July 6, 2021 • 46 mins
Are geniuses made or born? Listen in today to the story of child prodigy William James Sidis.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant over there, and it's just
us today. And that's fine because it's a Thursday. We
get a little crazy on Thursday. So we have a
(00:23):
potluckum today. I brought Gavelta fish and Chuck doesn't like it.
But we're just moving forward and this is stuff you
should know. I think it's good. I brought my my
deviled eggs. Yeah they're good. Thank you. You took my
advice and used the secret ingredient Coleman's mustard. Oh of course,
(00:48):
friends who are weigh into Coleman's. By the way, it's
really great in deviled eggs. I'm not kidding. I believe it.
I'm sure if you're a mustard fan, it's the one
to go to. Oh yeah, you hate mustard for remember
the narrative I hate mustard And he refused to accept that. Yeah, yeah,
it's just so bonkers that I can't wrap my head
around it, I guess is the problem. Speaking of narrative,
(01:11):
this this story today is a bit of a cautionary
tale on narratives. I think, oh, well, well put um
and you know, we'll get into it here in a second.
But it's the story of a of a young genius prodigy.
And in researching this there you know a lot of
conflicting accounts about how his home life was and how
(01:37):
his parents treated him, and uh, it's a story of
media sensationalism, and it's a story of parents who were
ahead of the curve in a lot of ways for
the time. But also I don't know about victims, but
also just sort of fell into the usual state of
parenthood at the time, which is end of the very
(01:58):
sort of beginning of the twenties and reso, it's not
like parenting then, let's that it's at its peak, you know. Yeah, no,
And you can also say that his parents, conceivably and
him went against the grain of normalcy and status quo,
and that um, you know, the American public immedia kind
of bristled at that, and that they were treated poorly
(02:21):
for that. And so you know, do we how much
do we need to question of what what is said
about them from you know, journalism at the time, And
it's a it's a big morass, basically, I think to
paraphrase what you're saying. It's a cautionary tale about making
cautionary tales out of anything, right, Yeah, although I do
(02:41):
think this is a cautionary tale. But okay, so we'll
we'll we'll get to the end. Well, in the end,
we'll reveal what you think it's a cautionary tale about. Yeah,
and you know, well, let's just get into it. Let's
let's talk about William James. Is it sidis or side
it situs? Is it side ice? I don't think. So
(03:04):
that's what you keep in your pocket for when you've
got some lukewarm soda. Well, just like everything else with
this guy, heard a couple of different pronunciations on YouTube,
so so I saw it's it spelled out a couple
of different places that seem to know what they were
talking about side us, Yeah, with the emphasis on the side.
But I had not heard of him before, had you. Yeah.
(03:25):
I mean we did a chapter in our book on prodigies,
and um, I he wasn't in the book, but I
remember reading a little bit about him at the time,
and I think just the whole idea of child prodigies really, um,
it's super fascinating to me. So I would like to
do one on Prodigies, maybe tackled. That would be maybe
(03:46):
one of the first book chapters we retrofit as a podcast. Okay, cool, Yeah,
but yeah, they just have always fascinated me. And Billy
was interesting in that a lot of times prodigies are
prodigies in like a single discipline, not serily saying they're
big dumb dumbs everywhere else, but there's like one major focus.
(04:07):
But young Billy was a language prodigy, a math and
science prodigy. He was just a well rounded kind of
no a lot kid. Yeah, he really was, and he was.
He's very frequently lifted up as the prodigy, perhaps the
most gifted child that has ever lived, certainly at least
(04:29):
in the recorded history in the West, and maybe the
smartest human. Yeah, it's entirely possible. Yeah it is. Which
I think is another thing that will really come up
in that Prodigies episode is you know exactly how do
you how do you say who's the smartest and who's not?
Is it you know? Or i Q tests reliable? Which
(04:50):
I think in addition to Prodigies, we need to do
one just on i Q tests took Yeah, and I
also want to go ahead and correct myself when I
said he was well rounded, he was academically well round,
did because as we will see, he was not very
well rounded as a young child. Uh, and that was
one of the major mistakes that his parents made, Yeah,
for sure. UM And one of the other things that
(05:12):
he's also often kind of held out as an example of,
is this this burning question that we still have today,
is um, are gifted children the products of their environment?
Like can you just take basically any child and make
them a gifted prodigy? Um? Or is it you know, genetics?
(05:35):
Is it really just you know, is that we're gifted
apt apt you know, where like you're you're kind of
born with this. You didn't do anything to earn it
or deserve it. You just it's just who you are.
You're a gifted, intelligent person from a very early age.
And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of that.
But um and he actually he he kind of muddies
that the answer to that question more than answers it
(05:58):
at all, you know, because I mean, I definitely believe
that you were born gifted, but then from the moment
you're born on everything else plays in. So he comes
one of the reason I think he he muddies the
The answer to that question is he comes from very
intelligent stock. Both his mother and his father were extremely
(06:21):
intelligent people, um, but they also were the kind of
people who tried to educate him starting around age two,
maybe even a little earlier. So he's an amalgamation of
those two things. Parents who were incredibly intelligent who would
have ostensibly passed along some pretty smart jenes um, and
parents who you know, made him produced an environment for
(06:44):
him that made him into, you know, a prodigious learner. Yeah.
So let's let's start with his folks. His dad, Boris.
They were both Russian immigrants, and his dad was put
in jail and Russia before he managed to get out
of there for apparently in a prison that was so
small he couldn't even recline himself fully in sleep and
(07:05):
to sleep in a little like fetal position, I think,
And he was he was jailed for for teaching, and
he he was teaching peasants. He didn't have permission. They
didn't like that in Russia. He was let out after
a couple of years on the condition that he didn't
teach other people how to read anymore. And supposedly didn't
read himself, was under surveillance, but then got the heck
(07:27):
out of there. Yeah, he was like, I see the
writing on the wall. It's time for me to get
out of here. I'm going to go to America. Because
at the time, America was this shining beacon for immigrants
saying come, We're a land of opportunity. We turned the
lights on in the Statue of Liberty. Tom Brocott did
it himself and just like a motel six and um,
(07:50):
it's uh, it's it's the doors are open basically, So
he and Sarah um Billy's mom both took America up
on that, although separately. They actually met in America, although
they were both from the Ukraine, I believe, yeah, and
Boris he he sort of bucked a lot of trends
back then, and this was in the late eighteen hundreds.
(08:10):
He was an atheist, um, which was you know, not
in fashion at the time. He later got into like
he made a big name for himself in the early
days of psychology and psychoanalysis, and he was an opponent
of Freud, which was certainly rocked the boat at the time.
And then he really despised traditional education and kind of
(08:32):
all its forms and the way it was back then,
particularly wrote memorization, it was he just hated it so
much he saw zero value in it whatsoever. And so
like that's kind of the basis of his concept of
educating not just children but anybody. It's figure out what
the basics are, learned the basics, the fundamentals, and then
(08:52):
use those to reason your way to answer basically any
question that you possibly could have. And that that idea
applies to everything from philosophy to math, to literature to
history to language. That you can figure anything out if
you understand just a few fundamentals of it. And so
that's what his big focus was on. That. Yes, Sarah,
(09:14):
his mother, Um, she worked your way through college, paid
for it herself. She worked as a nurse at night,
went to medical school during the day. I believe was
the first woman admitted to Boston medical school or medical college.
And she never became a doctor, though she instead chose
to parent. And Um, they both worked their way to
(09:36):
the I mean, by the time they came to the
East Coast in the eighteen eighties, they both worked their
way to the top of as high as you could
get in academic achievement in the United States. I think
Boris had his bachelor's and masters from Harvard in three years.
And uh, yes, Sarah went to Boston. You and that
(09:57):
they were both overachievers and obviously had a kid. I
never really They had a daughter named Helena, but I
didn't see how much she achieved. I don't know either,
although I saw that she and her brother shared a
lot of similar interests, so they were close throughout his
whole life. I'm sure she was pretty smart too, Yeah,
I would guess so too. Dumb, No, for certainly not um.
(10:20):
But but the the one of the things about Boris
and Sarah's both of them. Everything you just described that
they achieved in America, they did within ten years of arriving.
And when they both arrived, neither one of them spoke
a word of English. They went from speaking no English
to things like m d s and pH ds within
ten years, so they made quite a splash. Um. And
(10:42):
Boris himself enjoys kind of a separate fame from his
son as well. He was a really well um respected,
uh pioneer in psychology. I believe he was um instructed
under William James, who was considered one of the two
founders of psych pology, who basically believed that behavior human
(11:03):
behavior um was a way that humans adapt to our environment.
And so if you could just kind of study the environment,
study behavior, you can just kind of understand the world
that much better. And that was his kind of foundation
for psychology. And um Boris sitis was, you know, one
of his proteges um and he uh, bores it is. Yeah,
(11:26):
it does, um, But the uh man, you really threw
me off with bores itis because now I can't stop
thinking about what bores itis is. Enlarged foot. Sure, the
bores ITAs like a big cartoony like keep on trucking
guy foot, but just one of them. And then now
(11:47):
we can put it to bed, thank you, because I
think it would have thrown off the whole rest of
the episode if we hadn't just addressed it on his face,
you know. So um he so Boris Um looked up
to Williams so much he named his son after him.
It's William James sitis Um. But so he was respected
in his in his own right as well. But it
(12:09):
was it was Billy who became like far and away
the most famous Situs, and it was largely because his
parents really welcomed the spotlight and then realized far too
late in Billy's life that that was not a good
thing for a kid. Yeah, should we go over the
you took up these from Sarah Situs is another condition? Um,
(12:35):
you put ciitus on anything. Yeah, I guess you have
to have two syllables like Josh sidis doesn't sound like it. No, Yeah,
you're absolutely right, Chuck situs. I guess it's like a
it's something that ground beef can come down with or
Jerry scitus. Yes, sure that has something to do with me.
(12:57):
So it's me so overload like the blue man who
took too much copper. This is um. You just turn
you just start smelling like me, so it comes out
of your ears. Uh so should we I think before
our break, maybe let's run over um what you dug
up from Sarah Sitas is one know if this is
from her book that she wrote later, but she kind
of outlined her and they're parenting sort of checklist, which
(13:23):
when you read it it does not seem like a
parenting checklist from the early nineteen hundreds. No, it's super progressive,
isn't it. It is in a lot of ways. Uh.
Then I'll get to the part that they kind of
really forget at the end. But um, avoid punishment and
always possible, not bad. Why because it's the first cause
of fear. Pretty sensible. Sensible. Uh, try not to say
(13:46):
don't to your children. Instead explain why what you say
is so, that's awesome. That's a good one. A lot
of these are still very valid. Um awakened curiosity for sure.
Never failed to answer and never put off your child's questions.
Probably the hardest thing to do as a parent, but
valid right because they come hard and fast. Uh. Never
(14:09):
force your child to learn, nor judge their ability to
learn by adult standards. Now, that's a big one for
them that I wonder if they really abided by either
that or they did abide by it and they were
they were misinterpreted and miss labeled later on, you know.
Um there's a few more here. Implant ideas at bedtime,
(14:32):
just before sleep. I don't know about the science behind that,
but it sounds reasonable. Sure, Like when your child is
going off to slumber land, you can introduce them to
the concept that they'll die eventually one day and it
really sticks in their head. Uh. Never lie to your
child or use evasions if that's impossible, but sure, uh,
(14:56):
refrain from showing him off. I think that's where they
really dropped the ball. Yeah, that's almost revisionists to add that,
because there's just no way that they knew that from
the get go. They just didn't follow it. They didn't
even seem to consider following it. And I think they
really grossly overestimated the warmth of the response the public
(15:18):
would would greet young William with, yeah, and then the
big one that I think it just wasn't a thing
back then, So I'm going to give them a pass.
But we now know so much about social and what
they call social emotional development and teaching and parenting, and
it just didn't really exist back then, and and young
Billy certainly didn't get any of that, so he writ
(15:39):
he suffered for that reason. So they released this, and
American parents responded by saying, we're tired just reading this list, right? Yeah?
Uh so should we take that break so we can
get some rest? All right, I gotta go put up
this big foot. Let it relax for a little bit.
(16:01):
You have Boris itists. So it took we kind of
(16:24):
went over um Boris and Sarah's list on you know,
how to raise a child, and it kind of underscores
this premise that was basically the entire premise of boris
Is approach to childhood education was that if you, um,
if you do this with a kid, if you if
you say okay, you know the um, if you create
(16:46):
curiosity and interest in a child and then nurture it
with lots of books and like, you know, lectures and
whatever you can find to keep the kid's curiosity going
and just feed seven. If they have a question or
something like that, you just sit down with them and
talk it out. That if you do this and you
start a young enough age, you know, by the time
your kid is you know, they should be at least
(17:10):
as intelligent, if not more intelligent, than an average adult.
And his premise was that you could do this with
any kid, and that you kind of should do this
with any kid. And their proof of concept was their
son Billy, who had a really impressive list of accomplishments
to his credit by the time he was like eight,
(17:30):
nine or ten. Right, Yeah, I mean, we'll go through
some of these. I think some of these maybe take
with a grain of salt, because records from the early
nineteen hundreds are what they are, and his story has
been sort of Um, I don't know the best word
is convoluted, exaggerated in place, maybe exaggerated in places. But
(17:50):
I don't want to take anything away from because a
lot of it checks out too. But let's just go
go through him. Um. Supposedly, at eighteen months was reading
the New York Times uh by three, New Latin by six,
uh New Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Armenian, and Turkish. Was
typing letters at three to Macy's about Christmas toys. Very cute, right.
(18:15):
I also saw that he taught himself to eat with
a spoon by eight months old, through trial and error.
All right, that's I've seen babies do that, an eight
month old baby. Yeah, it's hard to remember, Okay, alright,
what else? Maybe not? I don't know. It just seems
like something that baby would be like, I don't know what,
this would be more likely to go in their eye
(18:37):
or their ear than there in their mouth. You know,
I'm trying to remember. It's all a blur. Uh. Let
me see. He apparently graduated. I mean, he went through
grade school and like no time, he entered the first
grade and graduated in through primary school entirely in seven months.
It was basically like Billy Madison, Yeah, which I've never seen,
(18:57):
but I know the story. Between six an eight he
wrote at least four books. Uh. In At eight he
passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam and then the
entrance exam to M I T. And also at eight
and then at his own language called in a book
called The book was called Book of Vendorgood and the
language was vendor Goood. Yeah, not like you know, just
(19:19):
some gibberish or whatever. He took from like Latin and
Greek and some of the Romance languages and figured out
different ways to conjugate um words based on these this
language and like he created his own language. It wasn't
just some lame thing where words were replaced with words
and I think they were like eight cases something grammatical cases. Yeah.
It was really impressive stuff. Um. And it was the
(19:42):
kind of thing I saw somebody put it, like a
linguistics professor would have been, you know, well received for
having written a book where they debuted their own language.
And this kid was doing it and you know before
he was ten. Yeah, so he's he's flying through school. Um,
This is all going great as far as the plan
(20:03):
that his parents had to raise a really, really smart kid.
But a very bad thing happened as he was doing this,
and the press noticed, Um, when you get into Harvard
at nine years old. Um, they didn't let him untill
he was eleven, but when you know, that's going to
be a news story. And by nine when he when
he entered Harvard as an eleven year old, it was
(20:24):
it was the full court press from the media. Apparently
he would and this is before he went to Harvard.
He would come home from elementary and high school and
there would be like two photographers waiting outside his place,
and one of them would hold him while the other
one would take his picture, like physically hold him. Yeah,
Like he had no saying this what he would be accosted. Yeah,
(20:46):
so I hear this, and I think that's awful. The
media is terrible. But I also I think, like, where
where where was his mom? Where was his dad? While
these photographers are holding him out in the street. Well,
you know, he's a free range kid, I guess in
that respect, And that's pretty bad. That's definitely a very
unpleasant thing from childhood, and even worse that would basically
(21:08):
lay the groundwork for his relationship with the media from
that point on, and they would just keep going after him.
Even after he'd been out of the limelight for decades,
they would still they'd be like, whatever happened to that
weirdo Billy Sitis and um they look him up and
write an article on him, and it would he he
was just as we'll see, he became a very private person.
(21:28):
Was a huge invasion of his privacy. But that's where
the whole thing started. But one of the other reasons
I think also that he was such a private person
and that the media spotlight was even worse to him
than it would have been for any other child his
age is that you touched on it. I think earlier
that his father is showed play like there was no
(21:51):
play involved. There was no socialization with his peers. There
was no encouragement whatsoever for him to make friends, And
I get the impression there was actually bit of a
prohibition on him going out and making friends because his
friends couldn't have possibly kept up with him, So how
could he possibly be enriched by hanging out with other
eight year olds? And I think his family kind of
(22:12):
acknowledged that later on that that was a huge misstep
and if they didn't, the rest of the world has
has admitted it for them, and they've they've been vilified
in a lot of ways for doing that, and I
think rightfully so like if they've if they've been vilified,
not all of it can be justified, but there's a
couple of things that you can be like, yes, that
was a really bad thing to do with Billy, and
(22:34):
it messed him up, and that was a big one
of them for sure. Uh. He when he got to Harvard,
he started showing his um massive capacity for math and
mathematical courses. He was designing his own log arrythmic tables.
He gave his first lecture, uh, including to faculty when
he was eleven years old, to the Harvard Mathematical Club
(22:58):
about four dimensional bodies. And then you know, he sort
of had apparently he had his little act down um
with the press. He would introduce himself and he would
he would try and you know, I think he was
described as precocious a lot, but it came across I mean,
precocious is sort of a nice way of saying that
(23:19):
he was rude to a lot of adults who he
thought he was smarter than yes, and I don't think
he was ever really taught any different by his parents.
The thing is, though, is like that's a really good
anecdote and it does illustrate like what he was like
at age eleven, granted, But the problem is is because
you have so many, so few anecdotes about him, that
(23:41):
it gives you the impression that he was a jerk.
And I saw after he died, a friend of his
road into a newspaper magazine and said, you know, a
lot of these editorials about William Sidas are really misguided.
And one of the things that you should know about
him is he looked down on no one. He was
a kind, gentle person who looked down on no one else.
(24:03):
And um, I really think that you gotta take that
along with that anecdote about him, like you know, kind
of talking down to some of the professors at Harvard
during that lecture. Well he was, Okay, that's a much
more succinct way of putting what I was what I
was trying to get at. I guess there's a lot
of eleven year old jerks, but the age out of it, hopefully, sure.
(24:25):
But that lecture, Chuck is it's a really pivotal moment
in his life. For one, it basically said, hey, world,
I am maybe the smartest person on the planet or
whoever lived. Check it out. And then that brought all
that media attention. But it also showed, like to the
people who were paying attention and who knew what he
(24:46):
was talking about, um, that that like this was a
legit dude. This guy was going to contribute to who
knows how many different fields in his lifetime. And in fact,
Norbert Weener, who became the father of side Ntis, who
was a child prodigy himself, he was like fourteen I
think at the time. He went to Harvard, starting the
same year as William Sidis did. Yeah, that's that lecture. Yeah,
(25:10):
there were some interesting stories about those two being there
at the same time. Yeah, because they were definitely not
the same person. And though everybody lumped him together, you know, um,
both being at Harvard and as like an eleven year
old in the fourteen year old, but um, Norbert Wiener
was at that lecture and he he noted that, like,
this lecture is based on this guy's original thinking. This
is not just a summation of a bunch of different
(25:32):
work other people's work on bodies in the fourth dimension,
like this is what this guy came up with about
the fourth dimension and it all checks out, Like that's
impressive stuff. Yeah. There was an M. I. T. Physics
professor named Daniel Comstock who said that, you know, he
has a real intellect. He said, it is not automatic.
(25:53):
He does not cram his head with facts. He reasons
and there there's a difference. That's a different kind of
intelligence than just you know, memorizing a lot of stuff.
So you can be on Jeopardy, um, which is you know,
another kind of intelligence, no shape. I mean, I would
love to go on Jeopardy and perform well. Um, but Comstock, oh,
I would not do well, So I don't want to go.
(26:13):
But do you think you'd freeze? I just I'm not
Jeopardy material. I'm Jeopardy from the couch material. Yeah. Yeah.
You could shout it out occasionally only when you're and
you're right. Yeah, but I'm not good enough to be
on the show. Uh. Comstock went on to say, I
believe he'll be a great mathematician, the leader in science
(26:34):
in the future, the leader in that science in the future,
and a lot of Hay has been made about i Q,
not just for him but certainly for him, but just period.
I mean, like you said, we should totally do one
on i Q tests and whether it's even valid or not.
But he uh, retroactively they have UM basically said that
(26:55):
they think he had an i Q of about two
fifty three d um A of one thirty is considered
very advanced. They have retroactively UM said that Einstein had
about a one sixty da Vinci had about a one eighty.
Newton may have been about a one ninety. So take
it for what it's worth. All this is just to
(27:16):
say that Billy Sidis was, you know, super super smart
by kind of any measure, and so so that Harvard
lecture definitely brought the spotlight on him, not necessarily to UM,
like an adoring spotlight. And then also at the same time,
his father delivered a lecture that became a book, really
(27:37):
kind of forty five page essay called Philistine and Genius,
and it was basically where he lays out this idea
that any kid can be a prodigy. And and then
ultimately we're doing our children disservice by being lazy and
you know, just living with the status quo and not
producing geniuses because we're just we're just not up to
the task. And that was not very well received either.
(28:00):
So everybody started to hate Boris because he was an outsider.
He's a recent immigrant from Russia and he was Jewish,
and he was basically telling America that its parenting skills
sucked um. And then at the same time, his son
steps out or steps into the spotlight, is like the
super brainiac, who's a proof of concept of all this.
And so the attention that was lavished on both of them,
(28:22):
on William for the rest of his life was you're
a weirdo. We need to tear you down because if
you if your father is correct, then we're all doing
our kids at disservice. So there has to be something
wrong with you or else we're the ones who are wrong.
And so the media and the American public basically started
to delight in tearing William down every chance they got,
(28:42):
and he really just tried to run from the spotlight
as best he could. All right, so let's take a
break and we'll come back and kind of pick up
at Harvard, where this eleven year old was still studying
right after this. All right, So Little Billies at Harvard.
(29:21):
His he was commuting, you know, with his parents, and
then they decided that they were going to leave and
go to New Hampshire and go into business, um, the
mental health business. Basically boris open to sanatorium in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, and they said, basically, you know, try out
the dorm, let's see how it works. He moved into
(29:41):
the dorm. It did not go well at all. Uh.
He was bullied. He was the butt of jokes and pranks. Uh.
He did not have interest in girls. They teased him
a lot about that. He eventually moved into a rooming house, uh,
instead of the dorm. And even still he graduated Magna
loud A at sixteen years old in nineteen fourteen and
(30:04):
told reporters after he graduated, I want to live the
perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life
is to live it in seclusion. I've always hated crowds.
He vowed to remained celibate, and you know, that's was
kind of his life. He he I don't think he
necessarily was that way by nature or yeah, by nature.
(30:27):
I think he was sort of forced into retreatment because
of what happened to him with the press, and having
no social skills because he was not socialized because of
his parents. A lot of factors going into it, for sure.
And on that celibate thing, like a lot of people
made a lot of hey about that at the time
because he you know, revealed it publicly somehow. Um, he
(30:48):
had taken a vow underneath the tree that he would
remain celibate throughout his lifetime, which a lot of great
thinkers have I think da Vinci did, and Newton did,
and a bunch of others. Um, And he followed it
in their footsteps. But he kept a picture of the
tree that he kept he carried around with them to
remind him like, oh, yeah, I'm celibate. Um. But the
(31:09):
media again, they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity
to tear this guy down. He's a total weirdo. He's
not interested in girls, he's not even interested in guys,
He's interested in nobody. Let's let's make let's use that
as evidence that this guy is out of his mind.
And he did very very sad. Yeah. So he leaves
Harvard and with that degree, and for a little while
(31:30):
he teaches math at William marsh Rice Institute for advancement
of letters, science and art. Eventually they just said, can
we just call it Rice University? It would be much easier.
He arrived in December nineteen fifteen. He was seventeen years old.
Um taught Euclidean geometry, non Euclidean geometry, and freshman math
(31:52):
and didn't last long there either because he was younger
than the people he was teaching and it was just
really really tough. Um eventually went back to Harvard Law
and left after three years without a degree, but with
good standing. Apparently. Yeah, so he got back. I guess
(32:12):
when he was at Harvard Law it must have been
Um that he, uh, he became interested in socialism, fervently interested.
He was described I think Chuck is a libertarian pacifist
by a friend after he died, and that his whole
thing like like, he was really passionate about trolley Carr transfers,
(32:35):
about Northeastern Native American history, about a lot of varied stuff,
but his great passion was the idea that every single
person should be free to live their life as they
see fit, and that the role of government, and you
needed a strong government, was to protect that those individuals
(32:56):
rights from encroachment in that sense that that is what
he cared about, and for a little while was directed
towards socialism and communism. And he was actually arrested h
and considered you know, unpatriotic and unamerican um at this
one May day rally um and almost went to jail
supposedly for assaulting an officer. Allo. Everybody says that didn't
actually happen. Yeah, it was for writing two charges, writing
(33:19):
and assaulting a cop, and it was all over the
newspapers because of who he is. I think a hundred
and fourteen people were arrested, including a young lady named
Martha Foley, who he actually fell in love with, so
he he tested his celibacy with Martha, even though I
think there I think it never grew beyond a close friendship.
(33:41):
Isn't that right? Yeah? Well yeah, And I don't really
understand what her her feelings were about. If she was
just like, we're just friends. He was always in the
friend zone with her, or she was like, you know,
you're actually not interested in me, will be friends? Who knows.
But she went on to marry another man, um and uh,
(34:01):
I get the impression that Bill was left to kind
of um just pine for her while looking at the
picture of the tree that he took them out. Um.
So back to the arrest. He was released on five
dollars bail um under the condition that he be released
under his father's care um or both of his parents
(34:22):
I guess at the sanitarium. So he gets shipped off
to New Hampshire. Um. He said in his own words,
he was kidnapped by his parents by arrangement with the
d A and was taken to the sanitarium operated by
them and kept there a full year under various kinds
of mental torture, consisting of being scolded and nagged at
(34:42):
for an average of six to eight hours a day. UM.
They said, they pumped him full of sleeping medicine, threatened
to send him to uh just sort of a standard
insane asylum, that's what they called him at the time.
And it just sounds like it sounds like things went
really really bad between he and his parents at that point. Yeah,
I think, UM, I don't really know what the relationship
(35:06):
was like, but it seems to have finally fully deteriorated
during that year. I don't think they ever spoke after
that well, that his parents wanted to. They used to
like UM try to track him down and they would
find as whoever his friends were, and you know, try
to get them to turn him over to them, because
you know, they're like, it's for his own good. He
doesn't he's crazy or whatever. He UM that just you
(35:28):
know is strange to him even further from them. But
if if it wasn't deteriorating before, it was after that
that year at the family sanitarium that or sanatorium that
he had to spend. Yeah, so he UM eventually has
released after that year, I think he goes to California
for about a year, then makes his way back east,
and basically from this point forward he did I mean
(35:51):
they called them uninspired jobs kind of mostly where I saw,
I don't think he was doing the good well hunting
thing UM been doing like custodia were. Mostly what I
found is that he was doing UM work. I mean
they call them adding machines like accounting work. What they
really were were sort of the first calculators, the UH
comptometers and UM. Even then, apparently he would do work
(36:16):
on two of them at once, one with his left hand,
one with his right hand, and would do his eight
hour work day and about an hour um, but would
sort of move from job to job whenever you know,
it says here, whenever people would recognize who he was.
I think it was probably a little more nuanced than that.
I would guess, like when the press got ahold of it. Um.
I don't think it's like if someone in his office
(36:37):
realized who he was, he was like, I'm out of here.
But he would kind of go from job to job.
He said that the very side of a mathematical formula
makes me physically ill. But here's the thing. He I
think a lot of publications make it seem like he
was shunning smarts and doing anything worthwhile. But the entire time,
(36:58):
he was just pumping out book uh, a lot of
most of them not published, many of them under pseudonyms,
but just writing about all kinds of stuff. He wrote
that book on transfer tickets. Yeah, he did three pages
on collecting transfer tickets. But he wrote a lot. Eventually.
He did write one book that became fairly well known,
(37:21):
called The Animate and the Inanimates in Yeah, which is
a super daring um premise, and that it talks about
the origin of the universe. Uh. It describes things like
dark matter. Um. It predicts um black holes, which a
lot of people are like, this is years before black
holes were discovered. Well, I think Einstein had predicted black
(37:43):
holes in his theory of relativity like a full ten
years before, five years before he was writing this. But
it's still super impressive. But the reason it's daring is
because he is one of the few people to suggest,
and you know, back up mathematically um or attempt to
the the second law of thermodynamics that matter in the
universe tends towards chaos and disorder and there will eventually
(38:05):
be a total loss of energy because of that, that
it can be reversed. And his premise was that life
itself is an example of reverse entropy, where you know,
disordered atoms are put into very orderly, very efficient machines
called organisms or life, which is pretty awesome. And that
(38:28):
was just part of it. But that's what really made
him like a kind of a pioneer, and that was
his big contribution. And I get the impression that this
book that was published in UM is one of those
things where I could see people going back in fifty
years and somebody rediscovering his ideas and saying, oh my god,
like you just advanced you know, quantum physics, by light
(38:49):
by light years. It's just been kind of languishing until then,
you know, or here's the cure for cancer. Yeah maybe. Uh.
This is a really sad though, because I think the
narrative that at the time was that like, boy genius
goes bust because he's working these jobs. And by all accounts,
you know, he lived the life he wanted to live,
(39:11):
and he had he had I don't think like tons
and tons of great friends, but he did have some
very close friends who, like he said, described him as
a as a good guy and kind of a could be,
kind of a fun dude, and he wasn't completely maladjusted
because of his childhood. And I think just wanted to
be left alone. Yeah. So that's why in seven that
(39:33):
New Yorker article on him was just so devastating, was
because he'd been trying so hard to be left alone.
Like his one and only publicly received book had been
published a full twelve years before he totally dropped out,
and The New Yorker sent a woman reporter to to
basically become his friend, under the guys of just being
(39:54):
his friend and to gather information and then publish an
article about him. You know, yeah, he said it was
humiliating and made him sound crazy. Um he sued now
this way, I got really confused, and I don't know
if he got to the bottom of it. He he
did sue them for invasion of privacy and malicious libel um.
And I saw all kinds of things from really good
(40:15):
sources that the case was dismissed, that they basically and
it's used in privacy law as saying, if you're a
public figure, you're always a public figure. But I also
saw that he did win some kind of settlement from them.
I think they were just multiple suits. Maybe yeah. I
think that the privacy the invasion of privacy suit he
lost and it was upheld on appeal to that um
(40:37):
that like you said, once, your public figure, always a
public figure. But I think that that um libel was
what he might have gotten a settlement for because there
was misreporting reported that he'd gone to Toughs, and I
think that was Norbert Wiener who had gone to Toughs
just a couple of technical things, nothing really really big time.
But he hated this this article so much. I get
(40:58):
the impression he wasn't about to drop it. And the
new Yorker settled out of court to settle it. Yeah,
so this was nineteen thirty seven. Lawsuits followed and then
very sadly that the sad end into this story is
that in nineteen forty four, at the age of forty six,
he was found dead by his landlady. Died of cerebral hemorrhage,
(41:20):
the same thing that killed his father in nine. Mm hmm. Yeah.
And you I mean, you can get a really good
impression of how he was treated by the media with
just the title of the obituary they ran about him
in Time magazine. Um, it was called prodigious failure. That was.
That was the title of his obituary in Time back
(41:42):
in nineteen Who lived his own life? Yeah? Exactly what what?
Why did he have to perform for you? And then
over time, you know the idea that he was this
great example of of what happens if you just give
your kid too much attention and try to turn them
into a um like a genius too young. This is
(42:04):
what happens to him. They burn out and they end
up running adding machines rather than doing anything useful. Um.
That that was. That became that narrative that you have
to look out for really interesting story. Yeah. So, um,
you got anything else about william Sitis? No, look forward
to uh to a full sort of more robust episode
(42:25):
on Prodigies for sure. Did you want did you when
you mentioned Goodwill Hunting? Did you see too that that
um that he was he in part inspired that movie? Oh?
Really yeah, that's interesting to do that parallel, um. And
then I want to give one shout out. So you
know he gave that talk on um four dimensional bodies
(42:46):
at Harvard when he was eleven. I was like, I
have no idea what that is. And I looked around
and I found finally a really comprehensive, really understandable explainer
on four dimensionals space. It's called what is four dimensional Space? Like?
It's by J. D. Norton. And if you're all interested
in figuring that out, I would strongly advise going to
(43:09):
check that out. I wasn't talking to you. Yeah. Uh.
Since since Chuck said, yeah, it's time for listener mail everybody,
how about the apples? All right, I'm gonna call this
sort of a double metal email. UM. Quickly we got
one from a gentleman named Kirk Brett Fold and White
(43:31):
Rock BC to challenge me on saying Bruce uh, saying
Bruce Dickinson was the metal god, the god of metal.
On the Damascus Steel episode, he said, I think you'll
find that Judas Priests Rob Halford is widely acknowledged to
hold the title of metal god. Okay, uh And I
wrote Kirk back and I said, well, it's subjective. And
(43:53):
I like Iron Maiden more than I like Judas Priest. Uh. Yeah,
I do too. Yeah do you do? I'm with you
you Oh yeah, yeah, like Juice Priest. But I really,
I mean, I think Iron Maiden I just like him more. Yeah,
me too. I think their songs more. Yeah, I think
I could see where he's coming from. It's much more
melodic and maybe in that sense a little less metal
(44:13):
than Judas Priest. Yeah maybe so. Uh. And then someone
we gotta shout out Gunner who who took your side
in the A C d C debate recently listened to
to unrelated episodes, and in both episodes, Josh said he
didn't like A C d C. So to you, Josh,
I just want to say you're right. Finally, someone else
(44:34):
thinks A C d C is overrated. They're just not
that good. Although some of the early songs are written
by the Flash and the Pan, and I love Flash
in the Pan. A C G C, A C d
C just doesn't do it for me. And that's from
Gunner and Gunner. I'm here to say that you were wrong.
I thought it was subjective. Well, that's my whole point
(44:55):
is I'm making fun of him saying right and wrong.
Oh I see, I see you turned it all over on.
So yeah, confused and check this out. We're talking, we're
talking about metal, we're talking about hard rock, and we're
getting emails from dudes named Kirk and Gunner. I mean,
how perfect is that we should start that band that
we always heard Gunner and Flash in the Pan? Yeah?
(45:17):
Have you heard of Flash in the Pan? I never
had before. I hadn't, but I had to look that
up to They were an AUSSI duo who produced uh
some of the early A C d C stuff apparently,
and then we're a band in their own right, so
you gotta check them out too. Now, the A C
D C and they wanted to produce the Spice Girls.
They're two big successes, that's right, and we're gonna get
(45:39):
that band with those guys. But I get to be
flashed this time. I'm not gonna be panned anymore. I'll
be Pan then can I be Pan? But I'm gonna
really play up that like super light pan flute kind
of thing. That's my jam, and I'm going to address like,
what's the half goat half man god Dionysus. No, it's
oh gosh, I can't think it's I guess it wouldn't
(46:01):
be Dionysus to be pan anyway, I'm gonna be like
the Greek god Pan. Okay, that's my jam, and I'm flash.
So I'll just go out there and open my overcoat
and no one will notice. Somebody will feel it. Yeah, well,
I'm just leaving that one. Uh. If you wanna get
in touch with Chuck and I, like Gunner and Kirk
(46:22):
did our new pals, you can email us at stuff
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W Chuck Bryant over there, and it's just
us today. And that's fine because it's a Thursday. We
get a little crazy on Thursday. So we have a
(00:23):
potluckum today. I brought Gavelta fish and Chuck doesn't like it.
But we're just moving forward and this is stuff you
should know. I think it's good. I brought my my
deviled eggs. Yeah they're good. Thank you. You took my
advice and used the secret ingredient Coleman's mustard. Oh of course,
(00:48):
friends who are weigh into Coleman's. By the way, it's
really great in deviled eggs. I'm not kidding. I believe it.
I'm sure if you're a mustard fan, it's the one
to go to. Oh yeah, you hate mustard for remember
the narrative I hate mustard And he refused to accept that. Yeah, yeah,
it's just so bonkers that I can't wrap my head
around it, I guess is the problem. Speaking of narrative,
(01:11):
this this story today is a bit of a cautionary
tale on narratives. I think, oh, well, well put um
and you know, we'll get into it here in a second.
But it's the story of a of a young genius prodigy.
And in researching this there you know a lot of
conflicting accounts about how his home life was and how
(01:37):
his parents treated him, and uh, it's a story of
media sensationalism, and it's a story of parents who were
ahead of the curve in a lot of ways for
the time. But also I don't know about victims, but
also just sort of fell into the usual state of
parenthood at the time, which is end of the very
(01:58):
sort of beginning of the twenties and reso, it's not
like parenting then, let's that it's at its peak, you know. Yeah, no,
And you can also say that his parents, conceivably and
him went against the grain of normalcy and status quo,
and that um, you know, the American public immedia kind
of bristled at that, and that they were treated poorly
(02:21):
for that. And so you know, do we how much
do we need to question of what what is said
about them from you know, journalism at the time, And
it's a it's a big morass, basically, I think to
paraphrase what you're saying. It's a cautionary tale about making
cautionary tales out of anything, right, Yeah, although I do
(02:41):
think this is a cautionary tale. But okay, so we'll
we'll we'll get to the end. Well, in the end,
we'll reveal what you think it's a cautionary tale about. Yeah,
and you know, well, let's just get into it. Let's
let's talk about William James. Is it sidis or side
it situs? Is it side ice? I don't think. So
(03:04):
that's what you keep in your pocket for when you've
got some lukewarm soda. Well, just like everything else with
this guy, heard a couple of different pronunciations on YouTube,
so so I saw it's it spelled out a couple
of different places that seem to know what they were
talking about side us, Yeah, with the emphasis on the side.
But I had not heard of him before, had you. Yeah.
(03:25):
I mean we did a chapter in our book on prodigies,
and um, I he wasn't in the book, but I
remember reading a little bit about him at the time,
and I think just the whole idea of child prodigies really, um,
it's super fascinating to me. So I would like to
do one on Prodigies, maybe tackled. That would be maybe
(03:46):
one of the first book chapters we retrofit as a podcast. Okay, cool, Yeah,
but yeah, they just have always fascinated me. And Billy
was interesting in that a lot of times prodigies are
prodigies in like a single discipline, not serily saying they're
big dumb dumbs everywhere else, but there's like one major focus.
(04:07):
But young Billy was a language prodigy, a math and
science prodigy. He was just a well rounded kind of
no a lot kid. Yeah, he really was, and he was.
He's very frequently lifted up as the prodigy, perhaps the
most gifted child that has ever lived, certainly at least
(04:29):
in the recorded history in the West, and maybe the
smartest human. Yeah, it's entirely possible. Yeah it is. Which
I think is another thing that will really come up
in that Prodigies episode is you know exactly how do
you how do you say who's the smartest and who's not?
Is it you know? Or i Q tests reliable? Which
(04:50):
I think in addition to Prodigies, we need to do
one just on i Q tests took Yeah, and I
also want to go ahead and correct myself when I
said he was well rounded, he was academically well round,
did because as we will see, he was not very
well rounded as a young child. Uh, and that was
one of the major mistakes that his parents made, Yeah,
for sure. UM And one of the other things that
(05:12):
he's also often kind of held out as an example of,
is this this burning question that we still have today,
is um, are gifted children the products of their environment?
Like can you just take basically any child and make
them a gifted prodigy? Um? Or is it you know, genetics?
(05:35):
Is it really just you know, is that we're gifted
apt apt you know, where like you're you're kind of
born with this. You didn't do anything to earn it
or deserve it. You just it's just who you are.
You're a gifted, intelligent person from a very early age.
And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of that.
But um and he actually he he kind of muddies
that the answer to that question more than answers it
(05:58):
at all, you know, because I mean, I definitely believe
that you were born gifted, but then from the moment
you're born on everything else plays in. So he comes
one of the reason I think he he muddies the
The answer to that question is he comes from very
intelligent stock. Both his mother and his father were extremely
(06:21):
intelligent people, um, but they also were the kind of
people who tried to educate him starting around age two,
maybe even a little earlier. So he's an amalgamation of
those two things. Parents who were incredibly intelligent who would
have ostensibly passed along some pretty smart jenes um, and
parents who you know, made him produced an environment for
(06:44):
him that made him into, you know, a prodigious learner. Yeah.
So let's let's start with his folks. His dad, Boris.
They were both Russian immigrants, and his dad was put
in jail and Russia before he managed to get out
of there for apparently in a prison that was so
small he couldn't even recline himself fully in sleep and
(07:05):
to sleep in a little like fetal position, I think,
And he was he was jailed for for teaching, and
he he was teaching peasants. He didn't have permission. They
didn't like that in Russia. He was let out after
a couple of years on the condition that he didn't
teach other people how to read anymore. And supposedly didn't
read himself, was under surveillance, but then got the heck
(07:27):
out of there. Yeah, he was like, I see the
writing on the wall. It's time for me to get
out of here. I'm going to go to America. Because
at the time, America was this shining beacon for immigrants
saying come, We're a land of opportunity. We turned the
lights on in the Statue of Liberty. Tom Brocott did
it himself and just like a motel six and um,
(07:50):
it's uh, it's it's the doors are open basically, So
he and Sarah um Billy's mom both took America up
on that, although separately. They actually met in America, although
they were both from the Ukraine, I believe, yeah, and
Boris he he sort of bucked a lot of trends
back then, and this was in the late eighteen hundreds.
(08:10):
He was an atheist, um, which was you know, not
in fashion at the time. He later got into like
he made a big name for himself in the early
days of psychology and psychoanalysis, and he was an opponent
of Freud, which was certainly rocked the boat at the time.
And then he really despised traditional education and kind of
(08:32):
all its forms and the way it was back then,
particularly wrote memorization, it was he just hated it so
much he saw zero value in it whatsoever. And so
like that's kind of the basis of his concept of
educating not just children but anybody. It's figure out what
the basics are, learned the basics, the fundamentals, and then
(08:52):
use those to reason your way to answer basically any
question that you possibly could have. And that that idea
applies to everything from philosophy to math, to literature to
history to language. That you can figure anything out if
you understand just a few fundamentals of it. And so
that's what his big focus was on. That. Yes, Sarah,
(09:14):
his mother, Um, she worked your way through college, paid
for it herself. She worked as a nurse at night,
went to medical school during the day. I believe was
the first woman admitted to Boston medical school or medical college.
And she never became a doctor, though she instead chose
to parent. And Um, they both worked their way to
(09:36):
the I mean, by the time they came to the
East Coast in the eighteen eighties, they both worked their
way to the top of as high as you could
get in academic achievement in the United States. I think
Boris had his bachelor's and masters from Harvard in three years.
And uh, yes, Sarah went to Boston. You and that
(09:57):
they were both overachievers and obviously had a kid. I
never really They had a daughter named Helena, but I
didn't see how much she achieved. I don't know either,
although I saw that she and her brother shared a
lot of similar interests, so they were close throughout his
whole life. I'm sure she was pretty smart too, Yeah,
I would guess so too. Dumb, No, for certainly not um.
(10:20):
But but the the one of the things about Boris
and Sarah's both of them. Everything you just described that
they achieved in America, they did within ten years of arriving.
And when they both arrived, neither one of them spoke
a word of English. They went from speaking no English
to things like m d s and pH ds within
ten years, so they made quite a splash. Um. And
(10:42):
Boris himself enjoys kind of a separate fame from his
son as well. He was a really well um respected,
uh pioneer in psychology. I believe he was um instructed
under William James, who was considered one of the two
founders of psych pology, who basically believed that behavior human
(11:03):
behavior um was a way that humans adapt to our environment.
And so if you could just kind of study the environment,
study behavior, you can just kind of understand the world
that much better. And that was his kind of foundation
for psychology. And um Boris sitis was, you know, one
of his proteges um and he uh, bores it is. Yeah,
(11:26):
it does, um, But the uh man, you really threw
me off with bores itis because now I can't stop
thinking about what bores itis is. Enlarged foot. Sure, the
bores ITAs like a big cartoony like keep on trucking
guy foot, but just one of them. And then now
(11:47):
we can put it to bed, thank you, because I
think it would have thrown off the whole rest of
the episode if we hadn't just addressed it on his face,
you know. So um he so Boris Um looked up
to Williams so much he named his son after him.
It's William James sitis Um. But so he was respected
in his in his own right as well. But it
(12:09):
was it was Billy who became like far and away
the most famous Situs, and it was largely because his
parents really welcomed the spotlight and then realized far too
late in Billy's life that that was not a good
thing for a kid. Yeah, should we go over the
you took up these from Sarah Situs is another condition? Um,
(12:35):
you put ciitus on anything. Yeah, I guess you have
to have two syllables like Josh sidis doesn't sound like it. No, Yeah,
you're absolutely right, Chuck situs. I guess it's like a
it's something that ground beef can come down with or
Jerry scitus. Yes, sure that has something to do with me.
(12:57):
So it's me so overload like the blue man who
took too much copper. This is um. You just turn
you just start smelling like me, so it comes out
of your ears. Uh so should we I think before
our break, maybe let's run over um what you dug
up from Sarah Sitas is one know if this is
from her book that she wrote later, but she kind
of outlined her and they're parenting sort of checklist, which
(13:23):
when you read it it does not seem like a
parenting checklist from the early nineteen hundreds. No, it's super progressive,
isn't it. It is in a lot of ways. Uh.
Then I'll get to the part that they kind of
really forget at the end. But um, avoid punishment and
always possible, not bad. Why because it's the first cause
of fear. Pretty sensible. Sensible. Uh, try not to say
(13:46):
don't to your children. Instead explain why what you say
is so, that's awesome. That's a good one. A lot
of these are still very valid. Um awakened curiosity for sure.
Never failed to answer and never put off your child's questions.
Probably the hardest thing to do as a parent, but
valid right because they come hard and fast. Uh. Never
(14:09):
force your child to learn, nor judge their ability to
learn by adult standards. Now, that's a big one for
them that I wonder if they really abided by either
that or they did abide by it and they were
they were misinterpreted and miss labeled later on, you know.
Um there's a few more here. Implant ideas at bedtime,
(14:32):
just before sleep. I don't know about the science behind that,
but it sounds reasonable. Sure, Like when your child is
going off to slumber land, you can introduce them to
the concept that they'll die eventually one day and it
really sticks in their head. Uh. Never lie to your
child or use evasions if that's impossible, but sure, uh,
(14:56):
refrain from showing him off. I think that's where they
really dropped the ball. Yeah, that's almost revisionists to add that,
because there's just no way that they knew that from
the get go. They just didn't follow it. They didn't
even seem to consider following it. And I think they
really grossly overestimated the warmth of the response the public
(15:18):
would would greet young William with, yeah, and then the
big one that I think it just wasn't a thing
back then, So I'm going to give them a pass.
But we now know so much about social and what
they call social emotional development and teaching and parenting, and
it just didn't really exist back then, and and young
Billy certainly didn't get any of that, so he writ
(15:39):
he suffered for that reason. So they released this, and
American parents responded by saying, we're tired just reading this list, right? Yeah?
Uh so should we take that break so we can
get some rest? All right, I gotta go put up
this big foot. Let it relax for a little bit.
(16:01):
You have Boris itists. So it took we kind of
(16:24):
went over um Boris and Sarah's list on you know,
how to raise a child, and it kind of underscores
this premise that was basically the entire premise of boris
Is approach to childhood education was that if you, um,
if you do this with a kid, if you if
you say okay, you know the um, if you create
(16:46):
curiosity and interest in a child and then nurture it
with lots of books and like, you know, lectures and
whatever you can find to keep the kid's curiosity going
and just feed seven. If they have a question or
something like that, you just sit down with them and
talk it out. That if you do this and you
start a young enough age, you know, by the time
your kid is you know, they should be at least
(17:10):
as intelligent, if not more intelligent, than an average adult.
And his premise was that you could do this with
any kid, and that you kind of should do this
with any kid. And their proof of concept was their
son Billy, who had a really impressive list of accomplishments
to his credit by the time he was like eight,
(17:30):
nine or ten. Right, Yeah, I mean, we'll go through
some of these. I think some of these maybe take
with a grain of salt, because records from the early
nineteen hundreds are what they are, and his story has
been sort of Um, I don't know the best word
is convoluted, exaggerated in place, maybe exaggerated in places. But
(17:50):
I don't want to take anything away from because a
lot of it checks out too. But let's just go
go through him. Um. Supposedly, at eighteen months was reading
the New York Times uh by three, New Latin by six,
uh New Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Armenian, and Turkish. Was
typing letters at three to Macy's about Christmas toys. Very cute, right.
(18:15):
I also saw that he taught himself to eat with
a spoon by eight months old, through trial and error.
All right, that's I've seen babies do that, an eight
month old baby. Yeah, it's hard to remember, Okay, alright,
what else? Maybe not? I don't know. It just seems
like something that baby would be like, I don't know what,
this would be more likely to go in their eye
(18:37):
or their ear than there in their mouth. You know,
I'm trying to remember. It's all a blur. Uh. Let
me see. He apparently graduated. I mean, he went through
grade school and like no time, he entered the first
grade and graduated in through primary school entirely in seven months.
It was basically like Billy Madison, Yeah, which I've never seen,
(18:57):
but I know the story. Between six an eight he
wrote at least four books. Uh. In At eight he
passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam and then the
entrance exam to M I T. And also at eight
and then at his own language called in a book
called The book was called Book of Vendorgood and the
language was vendor Goood. Yeah, not like you know, just
(19:19):
some gibberish or whatever. He took from like Latin and
Greek and some of the Romance languages and figured out
different ways to conjugate um words based on these this
language and like he created his own language. It wasn't
just some lame thing where words were replaced with words
and I think they were like eight cases something grammatical cases. Yeah.
It was really impressive stuff. Um. And it was the
(19:42):
kind of thing I saw somebody put it, like a
linguistics professor would have been, you know, well received for
having written a book where they debuted their own language.
And this kid was doing it and you know before
he was ten. Yeah, so he's he's flying through school. Um,
This is all going great as far as the plan
(20:03):
that his parents had to raise a really, really smart kid.
But a very bad thing happened as he was doing this,
and the press noticed, Um, when you get into Harvard
at nine years old. Um, they didn't let him untill
he was eleven, but when you know, that's going to
be a news story. And by nine when he when
he entered Harvard as an eleven year old, it was
(20:24):
it was the full court press from the media. Apparently
he would and this is before he went to Harvard.
He would come home from elementary and high school and
there would be like two photographers waiting outside his place,
and one of them would hold him while the other
one would take his picture, like physically hold him. Yeah,
Like he had no saying this what he would be accosted. Yeah,
(20:46):
so I hear this, and I think that's awful. The
media is terrible. But I also I think, like, where
where where was his mom? Where was his dad? While
these photographers are holding him out in the street. Well,
you know, he's a free range kid, I guess in
that respect, And that's pretty bad. That's definitely a very
unpleasant thing from childhood, and even worse that would basically
(21:08):
lay the groundwork for his relationship with the media from
that point on, and they would just keep going after him.
Even after he'd been out of the limelight for decades,
they would still they'd be like, whatever happened to that
weirdo Billy Sitis and um they look him up and
write an article on him, and it would he he
was just as we'll see, he became a very private person.
(21:28):
Was a huge invasion of his privacy. But that's where
the whole thing started. But one of the other reasons
I think also that he was such a private person
and that the media spotlight was even worse to him
than it would have been for any other child his
age is that you touched on it. I think earlier
that his father is showed play like there was no
(21:51):
play involved. There was no socialization with his peers. There
was no encouragement whatsoever for him to make friends, And
I get the impression there was actually bit of a
prohibition on him going out and making friends because his
friends couldn't have possibly kept up with him, So how
could he possibly be enriched by hanging out with other
eight year olds? And I think his family kind of
(22:12):
acknowledged that later on that that was a huge misstep
and if they didn't, the rest of the world has
has admitted it for them, and they've they've been vilified
in a lot of ways for doing that, and I
think rightfully so like if they've if they've been vilified,
not all of it can be justified, but there's a
couple of things that you can be like, yes, that
was a really bad thing to do with Billy, and
(22:34):
it messed him up, and that was a big one
of them for sure. Uh. He when he got to Harvard,
he started showing his um massive capacity for math and
mathematical courses. He was designing his own log arrythmic tables.
He gave his first lecture, uh, including to faculty when
he was eleven years old, to the Harvard Mathematical Club
(22:58):
about four dimensional bodies. And then you know, he sort
of had apparently he had his little act down um
with the press. He would introduce himself and he would
he would try and you know, I think he was
described as precocious a lot, but it came across I mean,
precocious is sort of a nice way of saying that
(23:19):
he was rude to a lot of adults who he
thought he was smarter than yes, and I don't think
he was ever really taught any different by his parents.
The thing is, though, is like that's a really good
anecdote and it does illustrate like what he was like
at age eleven, granted, But the problem is is because
you have so many, so few anecdotes about him, that
(23:41):
it gives you the impression that he was a jerk.
And I saw after he died, a friend of his
road into a newspaper magazine and said, you know, a
lot of these editorials about William Sidas are really misguided.
And one of the things that you should know about
him is he looked down on no one. He was
a kind, gentle person who looked down on no one else.
(24:03):
And um, I really think that you gotta take that
along with that anecdote about him, like you know, kind
of talking down to some of the professors at Harvard
during that lecture. Well he was, Okay, that's a much
more succinct way of putting what I was what I
was trying to get at. I guess there's a lot
of eleven year old jerks, but the age out of it, hopefully, sure.
(24:25):
But that lecture, Chuck is it's a really pivotal moment
in his life. For one, it basically said, hey, world,
I am maybe the smartest person on the planet or
whoever lived. Check it out. And then that brought all
that media attention. But it also showed, like to the
people who were paying attention and who knew what he
(24:46):
was talking about, um, that that like this was a
legit dude. This guy was going to contribute to who
knows how many different fields in his lifetime. And in fact,
Norbert Weener, who became the father of side Ntis, who
was a child prodigy himself, he was like fourteen I
think at the time. He went to Harvard, starting the
same year as William Sidis did. Yeah, that's that lecture. Yeah,
(25:10):
there were some interesting stories about those two being there
at the same time. Yeah, because they were definitely not
the same person. And though everybody lumped him together, you know, um,
both being at Harvard and as like an eleven year
old in the fourteen year old, but um, Norbert Wiener
was at that lecture and he he noted that, like,
this lecture is based on this guy's original thinking. This
is not just a summation of a bunch of different
(25:32):
work other people's work on bodies in the fourth dimension,
like this is what this guy came up with about
the fourth dimension and it all checks out, Like that's
impressive stuff. Yeah. There was an M. I. T. Physics
professor named Daniel Comstock who said that, you know, he
has a real intellect. He said, it is not automatic.
(25:53):
He does not cram his head with facts. He reasons
and there there's a difference. That's a different kind of
intelligence than just you know, memorizing a lot of stuff.
So you can be on Jeopardy, um, which is you know,
another kind of intelligence, no shape. I mean, I would
love to go on Jeopardy and perform well. Um, but Comstock, oh,
I would not do well, So I don't want to go.
(26:13):
But do you think you'd freeze? I just I'm not
Jeopardy material. I'm Jeopardy from the couch material. Yeah. Yeah.
You could shout it out occasionally only when you're and
you're right. Yeah, but I'm not good enough to be
on the show. Uh. Comstock went on to say, I
believe he'll be a great mathematician, the leader in science
(26:34):
in the future, the leader in that science in the future,
and a lot of Hay has been made about i Q,
not just for him but certainly for him, but just period.
I mean, like you said, we should totally do one
on i Q tests and whether it's even valid or not.
But he uh, retroactively they have UM basically said that
(26:55):
they think he had an i Q of about two
fifty three d um A of one thirty is considered
very advanced. They have retroactively UM said that Einstein had
about a one sixty da Vinci had about a one eighty.
Newton may have been about a one ninety. So take
it for what it's worth. All this is just to
(27:16):
say that Billy Sidis was, you know, super super smart
by kind of any measure, and so so that Harvard
lecture definitely brought the spotlight on him, not necessarily to UM,
like an adoring spotlight. And then also at the same time,
his father delivered a lecture that became a book, really
(27:37):
kind of forty five page essay called Philistine and Genius,
and it was basically where he lays out this idea
that any kid can be a prodigy. And and then
ultimately we're doing our children disservice by being lazy and
you know, just living with the status quo and not
producing geniuses because we're just we're just not up to
the task. And that was not very well received either.
(28:00):
So everybody started to hate Boris because he was an outsider.
He's a recent immigrant from Russia and he was Jewish,
and he was basically telling America that its parenting skills
sucked um. And then at the same time, his son
steps out or steps into the spotlight, is like the
super brainiac, who's a proof of concept of all this.
And so the attention that was lavished on both of them,
(28:22):
on William for the rest of his life was you're
a weirdo. We need to tear you down because if
you if your father is correct, then we're all doing
our kids at disservice. So there has to be something
wrong with you or else we're the ones who are wrong.
And so the media and the American public basically started
to delight in tearing William down every chance they got,
(28:42):
and he really just tried to run from the spotlight
as best he could. All right, so let's take a
break and we'll come back and kind of pick up
at Harvard, where this eleven year old was still studying
right after this. All right, So Little Billies at Harvard.
(29:21):
His he was commuting, you know, with his parents, and
then they decided that they were going to leave and
go to New Hampshire and go into business, um, the
mental health business. Basically boris open to sanatorium in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, and they said, basically, you know, try out
the dorm, let's see how it works. He moved into
(29:41):
the dorm. It did not go well at all. Uh.
He was bullied. He was the butt of jokes and pranks. Uh.
He did not have interest in girls. They teased him
a lot about that. He eventually moved into a rooming house, uh,
instead of the dorm. And even still he graduated Magna
loud A at sixteen years old in nineteen fourteen and
(30:04):
told reporters after he graduated, I want to live the
perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life
is to live it in seclusion. I've always hated crowds.
He vowed to remained celibate, and you know, that's was
kind of his life. He he I don't think he
necessarily was that way by nature or yeah, by nature.
(30:27):
I think he was sort of forced into retreatment because
of what happened to him with the press, and having
no social skills because he was not socialized because of
his parents. A lot of factors going into it, for sure.
And on that celibate thing, like a lot of people
made a lot of hey about that at the time
because he you know, revealed it publicly somehow. Um, he
(30:48):
had taken a vow underneath the tree that he would
remain celibate throughout his lifetime, which a lot of great
thinkers have I think da Vinci did, and Newton did,
and a bunch of others. Um, And he followed it
in their footsteps. But he kept a picture of the
tree that he kept he carried around with them to
remind him like, oh, yeah, I'm celibate. Um. But the
(31:09):
media again, they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity
to tear this guy down. He's a total weirdo. He's
not interested in girls, he's not even interested in guys,
He's interested in nobody. Let's let's make let's use that
as evidence that this guy is out of his mind.
And he did very very sad. Yeah. So he leaves
Harvard and with that degree, and for a little while
(31:30):
he teaches math at William marsh Rice Institute for advancement
of letters, science and art. Eventually they just said, can
we just call it Rice University? It would be much easier.
He arrived in December nineteen fifteen. He was seventeen years old.
Um taught Euclidean geometry, non Euclidean geometry, and freshman math
(31:52):
and didn't last long there either because he was younger
than the people he was teaching and it was just
really really tough. Um eventually went back to Harvard Law
and left after three years without a degree, but with
good standing. Apparently. Yeah, so he got back. I guess
(32:12):
when he was at Harvard Law it must have been
Um that he, uh, he became interested in socialism, fervently interested.
He was described I think Chuck is a libertarian pacifist
by a friend after he died, and that his whole
thing like like, he was really passionate about trolley Carr transfers,
(32:35):
about Northeastern Native American history, about a lot of varied stuff,
but his great passion was the idea that every single
person should be free to live their life as they
see fit, and that the role of government, and you
needed a strong government, was to protect that those individuals
(32:56):
rights from encroachment in that sense that that is what
he cared about, and for a little while was directed
towards socialism and communism. And he was actually arrested h
and considered you know, unpatriotic and unamerican um at this
one May day rally um and almost went to jail
supposedly for assaulting an officer. Allo. Everybody says that didn't
actually happen. Yeah, it was for writing two charges, writing
(33:19):
and assaulting a cop, and it was all over the
newspapers because of who he is. I think a hundred
and fourteen people were arrested, including a young lady named
Martha Foley, who he actually fell in love with, so
he he tested his celibacy with Martha, even though I
think there I think it never grew beyond a close friendship.
(33:41):
Isn't that right? Yeah? Well yeah, And I don't really
understand what her her feelings were about. If she was
just like, we're just friends. He was always in the
friend zone with her, or she was like, you know,
you're actually not interested in me, will be friends? Who knows.
But she went on to marry another man, um and uh,
(34:01):
I get the impression that Bill was left to kind
of um just pine for her while looking at the
picture of the tree that he took them out. Um.
So back to the arrest. He was released on five
dollars bail um under the condition that he be released
under his father's care um or both of his parents
(34:22):
I guess at the sanitarium. So he gets shipped off
to New Hampshire. Um. He said in his own words,
he was kidnapped by his parents by arrangement with the
d A and was taken to the sanitarium operated by
them and kept there a full year under various kinds
of mental torture, consisting of being scolded and nagged at
(34:42):
for an average of six to eight hours a day. UM.
They said, they pumped him full of sleeping medicine, threatened
to send him to uh just sort of a standard
insane asylum, that's what they called him at the time.
And it just sounds like it sounds like things went
really really bad between he and his parents at that point. Yeah,
I think, UM, I don't really know what the relationship
(35:06):
was like, but it seems to have finally fully deteriorated
during that year. I don't think they ever spoke after
that well, that his parents wanted to. They used to
like UM try to track him down and they would
find as whoever his friends were, and you know, try
to get them to turn him over to them, because
you know, they're like, it's for his own good. He
doesn't he's crazy or whatever. He UM that just you
(35:28):
know is strange to him even further from them. But
if if it wasn't deteriorating before, it was after that
that year at the family sanitarium that or sanatorium that
he had to spend. Yeah, so he UM eventually has
released after that year, I think he goes to California
for about a year, then makes his way back east,
and basically from this point forward he did I mean
(35:51):
they called them uninspired jobs kind of mostly where I saw,
I don't think he was doing the good well hunting
thing UM been doing like custodia were. Mostly what I
found is that he was doing UM work. I mean
they call them adding machines like accounting work. What they
really were were sort of the first calculators, the UH
comptometers and UM. Even then, apparently he would do work
(36:16):
on two of them at once, one with his left hand,
one with his right hand, and would do his eight
hour work day and about an hour um, but would
sort of move from job to job whenever you know,
it says here, whenever people would recognize who he was.
I think it was probably a little more nuanced than that.
I would guess, like when the press got ahold of it. Um.
I don't think it's like if someone in his office
(36:37):
realized who he was, he was like, I'm out of here.
But he would kind of go from job to job.
He said that the very side of a mathematical formula
makes me physically ill. But here's the thing. He I
think a lot of publications make it seem like he
was shunning smarts and doing anything worthwhile. But the entire time,
(36:58):
he was just pumping out book uh, a lot of
most of them not published, many of them under pseudonyms,
but just writing about all kinds of stuff. He wrote
that book on transfer tickets. Yeah, he did three pages
on collecting transfer tickets. But he wrote a lot. Eventually.
He did write one book that became fairly well known,
(37:21):
called The Animate and the Inanimates in Yeah, which is
a super daring um premise, and that it talks about
the origin of the universe. Uh. It describes things like
dark matter. Um. It predicts um black holes, which a
lot of people are like, this is years before black
holes were discovered. Well, I think Einstein had predicted black
(37:43):
holes in his theory of relativity like a full ten
years before, five years before he was writing this. But
it's still super impressive. But the reason it's daring is
because he is one of the few people to suggest,
and you know, back up mathematically um or attempt to
the the second law of thermodynamics that matter in the
universe tends towards chaos and disorder and there will eventually
(38:05):
be a total loss of energy because of that, that
it can be reversed. And his premise was that life
itself is an example of reverse entropy, where you know,
disordered atoms are put into very orderly, very efficient machines
called organisms or life, which is pretty awesome. And that
(38:28):
was just part of it. But that's what really made
him like a kind of a pioneer, and that was
his big contribution. And I get the impression that this
book that was published in UM is one of those
things where I could see people going back in fifty
years and somebody rediscovering his ideas and saying, oh my god,
like you just advanced you know, quantum physics, by light
(38:49):
by light years. It's just been kind of languishing until then,
you know, or here's the cure for cancer. Yeah maybe. Uh.
This is a really sad though, because I think the
narrative that at the time was that like, boy genius
goes bust because he's working these jobs. And by all accounts,
you know, he lived the life he wanted to live,
(39:11):
and he had he had I don't think like tons
and tons of great friends, but he did have some
very close friends who, like he said, described him as
a as a good guy and kind of a could be,
kind of a fun dude, and he wasn't completely maladjusted
because of his childhood. And I think just wanted to
be left alone. Yeah. So that's why in seven that
(39:33):
New Yorker article on him was just so devastating, was
because he'd been trying so hard to be left alone.
Like his one and only publicly received book had been
published a full twelve years before he totally dropped out,
and The New Yorker sent a woman reporter to to
basically become his friend, under the guys of just being
(39:54):
his friend and to gather information and then publish an
article about him. You know, yeah, he said it was
humiliating and made him sound crazy. Um he sued now
this way, I got really confused, and I don't know
if he got to the bottom of it. He he
did sue them for invasion of privacy and malicious libel um.
And I saw all kinds of things from really good
(40:15):
sources that the case was dismissed, that they basically and
it's used in privacy law as saying, if you're a
public figure, you're always a public figure. But I also
saw that he did win some kind of settlement from them.
I think they were just multiple suits. Maybe yeah. I
think that the privacy the invasion of privacy suit he
lost and it was upheld on appeal to that um
(40:37):
that like you said, once, your public figure, always a
public figure. But I think that that um libel was
what he might have gotten a settlement for because there
was misreporting reported that he'd gone to Toughs, and I
think that was Norbert Wiener who had gone to Toughs
just a couple of technical things, nothing really really big time.
But he hated this this article so much. I get
(40:58):
the impression he wasn't about to drop it. And the
new Yorker settled out of court to settle it. Yeah,
so this was nineteen thirty seven. Lawsuits followed and then
very sadly that the sad end into this story is
that in nineteen forty four, at the age of forty six,
he was found dead by his landlady. Died of cerebral hemorrhage,
(41:20):
the same thing that killed his father in nine. Mm hmm. Yeah.
And you I mean, you can get a really good
impression of how he was treated by the media with
just the title of the obituary they ran about him
in Time magazine. Um, it was called prodigious failure. That was.
That was the title of his obituary in Time back
(41:42):
in nineteen Who lived his own life? Yeah? Exactly what what?
Why did he have to perform for you? And then
over time, you know the idea that he was this
great example of of what happens if you just give
your kid too much attention and try to turn them
into a um like a genius too young. This is
(42:04):
what happens to him. They burn out and they end
up running adding machines rather than doing anything useful. Um.
That that was. That became that narrative that you have
to look out for really interesting story. Yeah. So, um,
you got anything else about william Sitis? No, look forward
to uh to a full sort of more robust episode
(42:25):
on Prodigies for sure. Did you want did you when
you mentioned Goodwill Hunting? Did you see too that that
um that he was he in part inspired that movie? Oh?
Really yeah, that's interesting to do that parallel, um. And
then I want to give one shout out. So you
know he gave that talk on um four dimensional bodies
(42:46):
at Harvard when he was eleven. I was like, I
have no idea what that is. And I looked around
and I found finally a really comprehensive, really understandable explainer
on four dimensionals space. It's called what is four dimensional Space? Like?
It's by J. D. Norton. And if you're all interested
in figuring that out, I would strongly advise going to
(43:09):
check that out. I wasn't talking to you. Yeah. Uh.
Since since Chuck said, yeah, it's time for listener mail everybody,
how about the apples? All right, I'm gonna call this
sort of a double metal email. UM. Quickly we got
one from a gentleman named Kirk Brett Fold and White
(43:31):
Rock BC to challenge me on saying Bruce uh, saying
Bruce Dickinson was the metal god, the god of metal.
On the Damascus Steel episode, he said, I think you'll
find that Judas Priests Rob Halford is widely acknowledged to
hold the title of metal god. Okay, uh And I
wrote Kirk back and I said, well, it's subjective. And
(43:53):
I like Iron Maiden more than I like Judas Priest. Uh. Yeah,
I do too. Yeah do you do? I'm with you
you Oh yeah, yeah, like Juice Priest. But I really,
I mean, I think Iron Maiden I just like him more. Yeah,
me too. I think their songs more. Yeah, I think
I could see where he's coming from. It's much more
melodic and maybe in that sense a little less metal
(44:13):
than Judas Priest. Yeah maybe so. Uh. And then someone
we gotta shout out Gunner who who took your side
in the A C d C debate recently listened to
to unrelated episodes, and in both episodes, Josh said he
didn't like A C d C. So to you, Josh,
I just want to say you're right. Finally, someone else
(44:34):
thinks A C d C is overrated. They're just not
that good. Although some of the early songs are written
by the Flash and the Pan, and I love Flash
in the Pan. A C G C, A C d
C just doesn't do it for me. And that's from
Gunner and Gunner. I'm here to say that you were wrong.
I thought it was subjective. Well, that's my whole point
(44:55):
is I'm making fun of him saying right and wrong.
Oh I see, I see you turned it all over on.
So yeah, confused and check this out. We're talking, we're
talking about metal, we're talking about hard rock, and we're
getting emails from dudes named Kirk and Gunner. I mean,
how perfect is that we should start that band that
we always heard Gunner and Flash in the Pan? Yeah?
(45:17):
Have you heard of Flash in the Pan? I never
had before. I hadn't, but I had to look that
up to They were an AUSSI duo who produced uh
some of the early A C d C stuff apparently,
and then we're a band in their own right, so
you gotta check them out too. Now, the A C
D C and they wanted to produce the Spice Girls.
They're two big successes, that's right, and we're gonna get
(45:39):
that band with those guys. But I get to be
flashed this time. I'm not gonna be panned anymore. I'll
be Pan then can I be Pan? But I'm gonna
really play up that like super light pan flute kind
of thing. That's my jam, and I'm going to address like,
what's the half goat half man god Dionysus. No, it's
oh gosh, I can't think it's I guess it wouldn't
(46:01):
be Dionysus to be pan anyway, I'm gonna be like
the Greek god Pan. Okay, that's my jam, and I'm flash.
So I'll just go out there and open my overcoat
and no one will notice. Somebody will feel it. Yeah, well,
I'm just leaving that one. Uh. If you wanna get
in touch with Chuck and I, like Gunner and Kirk
(46:22):
did our new pals, you can email us at stuff
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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