millionaire called Robert K. Graham, who made his money inventing shatterproof plastic lenses for spectacles, decides that he's going to go and collect the sperm of a load of Nobel Prize winners, in order to kind of breed a sort of, you know, better, superior race of Americans because America was getting very degenerate. I mean, this is the bit that is always—the side adjunct to it is: Why do we need these geniuses? And the answer usually comes back, Modern culture is degraded. Everybody's lazy. Everybody's degenerate. Often that comes with racial overtones. You know, it's no longer pure (read: white European). And you know, so he said that he got three Nobel winners to donate, including William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, and then embarked on an enthusiastic second career as a scientific racist and eugenicist. And I think, you know, Shockley is an interesting template for a kind of proto-Elon Musk in the 20th century, in that he had an undoubtedly distinguished first half of his career, and then the second half of his career was spent saying increasingly radical things to enormous pushback, which he then presented as him being whatever the 1970s word for 'canceled' was. You know, as if the reaction itself proved that he was doing something right. And also, in both cases, about a feeling that maybe the creative juice of the career had run dry but, you know, the attention tap needed to stay on. And that's something that I think you see with lots of people who talk about this kind of breeding of geniuses, is that they know that they're putting their hand on, you know, a hob that is still hot. They know people react enormously strongly to these discussions about race and intelligence, and, therefore, they can't stop themselves from dabbling in it. Rosin: Right. Okay. So that's where we are now with Musk. Now he's a little bit of a different case study than some of the historical geniuses you write about, because he's alternately a genius and a juvenile idiot. Like, he attracts genius sycophants as much as genius debunkers. What does that mean? Like, none of these other geniuses existed in the age of social media, where you had so much controversy around someone. Do you think that points to a different path for him? Lewis: He's certainly a much more unfiltered genius than you've got in the past, but there are precursors to that. One of the reasons Thomas Edison is so famous is that he was operating in Menlo Park in New Jersey, which was a short train ride away from New York, which meant that if you were an enterprising young reporter on a big New York paper, you could get on a very easy train and be there in a couple of hours and stroll into his laboratory—where he would spin you a yarn about the latest thing that he was creating—and go home, write it up, and everybody would be, you know, excited. Being Thomas Edison correspondent was a good gig. And so you did get a lot of him being publicized by a whole cadre of people whose careers came to depend on him. And as you say, in his later career, after his great success helping the electricity grid be put into New York, he did really run dry. He did some very badly received experiments with ore mining. By that point, he'd moved out of the kind of useful phase of his career into the kind of oracle phase. And people would come, and he would, you know, talk to them about intelligence and the spirit world and his plans for world peace. And that is the phase—I think you're right—that Elon Musk is currently in. The only difficulty is that he doesn't have that filtered through a load of newspaper reporters in whose interest it is to present him in the best and most interesting possible light, you know, to perpetuate the myth of this kind of savant. What we have, instead, is him posting pictures of himself, like AI-generated images of him as Kekius Maximus, the gladiator, which makes it slightly harder to maintain the kind of genius mystique that you might hope for in those situations. Rosin: Right, right, right. Yeah. I think the phrase you used about Edison was coasting on the fumes of his own publicity, and it made me see very vividly the possible future paths for Musk. Like, you can see a future where he just goes on and fixes Tesla and, you know, does some useful things for space exploration, as you mentioned. But there's this other path, where he's just increasingly a meme—like, increasingly ridiculous. Lewis: He's at a crossroads right now. And, you know, Joe Rogan, the podcaster, who is a personal friend of his, said on his show last week, I think Elon needs to put the phone down. And I think at that point, when, you know, your extremely anti-woke friend who says—you know, I watched Joe Rogan do standup for the piece I wrote for The Atlantic last year, and he said, you know, Elon's so intelligent. He makes me feel like a man and his dog when I talk to him—if that friend is the one saying to you probably time to put the phone down, you have to hope that he would listen. But I don't know if he will. But that is the great paradox of Elon Musk—is that, you know, he has two futures ahead of him: One, beloved sage who got us to Mars; one, vile shitposter who burned away a promising reputation while still maintaining a huge amount of money. You know, this might be a sort of delightful bump on the road in the Musk story. You know, this might be the sort of Rocky-style montage, where he was at his worst low, and from that he rebuilt. Because these are stories and they're, therefore, you know, flexible. And, you know, then they could be rewritten. But you can almost feel everything bending towards the shape that the story wants to be. That's how I felt when I was writing this, is that we have these templates and the facts end up being nudged towards them, and people end up acting in ways that do that actively too. Rosin: Right. Let's move into an alternate universe, which is something that Musk likes to do, where Elon is not subject to the genius myth. How should we think of a person like Musk? Would you be just evaluating accomplishments? Like, would you say something a person did is genius, but you would not step into the trap of calling a person a genius, because that triggers so much else mythology—but it would be reasonable to say, Oh, this company or this decision that a person made was a genius decision? Like, would that be a better way to use that term? Lewis: That's, ultimately, how I see it. It's better to talk about moments of inspiration, of fingertip touches with a divine, if you want to see it like that. You know, I don't want to be a killjoy who crushes people's appreciation of— you know, I write in the book about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh, which I just absolutely love, and you know, the fact that he melded together impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints in this completely new synthesis. And the paintings, you can just feel the emotion pouring out of them and the brush work is so distinctive. I just—you know, I love them, and I'm bowled over by them. And I don't want to cheapen that by being, you know, grubby about it and saying, It's just a painting. My 5-year-old could have done that. No one's better than anyone else. No, I do think that those paintings are some of the best expressions of genius, in the sense of being kind of unfathomable. But I do think that the mythology itself is essentially marketing, you know, in the case of Van Gogh, very much created by his sister-in-law. So his posthumous reputation is bolstered by the idea of him as the tortured genius. And I think you're exactly right. In the case of Musk, it would be more interesting to read an appraisal of Tesla as a company or SpaceX as a company, and just take him out of the equation entirely, because I think that he's there looming over it and maybe, really, clouding people's judgment about those companies. Tesla is, you know, is paying him vast amounts of money, to the extent that it is currently in court about how much they want to pay him, because they believe that having a genius at the helm is so vital to what they're doing. And that may be profoundly distorting the reality of Tesla's market position. So yeah, I think it would be a healthier story to just try and put aside the mythology and see what's actually happening. Rosin: Right. Well, that is so helpful, Helen. Thank you so much for helping us understand this moment through the lens of genius. And congratulations on your book. Lewis: Thank you. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
